We took some pride in the fact that ours wasn’t an official “project,” a category that would have caused us to slur our address or lie about it altogether when we weren’t around people like us. Beyond its status as one small step above public housing, there was nothing proud about another bitter, run-down low-rise having the nerve to sit on a street named after Martin Luther King. The dark brown hallway carpet could hush the footsteps of any deviant. Most of the low-wattage bulbs cased in cheap glass cylinders were too dim to light anyone’s path, courtesy of a slumlord cutting every corner as sharply as he could. He only bandaged the boiler, never actually replaced it; winter nights were a grueling patience game while we listened for the radiator’s hiss from underneath every cover, sheet, sweater, and coat we could find. There was no trash chute; we had to suffer past or right next to garbage rooms that reeked always, more in summer, even more over the weekends when the building’s one super was off. Another quiet, more loathsome odor betrayed the presence of vermin carcasses lodged within the walls. Even the cleanest apartments were invaded by other people’s roaches, though most had given up so it’s hard to say whose roaches they were. Hash from split-open cigars littered the stairwell, and the offenders left the skunky odor of their weed blunts behind. They put their cigarettes out by mashing them against the walls and then dropping the butts straight down to the floor. The apartments were peopled with old-timers who were set in their ways and newcomers who had lost theirs. Nobody stood out in the hallway and discussed recipes or the weather; neighbors never borrowed from one another. Locked behind evergreen doors lined tightly as mausoleum slots, we daily ignored the sounds that penetrated walls: coughs, sobs, sniffs, screeching babies, whining children, decades-old rhythm and blues, midnight sitcom laugh tracks, over dramatic fucking and arguing. It was a graveyard spread up, not out.