How To Trash My Condo In 48 Hours

Back in the mid-nineties, I spent two summers living with Leslie in Atlanta. We shared her one-bedroom apartment in Buckhead, right down to sharing her full-sized bed bedecked with Laura Ashley sheets. In the mornings we set off to our respective jobs. And in the evenings, we sat down to eat spaghetti dinners at her lopsided coffee table while watching reruns of Wings. By the way, I dedicated a fair amount of time trying to fix that piece of shit table.

Eventually I moved back to Philadelphia and Leslie got married. She settled into a beautiful home overlooking the golf course at Chastain and I hunkered down in an old age home in the Philadelphia suburbs.

“Oh, that’s just my neighbor’s walker,” I said to my friend who couldn’t place the squealing noise coming from the hallway.

This past weekend, Leslie headed back to Philly for her high school reunion. Since our parents were in Sarasota, she stayed with me. Half-dressed the morning she was arriving, I ran around dragging a Swiffer sheet across any flat surface I could find. I adjusted the hand-towels in the bathroom and fluffed the pillows on my bed. It would be just like old times.

“Hey, so the light switch in my bedroom? Don’t touch it. There’s no overhead light and it simply controls the outlets. My alarm clock is plugged into one.”

“Oh, okay,” she said.

“And make yourself comfortable,” I added, before giving her a kiss and running back to the office to finish a proposal.

I returned home a little after five to find Leslie running in circles as she readied for the first event, a gathering at her old prep school.

“Oops,” she said from my bedroom as I poured a glass of water in the kitchen. “I’ll reset your alarm clock.”

And that was just the beginning. Over the next forty-eight hours, Leslie managed to do a lot of ‘oops’ qualifying things. Like, Saturday night she was blowing her hair dry in my bathroom and had the heat so high it was causing smoke to lift off her curling brush, thereby tripping the fire alarm. She also left my closet light on for so long that it blew out and needed thirty minutes to reset. And then she broke the towel rack in the bathroom.

“Um, Les?” I asked while pointing to the brushed nickel rod dangling precariously away from the wall with a chunk of plaster still attached to the screw.

“I didn’t do it.”

“What, are you Olivia?”

“No, but I seriously don’t recall hitting it,” she reasoned.

“Right. But, see, I know it can’t sustain too much force because it isn’t mounted into a tiled wall. So, like, I’m careful with it. That leaves you.”

“Sorry.”

The next morning, with my apartment in disarray, Leslie and I set off for the city to have brunch with friends. We then strolled the streets of Philadelphia before heading for the airport.

“Have a safe trip home,” I said as I hugged her at the curb. “Also, you’re never invited back.”

“I love you too,” she said before disappearing into the terminal.

I got in my car, pulled away from the curb and headed for the highway. Halfway home, trapped in post-Eagles traffic, I reached for my phone and called my handyman.

“My sister is pretty much a twenty-one year old frat boy,” I said when I finished relaying the problems.

“I’ll see you Monday.”