The condo

 

The minute we move in, I’m thrilled

All my life I’ve ached to live in Manhattan.

It’s a sign that we’ve made it.

What do I care if five years ago it was a slum.

To me, Mayor Bloomberg is a hero for clearing out the riff raft.

We’re just about settled in when I see a hippie-like character wandering in the hall.

I call the building’s maintenance director demanding to know how such a “bum” got in.

Don’t we have locked doors downstairs to keep his kind out?

I try to keep my voice down even though I am upset, not to upset my wife who is chirping a happy song in the other room.

This is the good life, the first great step into a great future, and we both know we will go up from here as the city clears more slums nearer the river and I move up in my company so I can afford an even better place.

The maintenance director tells me the hippie I saw didn’t wander in, he lives here.

This s befuddles me I can hardly concentrate on my job the whole next day.

I thought my owning a condo protected me from scum like this.

What is the point in having money if we have to live side by side with scum?

 learn later that there is more than one hippie living on the top floor. A commune owns it and dozens if not hundreds of hippies pass through the place in the course of a year.

I call my attorney to see what he can do.

He tells me I’ve confused a condo with a co-op.

Anyone can own a condo; you have to be accepted into a co-op.

I tell my wife we have to move.

She doesn’t understand. She doesn’t care about the hippies since they appear not to bother anybody but me.

When I insist, she agrees, though it takes six months for us to find a co-op that will accept us, and this costs us twice as much as the condo did for half as much as we got with the condo, and worse, in a neighborhood Mayor Bloomberg hasn’t yet had time to clear out fully.

But I’m relieved.

Still all this has had a terrible impact on my life – at home and at work.

For a while, I thought my wife would file for divorce, and my boss would fire me for all the ill-conceived decisions I made on the job.

All that’s over now and I take my wife out to celebrate – though I do wonder how long it will take the city to ride our street of the bums and panhandlers – at which point I noticed one of the bums going into our building

And he’s using a key!