Life is Hellin Illinois

Life is Hellin Illinois

By Daniel. F. Migues

Copyright 2012 Daniel F. Migues

Smashwords Edition

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Cover Art: By Coyau (Own work), via Wikimedia Commons

Also from this author: Between the Clown & the Corpsecicles

For Kay, who has always appreciated my little stories.

Table Of Contents

Apartment Hunting

Settling In

Back At The Apartment

More Tasks

Retirement

Health Problems

Problems Of A Different Kind

Cycling

It’s Greek To Me

A Bit Of History

God's Love

The Adrastos Family

Prologue

You know, there are certain pivotal points in your life: times when you look back and say, If I’d only stopped and thought. Like the first time you were going to have sex and discovered that you didn’t have any condoms. STOP! THINK! Nope. Bang! A case of the clap. WTF! Or the time you were bummed out about your first case of the clap so you got falling down stinking drunk. STOP! THINK! Nope. Bang! Car up an oak tree. WTF! Life is full of moments like these. STOP! THINK! Nope. Bang! Hellin, Illinois. WTF??

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Apartment Hunting

It’s hard to remember the chain of events that led me to Hellin. Lord knows I never actively participated in seeking the place out. I’d never even heard of the place until two days before I moved here. In fact before the closing on the sale of my house upstate, I had been looking to move nearer to St. Louis, and had settled on three apartments on the Illinois side of the river that I would have been satisfied, if not happy, living in. One day I was chatting online with a friend in Chicago about those apartments when he mentioned that he’d gone to college in the southern part of the state, and he had loved the area. The gears in my brain started working. That’s always a bad sign. I ditched my plans to move near a big city, and decided instead to move near the university with its smaller surrounding towns. I felt that it would also be a great opportunity to continue taking classes in Spanish, a language I’d loved and had always wanted to become fluent in.

I’d taken Spanish off and on over many years: decades in fact. I never seemed to be able to get very far. I'd take a class, and then it would be years before I was able to find anyone more advanced than me to speak with. By then, my Spanish was so rusty I sounded like a first grader. My daughter and I had gone to Spain on a whirlwind bus tour after my second or third class. One morning at breakfast, or desayuno as the natives would say, I’d somehow managed to convey to my waiter that his mother was a pig. This faux pas might have remained hidden from me forever except for the fact that another waiter standing near by, whose English was much better than my Spanish, explained that the insult was the reason there was a bowl of cereal and a large quantity of milk in my lap. Thankfully, juice, instead of coffee, had been my drink of choice that morning.

Finding an apartment near the university proved to be an impossible task. Arriving in Carbonville in early November, there wasn’t a single apartment to be had. Everyone said there would be plenty of apartments in June when summer break began. But I couldn’t wait that long. The cost of renting motel rooms and eating out was chewing up my 401K at an alarming rate.

When first attempting the move to the southern part of the state, I’d contacted an apartment complex on one of the streets named after a nut. For some reason, the name of the nut still eludes me. You’d think with all the grief they dished out to prospective tenants that their name would be impossible for anyone to forget. The cost of over-nighting the $25 certified check for a reference check two weeks earlier was more than the check itself. Several weeks and numerous calls later led me to believe I'd never be approved. It became apparent by then that these people made more money off the $25 security checks they didn't do than they did off actually renting apartments. But it was a blessing in disguise, for a quick run by the place one day led me to believe that not even cockroaches would have lived there, though college students did. Hundreds of drunken male college students. Ugh.

Stuck in the Day’s Value Inn, I found myself again burning money I really couldn’t afford. Thankfully the motel, with all of its questionable ambiance, was cheap. In fact, it was so cheap the continental breakfast consisted of cereal and milk from the managers own private stock; when the manager was home, that is. For most mornings he could have been thought of as an absentee slumlord more than the manager of a motel. On the rare days I would find someone in the office and would ask what was on the menu, the reply was always the same: cereal and milk. Each day I declined, opting instead for fast food, or for a treat, a sit-down restaurant. The daily ritual just drove me to look harder for a place to live. So scouring the internet, sometimes eight or ten times a day, I managed to find about half a dozen possibilities. None of these panned out. In desperation, I extended my search to the small towns within twenty-five miles of the university. To my dismay, there was nothing out there but the dregs; apartments not even drunk and rowdy college students would be caught sober in.

In one, there were holes in the ceilings. While the apartment manager assured me they would be fixed as soon as the lease was signed, he admitted to having a bit of a cash flow problem right then due to a tenant who had skipped out after missing four months rent. Another was little more than a closet that purported itself to be a studio. Yet another was over a bar. Thanks to the new county law they would be open until 3:00 AM on week-mornings, and 4:00 AM Saturday and Sunday mornings. But the most memorable of these viewings was also the one that has remained the most vivid in my mind even to this day. The manager reminded me of my favorite grandmother. She was a sweet, petit little thing. There was no doubt that even the most hard-hearted ogre would have loved to have rented from her. Having left her in the living room to scope out the rest of the apartment myself, I came across a fascinating kitchen stove. It was electric, very old, and extremely unusual. It didn’t have a single flat top as every other one I'd seen, but instead had two levels. There were two burners on the upper back level and two on the lower front level. Its design surely afforded easy access to back burners, and why such a design was not still in vogue remains a mystery. The desire to turn the knob to see if it worked was unbearable. With a quick twist, which was fluid and quiet, the front left coil began to glow brighter and brighter, thus confirming its functionality. Suddenly, to my shock and amazement, what could only be described as a crazed kamikaze cockroach, waltzed out of a crack between the counter and the upper rear portion of the range. It ambled across to the center of the stove, crossing one of the cool coils as if it owned the place. Then, without fanfare, it leapt from the precipice, landing in a full-bodied belly flop onto the burning hot coil. There it sizzled briefly, popped like the last, lone kernel of popcorn in a bag you'd just removed from the microwave, and was no more. Turing the knob to the off position and fanning the smoke and fumes furiously with my arms, I spun around just in time to see the landlady moving surprisingly swiftly towards the kitchen and the yellow stench which was all that remained of the roach. Before she could reach the kitchen door, I quickly ushered her by the arm to the front door, hoping to outrun the specter which by then was winging its way across the living room. We exited the apartment just as the ghostly apparition careened silently into the other side of the door, where it blended itself with years of other questionable stains.

Another apartment sounded great in print, but proved once again that what you read in ads about apartments must be taken with a grain of salt, and a lot of laxative. Sunday morning at 10:00 AM sharp, found me in the artsy-fartsy section of town viewing an apartment over a business. From outside, it looked promising. The building was old, but seemed to be in good shape. Living in apartments over businesses is an audiophile's dream come true. With no one stirring over, beside or underneath after the business closed allowed music to be played at earsplitting volume. One could rattle the windows to the lilting sounds of Metallica, Led Zeppelin or a host of head-bangers' music; thus ensuring the continued prosperity of hearing aid manufacturers for decades to come.

Right off the bat it was obvious that being in the artsy-fartsy district didn't change the fact that this apartment had problems. It was a shotgun: one room wide. From what could be seen from the front door, it was at least sixty feet long. There were eleven or twelve foot high ceilings. The bathroom, which was off to the right of the living room and which was the only room with a door, was also the only room not in a straight line.

Even though it was almost freezing outside, the living room was warm. In fact, it was oppressive. The source of that heat was an electric space heater glowing like the sun in the outside wall corner nearest the front door. It rested on a pad of used fire bricks. The apartment was furnished, so it was obviously still inhabited. There was a thread-bear sofa in front of the two windows on the north side of the room. Its faded flower print dated it to about the 1950s. Surprisingly, though it was centered on the windows, it was about three feet towards the center of the room. A single non-matching chair, likewise in need of repair, rested dangerously close to the space heater. There was a pole lamp, also of questionable heritage, nestled in the farthest corner from the front door. Its less than sixty watt bulb gave little light, and the low, heavy clouds outside conspired to present a gloomy effect. Through the dirt encrusted windows, green lichen could be seen growing on the rails and stool of each. A coffee table riddled with scratches and dents completed the contents of the room.

The toastiness of the living room only accentuated the coolness of the bathroom, which was at least fifteen degrees cooler. This was despite the fact that the door between the two had been opened when we entered. Due to its location, there were no windows or exterior walls, so the drop in temperature was surprising.

In the kitchen, no canisters, coffee pot, toaster, or any other item one would normally find on a kitchen cabinet were present. Only an old and chipped set of salt and pepper shakers graced the table and two lone chairs which, except for the stove which had been left on for heat, made up the only items in the kitchen.

The rearmost room in the house, the bedroom, was cold and drafty even with the heat which came from the kitchen stove. There were two dressers made of cardboard that can be bought at places catering to families who have fallen on hard times. The recently slept in full sized air mattress on the floor next to the wall farthest from the windows was unmade. The cold could be felt seeping through the single pane windows which provided the only light in the room, which, like the living room, had no overhead light.

As I stood there, pondering what the lack of a central heating system would do to my budget, I was reminded of my house in western New York. In contrast to this apartment which was probably seventy years old, the house in New York was over 115. I'd fallen in love with the old Victorian as soon as the real estate agent pulled into the driveway. Never having owned such an old home, the hardships of owning a money pit were unknown to me. The horrors depicted in the movie of the same name weren't sufficient to prepare me for what was coming. But it was reminiscent of the old homes on The Point in Biloxi that I'd loved as a child. I had to have it. Due to all the legal hassles entailed with the sale of a house in New York, it was three months before the closing. It was pleasantly cool in the summer, but that first winter it was as cold as a witch’s tit in winter, as they say. It was heated by a boiler, which broke down and needed to be replaced within a couple of months, and a radiator system. The lack of insulation caused it to be not only cold, but very expensive to heat. Natural gas bills of more than $800 in some winter months were common. My reward: ice dams weighing tons hanging from the roof.

The owner of the apartment and his son had been shadowing me throughout my wanderings.

How do you like it?

I wasn't sure who said it. I was too busy trying to think of what to say that could get me out of the place without angering them so much that they'd slit my throat.

Well..., I hesitated.

Then, with a smile, I still have three or four more apartments on the list to visit over the next couple of days. But I'll get back to you by Wednesday.

Which never happened.

After much searching and endless viewings of cockroach, rat, and/or student infested dumps, the reward for my persistence was a nice little apartment in Hellin. The rooms were large, and though old, it was comfortable. Within less than an hour of viewing the apartment, the twelve month lease was signed, sealed and delivered.

All the furniture from my old house had been sold before coming south. Things like the big screen flat TV, an air mattress, a