In April of 1986, about a month before I graduated from college, I knew that I was going to have to find a place to live. This would be my second step toward adulthood following my graduation from college. (The first was finding a full-time job, which I got four months before I graduated.)
After years of helping my Dad take care of his apartments, I had a really high standard for the type of place I wanted to live. I got the Clovis paper and looked at the classified ads for the apartments. I carefully vetted the locations, fairly aware of the "good" and "bad" neighborhoods. I found an interesting location I was not familiar with. The address was 1000 Thomas Road. There were furnished units for about $100 a month. I thought that was a pretty good deal. However, the ad mentioned something about taking vouchers. I drove by the address and saw several apartment buildings on the site, but because it was a little bit out of the way, I had questions about it. I asked a co-worker if he knew whether those apartment were where the people who get welfare lived. He said, "Yeah, that's not a very good place to live unless you want to get stabbed." I never asked to see the apartments.
I got my classified search narrowed to a couple of apartments. One was an unfurnished studio for about $175 a month. The other was a furnished one-bedroom for $225 a month, but the electricity and water were paid. The second apartment was part of a complex called the "Muse Apartments." It was run by a property management company. I went over to the office and a woman drove me over to the apartment. It was in a really good location. It was about a little more than a mile from my work at the radio station. It was also across the street from the South Plains Mall and the Steed-Todd Funeral home. It would be easy access to work, shopping and death.
It was an upstairs unit and had a balcony. The living room was a nice size and had some decent furniture. There were a couple of sectional pieces, a coffee table and what I would wind up using as a TV stand. There was a double-sized bed and two dressers in the bedroom. There was a table and chairs in this small dining room and and stove and refrigerator in the kitchen. I was pretty much sold and decided I didn't need to see the other apartment. I went back to the office, paid the deposit and signed a six month lease. The woman gave me the keys and said I could move in the middle of next month.
I visited the apartment a couple of times before I moved in. I was able to explore a little more. One of the odd things I found was that there was this door in the kitchen and a door in the bedroom. I hadn't noticed them the first time I was in there. I opened the kitchen door and saw that it led to a stairway. The other bedroom door also connected to this stairway. At the bottom of the stairs was a door that went outside. It was like a secret passageway.
I figured out what was going on. The door at the bottom of the stairway was the original front door to the apartment. What was now the bedroom used to be the living room and the living room used to be the bedroom. This would explain why there was a walk-in closet in the living room, but no closet in the bedroom. But this would have made the original bedroom larger than the original living room. At some point, they built the balcony outside and made that the front door entrance. I thought that this might come in handy: If the cops came banging on the balcony door, I could slip out through the downstairs door and not get caught.
There were other oddities about the apartment. One was that I couldn't find the light switch to the dining room. There was a fixture in the ceiling, but I had no way of turning it on. I had to turn on the kitchen, bathroom and bedroom lights to get any kind of illumination in there. A few months after moving in, I found the light switch. It was right next to the refrigerator inside the kitchen. When I found the light switch, I also found a box of "little treasures," like in the movie "Amelie." It mostly consisted of stuff from the beach. I didn't even try to find out who it belonged to.
When I moved out two years later, I experienced "mover's remorse" for the first time. I had worked hard to clean the apartment to get my deposit back. When I was finished, I thought, "Oh, the apartment looks nice and clean now. I don't want to move." This thought has occurred to me every single time I'm about to leave a dwelling for the last time. This even happened with my most recent move in July of 2014. After Ms. Ogolon and I had cleaned up the apartment we lived in for more than ten years, I said, "Oh, the apartment looks so nice and large now. Let's move back in!" Ms. Ogolon laughed.
To this day, I still have dreams in which I am put in a position to move back into that apartment. I don't have dreams about any of my other old apartments. Sometimes, I will dream about being somewhere with a secret passageway. I know those are connected to the time I spent living there.
All and all, it was a very good first apartment and set the standard for my taste in residences for the next 20 years.
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