Welcome to part 4 – its still 1996. I’m 21 and I keep losing my licence…

ADELAIDE AVE

We stayed in the townhouse six months, long enough to run out our lease. By this time I had become very close with a coworker of mine (Kim) she and I had bonded over our mutual hatred of our shared boss and we decided to get a place together, I was done living with boys and I was looking forward to only supporting myself. Of course, 5 days before we were set to move I changed my mind and asked Shane to come with me – how could I possibly live without him? (Can you say codependent much?).

The three of us found another inexpensive apartment but this one had just been completely rehabbed – we even got the first choice of units, we left the dark dirty townhouse and moved in to a spacious two bedroom with brand new carpet, new paint  – a huge livingroom and a pool – A POOL!

Ironically right after moving in both Kim and I quit our jobs, we turned our boss in to the California Labor Bureau and they got him to pay us back wages that we were owed (I bet he knows my name now!).

So once again I was living with my unemployed boyfriend, making excellent life decisions. The one saving grace about the apartment on Adelaide is that it was walking distance (still carless!*) to a very inexpensive Mexican market where we could get 3 artichokes for a dollar and a 5 pound bag of potatos for the same – they also sold fresh homemade salsa for pennies. For the next several months I lived on a consistent diet of steamed artichokes and baked potatoes stuffed with salsa.

For the first few weeks it was ideal, we had a great place, plenty of time to sit by the pool while we dreamed up new ways to cook potatoes, but all the serenity ended abruptly when our new neighbor moved in – a bi polar alcoholic with anger management issues – she took an instant disliking to us and suddenly our sunny little courtyard became a war zone. She yelled obscenities at us at all times of the day, threatened our lives and sometimes laid in wait for us to come through the front gate to throw trash at us. We could still retreat to the pool though, she never bothered us there and that became our sanctuary until the school year started and kids from the elementary school would wait for us, pounding on the chain link fence demanding to be let in and allowed to swim. We never let them in, but they managed to get revenge by one day climbing over the fence and throwing the glass patio table in to the deep end – thus ruining pool time for everyone.

So, we retreated back inside our apartment where we put up with the verbal threats from our neighbor mostly because her son also lived with her, her son was nice and reasonable and just trying to get through college, every day he would beg us not to call the cops on his Mom. I think we only ever had the cops there 1 or 2 times, which is a testament to how much we liked this kid, his Mom was a real bitch.

I spent my days taking long walks, sometimes to the El Pollo Loco for a $.99 BRC (bean, rice and cheese burritos) which were a total splurge and telling Shane that I would get a job when he got a job… the entire time we lived there we were unemployed.

Eventually though, Kim got a new job an hour up the coast, our lease came up for renewal and we had used up all of our patience dealing with our neighbor we decided to bid adieu to Adelaide street. Also – I had finally been accepted into college and I needed to find employment and transportation so that I could actually attend school.

*Sidenote: I just want to explain to you how very very hard it is to be carless in the San Diego. San Diego is a commuter’s city – it is HUGE and no one walks. No one. Ever. I used to joke after I got a car that even when I was going the same places with my friends we would all take our own cars, no one would carpool – no one wanted to be without the ability to get somewhere (see no one walked – ever). It’s probably a little easier now that they have an established trolley system, but when I was there, there was virtually no ‘mass transit’ just a collection of old city buses that mostly went from the boarder to different point around town, to try and navigate from say the college area to downtown San Diego was almost impossible and would take you anywhere from 2 – 5 hours of traveling time (A journey that could be done in 20 minutes in a car). One of the reasons I didn’t look very hard for work because I couldn’t justify the return on investment in so much travel for whatever minimum wage job that I was then qualified for.

to be continued…