Livin’ In The Fridge

by M. Lyons

It’s 1993, and Weird Al is singing a parody of a reasonably-successful Aerosmith song, peppered liberally (like the original Steven Tyler/Joe Perry composition) with references to paranoia, bizarre forms of life, decay, rot and a general undercurrent of simmering unease.

Oh, and it’s got a refrain that contains, and in fact, seems centered around, Al’s repeated cries of “DYSENTARY!”

You know, for a parodist, the guy’s kind of got a point.

This past weekend, it was nearly twenty years since Weird Al recorded his account of left-over liver cake gone terribly, horribly sentient, and my fiancee and one of our roommates decided to clean out our fridge.

Now, to anyone with roommates, or what-have-you, this can be something of a process, and manages to be a categorically unpleasant one pretty much across the board. But in our apartment, it was a full-blown, balls-to-the-wall Tribulation with a capital-T.

This is because our apartment isn’t the typical lease-terms kind of place, and as such, the fridge itself has been subject to years – Years! – of culinary battering at the hands of, at this point, countless individuals, all of whom, by my inexpert approximation, were fucking slobs.

Let me explain.

We live in a three-bedroom apartment with no lease. So, in a place like New York, this basically means that when one roomie moves out, we just fill the room with someone else. Call it a revolving door policy, or whatever you like, it works and that’s really what matters. Now, I’m a nine-to-fiver, my fiancee is a nine-to-fiver, and one of our two other roomies is a nine-to-fiver, but up until this point, the apartment was filled primarily by actors. This becomes important in a minute, I promise.

Now, the actors that lived here would occasionally go out as part of a touring company, or would get a gig working in Connecticut or something, and as such, would have to be away from the apartment for some time. So they would sublet.

The sublets would typically last a month or so, enough to cover that month’s cut of the rent, while the primary roomie would be away. With three-ish bedrooms filled with actors, that could potentially mean a lot of subletters at any given time, you follow? I mean, hell, when we moved in, it took us about a month to even meet the primary roomies, because they were out in other parts of the country, doing actor shit. We lived with two subletters, a slutty blonde and a catty gay man, for the first month we were even here. It was weird, but we rolled with it – not like we had a lot of choice, you know?

By my count, we’ve had at the very least thirteen different people living here (all for different stretches of time) over the course of the past year and a half.

That’s a lot of people around and a lot of leftovers stuck and forgotten in the fridge over the course of eighteen months, man.

And let me point something else out before I move on – this place was the Actor’s Hotel for like, six years before we even showed up. I mean, that means what, potentially ninety-plus people stayed here up until now?

…Jesus H, I’ve got to go clean something. Clean anything. Clean everything.

I’ll be back.

Still here? Great. Where was I?

Oh right, ninety-plus. Shudder.

So, in the seven-or-so-years that this cycle’s been spinning around and around and around, no one has ever once cleaned the inside of the refrigerator. People have swept the floors occasionally, they’ve done dishes, scrubbed the toilet bowl, they’ve even used that self-rinsing cleaning spray on the shower after they’ve finished bathing. But the fridge has gone so neglected and abused that it should probably qualify under the strictures of the Geneva Convention.

Kids, this is not okay.

So that brings me, mostly, up to now.

This weekend, we made the bold, stupid, stupid decision to clean both the fridge and the freezer out. This started as an idle curiosity, a notion to clean out all the old stuff to make room for new stuff as a courtesy to our newest roommate (not a slob – yet). No biggie, right? Yeah, no biggie, except for the years-old horrors left in there by some inconsiderate bastards three years back. Thanks to years of thoughtlessness and arrant fuckery, what was supposed to be a “Let’s Get Rid of the Old Salad Dressings” party turned into a two-and-a-half hour “Deep-Clean-the-Fridge-A-Thon.”

I mean, okay, don’t get me wrong, we threw stuff out. We threw plenty of stuff out. Basically everything, in three full Hefty bags, each weighing nearly as much as a very small person or a very large dog, I haven’t decided which yet. Among the highlights of the insane detritus were:

+Four cartons of eggs

+Six half-full jars of spaghetti sauce, various ages

+Multiple mysteriously-frozen bags of almonds

+A plastic yogurt container in the freezer filled to the brim with what looked like desiccated peas, but I can’t say for sure

+A jar of pre-minced garlic in oil, dated 2007

+A years-old jar of twelve-dollar rhubarb jelly with a single knife-dip taken from the top

+One bag of soft, rotting carrots coated in a stinking, frothy, milk-like substance

After sorting through all of the contents of the fridge and sorting the wheat from the chaff without puking, we began to actually undertake the cleaning, which is something I never, ever want to do again. Without getting into all of the squicky details, allow me to just say that we scraped crystallized, rotten milk from the glass of the crisper, scrubbed sticky, blackened cheese-muck from the wire racks, and prised a kind of thick, yellow mold from the bottom of one of the drawers, a mold that screeched in agony when we hit it with the antibacterial spray. I think I saw an eye in there somewhere, bloodshot and flooded with tears of pain. What was that I said about squicky details? Oops.

And, to be entirely fair, it was good that it was a team effort, because if one person had tried to clean in on their own, I have no doubt they would have perished horribly. Also, we managed to not breed resentment or enmity with regards to certain people doing chores, but I think the perish thing rates a little higher than a few hurt little feelings or whatever.

And you know something? Our fridge looks legitimately awesome now. Clean and factory crisp-white on the inside, despite the fact that it’s… basically empty. It’s true, most of the stuff that was taking up room in there was the old stuff that former roommates or subletters didn’t care about enough to just throw out when they moved out, because it’s New York, and who gives a shit, right?.

So, to my former roomies, I say: thanks a lot, fuckers.

I digress. The fact of the matter is that it looks nice again. It looks like a place you might actually store some of your food that you intend to eat. Not to say that we were keeping our Pepsi and Gruyere cheese chilled in the diseased, pitch-black swamps of Mordor – but it was close.

I’m proud of us, too. It was a trial, it sucked, but we got through it. Go us.

And god help the next person to spill a single goddamn thing in there. I’ve put too much time and effort into getting it clean again, and if I have to deal with any more goopy, crystallized sun-dried tomatoes or another spongy, rotten-milk-stinking bag of carrots, I might just burn the whole house down and dance on the ashes.

If I’m not happy, nobody’s happy, and I’ll make damn sure of that.

What was I talking about?

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