White Dodge Pick-Up

My trusted, yet very disloyal J drives a white Dodge Ram.  I look for him each time one passes–and that’s a lot in Kentucky.  I look straight at him, and he turns his face in the opposite direction.

My ex-husband does the same thing.  He treated the mother of his children with such venom and anger–and continues to do so.  He can’t look me in the eye.  His lip quivers in my presence.  Even at our son’s soccer practice.

I look people straight in the eye.  I am brutally honest.  And, I trust completely. A simple apology while looking me in the eye.  That’s it.  That’s all I want, but it’s everything I won’t get.

 

Awkward Phone Conversation #62

One evening, a tenant’s visitors drank quite a bit.  A lot.  Probably tons.  I would venture to guess there might have been some additional recreational drugs tossed into the equation.  A little trash talkin’ ensued with other tenants in the parking lot.   The drinking visitors went up to a second floor apartment.

The drinking visitors had apparently talked a bit of trash with some other folks in town who found out they were hanging out on my property.  Always great.  Now, I had tenants pissed and previously-pissed town’s people allied against these drinking visitors.  There is always a Paul Revere in the mix.

My peace-loving sensibility cannot quite wrap my arms around what follows.

The angry mob storms up to the second floor apartment to talk a bit more trash with the drinking visitors.  The drinking visitors decided to run from the angry mob.  And, logically, from the second floor, the only choice was to jump through the window screens and fall two stories to the grass.  They ran for their car and jumped in it.  The cops were called, and a chase ensued.

The drinking visitors pulled over for the cop, but, after the cop approached the vehicle, they decided to speed off and drag the police officer with them for ten or so feet.  The police officer was fine.  There was a lovely news story in the paper.

The drinking visitors bailed themselves out of jail and came back to hang out on my property.  I posted a sign stating that these people were not permitted on the property.

On a lovely spring afternoon, I received a phone call from an angry mother of one of the drinking visitors.  She accused me of slander and threatened to sue me.  I simply stated that her son had done a perfectly good job of ruining his own name.  She said, “Well, I don’t blame you.  He’s wild.  He don’t listen to nobody.  And there ain’t no reason for him to be jumpin’ out of windows anyhow.”  Amen.

Gun Number One

They were hoarders.  Crazy hoarders.  Reality television/intervention-needing hoarders.  Oh, and did I mention crazy?  And, from what I could tell, were defrauding the government?  We’ll just call them the Pears.

The Pears were the typically annoying, late-paying tenant.  They were receiving a government subsidy for their apartment, so they were only responsible for a small portion of the rent.  They would get behind on their portion; I would send them a 30 day notice to pay or vacate; and they would pay in full on the 30th day.  This happened over and over for a year.

The smell coming from their apartment was brutal.  They didn’t actually live in the apartment.  They had another government-subsidized trailer on the edge of town.  They used my apartment as a storage shed.  Two bedrooms, a bathroom, a living room, and an eat-in kitchen filled floor-to-ceiling with every imaginable and unimaginable item.  I assume they were addicted to yard sales and buying meats and fruits on sale and in bulk.  The refrigerator and freezer were strapped with a bungee cord to keep the doors closed.  All of the cabinets were overflowing with cans of food, bags of beans, bags of rice, and always a rotting cantaloupe.  Computers, stereos, tacky-ass ceramic collectibles, musty-smelling clothes, mattresses, couches, and a gun and two forms of ammunition.

It was a simple, straight-forward case from my perspective.  I gave them a thirty day notice that I would not renew their lease.  Their subsidy ended, but they stayed.  They paid no rent, so I filed an eviction notice with the court.  I drove the two hours and forty-five minutes to court.  They came to court and told me it was my fault that they had not paid.  That is typical.  It is always my fault for someone else’s eviction.  It is always my job to keep a roof over someone else’s family’s head.

The court gave them five days to vacate the property, and a follow-up hearing for damages was scheduled for two weeks.  On the sixth day, they had not vacated the property.  I called the court to issue an order for a sheriff’s escort.  That’s always fun.  The sheriff’s deputy escorted them from the apartment.  The Pears were just wearing their night clothes.  It was in the middle of the afternoon.

My property manager was able to photograph the apartment and its contents and change the lock.  He noticed the gray leather bag right next to the bed.  There was a pistol sticking out the top.  He checked it.  It was loaded.  He waited for me to arrive just before the follow-up hearing to discuss the gun.  He didn’t want me to worry.

I had no idea what to do.  Legally, it was the tenants’ property.  The property manager took the ammunition from the chamber and noticed there was another size of bullet in the bag.  We looked around for another gun, and we only found an extra fake one.  I put the real gun in the trunk of my car and the ammunition up front.  I drove to court.

I was early, and I asked the court’s clerk what I was supposed to do with disgruntled tenants and a gun.  A local police officer went to my car with me.  He ran a gun check, and it was a legal weapon.  Good news.  It’s always better to possess a legal weapon.  The officer told me the strategy.  He said for me to keep the gun in my car, and he would keep the ammunition in his cruiser.  His exact words were, “I’ll let you give them back the gun, then I’ll stall them while you drive as fast as you can out of town.  I would hate for you to have to give them a gun and ammunition at the same time.”  I felt the same way.

The hearing was quick and easy.  I have a $2000 judgment that is impossible to collect.  They took every bit of thirty days to retrieve the possessions they wanted.  And, I was left with a nasty refrigerator that had to be trashed and lots of canned goods.

The sheer terror of handling a tenant with a gun was completely gut-wrenching.  I was sick for a month.  I was nervous.  I was looking over my shoulder.  I cried.  I was ready to be out of this business.

Less than graceful exits

Tenants really do leave in the middle of the night. And I am left with all of their random shit. I am almost always greeted by a large pile of clothes just inside the door–like they can’t possibly carry another item to the car/van/truck.  The pile of clothes is accompanied by a home-canned jar of green beans, one New Balance shoe, some sort of porn and typically lots of it.

I have been the lucky recipient of countless nasty couches and mattresses at this point.  For anyone starting out in the slumlord business, I would recommend keeping a running tally of couches just for fun.

The Smell

A rental smells like cigarette smoke, humid like Mountain Dew, and some sort of chicken-fried meat. Toss in leftover spaghetti on a plate in the floor for the cats. And that smell attaches to your hair, your skin, your clothes. It helps to keep a slumlording only coat.

Yes, people do really install mirrors over their beds. . .

There is nothing better than walking through a house with an appraiser and seeing a mirror over a bed.  There was writing in lipstick.  I still wish I had stopped to read it. Instead, I just barreled through to the kitchen.  I tried to avoid eye contact with the tenant and the appraiser.  I didn’t know the appraiser well enough to say something along the lines of can you believe that shit?

These were the same tenants who made the house handicapped accessible by cutting all of the cabinets in half and placing them on the kitchen floor.  That was a not-so pleasant surprise.  I am all about appropriate modification, but really, taking a chainsaw to cabinets?

These tenants also made their own spray-painted sign announcing the upcoming birth of their child.  I don’t really know what the appropriate spray-painted birth announcement sign language might be.  I suppose, “He did it again. Another boy in September.” is appropriate.

He was a short man and at this point, I’m assuming he was compensating for some other shortcomings.  Lipsticked mirror over the bed.  Spray-painted declaration of seed-planting prowess.  Yeah, I’m drawing the right conclusion.

J-isms

I recently broke up with a handyman/property manager–J.  J turned out to be a pretty good handyman, but he was apparently much more comfortable working as a professional liar.  As my bff has always told me, I have a track record of trusting the wrong people.  But, that’s a totally different subject for another day perhaps.

In my effort to turn a frown upside down, I suppose I should be grateful for his deceit.  Our break-up has forced some radical, life-changing contemplations to become reality.  That’s a good thing, when your job keeps you awake at night and makes you sick to your stomach.

I do kinda miss his J’s way with words.  He is the kind of guy who gossips like a middle-school girl. And his stream of consciousness, well, let’s just say it is hilarious and totally inappropriate.

A few of my faves. . .

J showed a house to a prospective tenant, and this is what he had to say. ” Well, he didn’t have no hair.  He asked if there were any blacks in the neighborhood.  I told him, yeah, next door and across and down the street.  But I guess he was one of them black supremacist skinheads, so he didn’t take the house.”

J had this interesting piece of marriage advice. ” Lookin’ back, I don’t know if it was a good thing to have to drink a fifth of Jim Beam so that I could marry her.”

It was clearly a not-so loving marriage. “Gittin’ ready for New Year’s.  It’s the only night of the year she’ll kiss me.” Followed by, “She don’t have no self-esteem.  I paid for her to have a boob job.  But, it didn’t help.”

J came to the big city to help me with a project.  He  saw a sign for a fish fry at the Catholic orphanage.  It just happened to be holy week.  “You ain’t never gonna git a table at Joe’s Crab Shack on a Friday.  What with all them Jews eating their fish. Done made that mistake.”

J had more to say about boobs. “Yeah, I love to take my son to Hooter’s.  Them waitresses just come over and love all over him and me.  And, we just love that food.”

J’s favorite joke.  It is a great and little-known skill of mine that I can handle people repeating the same damn thing over and over again and acting like I have never heard it before.  I guess I heard this joke twenty-seven times. “You know the difference between kinky and perverted.  If you’re kinky, you just use a feather.  If you’re perverted, you use the whole chicken.  Cackling laugh inserted.  The whole chicken, ain’t that hilarious?  The whole chicken, perverted, did you git that?”  Yes, asshole I “git” the damn joke.

 

Economics 2010

I never took an Econ class, but gratefully I took three classes that covered the 18th century.  And, since that’s how poor people are living right now, it seems weirdly sensible.  It was also a time of paradigm-shifting thinking.  Let me explain.  Science meets religion.  New worlds and old worlds collide.  Opportunities in life shift and change and there is Enlightenment.  There were also plagues and such, but that’s just how the world rolls.

I sincerely believe in a few years, after Americans are in a much more sustained financial upswing, the economists are going to revise this Great Recession into a Depression. Because, it is for poor people.  And, let me tell you, it has been a bad time to try to make a living off poor people.  Before the recession, my tenants would get drunk and break into a neighbor’s apartment and steal dvds.  Then, a couple of years ago, around the third week of the month, a bunch of mysterious no-forced-entry break-ins would occur.  Only pain pills/prescriptions were stolen.  Now, and for the past six months, they are stealing food.  They’re asking me to intervene.  Simply put, hell no.

If you’re desperate for food, there is nothing more primal than that need.  I can’t remember what book it was, latin American writer, about a woman who clawed her way out of poverty in Mexico.  She had a horrible time relating to her American husband’s emotional needs.  She thought marriage therapy was total bullshit.  And, in my experience, I tend to agree.  But her point was simple.  If you don’t have to worry about being hungry or your family’s hunger, then you’re doing alright.

Most tenants cannot afford to turn on gas, so many actually heat their water on the stove for bathing.  True.  Pipes will burst in the winter, and I am somehow responsible and have to pay for it.  Electric heat keeps the livable square footage warm, but it doesn’t keep the crawl space and pipes warm.

Apple has a 70% net profit for third quarter.  We’re iPad, iPod, high-wired for this global economy, but poor people are living so, so very poorly.  It’s such a crazy juxtaposition.  The wealthiest are simply pissed because their $100 million net worth fell to $50 million.  But they still have their three houses.  Poor people can’t even live in a civilized way in one house.

As a firm believer in the what doesn’t kill you makes you better mantra, this Depression hasn’t killed me.  It just makes me see the world in a better, different way.

Stress has made me change my perspective.  This Depression has made me realize life is too short to do a job I hate for thirteen years.  This Depression has made me realize peace, love and happiness are only obtained through our spirits, souls, passions, emotions, thoughts, energy.

I’m lucky though.  I don’t have to worry about hunger.

Excuses. . .Excuses. . .Excuses. . .

My personal favorite excuse for not paying rent.  I drank my rent money.  There was a refreshing quality to this excuse.  It was true. There was no bullshit.  She literally chose to get drunk instead of keeping a roof over her head.  It must have been one hell of a tear–$120 in PBR in one night.

The most frequent excuse  for not paying rent.  The post office lost my check.  It’s funny.  The post office has never lost one of my checks.  In fact, I have received wrangled, mangled, soggy, half-eaten checks.

The classic excuse.  The dog ate my rent money.  Also, it has been re-interpreted to be the baby ate my rent money.  Really.

I had a toothache.  My car broke down.   My kids need Christmas presents.  I swear that I’ll catch up and pay ahead after I get my refund.  My girlfriend left me for another woman.  My boyfriend left me for his first baby’s mama.  I couldn’t work since I was having that time of the month.  I had to buy my pills so I don’t go crazy.  I really need my money, and I knew you could wait a few weeks.

Actually, I can’t wait a few weeks.  It’s not my job to put a roof over someone else’s head.  It’s business.  It’s not charity.

Pot Cultivators v. Pot Dealers

I miss the good ol’ days of tenants who grew pot on their front porch.  Really.  I do.  Pot smokers were chilled out, and they took criticism well.  They humored me.

I would say things like, “You can’t grow pot in a planter on the front porch.”  Or, “You can’t just smoke pot on the front porch.”  Or, “I can be responsible if you get busted for growing pot.  I call before I come to the house.  Please.  At least hide it.” I did not add, “You have your ancient VW van with green stickers all over it spewing nasty black fumes.  That would be a good place to hide it.”  But, I couldn’t help but like them.  They thought they were so cool with their patchouli and their unfortunate pasty white kid dreadlocks.  Cute, really, sort of.

It was much less fun to be unwittingly in the middle of a drug deal and left with the drugs following a domestic dispute where a kid’s car seat was thrown through the window.  He was a hulking guy with a tiny, tiny white trash wife.  They were both potentially very attractive, as indicated in their really beautiful two or three children under the age of four.  They were always blaring the raunchiest of raunchy rap music, while the kiddos walked around with their heavy diapers and bottles filled with mello yello or some such nastiness.

I have a college degree from one of the top liberal arts colleges in the country, yet somehow, this guy always found a way to make $335 a month in rent confusing to me.  He was always paying piecemeal, at weird times, with peculiar calculations for late fees,pro-rates etc.  As we were deciphering one of his cryptic rent payments, at least five random people came to the door.  He would go to the door, go back into the bedroom, go back outside, and then come back inside to further confuse me.

One evening at around 11PM, I received a call from potentially pretty, tiny white trash asking for hulking man to be removed from the lease.  (As an aside, I instituted a take no call after 7PM rule after this call.  Only the police or the fire department can do anything between 7PM and 7AM.)  I said something along the lines of no, we’ll chat in the morning.

I drove by the house in the morning and saw a kid’s car seat in the front yard, a double-paned window broken, and a notice from Child Protective Services on the mailbox.  I went to the door, foolishly.  The upstairs tenant came downstairs and told me they had left with the children in the middle of the night.  Potentially pretty, tiny white trash told the upstairs tenant they wouldn’t be back.

I went into the abandoned apartment and found a dog, lots and lots and lots of pot, pills, porn, and baby clothes.

What the hell do you do?  I flushed all of the drugs, found a home for the dog, trashed the porn, and took the baby clothes to Goodwill.

As I showed the apartment to potential new tenants, a steady stream of pot buyers kept coming in and asking for the hulk.  That was an average Tuesday night.

Six weeks later, the sister of the hulk called me demanding that potentially pretty, tiny white trash get their things.  Sister of the hulk called me a fucking bitch for taking the babies’ clothes to Goodwill.  I said something along the lines of don’t you call me that since they fucking threw a kid’s car seat through a window.  She told me, “Well, the baby turned out to be OK.”  So, yes, a baby was in the car seat.  Then, she proceeded to cuss me a bit more.  I told her to fuck off, since I found all of the drugs.  She stopped, put her hand over the receiver, and yelled back to potentially pretty, tiny white trash and the hulk, “Y’all she found the drugs.”  Mean sister asked me when they could pick up the drugs. I told her where I put the drugs. She cussed me again and threw in a couple of lovely threats.

I hung up the phone and installed an alarm system on my house the next week.