This morning, I left my apartment to catch the 2/3 Eastern parkway train here in Brooklyn as I normally do every morning. Normally the station is really busy with people coming and going and there’s usually a kid that’s selling papers parked out in front of the steps but I was running late this morning and instead of the usual 8:30 mad dash, I was starting my commute at around 10 AM and there was no one really around.

As I started down the stairs into the station, five guys started coming up towards me, scoping behind them and ahead off them to see if the coast was clear. They were acting really sketchy and one of them looked at me me and said to the others, “Him! Get him! Do it! Fucking punk-ass, do it now!” I had no doubt that I was about to get jumped for my bag or my wallet.

They blocked off the stairs to try and box me in, so I turned around and high-tailed it out onto the street. One of them reached out to try and grab me, but I was too quick. All five of them ran out onto the street after me and for a few seconds I had the incredulous thought that I was about to get beat down and robbed on a busy street in broad daylight, but they took off running down the block, stopping at one point when the mouthy one slammed another guy up against a car, yelling at him and calling him a punk-ass, I assume because he let me get away.

I really don’t like the idea of being mugged again. I don’t know what it is about me or this fucked up neighborhood ghetto shithole, but being robbed twice and mugged once is really and quite truly fucking enough. Just that morning, I’d received the shipment of my brand new laptop and for some reason decided to leave it at home, against my natural inclination to dive headfirst into a new toy, which is a really good thing because if I had gotten robbed, I’d be shit out of luck.

After much toiling, bleeding and quiet, nervous talks with the cracks in the ceiling, I have finally vacated that black hole from Hell that I’ve had the unfortunate karma to call home for the past year and a half.

On Saturday, tired, hung-over and bleary after passing out fully clothed and with shoes on after getting a shade more than slightly pasted at a bar, I dragged my aged ass out of bed and started shuffling boxes down the street. It was absolutely fucking horrible, but worth it just to be rid of the place.

By Sunday, I was able to wrap things up and lock the doors for the very last time by around noon. Turning that key for the final time, I should have at least hired a mariachi band and some confetti throwers to mark the occasion but whatever. It’s over and done with. Some other Caucasian twenty-something who makes too much money and is willing to live in a pit will move in and the cycle will continue. Such is the power of New York real estate gentrification.

I for one am slowly and surely becoming fully fucking sick of the New York renting game. For years now, I’ve opted to live in the ghetto in exchange for square-footage and proximity to things that are “cool”. I spent one year in Queens, in a quiet little residential neighborhood where nothing ever happened, far away from anything that mattered and that experience taught me one thing–that I moved to NYC to be near and to do things that I consider to be “cool”. I want to walk out of my door and within minutes be frolicking in various states of lucidity amongst the things that I find “neato”, “keen” and “boss”. Possibly along with things that are “peachy” as well.

This desire has seen me live in some fucked up situations, this last being particularly trying upon my withered and trodden-upon soul. Two robberies and one mugging with a healthy slice of beat-down is just not worth it to me. Fuck cheaping it out, the next time I move, I’m hiring some guys to do the work for me and I’m going to relocate someplace nice so when I’m mugged, stabbed and left to die, slowly bleeding out onto the pavement as my neighbors dispassionately watch, I can go to the great beyond with some lovely Brooklyn scenery about my body and the knowledge that I leave behind a decent apartment.

I’m in a mad dash to get out of my old apartment. I haven’t lived there in almost a month and a half. During that time, I’ve been using up my security deposit and half-assedly moving my shit around the block to my new digs. Since it’s so fucking hot, things haven’t progressed that smoothly.

This inside of my apartment is hot. When I say hot I don’t mean uncomfortably sweaty… I’m talking tar and feathering hot. Napalm to the testicles hot. Crack torch to the armpit hot. Searing! What with this insanely humid bullshit I’ve been slogging through, the most I can stand to be in the place is about an hour. After that, I need to sit naked on a block of dry ice and have a little cry because the temperature in that black hole of doom is just not okay. While my recent trip to Vermont was necessary and extremely welcome, it didn’t help the situation, taking one extra weekend of pathetic labor away from me. I now have essentially two days to get the fuck out. Things are tight.

I should be able to pull it off. I really don’t have that much shit left in that god-forsaken crack den. Most everything went to the trash pile, thereby ending up all over the street after the homeless and the junkies picked through it all. Nasty. I just need to get what’s left from point A to point B then I can give up the keys and give a big, fat fuck you to that pestilential shithole from hell.

My landlord aka slumlord called me this afternoon trying to nudge me out sooner. Even though this month is paid in full, he’d like me out now, so the realtor that first got me the place can start showing it and hustle another sucker in. I have no doubt that she and the landlord will neglect to mention that the apartment has been robbed six times in two years, just like they failed to tell me it was four times in one year. I’d really like see that my landlord and that bitch realtor don’t get away with it again, but more than anything, I just want to be done with the place and never have to go back or ever walk down that street again.