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The Apartment It was 1964, and in the words of Bob Dylan, the times, they were a changing. We were sophomores at the newly established State University of New York at Buffalo. According to the university's rules, sophomore students were no longer bound to live in the dorms, but could find their own housing, off campus. This sounded like a good deal as well as an exciting idea. By splitting up the cost of an apartment with two or three roommates you would actually be paying less money than it would cost to live in the dorms, not to mention the whole concept of having your own apartment; able to do what you wanted, when you wanted, without supervision of any kind. But it wasn't easy for a student to find off-campus housing, a regular apartment that is, in Buffalo in 1964, and it's probably still hard. Although we were not sympathetic at the time, it's not really that difficult to understand the reasoning of the landlords. Students are notorious for not paying rent on time, for making a lot of noise and for being careless, messy, and even destructive. So, the summer after our freshman year, I teamed up with three fellow students and we dedicated ourselves to finding an apartment for the coming semester. Like I said, it wasn't easy. Most landlords simply would not allow students no matter what, and it seemed that the ones that allowed students took full advantage of the situation by charging ridiculous rents for veritable dumps. We were just starting to get really discouraged, when we lucked out and found what appeared to be the perfect place. It was a garden-type apartment, two bedrooms, one bathroom, clean, nice kitchen and in good shape. The rent was reasonable and they allowed students, as long as they paid in advance for the first and last month's rent, plus a security deposit equal to a month's rent. Wow, it was too good to be true! The only problem, or so we thought, was that the apartment was unfurnished, and in addition to having to come up with all the advance payment, we would have to either buy or rent furniture. We solved this problem by going to garage sales and buying used furniture and the bare minimum of stuff that makes life more comfortable, like dishes and pots and pans and towels. We got the place in shape in a matter of a few days and moved into the apartment on the first of September, just about a week before the beginning of classes. On our first night in our new digs, we made ourselves a nice dinner, watched some TV and went to sleep. We soon learned that there was a problem concerning our new abode, one we had never taken into consideration, but one that became painfully evident at about 5:00 the next morning, when we were just about shaken out of bed by a loud crashing, metalic sound that shattered the still dark morning sky with its intensity. "What the fuck was that!" my roommate shouted. My bed was near the window that looked out to the rear of the apartment complex. A window, by the way, that none of us had paid attention to previously. Not more than 50 yards away was a large fenced yard, full of giant piles of scrap iron. Train tracks led through the yard and a long freight train stood motionless in the center of the yard. A huge crane was in the process of sucking up tons at a time of the heavy iron scrap with a powerful electromagnet. "BA-CRASH!" Then the crane spun around making a loud whirring sound "RRRRRRRRR," until the crane holding its cargo of old car parts and rusty steel beams and assorted twisted scrap iron was aimed directly over one of the open boxcars of the freight train. The electromagnet was then turned off and the iron was dropped unceremoniously into the metal box car, "KA-RASH-CA-LANG." The operation was to be repeated again and again until the last box was full of scrap iron and the operation ended - about three hours later at 8:00 AM. I always kind of knew that this whole deal was too good to be true! The end of this story is this. I have found that people will get used to almost anything. And such was the case with us. Having invested so much into the apartment and really having no place else to go, we stuck it out, and, amazingly enough it wasn't that long before we were able to actually sleep through the noise - sometimes. |