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I trudge up the mustard colored stairwell that smells like cabbage, desperation and wet farts. Bird shit is caked on the ledges of the windows at each landing. Cold wind blows in despite the windows being closed. Four flights up - it always seems like more... My body a thousand pounds of twisting wretched screaming nerves. My brain pounding to get out of my skull... My feet sloshing wet... I'm exhausted. Approaching the door, apprehension growing thinking of that mean little French woman waiting for me in that tiny apartment with her permanently tousled hair and that crazed look in her eye - Jesus she'll be the end of me one day... I'm always thinking of her... she's always driving me fucking crazy, even when she's not around. I swear to God she's a witch. She's possessed my soul. If she couldn't cook like a dream and I had somewhere else to go, anywhere, I'd have left her long ago. How am I supposed to get any fucking work done with her around, always smoking and stomping around saying crazy and antagonist things like, "I woold ave slep with that boy if yoo weren't ear." What in the fuck is that supposed to mean? The nerve of that woman, the way she treats me. I am a delicate sensitive creature for chrissake. I'm a genius, a prodigy, a wonder to the world and I'm stuck in this rotting shithole in the middle of some rat infested excuse for a neighborhood wasting my days away working for rent money and food while my creative genius lies dormant like atomic bomb in the pit of my stomach giving me indigestion day in and day out as I labor away then trudge up these stairs night after night after night, again and again and again... God, I can't even hear myself fucking think in that apartment, let alone work. I have written not a word since I abandoned my life of luxury in a liberal bastion of the South almost a year ago with the promise that my talents for words would be put to great use in this supposed Urban Mecca and literary capitol of the world! It was a lie, a scam, a hoax! No one appreciates my beautiful words up here. They are too brilliant, too powerful, too radiant! Trying to read them for the dim souls that inhabit the publishing world here must be akin to staring into the sun for the first time - blinded by brilliance, then angry at the source for the pain. So I have been unjustly relegated to manual labor until my words cross the desk of the rare creature who can decipher them and grasp their magnitude. To top it all off, I swear the woman's cheating on me to boot. She's always talking about how good looking this guy is, or how cute this boy is, God, it's enough to make a grown mans penis want to crawl up into his crotch and hibernate out of shear fear the way she goes on and on like a lobotomized teenage girl. And then if I make one fucking peep or protest about how she goes on and on, or if I ask her if she's been faithful when I hear her going on and on about some Jamaican asshole (who seems to have hung the moon) on the phone with her girlfriend all holy hell breaks loose. And God forbid I should mention another girl... as then, she tells me that she'll make my life a living hell! But how could it get any worse?!!!