I Am Pigeon Man: part 5

by Pat Devine

part 1 | part 2 | part 3 | part 4

My determination to see the pigeons removed seemed to have finally been rewarded. Maintenance people had come over and cut a hole in my ceiling, revealing live and dead birds, feathers, eggs, and an almost incomprehensible amount of bird shit. I’d left them to do their job and clean the area out. I was sure that my dealings with Jen and Sergio and Aneta were a thing of the past. Of course I was wrong.

The birds had been removed and so had the shit that fell to my floor when the hole in the ceiling had been opened. But the massive amount of shit sitting atop my ceiling? It remained. This is a fact I would not have discovered but for my own curiosity, which was informed by my experience dealing with the maintenance team’s laziness and incompetence.

What happened was this: I had left the maintenance guys to clean out the crawlspace. Before I returned they installed a latch door over the hole they’d opened up. That evening I could not inspect their work because I didn’t have a ladder (I could open the latch door while standing on a chair but I couldn’t get high enough to see into the area). Very early the next morning a team of painters came by and painted over the latch door, so for the whole day there was wet paint on the door that I did not want to disturb. When the paint dried it sealed the door shut.

All this was a minor obstacle that gave me an excuse not to see if they’d done their job well. I felt victorious after a long list of defeats. I wanted to enjoy the win. But by the next day I could no longer ignore the voice in my head telling me I needed to see what it looked like up there. I managed to find a ladder in the neighborhood.

When I cut through the sealed latch and opened the door I couldn’t believe what I saw. None of the shit had been cleaned out. I mean, nothing that I saw up there before had been disturbed.

My problem with the pigeons had always been twofold: the noise they made and the mess they were leaving in an area that I supposed affected the air quality in my apartment. This concern grew to alarm when I actually saw how awful the environment was in the crawlspace. So while I was pleased that the annoyances (birds) were gone, I hardly felt better knowing that the potential danger and general grossness of their waste remained.

Of course, it was Friday at about 5 pm when I made this discovery. I had at least another weekend of living under these conditions. So I did what I always did. I wrote an e-mail to Jennifer, my contact at the apartment management office, explaining what I already explained here. I concluded the e-mail with this:

I chewed on that while I walked around the outside of my apartment and stared at the roof. There were a few pigeons walking around trying to figure out how to get into their home. There was one who was particularly focused. He appeared to be trying to get into one of the circular vents that had recently been blocked off by wire. I was amused watching this. I had asked a long time ago that those vents get blocked off but it wasn’t until a few days ago that Team Sergio finally got around to doing so. The longer I watched, though, the more it intrigued me, because this vent was not above my apartment; it was above my neighbor’s. He probably had a load of crap sitting atop his ceiling too. I stared awhile longer until I saw that THERE WAS A PIGEON TRAPPED INSIDE!

I went back inside and wrote the following e-mail:

So that Monday Jennifer and Aneta (with the city) had those two e-mails and a third e-mail featuring photos of the mess above.  This latest development inspired more e-mails—Jennifer was in touch to say the work would be done Wednesday, Aneta wrote to say it had to be done this week or code enforcement would get involved, which she promised would “make things more complicated.” Somewhere along the line it was decided that the city needed to inspect the unit again. A time of 4 pm Thursday was agreed upon. There was never any response about the pigeon I saw trapped above my neighbor’s place.

In the interim there was yet another little drama going on, inspired by an e-mail Jennifer had sent me along with a subsequent phone call. Here’s the e-mail:

The e-mail I sent Aneta at the city explains the phone conversation I’d had with Jennifer:

That’s pretty odd, right? For one, maybe two years nothing gets done and now they want to clean my carpets? And when I ask how I’m supposed to deal with all of my things the response is “box it up.” This didn’t feel like a gesture to make things right; it felt like harassment.

I don’t know if Aneta said something to Jennifer, but not long after I sent those e-mails I got a call from Jennifer explaining that the carpet cleaning was happening only as a courtesy to me. The carpet cleaners would clean around my things.

In the end the crawlspace was cleaned, and so weres my bathroom, stove, carpets, and windows. That Thursday at 4 pm the old gang got together one last time for the inspection. To tell you the truth, I never again inspected the crawlspace. I abided by what Dave, the city inspector, said when he looked up there. He simply put his head through the hole, looked around with the aid of his flashlight and declared, “I’m satisfied.” I would have preferred that he actually got up there and walked around, but I was too burned out to battle him too.

Before everyone got too excited, though, I thought I’d show them that the building still had a problem. I led them outside and directed their gaze to the vent where I knew at least one pigeon—alive or dead—remained trapped above my neighbor’s ceiling. Aneta stood with her arms crossed and Dave asked if Jennifer had received any complaints. “No. None.”

“All right,” Dave said. “As long as you’re not getting any complaints then there’s nothing to do.”

My story with the pigeons ended there. If I was on top of my game I might have called PETA to come to the rescue of the endangered pigeon. But I was done. Witnessing that last exchange confirmed to me a lesson that always feels disappointing: If you want anything done you have to complain, threaten, and persevere. Of course, for all Dave knew, there had been complaints and Jennifer just told him there hadn’t been. Out of sight, out of mind was all that was important. I expected that from Jennifer, but not from the city who had been helpful to me. I wondered how Aneta felt about this. She clearly deferred to Dave on this, but pushing something under the rug didn’t seem to fit with the young woman with the slight Armenian accent who said things like, “I will not rest until this is solved.”

In the weeks that followed I was something of a hero to my neighbors. I’d inspired them to persevere in fights they were having with management. I heard one of them arguing with Jennifer on the phone. That felt good. I never talked to my other neighbor about the pigeon I saw above his place. Believe it or not, that guy is the on-site. If he had a problem with things, he knew where the levers of power were.

As for me—I actually moved out a few months later. I had a general idea that I wouldn’t be in the place a whole lot longer, but it was worth it to me to keep fighting. I didn’t want to live with the pigeons another day and I didn’t want someone else moving into the place only to discover they were living in a pigeon coop. The pigeons moved on too. They still came by and hung out on the roof occasionally, but they no longer lived in the building. My apartment management owns quite a few buildings in the area, so it wouldn’t surprise me if they settled in another one of their buildings.

If so, the tenants there can count on Sergio and Jennifer to do something about it within a couple of years.               

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