Man, I really have the worst luck with apartment complexes.

When I lived in Portland and was working for Liquid Development, I lived and worked in the same building downtown. The apartment complex was called Fifth Avenue Court.

It was very convenient, just an elevator ride to work. I traveled farther vertically than horizontally. :) It freed me of the need for a car. It was a small apartment, but clean, and had a nice view of the city. That much was fine.

Unfortunately, almost everything else sucked enormously. The apartment manager would take off days at a time with no notice and no emergency number. She’d yell at me. She’d slam the door in my face. On several occasions, she signed for my packages then hid them and pretended I didn’t have any. She even refused to fix my dishwasher for over a month.

Also, my next door neighbor was insane. Literally.

One wintry morning in December, we were awakened at 5AM by him screaming “MERRY ALCOHOLIC CHRISTMAS!” at the top of his lungs. Immediately following that we heard him throwing beer bottles and anything else he could get his hands on out the window, six floors onto the street below.

We were fairly freaked out, but tried to go back to sleep. At that point, he grew weary of chucking all his worldly possessions out the window. There was a brief pause as he decided it’d be a much better idea to pick up a sledgehammer and start destroying everything in his apartment that was too heavy to lift.

We were wide awake no. We heard him running around smashing out all his windows, putting the sledgehammer through his furniture, smashing up the bathroom, annihilating the toilet, and punching holes in the walls wherever he could.

This went on for about half an hour, screaming “THIS SUCKS!” repeatedly as he smashed everything.

After a short pause that worried us greatly, he decided he’d like a bigger apartment. Why do I know this? Because he started breaking down the wall separating our bedroom to his. It shook our entire bed and we could feel enormous chunks of drywall falling off.

At this point, we were sufficiently freaked enough to call the police and get the HELL out.

Later, we told the insane bitch apartment manager about it, who seemed appropriately worried. She went to do an inspection of the apartment to see what happened to it, and wouldn’t let us anywhere near it.

A couple days later I dropped by and asked her what she found. She looked at me like I was insane and said that the apartment was completely undamaged.

I was astonished. Nearly an hour of destruction went on in there, and there is absolutely no way that nothing was destroyed. I couldn’t believe it.

And then I didn’t, because the very next day there was constant construction and drywall experts working inside the apartment for over two weeks. Nothing damaged? Interesting. Made me feel a lot safer.

A lot of other random crap happened there, like the crazy lady that sat outside the apartment complex and talked to a tree all day, and random people getting shot outside, but that incident was by far the most entertaining.

So fast forward to California. I’ve lived in this complex for nearly 11 months now. I have one month left go on my lease, but I want out so badly that I’m moving out a month early and simply paying for two apartments for that last month.

When I moved from Portland to Huntington Beach, I hired movers, sold my car and flew down here. I had to sign up for the apartment sight unseen, and handle the deposit and paperwork and everything without having seen the complex. Time was a factor.

The apartment complex in question is Huntington Vista Apartments.

The complex sounded great, initially. A mile from the beach, two bedrooms, two bathrooms, 1100 square feet, second story, vaulted ceiling, reasonably close to work, and so on.

Mainly, I was excited about it because of the fitness center, air conditioning, utilities paid, and NO CONSTRUCTION. I’d spent a year living across the street from an extremely active construction site, and by golly, I’d never do that again. This was all verified as being completely true by the apartment manager. Sold, I thought!

So I sold off much of what I owned, hired movers to pick up the rest, sold my car and flew down here, leaving Portland behind for good.

I had a friend drive me to the apartment complex, having seen it for the first time, and I sat down to sign the lease and hand over the cashier’s check to move in.

They waited until that moment to tell me that, actually, the “finished” fitness center had only begun construction. Utilities aren’t paid. And worst of all, there is no air conditioning, and they don’t allow window air conditioners.

Oh, and to top it all off, we can’t see the apartment yet, but I have to sign and pay now anyway or I don’t get it at all.

To establish a bit of context, at this point I have no car, virtually no money, and two days until the movers arrive and no way to contact them. My only choices are

1) Sacrifice a few hundred bucks and desperately scramble to find a place to live, or

2) Sign.

So I signed.

Remember how I said I hated construction? Right after I moved, they began to construct the fitness center 20 feet from my bedroom window, starting at 6am sharp every day. Awesome.

We live across from a girl who, I swear, is the cosmic love child of Fran Drescher and Gilbert Gottfried. She could shatter bulletproof glass simply by speaking. When she laughs, birds fall dead from the sky. Whenever she’s surprised by something, she shrieks with a volume usually reserved for someone that is in the process of being murdered. I always hope that maybe, just maybe, just this one time, that that’s actually the case. But then she keeps talking, and I sulk.

It wouldn’t be so bad if she stayed inside, but for some reason this blabbing bitch sits out on her front porch, facing our apartment, talking on the phone and smoking for hours at a time, every night.

I’ve seen a dozen people move in next to her and move out within a week. You can only do that by breaking your lease. With the apartment they lived in and the fees for breaking it, that’s nearly $4000 per person.

I’ve called security on her more times than I can count. I’ve even called the police on her because it was so bad.

We’ve tried closing all the windows and all the doors in our apartment and retreating to the bedroom, but we can still hear her and she still keeps us up at night. It’s incredible.

The constant stream of lease-breakers ended when her friends moved in next door. They ALL started hanging out on their front porch, laughing and drinking and screaming and being idiots and playing loud music and never stopping well into the night, every night.

Over the Fourth of July weekend, one prick hooked up an electric guitar to an amp, cranked it up to concert levels and played music all day and all night long.

This, of course, coincides with record heat, where we literally can’t close our windows without getting physically ill from the heat. And we couldn’t very well escape from the noise because they don’t stop at night. The police were even called at night and still they wouldn’t stop.

The apartment manager finally got so many complaints about them that she contacted a lawyer and threatened them with something horrible she wouldn’t elaborate on, and the volume has died down somewhat. A minor relief.

A couple doors down from them live more assholes. On they first day of their moving in, they parked their truck across four parking spaces, including mine, and left it there. I was going to see a movie with Dea and couldn’t leave because of them, and I couldn’t find them. Awesome!

We had to call the apartment manager, read her the license plate, have her look up whose apartment it belonged to and walk over there and ask them to move it.

The beer-guzzling idiot that parked there grudgingly got up from his plaid loveseat, shlumped his way into his raggedy pickup truck and gracefully backed over the recliner he forgot he’d set behind his truck, destroying it immediately.

After he cleared up the mess and moved completely, I was able to leave. Then he immediately drove back in front of the same spaces and left again, so I couldn’t even park when I came back. Double awesome.

I believe the apartment manager had him towed after we left.

The next day, I discovered hundreds of dollars worth of damage to my nearly-new car from variously keying the doors, hood, trunk, top of my car and the wheels, and also several dents that were so bad they scraped all the paint away. Yay.

He and the stupid loud bitch have each done the same thing to my car on two or three more occasions, coinciding perfectly with security being called on them.

Most recently, we had a heat wave. It was over 100 degrees outside, and 95 degrees inside our apartment. There was no air conditioning, window units weren’t allowed, and all our window fans had no effect. We had a window air conditioner from Portland that we weren’t allowed to use, and I called the apartment manager and begged her to use it. She said we couldn’t use it because they look unsightly from the outside. She suggested we buy a swamp cooler ($100 - 500) or a standing air conditioner ($500 - 2000) instead.

We called Renter’s Rights and every local city phone number we could but apparently air conditioning is an amenity and they can evict us at any time if we install one without their permission. Even if it’s a health issue.

We did our best to survive through it, but it was so bad that Dea had a heat stroke. It gave her a migraine so bad she was crying and couldn’t even stand up and threw up for hours. I’m very happy she didn’t lapse into a coma like many heat stroke victims do. Did I mention this happened INSIDE OUR APARTMENT?

Clearly, Huntington Vista Apartments cares more about nondescript tan boxes poking out of a window than human lives.

After that — which was horrible and stressful — I got clever. I bought some plastic tarp, a small wooden table, and some packing tape. With these materials I installed our window unit air conditioner in the living room sliding glass door, then hung up a towel over the chairs on our patio and blocked it off completely. Then we sealed off everything with plastic tarp and tape, and the temperature of our department dropped by 20 degrees and we were fine.

We still run it, they haven’t bitched at us, and we’ve been happy ever since.

There was a lot of other assorted bullshit, like the construction workers following Dea around and whistling at her constantly, then putting a wooden board with nails in it in my parking space so I’d drive over it after we complained.

Fortunately, this is our last month in the apartment, and I can’t wait to get out. I hope the new place I’m moving into will be better.

Are these kinds of problems normal?