My Columbus Chronicles
- Jacob Rodriguez
- Jun 25, 2025
- 17 min read
Sweltering. An adjective which describes a feeling beyond the uncomfortable sweat you wake up in on a summer night that I am currently experiencing as I go through and revise what was originally supposed to be a brief recap of some of the most absurd moments I had in Columbus. The more I wrote however, the more detail I added and the more personal I allowed myself to be. I describe this blog as a public online diary. Most of the thoughts I value enough to type out are on here. This piece specifically, is more of a diary entry than any other before it.
“Where you headed?”
“Columbus. You?”
I was watching Zombieland when I decided I wanted to move to Columbus, Ohio. Escaping the Valley had been a goal of mine since I moved there when I was 12. Originally it was so I could move back to my first hometown, Kingsville, but I eventually determined that there wasn’t a place in Texas that could give me the kind of life I wanted after graduation. I don’t hate my family, and I don’t resent people that chose to stay where I didn’t want to. Some places in Texas are still novel to me and I don’t mind hearing the occasional gossip about what’s going on back home, but I spent two decades with only Texas and the world is too big for me to stay in one place my whole life.
At first, I thought I would be moving to Chicago since that’s where my job offer was. I hinted to the hiring manager about migrating and their response made me feel like I wasn’t welcomed. I’ve since determined that this impression was incorrect, and they were likely trying to assure me that I didn’t need to overextend myself. Regardless, my starting salary would not have been ideal for Chicago. After Googling Columbus, solely from hearing it named by Jessie Eisenberg, I decided it was a good enough place as any to start my independent life.
The first person I told my plan to was a woman I was introducing for a marketing class. When getting acquainted before the class started, I mentioned my postgrad plan when introducing myself and how I had impulsively decided to move to Columbus, Ohio mere hours earlier. Unable to provide solid reasoning for the location, she gave me a warning that whatever problems I had in Texas wouldn’t leave me once I moved. I took slight offense to her remark even though I knew she was only trying to be helpful. I wasn’t running towards or away from anything- only running.
I picked my apartment based on pricing, space, and proximity to Walmart and Panda Express. My dad encouraged me to take a flight to Columbus during Spring Break to tour apartments and even offered to pay for my ticket. I declined after seeing the price of the ticket. Even if I was comfortable with my parents paying, I would have had to fund my own stay, travel, and meals. My savings account at the credit union was much humbler than what I have today, and the trip would have stolen a signification fraction of what I had saved for this move.
My job started on the 10th of June, and I left College Station on the 30th of that month to make an 18-hour drive to what would be my first personally financed living space. It’s funny how certain details stick in your head that are insignificant and really have no business being remembered. I recall not knowing if I had made it out of Texas yet when I stopped to eat dinner at a Panda Express on the edge of Arkansas. I drove through the night with all my earthly possessions packed into my car. Memphis, lit up at night in all its glory, is the only notable place I remember seeing on my path of taillights and asphalt. If I had driven through at a reasonable hour I would have gone inside the infamous Bass Pro pyramid.
Towards the end of the expedition, I became severely tired and attempted to stop at a gas station to sleep for a couple of hours. Google misrouted me down an old dirt road that hit a dead end after several minutes of driving. I eventually did get to a gas station where I purchased a small bag of popcorn and a purple Monster energy drink to hold me over for the last few hours. I was blinded by the sunrise driving over hills. Passing through Cincinnati, I felt reinvigorated.
This next part is embarrassing but I have a fondness for the events absurdity so I will record it anyways. After arriving at my apartment, I waited to hear from my leasing agent on where I could get the keys. I badly needed to use the restroom, so I drove to a nearby Kroger and prayed that they had a public restroom. After obliterating the toilet and making sounds that were undoubtedly heard all the way down to aisle seven, I found myself unable to flush away the crime scene due to a poor motion sensor. Thankfully, by the grace of James T. Kroger himself, I got the toilet to flush. Unfortunately, the toilet was unable to flush away the smell which was very present for the employee that I found waiting to use the facilities after me.
Eventually, I was let into my apartment that I had only seen in pictures. The property management representative was smoking a cigar when he retrieved the key from the lock hanging on the handle and continued to do so through my entire apartment. Unassuming from the outside, the inside was rather spacious for a single person. The most noticeable defects were the uneven floors and extra doorway to the bedroom that had wall-painted plywood blocking it off. There was also a considerable amount of dirt on the floors.
Moving my belongings into my apartment, the weather was truly sweltering. I moved everything into a corner of my living room before I cleaned the floors and started to unpack. I discovered that my A/C was only capable of conditioning the air to be hotter and that I was out of luck when it came to taming the heat. I believe I bought a fan from Walmart my first day in the city which I kept pointed at me as I slept in the Livingroom, laying atop a stack of blankets to make the floor softer.
Besides the heat, the first few days were rather standard with two exceptions. When moving my belongings out of my car, I was approached by an older looking woman. With my headphones on, I assumed she was asking me if I was moving into the apartment. I nodded and said yes. After she didn’t move, I asked to repeat what she said while sliding my headphones down to sit on my dripping-with-sweat neck. She had asked me for a loosey. When I said I didn’t have any cigarettes, she asked for a quarter to buy one. I didn’t have a quarter either. The second event happened when trying to exit the building through my front door. I was caught off guard when the whole doorframe came off the building when I pushed on the door to open it. I chose not to say anything in fear that the property management company would charge me to fix it. This door only gave access to the communal hallway, not my unit, so I didn’t have to worry too much about it (or so I naively thought).
The rest of my first week in Columbus was fairly standard for someone setting themselves up in their first place. I got fiber internet, a bed, a standing desk, and some furniture. I became accustomed to visiting IKEA and always walked through the entire store even if I only needed one thing from the warehouse that I knew about in advance. I visited Easton Town Center at the suggestion of a coworker where I fell in love with the free garage parking and large selection of locations to engage in commerce with including a top class AMC theater.
I may be a nerdy, small-town Texan, but I do possess some street smarts. I knew not to interact with the cigarette lady any more than I absolutely had to. I also knew that I had to expect to see city things that I couldn’t give too much mind to. When I saw a man circling around a liquor store parking lot with his willy out, taking a piss, I barely did a double take. The spun guy changing his shirt in the laundromat parking lot with the coordination of a toddler was almost entertaining to watch. Getting what I came for, I began to witness events of a world bigger than the one I was accustomed to.
The timeline of all the cooky affairs I endured through during my yearlong Columbus residence is muddled. I believe the catalyst was my lights going out. Without any warning, all of my ceiling lights in my apartment went out at once sometime in October. I got no response from the work order I submitted and cooking at night by phone flashlight proved to be quite the challenge.
Just a week after the partial blackout, the heat turned on… and stayed on. The thermostat was unresponsive, and the temperature rose upwards of 90 degrees in my apartments with all the windows open. I was showing Hummer drivers what’s what by contributing to global warming in an innovative way. It took two days for the heater to be fixed and five months for the lights. I had to get the code inspector to come down to the unit and issue a work order for the property management company to pull it together. October to February, I was in the dark. The inspector also found out that most of my smoke detectors didn’t work and the building was even missing some in key areas. Also, when maintenance first came to my unit to diagnose the heat problem, they turned off my electricity and left for six hours without telling me they were leaving.
My downstairs neighbor(s) left me mostly unbothered with the exception of some notable occasions. One weekend morning, I woke up to a commotion. There was a lot of onomatopoeia happening downstairs. I walked to my office to look out at the parking spaces at the back of the unit to see my neighbor’s car had a broken windshield and white paint on it. The front bumper was also hanging. The trashcan in front of their unit was tipped over and hot ash still had smoke coming off it. He was screaming inside his unit, “YOU DON’T UNDERTAND! I CAN NEVER FORGIVE YOU!” on loop. I decided to escape the volatile environment by going to the movies. My exit was poorly timed, and I came out of my apartment right as he decided that he should be having his phone call outside. When backing out of my spot, I saw that his window was broken and what looked like chunky salsa covered his entire kitchen.
He and his boyfriend had several domestic disputes where they would mutually abuse each other. I even recorded the audio of some of them from my apartment with my phone. One would accuse the other of being a dead beat, the other would counter by calling his partner a cheater. There was an accusation of one throwing the other into a wall after I heard a sound which could best be described as a person being thrown into a wall. I listened to the human dart scream at the thrower to not leave. I highly considered calling the police on multiple occasions yet always decided against it. These people had demonstrated their capabilities, and I did not want to end up on the receiving end of an outburst. I also didn’t think anything would come of calling the cops. You could tell by the pattern that they would end up in the same spot a week later no matter who got involved. Towards the end of my stay, I thought they had finally broken it off for good when their shouts returned.
On a Sunday night, when coming back from the movies, I noticed a car behind me picking up speed as it was approaching a curve on the two-lane highway. Having taken a college level physics course, I slowed down so the vehicle would pass me. Right after it got in front of me, as I had predicted it would, it spun out on the turn. It turned 180 degrees before coming to a complete stop as it hit the wall sideways. I turned on my hazards and came to a complete stop to look for some signs of life. It didn’t look like the crash was bad enough to do serious damage to the occupants, but I was still getting ready to get out and perform first aid if needed. Another car came around the curve right as the spun-out car started to peel out, turning itself the correct way, colliding with the new car at a slow speed. The probably inebriated driver sped off and the other car pursued. I followed their chase until the freeway came back into a multilane highway with other traffic and quickly decided not to risk my life and the lives of other drivers as the two weaved between lanes at dangerous speeds.
The five minutes I had remaining of the drive I spent thinking about what would have happened if I hadn’t slowed down. I would have been hit very hard by that car and needed to pay thousands of dollars on vehicle repairs and possibly medical bills. I was very shaken up by the event.
The morning after witnessing the crash, after snoozing my alarm, I got a unique wakeup from the Columbus police department. “COLUMBUS POLICE!” I heard from inside my hallway kitchen. In my underwear, I grabbed a pair of shorts and stuck my head out to see what was happening. Without my glasses, I could still make out their uniforms and saw that they were indeed police officers. They had received reports of people in the building that weren’t supposed to be there and came in because my door was unlocked, which was a sign of a break-in. In shock from the night before, I had forgotten to lock my door. They looked around my apartment as I put on a jacket and found my glasses. After they left, I got properly dressed and started work for the day.
People who are at an apartment who aren’t supposed to be there are called squatters. This word wasn’t used by the police but that’s what was happening in the basement. See, at some point during my stay, I got new neighbors in the unit next to mine who I shared a wall with. The couple talked to me the first time I ran into them on the stairs. They mentioned seeing a washer/dryer hookup in the basement and that was about it. I try not to judge books by their cover, but I would come to find out that I would have been right to do so in this case. In the first month, I didn’t see too much of them besides a third woman who sat on a plastic garden chair at the top of the stairs or the couple of times they had guests over who would drink and smoke on the stairs.
One day, I heard a drilling noise in the building and assumed it was maintenance. It wasn’t until I checked my mail by walking out the front door that I saw that my neighbors had installed a hallway security camera to see who was at the door. This was the stereotypical drug dealer camera that you’d see in movies. It was obvious what they were doing as dozens of people a day would come and go from the apartment. When I went home for Christmas, I saw a notice on their door that they were being evicted for drug related activity.
Evictions take time and as soon as someone knows they’re going to be evicted, they don’t need to be discreet with their offensive behavior. I was sitting on my IKEA chair, reading, when I heard some shouts and loud footsteps in the hallway, followed by a car peeling out. I walked to my window and saw a man coming out of my apartment building with a gun drawn. My suspicion is that someone left with something they didn’t pay for. When I called the Columbus police department, they didn’t think it was worth checking out since no shots were fired. I submitted a report about their activities online but there was never an undercover operation conducted and nobody living in that unit received any consequences for their dealings.
The squatters that I mentioned earlier didn’t enter the apartment until after the eviction notice was posted. In the basement resided what I’m going to assume were customers of my neighbor. I didn’t’ actually know there were squatters until maintenance came by and told me they needed to walk through my apartment because they planned to board up the front door to keep the squatters and drug clientele out. This renovation would have left me relatively unaffected as I had stopped using the front stairwell after I discovered the camera if it weren’t for the fact that it now forced all drug buyers to use the stairs at the back of the building that were now the only way into my apartment.
I was having a dream where there was a crazy person mumbling to themselves when I woke up only to find that I could still hear the voice. It felt like in the movies where an alarm clock goes off while someone is asleep and the sound carries into the dream. What was most concerning was that it sounded like the voice was coming from inside the house. Justifiably terrified, I got out of bed, grabbed a wooden dowel from my closet, and went to check if there was someone in my apartment. I found that there was a man outside my door talking to himself about burning my building down. I recorded his voice and went back to bed.
Towards the end, I got really fed up with these people around me, which I think is understandable. I felt helplessly frustrated about my predicament that I can best describe as being the monkey in monkey in the middle as a child. You just have to stand around and wait for something to change because no matter what you do, you’re too small to participate fairly in the game. My neighbors, some of them, were undoubtedly some of the worst types of people. They were criminals- dangerous and reckless with no regard for me or anyone else that didn’t benefit them. The effect this environment had on me affected my work and personal life.
Approaching the end, I showed signs of cracking. Strangers would knock on my door, mistaking it for my neighbors, trying to buy drugs. I would yell at them from the other side to get lost. I even started to confront people standing around my building that I knew were there to buy. I asked things like, “Do you live here?” in a hostile tone basically asking for them to start something not considering the harm I could put myself in. I fully expected to get a gun pulled on me eventually and I didn’t care.
Living in the environment that was facilitating and grooming this behavior, I didn’t know how much blame to cast on the system or the individuals themselves. I know most of these people didn’t get the opportunities that I had and even I found myself succumbing to my environment in a short time but is that justification for people to knowingly commit wrongs? How many of these people applied to McDonalds before picking up a pipe? Like anywhere, there were children in my neighborhood. The school bus would come by to drop them off before 3 o’clock. A lot would spend their time outside after school- playing or riding their bikes. At what age are they pressured to take the wrong path? Who is living in their houses and how are they being raised? How many of these kids are going to throw away their future? I became depressed at the sight of children on my street. Life is unfair.
After my dealer neighbors vacated their unit, someone came back and tried to break in. They were kicking the door to their unit so hard that my door was shaking. I yelled at him to get out before I called the cops. I stood around the corner of my Livingroom as I shouted this in case he was armed and decided to shoot through my door. He responded, with anger and frustration in his voice, that he had stuff in the unit. I don’t know if stuff was a euphemism for some kind of stimulant or if he had just left a bag of laundry in there. Either way, it didn’t matter as a company had spent the previous two days hauling everything out of the unit. The truck bed was maybe filled a dozen times getting all the trash out of there. I called 911 and this time multiple police cars were on the scene in under four minutes. The man had already left but the marks on the door were clearly visible.
The attempted break-in wasn’t the only side effect of the eviction. The wiring in the building was so poor that when the neighbors’ power was shut off, so was part of mine. I’m sure that if they audited it, they would still find electricity incorrectly routed although I don’t know if there’s even a number to prevent this kind of fraud.
At the start of my lease, these kinds of incidents were funny to me. Especially when I was only an observer. Once I was cooking pasta by flashlight with the sound of constant domestic abuse underneath me and drug abuse to my side, I saw that it wasn’t funny at all. I played tourist in the slums, and it was not fun. I didn’t do it on purpose, and I don’t plan on exploiting my stories to develop some kind of ignorant slam poetry. I am semi-grateful that I had the experience, however. It’s easy to forget how good some people have it. They can drive down a bad street and tell themselves they have it good, but they won’t truly understand until it’s their life. I was lucky to have not been killed with the close calls I had.
There were so many other little things that became normal for me that took me relocating to properly realize. Whenever I checked my mail, I would typically find a small card titled, “Sex Offender Notification,” with a picture of someone’s mugshot, their defining marks, and offenses. These people were all moving into my neighborhood and sometimes would just be a few houses down. I must have received almost a dozen of them. My mailbox was also used as a trashcan, with people leaving plastic water bottles and burger wrappers in it. Any mail I had sent to me needed to be sent certified because some of my mail had been stolen during my first month there. My refrigerator also only got to 60 degrees Fahrenheit (on a good day) which meant that my food would get pink mold on it if it was in the fridge longer than two and half days or more than 24 hours when it was hot. Mold grew in my bathroom and even in a corner of my office.
I didn’t even mention the lady who I confronted out after I caught her trying to steal my dryer sheets at the laundromat when I turned my back or the hooker there who was ruffling through the trash for money. My last week in Columbus, a family was having a barbeque on my street with a big plastic sheet hanging in front of the porch that said new grad. I don’t know if the person was graduating middle school, high school, or college but it was nice to see something so normal. It’s easy for the good/normal to go unnoticed, so I appreciated the reminder that most people around weren’t too bad. Of course, I also found out on my last day that my downstairs neighbor was being evicted for failure to pay rent so who knows how wide the moral split really is.
I’m not saying that all of Columbus, Ohio is terrible. There are very nice parts to it. There are also nice people there. I even dated a girl there for about a month. Coming from an ugly part of Cleveland, she said that my street reminded her of home in the worst ways. I spent a lot of time at different AMC theaters with my A-List subscription which all felt very premium. There were two lively malls that I went to. Because of its location, I got to visit Cleveland, Cincinnati, Dayton, Toledo, Philly, and Chicago. I loved seeing the snow and getting to wear real winter clothes for the first time in my life. I have gloves now! Overall, I appreciate the experience- mostly because I have no choice but to. I cannot recommend it for family, friends, or even enemies.
By the time I finished writing and revising these tales from the hood I have already settled in my new apartment in Pittsburgh where I am in an infinitely more pleasant neighborhood. I look forward to using my new lease on life during my new lease.
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