I didn’t worry until the end of the month came up like that last shot of tequila that makes you know you’re going to puke.

It was noon and I was skipping class to sleep. It was either my clock radio or car alarms that woke me up. Or the rain outside whipping the curtains around like ghosts above me. My roommate is playing his new soccer game on Playstation in the living room, still trying to stumble out of a hangover and a night on the couch in his clothes.

Someone buzzes at the door. “Wayne will get it,” I think. Then I’m bask asleep and dreaming about airplanes and the Martha Stewart scandal…there’s a knock at my door. The doorknob’s angry rattle. The lock that never works. Pounding on the door frame.

“Wake up, you got evicted!” It’s Dave from downstairs.

“Get dressed, seriously. I got kicked out, too. Same letter. I found it under your door when I just came in.” He sits down on my bed. Slaps at me with my letter which I see he’s already opened.


But as I pulled my way through that underwater feeling of actually getting up, of knowing you’re up for good, I knew he was telling me the truth. I didn’t have to read the letter. I’d blown way too many chances with the people who owned the building, the landlord, even the security guard or “courtesy officer” who I found out later shot a 24-year old student after the Jimmy Buffet concert for “causing a disturbance.”

Anyway, the place was a high rise and there’s no way any college student should be allowed to live in a place that high with windows…that open. You throw a few road cones or let one of your friends dropkick a keg out the 14th floor window and see how long you last. See if you don’t get this special letter, too.

Our building didn’t have a 13th floor, but I lived on the 14th. I’m not superstitious but I’m also not crazy; I always thought that was unlucky. It was an old building and in some historical society for being something like the tallest residential building in the Southeast at some point. So there were loads of old people still living there. One old guy who pushed himself around in a wheelchair, white hair poking out his ears, slumped over always making you wonder if he’s going to die right there in the elevator with you. Mouth full of food. Shaking.

Naturally, I was an awful neighbor. Too many noise complaints was what the letter said. I was glad they had the taste to just write that. I don’t know how we ever ended up in that building anyway. I guess we liked the view.

“We have five days to move out,” Dave says. “Come on, we’ll go find a place.”

What you need to know about Dave is that he’s always indestructible, and you hang around him long enough it starts to rub off. You even start to talk like him.

Walking down Greene Street in the rain I thought about why I wasn’t bothered by this. Drug addiction, jail, bankrupts and eviction - the four horsemen of grown ups. The fears that hide away in the attic of every conscience until you’re old enough for that mid life crisis. In college, though, it’s different.

No families to worry about, no wife to nag us. We get arrested at least once, our bank accounts hand us overdraft slips like tickets to a show every other month. We get evicted. And we don’t care. We can’t care because that’s what is separating us, driving a wedge between two lifestyles, forcing the generation gap between us and our parents. We’re not going to tell them, even that’s just as bad. And now we’re indestructible.

Writing down apartment listings with a borrowed pen on the back of a flyer we pulled off a telephone pole, I know it will work out.

In an hour, we have a new place. Cell phone calls are made, applications filed. Somewhere there’s the nagging guilt, but it’s being licked away by the tide of excitement now. As we move into our new place.

“Did you sign off your old lease,” Dave asks me later.
“Did I have to?” I ask.
“Yeah, but you have until the end of the month. So you won’t have to pay for the entire month of March for the old place. You have like a week, dude don’t worry about it.”

I didn’t worry. I didn’t worry, in fact, until the end of the month came up like that last shot of tequila that makes you know you’re going to puke. Your mouth goes warm, you get dizzy. I’d waited too long.

My bank account already exhausted from the standardizations of the new apartment, the deposit, the first month’s rent, cable and internet fees, I was out of cash, bankrupt. You always hear adults talking about the end of the month like they’re going to a funeral. I bet those disappearing dads you hear about start taking off around 26th. Go to the store for cigarettes and don’t come back. Mom’s wait until the 28th, women are like that. Going to get some milk and they don’t come back until 30 years later when they’re back with their kids crying on the sound stage of a talk show in the graveyard of daytime television.

I understand it a little now, is all I’m saying.

The end of the month was getting me for the first time when I was 22-years old and getting evicted. It had cleaned my bank account and it had left me in the rain and scribbling down numbers with an area code 1,300 miles from where I was born.

My old building leered above me that entire weekend. 19 floors into the sky, it stared at me the whole time unblinking; the two antenna lights, red eyes following me. While I moved couches and piled kegs and chairs and boxes into my friends’ pick-up trucks, it watched and waited. Holding me out until the end of the month. Dangling me like a puppet all over the city, watching me dance and show my friends my new place and smile and laugh and let me joke about being untouchable. It waited.

February 28th at 1 a.m. I remembered the signing off of the lease. I lost.

I fell to pieces at my computer desk in my empty apartment. Procrastination is worse than they say it is. It’s even worse at the end of the month. Where do I come up with the $320.00 they are going to demand for March? If I don’t pay, my credit will be shot for life. No house, no car, no future, I’ve seen the commercials. Somewhere a guy in a suit in a tower, higher than my former residence, writes off my future for three hundred and twenty dollars. He calls me “high risk,” he takes out his pen and he clicks it like a trigger.

The calendar is not my friend. I think that’s why I looked at it then. It’s funny that way, when you’re in a bad situation, when you’re rock bottom, when you think you lost it all, you never look for a friend. Friends can’t help you when you’re by yourself, so you’ll make a deal with anyone. So I look at the calendar.

But this can’t be right. February 29, 2004.

Holy shit, it’s a f**king leap year! The bottom drops out of the entire weekend. Somewhere in my chest I feel new blood, warm blood.

Tomorrow I’ll sign off that lease and I’ll get out before the first of the month. No penalty. No nothing. I’ll walk away bright white and dry as a bone. And the chances of this? Every four years.

Lucky. Lucky. Lucky.

The leap year that saved my life.