Landlords

We have a small house on a large yard, off the street behind a large house with a small yard. It's a rental, and we've had good neighbors and bad neighbors over the years. We were sad recently when our best neighbors yet told us they had to move. The landlord couldn't afford to keep the house any more and was selling it.

So I'm surprised, a few months later, to see a For Rent sign in front of the house again. What? Did the landlord lie just to get them out? What did she have against them? Very strange.

But I wouldn't put anything past a landlord. I've dealt with them as a tenant and as an employee (as an apartment manager). I once rented from a slum lord -- who also was a big liberal lawyer in town! I once worked for a racist who almost fired me because I rented an apartment to a black man ("there's always a way to turn someone down," he told me). Once an apartment I managed lost power during an ice storm. We were without heat for several days. After the power returned, a tenant came to my door with her frozen, dead parakeet in its cage. She wanted a free month's rent in exchange, which seemed generous of her to me. But the landlord only offered this -- ten dollars off the next month's rent. It was hard to work for these creeps but sometimes I found ways to help out the tenants without the boss knowing.

The bigger the company managing the apartment, the less humane the treatment of the tenants. A large corporation I worked for as manager once referred to tenants in a meeting as "incomes in your ledger book, nothing more." Quite an education and, of course, eventually I couldn't stand it any longer and quit. For a few months, I was officially homeless after quitting but a fellow manager, an actor himself, let me crash in the basement of one of his buildings, where I put a mattress in a spare storage room and used an old isolated basement shower and sink and toilet, quite the digs. But it was free rent, so the price was right. I got a hell of a lot of writing done there. I used to work at a table with a window at ground level and the outside ground at my eye level. Around ten every morning a cat would come by and piss on my window. I thought of him as a literary critic.

I got out of this mess, thank the gods, by collecting some very well-timed grants. I also picked up a job with a direct to video company. My homeless/basement experience was short, only a few months. Still, I don't look back at the experience as "a bad time." It was an eventful, educational time. At least I wasn't on the street.

The basement, and my tree house in Berkeley for the weeks before I joined the Army, were the low end of my housing history. So far, knock on my wooden head.