RESURRECT DEAD ON PLANET JUPiTER

Landlord

Renting an apartment in an exclusive area of the city on a relatively low salary can be a treacherous thing. I believe that I’ve found myself in a good situation – finally – but today was punctuated with the worst tenant to landlord conversation I’ve ever had. This was a conversation with my old landlord, or the batshit crazy old bitch whose proper name I won’t use here.

For 2 years I was a good tenant. I paid my rent on time and I complained little. I didn’t hassle her when 100 pounds of brick dust fell into my closet. I cleaned it up, washed all my clothes and installed a drop cloth. She knew about the problem, but how much can you do when the house is slowly falling down?

When she kept the heat low I didn’t do like some of my neighbors and bother her about it. What good would it do? She never turned the heat up. During the cold winter of 2005-6, she turned it down and put a locking box over the thermostat. She said oil prices were too high. Even though the apartment had a misfit old door with 2-3 inch gaps open to an uninsulated back porch area, I didn’t complain. I hung a heavy blanket in front of it to keep out the winter air. I put on a sweater and drank tea in the evenings. By choice or by circumstance, my liberal ass considered it my civic duty to conserve energy.

When one of her workmen repeatedly broke into my apartment and stole beer out of my refrigerator, I did complain. I have to say she was nice enough to change my locks. Good for her.

When she wrote me a nasty letter about things in the hall (that weren’t mine) I left her a polite message letting her know that her nasty letter was directed to the wrong person. I never heard back from her. When things broke… like the front door, I was a good tenant and fixed it so that other tenants could enter and/or exit the building. I never whined about not having luxuries like a fire exit or locks on my windows.

Why was I so mute to all these problems? Because she wasn’t the worst landlord I’ve had. All I’ll say on that is that in an old apartment there was a toilet in the unit above mine. Just before I moved in a man died on that toilet. He sat there for a week. Now that’s not the landlord’s fault. It was really just a combination of a weak blood vessel in the brain of a person who didn’t have any friends. The smell is what finally got someone’s attention.

After he was removed, they decided not to replace the toilet. Even thought it leaked a lot, the workmen were able to save their boss a few bucks by scrubbing the putrefied flesh off the enamel. They told me all about it while later investigating one of those leaks in my apartment. Eventually the toilet fractured, cracking in half and spilling raw sewage into my hallway. I really complained after that.

I won’t even get into the mold, flies and snowdrifts.

This was also the same landlord that sued a friend of mine after a (sober) girl leaving his apartment fell over a 4th story shin-high banister and fell – absolutely horribly – to her death. They were a real class act.

But getting back to my more recent landlord and today’s conversation, in a few hours, my lease terminates for good. I received a note – pinned to my door – outlining what I needed to do before vacating. It was the usual stuff, clean, scrub, paint… (Paint?) I cleaned, but I have to admit that I didn’t paint.

She left it to me to arrange the return of the keys. The note said something like: “It is your responsibility to arrange to return the keys to me by 12 noon on May 31, 2007.” The problem was she doesn’t pick up her phone. Her mother – who does sometimes pick up – doesn’t take messages and told me that she wouldn’t return calls. This made my listed duty of arranging the exchange kind of difficult. Since my only real communications with her have been by mail, I figured I’d just send them to her that way.

Then this morning she calls me to let me know that she expects me to get her the keys within the hour. I told her I was at work and asked if maybe we could work something else out. Bitch flipped out. She screamed, she yelled and eventually she hung up on me. So now I’m complaining. Along with this screed here, I will return her keys to her by mail. Since she hasn’t returned the call I made to her after she hung up on me, I guess I’ll go ahead and send them that way. I’m thinking I should get certified mail with some kind of delivery confirmation.