Issue #04/59, February 25 - March 10, 1999  

by Mark Ames

A man was murdered on my stairwell. It happened a couple of weeks ago. He was one of the homeless horde that have made my stairwell about the most popular guesthouse in my okrug.

Thanks to them, my building is the smelliest in all of Moscow. Which pretty much puts her in the running for smelliest world-wide. 'Course, I ain't never been to Calcutta. And I ain't never been to Karachi. And I ain't never been a panty liner in Jean MacKenzie's underwear on a humid summer's day, pressed up against her sweaty tuckus, as the feller said. But that don't mean my building ain't a-smellin' every bit as mean.

The stench first hits you when you walk through the unlocked entrance door, and doubles in intensity when you pass the mailboxes. Reminds me a little of the giant industrial slaughterhouse you pass on I-5 in Central California. Or a dirty fish tank. No, it's even worse. Like putting your nose right into a bedridden octogenarian's mouth: the gum disease, the stale blood. Imagine scraping fish scales from the bottom of an old fish tank, and wiping the rancid paste in the bedridden octogenarian's gums; then you place a heavy towel over your heads, blocking out all the fresh air, so that all you breathe is his stale, aquarium-paste breath. This gives you an idea of what I go through every day. When the elevator drops down to meet you, it pushes the even more foul air from underneath the building, where the trash duct ends in what I imagine is just a tapeworm-infested pile of soggy trash. I've had guests over who literally blanch and cover their mouths with their shirts. All thanks to the fungally disadvantaged folks who check in to my stairwell every night, free of charge.

Homeless people don't bring out the best in me. When I see them--or rather, when I smell them--in my corridor, I start to hear "Singin' In The Rain"... the Clockwork Orange boot-and-cane remix. I never play it.

No one does. My building must be legendary for its hospitality in homeless circles. It would come highly recommended in a "Homeless Planet Guide To Moscow". My nine flights of stairs, which hold up to a dozen or more homeless people at a time, is the fungal-infested answer to Banglamphu. Salthill with eczema. Backpacking body lice's Charles Bridge. Look under Places To Stay: "Ames's apartment stairwell is especially popular with Lonely Homeless travelers who boast a wide variety of fungal fauna and incurable, easily-communicable diseases, including viral tuberculosis and flesh-eating staphylococcus bacteria. Stairwell corridors well-lit make it easier to urinate or defecate on the floor. Most Homeless Planet travelers praise the 'familiar smell' and the 'relaxed company.' Some recommend you shit on the last step of the ninth floor: that way, Ames might mistakenly step into it with his deeply-grooved electrician's boots, then do his celebrated 'hot foot' dance, smearing feces on the walls and harmlessly cursing you, the Lonely Homeless traveler, with empty threats of violence."

The odor buildup was slow, which is why I'd never quite noticed how bad it had become. So bad that no visitor could believe that mere body waste could produce such odors. Taibbi was convinced that only a corpse could smell that awful. Finally, I started asking around. Two middle-aged neighbors I asked agreed: "Nu trup, naverno." One old widow took matters into her own hands and started banging on every door to see if perhaps some old pensioner had died and was rotting, neglected, inside an apartment. You read about that shit in MK all the time. My pensioner neighbor, always on the proverbial precipice of death, is a prime candidate for "discovered two months later dead on the floor, his body badly decomposed." The lhasa apso who lives in the apartment below me is even worse: milky-white cataracts and the largest patch of raw, smelly, mange-infected hide I've ever seen. Straight out of Pet Cemetary. You can't go in the elevator for a good hour after it's been in there.

I finally called the dispecher to solve the odor mystery, and she told me that some city sanitation officials had already been on the job for two weeks, trying to locate the source.

During their "investigation," someone murdered a bum on the stairwell between the fourth and fifth floors. He'd been beaten to death with a vodka bottle. Not exactly the kind of death that dignifies what was already a horrible medieval life, this "killed by a vodka bottle," but consistent at least. I still have a hard time imagining how it happened: two sickly, dumb homeless men arguing, then one taking the empty bottle and going THUNK! The other protesting, and then THUNK! again... and again... The torn rags on the bodies would slow the fight up considerably. I'd guess it took at least a half hour for the victor to beat him literally to death. The old serf lady who cleans our stairwell told me that there was blood everywhere. Must have been a helluva workout for the victor, using that bottle like a dumbell. Sore tri's and lats for days afterwards. Lactic acid and endorphins squirting all over the place.

I first met the dead bum over a year ago, when I screamed at him for shitting on my stairwell. He denied it, but the evidence was pretty overwhelming. He had his shit on his hands and sleeves. The same shit that was now wedged in my boots. I made some empty threats, and stormed away, tracking into the elevator, through my courtyard and all the way to the metro, where I was instantly popular.

Now that one of their kind has been killed, the homeless won't come near our building. Bad karma.

It's not just bums that are dying. Last month, some thug was plugged twenty feet from my door in what Moskovsky Komsomolets called the first contract murder in Moscow in 1999. Right outside my door! That's two murders in two months at one address! Compton, you ain't shee-it.

For two years, this building has been ground zero and home base for the most epic events of my life, and the place where I've punched out more words than in all my years combined. Every time I think my building has shown it all to me, the volume of events gets ratcheted up to a new high, without ever distracting me from work. Two murders in two months, and a mysterious odor that even the sanitation department can't figure out after almost four weeks of feckless inspections. I can't tell if my building is trying to scare me away or if it's scared of losing me, but either way, I appreciate the attention. The only thanks a mere mortal like myself can offer in return is to try to immortalize it. So here it is: an ode to my apartment building, the only loyal, selfless creature I've ever slept with. But not necessarily the smelliest.