My First Home: Free pizza and our own slice of life
Try running the hair dryer and the microwave at the same time and a fuse would blow ... in the first-floor apartment.
Laura Liedo for The Boston Globe
Sometimes, even modest celebratory meals stick in your brain forever if the reason for celebrating is important enough.
For me, it was a Sam Adams and a cheese pizza at Daveluy’s. The bartender gave the pie to us, a welcome to the neighborhood. I had just moved into an apartment that night back in 1994, on Echo Lake Road in Watertown, Conn., with my childhood buddy Kyle and his girlfriend, Andi. The monthly rent for this top floor in a three-family was cheap enough: $450.
The apartment had a deck just big enough to fit the three of us and a living room with just enough space for a TV, small folding table, and futon.
We didn’t really get to know our neighbors, though we heard them all the time. The pitter-patter of little kids’ feet on the first floor (there were three crammed in there, along with Mom and Dad) was constant. We learned the musical inclinations of the second-floor guy, the one whose truck said “Wet Basement.’’ One night he passed out, treating us to Garth Brooks’s “The Thunder Rolls’’ stuck in repeat until his wife got home.
There was only one radiator that we could find, in the TV room next to where Andi and Kyle slept. I had a space heater in my bedroom, but this provided little warmth on the nights I needed it most. So I crashed on the futon.
Try running the hair dryer and the microwave at the same time and a fuse would blow — in the first-floor apartment. We kept a supply of old glass fuses for these occasions, and Andi dutifully knocked on the downstairs door to get the juice flowing again.
Sometime in February, our landlord decided to fix the electrical issue. But this was a two-day job, and the electrician left on Friday with the exterior wall of my bedroom exposed to the street. A nor’easter blew through the next day, and snow sprayed my room in a fountain of white. Back to the futon for me.
Later that month, a plumber visited to check on another issue and asked us whether he should turn on the pilot light to our “furnace.’’ What? All three of us did a double take. Apparently, our stove also doubled as a radiator, one powerful enough to heat the entire apartment. We endured most of a winter before finding that out.
Then there was the claw-foot tub and the slippery snake of a shower head. Turn on the water, and the force would send the thing spinning in its holster, spraying in every direction. I would often emerge to a flooded bathroom as a result. The Wet Basement guy didn’t seem happy about this.
But the price was right. We were just starting our careers; we watched every dime. The location was ideal, a halfway point between my office and their school. Plus, Daveluy’s was just three doors down.
And there was something much more valuable: We were finally on our own, free from the safety nets of college life and bunking under our parents’ roofs.
Sometimes independence looks like a rundown three-family house, its porches drooping under gravity’s pull. It can sound like a Garth Brooks song, stuck forever on repeat. And sometimes it tastes like a slice of Daveluy’s pizza, one made just for you.
Jon Chesto can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @jonchesto. Send a 550-word essay on your first home to [email protected]. Please note: We do not respond to submissions we won’t pursue.
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