Late July of 1994, my roommate Hudd decided he was going to move back to Los Angeles with his parents. He thought that was going to be the best course of action so he could get his life on track. I figured that I was in a good enough place to get my own apartment. I knew I would have to settle for a studio because I wasn't financially sound enough for something larger. I did go look at a few different apartments. I remember there was this one that had external stairs leading up to it, but I could detect this very strong urine odor. I may have been desperate to live in a cheap apartment, but not that desperate.
I did find one studio in a decent location on Hamilton Avenue in my price range for $385 a month. (But this was $15 a month less than the one bedroom apartment I used to live in. After two years, rentals were already starting to hike.) I called up the property management company to come see the place. I arrived on time, but no one showed up. The window was open, so I could see into the apartment and view the living room and kitchen. I couldn't see the bathroom. I didn't want to waste the opportunity, so I called the company and started the process to become a tenant.
The building had 12 units in it. There were one-bedroom and two-bedroom apartments and two studios. The studio had enough room to put my bed, comfy chair, table and dresser. I didn't expect to need more space that that. It was certainly larger than my old studio on Texas St., but I still had a bathroom where if I sat down on the toilet, my head was in the sink. And it just had a shower, no bathtub.
It was close to the intersection of El Cajon Blvd. On the corner, there was a Taco Bell. I can't say that I ate there very often, but I do know that if I wanted something to eat when only the drive-thru was open, I would have to get in my car and drive down the half-block to order something. Since I had just declared bankruptcy, I couldn't eat out very often.
One really good thing about the apartment is that I never had to turn on the heat. Because there were apartments on both sides and underneath, mine was able to absorb the heat from those units. It was nice not to have my gas bills go up during the winter.
One thing I definitely didn't like about the apartment was the parking. There were six spaces in the front and six spaces in the rear. It was enough for one car per apartment. However, you could tell from the old paint that they originally only had ten spot and repainted it when they had all twelve tenants who needed spaces. I was assigned a specific spot, and it was a good spot because it was on the end. However, there was always someone parked in my spot. And there was no way to park in the other spots without hitting your car door against another car when you got out or in. Since I was already used to parking in the street from my previous apartment, I decided that the space wasn't worth fighting for and that I would park on the street for the entire time that I lived there. (Looking at the pictures on Google Street View, they still have 12 parking spaces.) I do remember when this one new tenant moved in, he started yelling at another tenant for parking in his assigned space. I couldn't bring myself to do that.
Because I had a lot of large items, I rented a U-Haul truck so I wouldn't have to make so many trips back and forth between my old apartment and this one. I went to the same U-Haul location where I had rented a car-top carrier. I went in a week ahead of time, requested and reserved their smallest vehicle available, which was about the size of a Toyota pickup. I didn't need more space that that for my large stuff. The day I went to pick up the truck, the one I had requested was there. Waiting in line, the man in front of me was setting up a rental. He told the attendant that he wanted to rent that small truck. He was told it was reserved. When it was my turn, the attendant handed me the key and walked with me outside. He pointed to one of the larger trucks and said that one was mine. I told him I had reserved the smaller truck. He said someone else had reserved it, but the one I was getting was the same price. I told him I didn't feel comfortable driving the larger truck, but he wouldn't budge.
The attendant told me that if I returned the truck after 6pm, I needed to park it on the side street, drop the key in their mail slot and they would retrieve it in the morning. The directions for the truck explained that I needed to provide my own lock for the truck, so I went and bought one. I returned the truck after 6pm. I figured that if I didn't leave the lock on the truck, there might be a problem with homeless people going and sleeping inside the back if it wasn't locked up, so I locked the rear door, put the key with the truck key and dropped them off.
I returned the next morning to collect the remainder of my deposit. They gave it to me. I asked for the lock I put on the truck. The attendant said they had to use a bolt-cutter to remove the lock. I told him that the key was on the key ring with the truck key. He shrugged his shoulders. I asked him if he could reimburse me for the cost of the lock. "We didn't tell you to put that lock there." I couldn't argue about that, but if they were too stupid to figure out that the extra key would fit in the lock, they were too stupid for me to do business with again. I guess they love destroying property AND chasing homeless people out of their trucks. The next time I needed a U-Haul, I went to their closest competitor.
(While writing this, I got the idea that I could go onto Yelp! and write a bad review detailing this information, even though it's more than 20 years old. However, the operation moved to a gas station across the street, so it probably isn't even run by the same people anymore. It wouldn't be right for me to post a bad review on them now, but you have no idea how badly I wanted to do that!)
The day I moved in happened to be my 30th birthday. Because of this, I didn't have time to reflect on this particular milestone. It was just another day of me moving into an apartment. Abed helped me out that day. It was pretty uneventful, except for the fact that I wasn't able to park the U-Haul at the building and we had to walk back and forth down the block to move all my stuff in. As usual, we did have pizza afterwards. I ordered a slice of cheese and he got a slice of garlic pizza, but we had a hard time telling which was which because the garlic wasn't obvious until we smelled the slices.
The time I spent in this apartment (16 months) would be the longest I stayed in one place in San Diego until I moved to my next address. While I was there, it went through two changes of ownership. I was fortunate in that neither one tried to raise my rent. However, the second owners had planned an increase until they found out by me that my apartment was a studio. They then thought the price was fair. (It was still too high!)
I got lucky when I needed to move out. We were already 10 days into December when I put in my one month notice. But because a boy who lived at St. Vincent de Paul was about to turn 18, he needed to move into an apartment at the beginning of the year. I just had to make sure I had it completely clean and I wound up getting my entire deposit back. It felt good to know that I was helping someone get a good start in life.
It was a good place for getting back on your feet.
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