The Potato Bag

When I moved into my first apartment, my roommates, Aaron and Dylan, decided they were going to save money by buying a giant 50-pound bag of potatoes (roughly the size of your rolling suitcase) instead of frozen French fries.

To this day I’m not even sure if their math was right because frozen potatoes are cheap, especially if you get the store brand. And that is, of course, before you factor in having to actually cut the potatoes because neither of these two could cook at all, much less use a knife.

The bag is just huge, and we had nowhere to store it in our apartment, so they decided to put it in this outdoor closet on our deck. We were on the third floor.

Now, the next part of this story should be about all the awesome hand cut French fries these two cooked up.

Should be.

Instead…

I’m in the apartment while these two are out. This is June now, eight, count ’em eight (8), months after we moved in.

There was a thundering knock on the door, like I imagine it sounds when the SWAT team is about to bust into your home.

I answer it, and it’s our downstairs neighbor who, quite objectively, smelled like warmed over death. And she asks, “Hey, what is that shit leaking down from your deck to my deck?”

And I said, “What the hell are you talking about?”

She said, “I can show you. Can I come in?”

I took an inhale and then said, “That’s gonna be a ‘no.’”

Her: “Yeah, smells awful. I was having a glass of wine and globs of shit started falling on me.”

Me: “I’ll tell you what, why don’t you go get changed, I’ll take a look, and I’ll call you in a minute.”

I head to the deck, thinking maybe there’s a busted drain line somewhere in the building. I can see something seeping out from the closest door, and for the first time in eight months, I remember the bag of potatoes.

To be clear, at no point after buying the bag had Aaron or Dylan remembered, much less given a second thought, to said bag of potatoes.

And, yes, they had bought frozen French fries. Many, many times.

I opened the closet and the potatoes had basically started to turn to vodka. They were also hosting multiple insect colonies. Large colonies, like the graduate level class on insects.

I made an executive decision to do nothing.

Here’s where the story gets good.

These two get home and I tell them about our rightfully angry neighbor, their now science project, how I’m not going to participate in resolving any of this, and most importantly how they better not produce some sort of putrid potato skid mark in our apartment while rectifying this.

They go inspect it, not much has changed in the last hour, and they devise a plan to get rid of the bag.

Aaron gets changed into some clothes he kept for painting and yard work and such, puts on some winter gloves, and starts to pull the bag out, which instantly produces just a flood of rancid potato shit streaming onto the neighbor’s deck.

Her sliding glass door opens, and she shouts up, “WHAT THE FUCK?!?” and Aaron rather meekly says, “Sorry.”

Concurrently, Dylan has moved his pickup truck to the curb.

You can see where this is going. Let me lay out some data points for you.

· The base of our third-floor deck is somewhere between 20–25 feet from the ground.

· There’s a common area with landscaping between the building and the curb, probably about 15 feet.

· The bag of potatoes was originally 50 pounds. It was less now because a chunk of it had been eaten by the insects, and still more had liquified before relocating to our neighbor’s deck. But still heavy.

I had stepped onto the deck at this point, was surveying the situation, and shook my head.

And Aaron says, “This is gonna work, right?”

And I said, “No. Not a chance.”

Aaron starts to heave the bag up, forgetting the soak through had turned the paper of the bag into just the thinnest single sheet of gas station toilet paper. The thing starts coming apart, the insects are pissed as hell, and more potato puss keep streaming out of the bag.

He actually got a good amount of air under it. It looked promising.

Until it the side wall of the truck bed and exploded like one of those cysts on Dr. Pimple Popper. The insects swarmed around the remains, a portion in Dylan’s truck bed and the rest all over the side of his truck and the landscaping.

Aaron turned to me, and I said, “That actually went better than I thought it would.”

So, I think it’s pretty obvious they left all those potato remains in and on the landscaping. Dylan took his truck to the carwash. Aaron had the decency to take those clothes off on the deck, come in, get a trash bag, and then throw them away. Aaron called the apartment complex office, ate some crow, and he and Dylan had to pay for maintenance to our deck and closet, and our neighbor’s. They apologized to everyone, and we didn’t get kicked out.

The moral of the story is, just buy the frozen potatoes.