Hi. It’s me, Adam, of “Eryn, Adam, & James.” Apartment 64? Let’s take this slow. I’ll be careful.

1. We really like living here. Sure, the building is old, but it’s not so old that it’s a detriment, it just adds character. We really don’t mind that the floor is a little slopey and the hot water takes a while. We moved in expecting that. We actually want that. That’s what “prewar” means.

2. I understand you have a really bad temper. (Bipolar? Alcoholic? Recovering Alcoholic?) As someone who tends to lean toward the melodramatic, I empathize, I really do.

3. That being said, we would like to have the globes and glass coverings that were removed from our light fixtures when you painted our place the week before we moved in. I know you “have them in the basement” and you plan on bringing them to us, but we are about to sign our second lease. We do appreciate the sentiment—you "didn’t want to get paint on them.² we know—but splattered with paint or not, they are useless to us if not in our possession.

4. The same goes for the electrical covers to the three-prong outlets in the living room and James’s room. The curtains kind of hang over them, so it doesn’t appear to our guests as though we are living within a work in progress, but I am afraid it is only a matter of time before our cat gets curious about what exposed wiring tastes like.

5. Yes, I did get a little pissed when I asked you to fix the toilet and you said you couldn’t because you didn’t have keys. Of course you have keys. You’re the super. You gave me the keys to copy when I moved in, and I returned them to you with a copy of the key to the deadbolt I added. Did you just throw our keys out?

6. Eryn did get a little pissed when she lent you her keys and they were returned to her with our apartment number written, in pink highlighter, on the back of her leather Louis Vuitton keychain. Yes, it was fake Louis Vuitton, but you didn’t know that and either way that’s still pretty ghetto.

7. Thanks for fixing the toilet. I have to admit I was scared (Eryn’s parents will be here in two weeks, and we didn’t think it would get done in time). At first you just added all that grout and that didn’t work at all. Then you replaced the seal but cracked the toilet and made everything a lot worse. But the third time was a charm, and the new toilet is working fine. We were able to get all that grout off the hallway floor, and I’m sure Eryn will be able to scrub those greasy handprints out of the white paint in the bathroom, so don’t lose any sleep over that. It was a stressful seventeen-day tug-o-war, but in the end we all got what we wanted. By the by, don’t worry about that razor you accidentally smashed to bits; it was one of those cheap ones from Duane Reade.

8. I am not to blame for any of the following:
- The old fuse that blew up when you stuck that electricity-tester in it.
- The lack of globes and glass coverings on our light fixtures. I did not break them; they¹ve been missing since we moved in.
- The toilet you cracked while trying to fix it.
- The “speed bump” in the middle of our kitchen floor. In college I was certainly guilty of some tenant malfeasance, but I cannot fathom how you would think this could be my fault. How on earth could I make our six-story brick building sink four inches around a weight-bearing floor beam? I could not. This is part of a slow settling process that I suspect the building has been subject to since the thirties.
- The turning of that knob behind our cabinet that I didn’t even know was there. Regardless of whether or not it had something to do with the water pressure on all the floors beneath us, I did not turn it.

These things are not my fault. Please stop yelling at me about them each time you enter my apartment.

Let me know what I can give you as a token of my appreciation. I would love to give you something that would establish a sort of request/reward system. If you were a normal nonpsychotic person I would give you a little bottle of booze, but I feel really skittish about adding any more chemicals to your already massively maladjusted biochemistry. Do you like cookies?

Sincerely,

Adam Scally of “Adam, Eryn, and James”
Apt 64
NY, NY