Landlord

February 6, 2017

Greetings from the lessor,

For more than a decade I was a landlord.  There is a sliver of perspective where this sounds regal and important like you are the master of property, a baron of sorts.  The reality was something more mundane and far grittier. 

My free time was mostly consumed with attending to the crumbling architecture of my domain.

Many months I was essentially working for my tenants.  Repairing and maintaining the places they lived in turn for the promise of rent that would be paid.  Often the promise was more significant than the reality.

It was called ‘Roosevelt’.  That sounds important too, but that was merely the street it was on and so that was how I referred to it.  As in: “I can’t meet you at the beach today because I’m working at Roosevelt.”

It was a large house that had been converted to a three apartment unit.  When I bought it there seemed great potential, which for all I know still remains untapped.  It was a clapboard house painted a deep red, trimmed in white.  It had a rickety outside staircase up to the second floor, which was usually clogged with abandoned bicycles and for a while a hibachi/birdfeeder.

The backyard was grass and dirt, which I mowed weekly using a reel push mower.  This produced as much dust as it did grass clippings, which in my view was a blessing.

The tenants upstairs rotated in and out, the low rent attracting people from an income strata that included a variety of students, unemployable dishwashers, newly divorced, previously incarcerated.  They all had stories, some more interesting than others.  I usually heard the stories as I stood in the doorway trying to collect last month’s rent.

On the main floor lived Mrs. Persails, who had lived there for several years, and I had inherited her when I bought the house.  She was in her sixties, a tiny woman surrounded by her collections of tchotchke, too ensconced to consider uprooting just because a new landlord had appeared.  She was like many people who rented from me over the years; mildly tolerant of me, polite but not friendly, visibly resentful once a month.  While she never said the words, I felt the message when she handed me the envelope with her rent; that I was the oppressor, and she, the helpless widower, was the victim.

Mrs. Persails called me regularly to fix things.  A stuck window, a faulty switch, a stubborn toilet.  I would putter around in her apartment, absorbing the smell of fried food, mothballs and potpourri.  She always seemed to take a degree of satisfaction in seeing me work for her.  And then one day she called to say there was no hot water.

The basement was like every house I owned in the city; dusty, musty and damp, cluttered with the junk that the last owner or tenant had left behind.  I walked down the steps, carrying my toolbox, and pulled the string for the light, and while my eyes adjusted I heard a noise behind me.

There, under the steps, was a man.  He was lying on a narrow mattress piled with a few blankets. At his feet was a bag, which I could tell at a glance was his possessions.  His shoes were lined up on the floor next to him.

He sat up and looked at me, a little startled, wavering between outrage and fear.  When I got close enough to smell him, I knew he wasn’t sleeping in the middle of the afternoon because he worked the night shift.  Whatever he had been drinking was leaking through his pores and overpowering the odor of mildew surrounding us.

“What are you doing here?” I asked, the only thing I could think of.  As a reply of sorts, he asked me the same question.  After all, it appeared I was in his bedroom, and it would seem he had a right to know.  It unfolded that he was renting the space from Mrs. Persails.  Evidently the appeal of earning income from a crumbling domain was not lost on her, in spite of her indignation toward the position. 

It was not the most desperate tableau I have encountered, but it was on the list.  Whatever circumstances this man left to live under the basement stairs in Roosevelt had to have been ugly.  And I was going to send him back to it, or whatever else he could find.

In the hours that followed I negotiated a time that the man would have to leave.  I explained to Mrs. Persails the fundamentals of her lease, which indirectly indicated she could not invite transients to bunk in the basement.  In the end, not one of the three of us was happy.  I fixed the hot water heater. That would count as the one redeeming element of that day.

It was not a defining moment, but it was one of many that ultimately led me to understand I was not cut from sturdy enough fabric to be a landlord.   Over the years I became smarter, and more callous, but no more successful.  There were as many funny stories as tragic, just like any other chunk of life, but I eventually learned that there were better ways for me to spend a day off than unclogging someone else’s sink. 

Like unclogging my own sink.  Or going to the beach. 

Hope this finds you changing scenery,

David

Copyright © 2017 David Smith