Fire Trap

Twenty one years ago, on the first evening that I lived in this house, I decided to do a load of laundry in the building's laundry room. I had bought this place from drug dealers and had just moved in that day. The laundry room was a very dirty, scary looking room at the back of the building. Despite the mess, I needed some clean clothes, so I loaded the decrepit old washer up and turned it on. Later I took the load of clothes and transferred them to the dryer. I flipped the on switch and went back into my apartment. About five minutes later, as I was scraping the filth and dirt off of the walls and floor of the bedroom so that I would have a clean place to sleep, I smelled smoke. The house was on fire, or at least the electrical box on the back of the house was. After an initial period of running around in a panic, I decided to pull all the breakers, disconnect the dryer, and smother the flames. I called in an electrician the next day who informed me that my house was a fire trap. He used a phrase that my dad used to use, which I cannot use here. He said that the wiring in this house was all "(fill in the blank) rigged". So for a few hundred dollars he got it straightened out enough so that I could use my dryer without burning down the place.

Yesterday I decided to get Mark off my back and put that light fixture up in the hallway. Easy enough job, twenty minutes tops I thought. Take down the old one, and slap that new one up in its place. It turns out that the drug dealers I bought this place from left me another little surprise. The old hallway light fixture was not attached to a junction box. They had drilled a hole through the ceiling, stuck live wires down through the hole, and attached that light fixture to the ceiling with toggle bolts. Three hours later, after crawling through the attic, taking a trip to Home Depot, and then another crawl through the attic, I had my new light securely attached to a proper junction box and wired as close to correct as I am capable of doing. I stood there admiring my work covered in plaster dust, bits of attic insulation, and sweating profusely, but I was happy. All that I needed to do was attach the glass globe over the light bulb and I was done. Too bad for me, the glass globe didn't fit. Somebody had put the wrong glass globe in the box, and it didn't goddamn fit. This is the point where I got loud and vulgar. This is also the point where Mark grabbed the glass globe and ran out the door.

We have our light up and working with the correct glass globe now. I'm glad I didn't go to the hardware store with Mark when he returned it. It's much cleaner that way, just let him be the bitch. I would only muck it up. The only problem as I lay in bed last night, was the nagging suspicion that there has to be another "(fill in the blank) rigged" electrical connection somewhere in this house and we might just die in our sleep.