Did you ever want to live in a fun, cool neighborhood in New York City? Did you wonder what kind of a trade off you’d have to make to do that? Did you ever think that cramming two people, two cats and 2000 compact discs into 250 square feet was a perfectly reasonable thing to do until you did it and then figured that this lapse in logic alone would be your only punishment?

You were wrong.

Last Wednesday night I returned home to a confounding mess in the second floor hallway. In my wine-dazed state, I was unable to discern whether the pools of yellow liquid and smears of blackish grit were fecal matter or just garbage, and as I stepped gingerly over the wreckage, I noted a discarded chicken bone lodged under the first of the stairs to the third floor.

By Thursday night the mess — what turned out to be some kind of cooking oil and coffee grounds — had been tracked across all four floors of the building, and oiled footprints glistened on each of the staircases, turning an already dangerous climb into something nearly death-defying. Chad and I wondered who would leave such a mess in their own home, but only had to think of the other tenants in the building before we shrugged the whole situation off as a perfectly normal thing to do.

On one floor is a Puerto Rican transvestite with a roach problem so bad that the exterminator has complained to us about it repeatedly. Next door to us, a middle-aged single fellow listens to the same mixtapes over and over and over and over, and a large Asian family is stuffed into one apartment on the first floor. The women in the apartments on the floor above us decide on a daily basis whether or not to completely ignore us or make eye contact and then look quickly away. In fact, the only person in our building — a four-floor walkup crammed to the gills with teeny tiny studio apartments — who consistently acknowleges my or Chad’s existence is the super, a constantly stoned but always-friendly gay guy with an adorable dog.

So the presence of garbage in the hallway for three days, although disgusting, wasn’t totally shocking. And that’s pretty gross.

Anyway, by Friday when we headed out to do our laundry, the mess had been tempered by a zillion sheets of paper from the New York Times. But the grease was leaking through fast, and somebody must have noticed because on Saturday when went out for breakfast, a full issue of the Village Voice had been laid over the Times and the whole mess had been taped down with six foot strips of duct tape.

At this point, we’d already called the super, but he was out of town and promised that he’d spoken to the offending slob — a slob who actually had the gall to ask the super to clean it up — and that the whole situation would be taken care of on Saturday.

No matter to me though, because I had my bags packed and was heading down to the New Jersey shore for a long weekend in the sun with my family and several hundred thousand margaritas. Of course, the weekend was fabulous — and I’m going back on Thursday night for more trashy beach fun.

But come Monday evening, after wading through calf-deep rivers of sewer water flowing down the streets in my neighborhood during a heavy rainstorm, I come home to the same scene I’d left on Saturday.

Newspaper. Duct Tape. Oil. Coffee grounds.

One of my neighbors, a woman who usually pretends she can’t see me, was coming up the stairs behind me as I dripped across the newspapers lugging my duffel bag from the shore. “So,” I asked her. “You don’t happen to know anything about this crazy mess here, do you?” Not pointing fingers, mind you — just asking. She had a wild look in her eyes and shook her head repeatedly. “No,” she said. “It’s getting worse though.” She shrugged as if unfazed and totally unbothered by the presence of molding garbage and animal bones — Does she live like this within her apartment? — and slipped through a crack in her apartment door, locking the 97 deadbolts behind her.

Yeah, thanks.

OF COURSE IT’S FREAKING GETTING WORSE! This might have something to do with the fact that NO ONE HAS CLEANED IT UP IN SIX FREAKING DAYS! What kind of an imbecile makes a mess like that and then leaves it to rot IN HIS OWN HALLWAY for nearly a week? What kind of a bona fide moron then covers said mess with a century’s archive of newspapers rather than MOPPING IT UP? Seriously, wouldn’t it take LESS time to just mop the whole damn thing up? Who has that much duct tape anyway?

Fair readers, lest you become concerned for my sanity, I must divulge that the mess was finally cleaned up this afternoon — Tuesday. By who, I do not know.

The chicken bone, like a souvenir, still remains.