So, my lease at the fantastic 1739 Fontain Street ends today.  It’s been a pretty good year with the Friars – I graduated college, got a 4.0 during my last semester, and got to meet a ton of people I never would have met (i.e. the entire honors college).  Good, good stuff.

And the place wasn’t even a pig sty!  It was actually much, much worse.  Keep in mind that 5 college-aged men lived there.  Allow me to break it down by the 5 senses.

• Sight
  • The place wasn’t exactly tastefully decorated.  There was a ~12’x6′ American flag hanging in our living room.  Next to that was a poster of dogs playing poker and drinking beer.  In our basement, a Borat poster, and a PBR banner that was probably stolen from Montgomery Beer Distributor.  Classy
  • At least the wall decorations covered the myriad scuffs/scratches/holes in our shitty drywall.  There was a lot of those.
  • Up to 4 bicycles in the living room, taking up all the usable space, and scuffing the walls with their tires.
  • Bunches-piles- mountains of dirty dishes.  Starting in the sink, spilling onto the counter, then finally the stovetop.
  • Dried bodily excretions in the bathroom that I will not mention in greater detail (for your sake).
  • Rotting food in the back of the fridge.  Found this beauty while moving out:
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• Sound
  • Crazy Al playing guitar in his room, singing 90’s alternative lo-fi indie (obviously the best music genre)
  • A phantom buzz from the TV in the basement.  It never went away.
  • (before he moved away) We had a hoodrat neighbor named Antonio (or Anthony, or something).  You’d often find him on the stoop next door, and if you had 15-20 minutes to waste you could hear Antonio talk about growing up in the projects (likely), having a few kids (confirmed), living in Miami (dubious), or playing basketball with LeBron James (ludicrous).  He was a pretty nice guy though, I even invited him to one of our house parties.  Not a popular decision.
  • And the sweet sounds of North Philadelphia, which weren’t unique to 1739, but an integral part of any Temple students’ education.  Class of 2012, sup?
• Touch
  • This is going to refer entirely to my thermoreceptors.  I lived in a tiny, tiny room, roughly the temperature and dimensions of an oven.  This was a mixed blessing.
  • Winters were nice, simply closing my door and using my laptop would generate enough heat to keep me comfortable in a t-shirt.  I didn’t even need a comforter to sleep.
  • Summers SUCKED.  Sleeping was impossible without sleeping in my underpants with my fan pointed directly at me. No bueno.
• Taste
  • We lived in close vicinity to Philly Central Food and Fontain Deli, both of which were impeccably clean and popular culinary destinations (see: bodegas).  The food was dirt-cheap, lifespan-shortening, and diarrhea-inducing.
  • But it was so good.  Like, so good.  The secret was the cook – known only as “Daddy”.  He was a short, Mexican man , originally from Mexico City, but now living in Camden (I think Mexico City is safer).  He cooked all of his food with heaping helpings of love.  You can’t teach that.
  • Some days I’d crave nothing more than a $3.75 cheesesteak (whiz, fried onions) after a long shift at work.  If I felt like splurging, maybe a $4.50 chicken finger platter (salt, pepper, ketchup?).  And there’s no better hangover cure than a bacon, egg, cheese, and hashbrown ON A BAGEL, with hot sauce.  $4.00.  Oh yeah.
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• Smell
  • Smell is the sense tied most strongly to memory.  Your olfactory senses (smell) are a part of your limbic system (emotion), and memories linked to strong emotions are easier to remember in great detail (example: everyone knows exactly where they were on 9/11(though oddly, most don’t remember what they smelled)).  My house smelled strongly, I had strong emotions toward those smells, no matter how hard I try, I’ll never forget those smells.
  • That onion I found?  We had a lot of food rot in the fridge.  Pushed to the back, neglected, forgotten.  Until they started to stink.  Imagine: moldy bread, rotting vegetables, bacterial colonies in bags of cheese, gallons of milk fermenting to the point of explosion, lunch meat so infected it may have been undead.  Luckily the cold air and closed door would dampen the smell, slightly.
  • Our trash can was kept right near the kitchen, so it also collected culinary rubbish (coffee grounds, egg shells, vegetable stems, tuna-can water, plastic cups with a little bit of fluid congealed at the bottom) and it was allowed to stew at room temperature for an entire week.  What was really cool is that we just kept heaping trash into it, even when it was perilously full, so this mountain of slowly decomposing crap kept building up.  Taking the trash out on Sundays was pretty unpleasant.  Every once in a while we’d forget to take the trash out, and come Monday morning we’d have to do something with our rotting filthpile.  The easiest solution was to throw the trash bags in the back yard.
  • Huge mistake.  Awful.  Those bags of trash would collect in our little alleyway and cook all week long.  Sometimes longer than that.  Opening the door to the back yard would allow a deathly, fetid stench cloud to impregnate our house.  This odor would hang thickly in the air, choking anyone unfortunate enough to be caught in it.  Trying to step over the trash would give me dry heaves.  It smelled so bad I think the flies got nauseous.    A soup made of horseradish, muenster cheese, and elephant poop would smell comparably delightful.  Hyperbole aside, it really may be the worst thing I’ve ever smelled.  And I’ll never be able to forget it.  Anyone who has spent a summer in Philly knows how bad the city smells.  They were really just smelling our backyard.
  • Bonus, here’s Crazy Al shoveling some of it into the alley behind our house:
    

So though you may have never lived there, I hope this post gives you a day-in-the-life idea of what the place was like.  Will I miss the house?  Not exactly.  Will I miss the people I lived with and the experiences I had?  Absolutely.  Another chapter in my life comes to a close, but a new volume in life begins.  I can’t wait to keep reading.