This is a knarley one, ladies and gentlemen. I feel like this is one of those stories that, if I ever had grandkids, I'd be telling them and my granddaughter would run screaming from the room and my grandson would sit there with eyes wide and mouth agape....waiting to hear more.
To preface this I'll say that many of the tenants who lived at Shorehaven were older folks. Some living alone. A few who may have not had any family members to visit them to see how they were doing. Which means that if something happened to them in the apartment, the possibility of no one finding out about it for a while was highly likely. Here we go.
One working weekend I had just arrived to our locker room for the usual twelve o'clock lunch hour and my co-worker came in and told me that there was a dead body in the apartment of one of the buildings he was working in. As he walked into the said building he noticed an odd smell. He jumped into the elevator to head to the sixth floor to begin cleaning and he noticed the smell was stronger on the upper floors. I can imagine that, even if you've never smelled the rotting flesh of a human corpse, you would have the sense to realize that someone was dead. Long dead.
He asked me if I wanted to come to the building to check out the smell. My initial reaction was, "fuck no!" There are certain things in life that I never want to experience. One being the rancid odor of a person who had been dead for two weeks in the heat of summer.....locked in an aparment. I will never regret that I declined his offer. I have no doubts that the smell would never leave my consciousness. No, thank you.
Well, the fire department was called and since the apartment door was locked, they climbed up the fire escape to see if they could enter through a window. As they came upon the window that led the dead person's aparment they noticed that it was open with the screen down. They also noticed that the screen was completely covered with flies just itching to get in and start scarfing down the rotting corpse!
The lady died on her living room rug in the dead heat of summer. In New York City many of the apartments don't have central air conditioning as they do in the burbs. Let's just say that in my apartment during the summer I sit on the couch with two fans going and....just sweat. This lady was rotting away in this heat. When they removed her body part of her scalp had melted onto the living room rug. Don't believe me? Well, I was one of the lucky ones to have to rough clean her apartment. Rough cleaning is basically when no one comes to claim the items left by the deceased, so we empty the apartment and throw everything out. Paulie and I were the ones who got to roll up that living room rug. And yes, that dead lady's scalp was still stuck to it. I don't recall dry heaving or anything of that nature, but I guarantee that there will never come a time that I do that again. Ever. I hope you didn't read this before a nice meal.
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