This photo of the bathroom omitted from this Airbnb’s property…I wonder why.

Just as I reached the gate

to the apartment building, I saw an old man with his penis out pissing on the bushes in front. I wasn’t in the Tenderloin in San Francisco but in a suburban neighborhood in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. It wasn’t midnight or 4:00am but in the middle of the day in bright daylight. The small man, nearly bald with scant hairs around his ears, clad in a loose white tank top and baggy shorts, flicked his head toward me and turned back to finish his business. I entered the building and took the elevator up six floors.

Yanking the heavy door open, I plopped down on the faux wood laminate floor with pained disgust. First of all, my low-ceiling Airbnb stunk with layered scents of cigarette smoke, body odor, musty mattresses, bleach and other toxic cleaning fumes. At 5’4” I could touch the ceiling by raising my arms. The studio was a microcosm of the apartment building—a building that reeked from being old. Old comes with its own odor, and it stains. You can never get it out.

When I had booked the Airbnb from the US, it showed a single photo of the bed and glowed with five stars and high praise. It did not reveal the scent of ramshackle ruin or the dead cockroaches—plural—in the refrigerator, or the tinfoil plastered over all of the windows in the bathroom. The sole chair appeared to have been lifted from a kindergarten—made of bright red plastic and clearly for a little person. I elected to sleep on the floor since the bedding smelled of unwashed hair, only to wake up with bug bites on my back.

I don’t have anything against

dilapidated fill-in-the-blank—cities, houses, people. I lived in a dilapidated flat in the Haight Ashbury district, in which mushrooms sprouted from the hallway walls because that’s how dark and dank our unit was—fertile environment for fungi. We treated them as spontaneous pieces of art-growth and pointed them out to visiting friends and family. We had to keep our dogs from munching on them.

The difference is that our rundown flat imbued a sense of frivolous hippie happiness, like we were supposed to have mold sprouting up as visible protrusions, inspiring someone to play the didgeridoo while another made vegetarian enchiladas. We felt creative in our rundown environment.

In my Taiwan Airbnb, the last thing I felt was creative. Trapped is a word that comes to mind.

To further cement this reality,

later that evening, our old public urninator ended up on the sixth floor, pounding on a door adjacent to mine. He shouted in Chinese. Then he banged some more. Then he shouted in Chinese. Then all became quiet, so I assumed someone had opened the door for him. Not so.

Late into the night, he pounded with renewed vigor while shouting in Chinese. This went on for a while, when I heard another male voice yell in Chinese. The old man slurred back. The other male voice volleyed a rebuttal, but the old man stuck in like a stubborn splinter and wouldn’t budge. He continued to strike the door, keeping the tenants on the sixth floor in a perpetual state of not sleeping.

Like an intermission of a play,

he stopped acting out and either passed out or was allowed to enter the apartment. Wrong. At 7:00am sharp, our lead actor was back at it, slurring and hitting the door. I wondered if anyone would call security or the police. In the meantime, our apartment-door-abuser walked down a flight of stairs to harass the tenants on the fifth floor, hollering and beating down doors like the big, bad wolf, “I’ll huff, and I’ll puff and I’ll yell, and I’ll punch…”.

Finding no success, he proceeded down to the fourth floor, and so on and so forth until he ended up outside the building. Presumably, he had to pee in the front bushes.

The commotion lasted through noon time. Luckily, I had food in the refrigerator. I did not dare sneak out to buy lunch and risk running into our ill-humored bad wolf.

Seated in the miniscule kindy-chair,

I dug into cold, stir fried vegetables while the ancient air-conditioner cranked out irregular streams of cold air. The cord had been taped into the electrical socket to keep it in place. This Airbnb was a 1-star-zero-praise studio, which featured a senior citizen drunkard creating chaos, keeping tenants captive in their apartments.

I closed my eyes, inhaled the rancid air and visualized walking through the Tenderloin, passing strung-out addicts huddled together like beads on a bracelet, a tall Black woman standing on the corner shouting “I’m a big momma”, and slurping down a bowl of pho at a mom-n-pop Vietnamese restaurant.

Incredibly, I heard our public-menace-urinator rattling the front gate. The gates automatically lock and he didn’t have a key. He wailed, he pleaded, he huffed, and he puffed. I glanced around my studio. Maybe all that tinfoil and tape were actually holding this raggedy apartment building together, preventing a wino wolf from blowing it down.