Glamorous's blog

Landlords are douchbags. Every last one of 'em. They are all shits. They all take advantage of the poor tenants.

One of the reasons I rarely post anything here anymore is that I got tired of hearing about how ALL people who own property and rent it out as living space are "douchebags".

I have a house that I must sell or lose because the TENANTS drained me dry financially with their breaking things and clogging toilets and smashing doors and stealing metal and running up the water bill doing god-knows-what--I think they just let the water run to be spiteful--and moving in unauthorized roommates, then disappearing, leaving ME with the job of figuring out who these goddamn crackheads are so that in my douchbagginess, I can pay to evict them. This takes at LEAST $275 cash PER SQUATTER and at least 3 workdays lost for time in court. Let's not forget the travel time and gas money involved in showing up for court.

The bank that holds my mortgages does NOT care if the tenants refuse to pay. They still want their money, and rightly so. Every time I miss a mortgage payment, my credit rating goes lower. One by one every credit card I had, even the ones that I was keeping up to date with minimum payments, was closed without warning. The card companies sent me letters that said "account closed due to credit file review". Mortgage default is a serious offense in the credit world. Thanks to my tenants, some of whom I never even rented to, I no longer have a credit card to bail me out if I have an unexpected car repair or need to fill a prescription.

Since laws protect tenants, I would be arrested if I were to just go over to the house with a Louisville Slugger and tell the squatting bastards to get their asses off my property. They are tenants. They have rights. They have the right to put me into bankruptcy. The banks lately do not actually foreclose and get it over with, they drag the process on for literally years, completely destroying my credit rating and periodically slapping me with bank executions that have more than once left me without enough money to buy food or gasoline. Douchebag that I am, I guess I must deserve it.

As a landlord, I was often forced to choose between paying my own family's expenses and paying for what the tenants, who were 2 months behind on rent, destroyed. One of them flooded the basement while doing laundry and ruined the boiler. $2800 for a used boiler...I was borrowing all over town while the law demanded that I pay for a hotel room for my late-on-the-rent tenant. My family was cold that month because we couldn't pay our own bills, but the tenants...warm as toast. Since I bought that house, I have not been able to travel, buy a new car or send my kids on any excursions. We don't buy new clothes. We don't have gel nails or Baby Phat jeans, but you can bet our tenants do.

I have been told that I was "ridiculous" to expect rent to be paid in January because the tenants had just bought their kids Christmas presents. I was told that the rent couldn't be paid because they had taken the dog to the vet. I asked what the hell a dog was doing in my house on their no-pets lease and was told "oh, it's my mother's".

The last nonpaying bastard split without notice, and to make sure I'd lose even more money, he called the building inspector and said that he was leaving without paying his last month's rent because of unaddressed repairs...he'd pulled out ceiling tiles, knocked holes in the wall, and removed all window locks, then claimed I rented to him in that condition (my question to the inspector...why would he have rented a place in that condition??). No matter how it got that way, I am now stuck with fixing the mess. I can't just let it sit and fall apart, there are other people who own property on that street who do not deserve to have their property values brought down because of abandoned buildings in the neighborhood.

Let's not forget that while this ongoing nightmare is in progress, the squatters get to live in my house for free for at least 90 days...more, because they get 90 days from the day I file for eviction, and I can't afford to do that right now. Since they're outraged that I dare to evict them for their unauthorized use of my property, they WRECK the place, destroying walls and doors, selling off MY appliances, ruining plumbing fixtures, pissing down the heating vents.

A friend offered to start collecting rents for me, thinking that the tenants might be less difficult to a big, strong man than to a woman. They assume that he is my employee, and are candid with him, making comments like "That bitch can kiss my ass. She drives around in a Mercedes, and we're POOR!" "I can't pay this month..her little private school babies are just going to have to do without their new iPods this month--ha ha." "My daughter had to get her prom dress and hair and nails...that bitch can wait til next month." Sometimes they catch it up the next month. Sometimes they don't. Either way, it's going to cost me.

I don't have a Mercedes, I drive a seven-year-old Saturn with ninety-eight thousand miles on it, and still requires a $278 monthly payment if I plan to keep driving it. My kids attend public school just like theirs do. My daughter's prom dress will be a gift from her older sister, hair and nails will be done at home, and she will dance in borrowed shoes. Not one of us has an iPad. I'm in bankruptcy. And when the goddam tenants' hooligan kids clog the toilet by flushing Buzz Lightyear, it's me, in my old Saturn, calling from a hard-to-find pay phone (because I can't afford unlimited minutes on the cell phone, unlike my tenants) to tell my kid I can't pick her up from school because I have to go unclog a toilet. A toilet full of somebody else's bullshit. Again.

I'll admit, becoming a landlord was one of the worst mistakes I've ever made.

It does not make me a douchbag.

If it makes you feel good to dump bigotry and hostility onto ALL landlords even though everybody here knows that there are several landlords among this group, fine. Knock yourselves out.

Landlord Haters, fuck you. Douchebags.

I've had it with belonging to a group that accepts this kind of crap.

Week two in her new school, High Schooler managed to miss the school bus to school.

On Sundays in our house, we have a standing plan that we catch up on chores. Laundry gets done and outfits get pulled for the week. Doesn't have to be anything fancy. Pants, tops, underwear and socks dumped unfolded into a bottom drawer or plastic bin is fine, as long as one can reach in there and extract someting to wear to school. If she wants to go wrinkled or mismatched, fine. Just get ready and go.

Every time I saw her that day she was watching movies, on the phone, or playing. I'd say to her "Is your laundry finished?" to which she'd reply with rolled eyes and annoyance. I'd tell her to shut off the TV or get off the phone or put down the video controller and get the laundry done. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

Fast forward to Tuesday morning. Ten minutes before bus time, she is walking around barefoot, hair wet, eating instant oatmeal. "Shoes on. Coat on. The bus will be here in ten minutes."

"I KNOW!"

"Then go out there!"

"You don't have to treat me like a little kid!"

"I shouldn't have to treat you like a little kid, that's true. Now go outside."

We repeated this three times, each time with her getting more annoyed with ME. I went into her room to see why the heck she was still not outside, as we were two minutes to bus arrival.

She was digging through a basket of unfolded clean laundry. The basket yielded no socks. Turns out she'd not bothered to finish her laundry and all of her socks were in the washer, wet. How she expected to get dressed if she hadn't dried any socks is a mystery to me.

I threw her a pair of mine and screamed "GO! Now! Carry your coat, shoes and socks and finish at the end of the driveway!"

The bus roared by as I yelled.

New school. New chance to catch up. Fresh start. Damn.

What to do? Providing a ride sends the message that she can skip preparing for school, ignore my requirements, and as a result, get a ride to the door. If I refuse the ride, I am allowing her a day off as a reward for her lack of preparation and for her belief that she has options when I give direct instruction.

I drove her, with the admonition that she would not get another ride. Miss the bus again, and you walk. You will not stay at home. If it takes you all day to walk there, too bad. You will go to school one way or another, I told her. Since school is nine miles away, I suggested that she take the free transportation that comes right to our door.

Next morning...dawdle...dawdle. I told her to go out and wait ten minutes before bus time. "Yeah, I know".

She went into the kitchen and started leisurely putting a yogurt and spoon into her bag. Not until the bus was visible did she try to run for it.

The door was locked or stuck, we never figured out which. She flipped the locks, but that unlocked one and locked the other. She pulled again, shouting "I can't get the door open!". She flipped one lock. The door opened as the bus roared on by in a cloud of dust.

She sat down.

I got out the ski pants and insulated jacket.

"What's that for?" she asked.

"You're walking."

"It's too far!"

"The bus was a hundred feet away. You refused to go wait for it. Now you can walk. I suggest doubling up on the socks."

"I couldn't get the door open!"

"If you had gone to the bus stop ten minutes early as you were told, you'd have had plenty of time to figure out the locks and still make the bus. Instead, you decided to gamble ten more minutes in the house against walking to school. I will not spend a penny's worth of gasoline taking you to school because you squandered the free ride. Walk."

Wailing and sobbing, she put on the hated ski clothes. She kept telling me that there was no way she could have made that bus. I threw her a pair of insulated gloves, but said nothing. She slammed out of the house.

The incident wasn't mentioned when she arrived after school. She stormed up to her room and threw the ski clothes onto the floor.

Then she finished her damned laundry. Then did her homework. Then went to bed. Early. After putting her coat and bookbag by the front door.

This morning, she was fully dressed, lunch packed, and out at the bus stop ten minutes before the bus was due to arrive. She made and ate breakfast before leaving. Peeking unnoticed from the bathroom window, I breathed a sigh of relief as the bus eased to a stop at the end of the driveway. She boarded calmly without rush, drama, or a backward glance.

Maybe they really can learn from their mistakes.

From earliest childhood, I slipped into books when the going got rough.

My older sister noticed that as a child, I got a lot of shoutings and whippings for being a 'pest'. Although she was only eleven years old herself, she realized that an energetic three-year-old needed something to keep busy. I had no playmates. My parents had no interest in finding me any, and scorned the idea of pre-school even though it was free. My sister, annoyed with the backward ways of my family, tried to include me in her activities to keep me out of trouble. She devised an ingenious method of study using waxed paper, a pencil and the few Little Golden Books we had in the house. Every day when she came home from school, we sat at the den table using her method. With her as my teacher, I was able to read before I was old enough to enter kindergarten.

She showed me that there were lots of people just waiting to play in the pages of books. Weekly, she brought home a few picture books with her novels and LP Albums, sometimes letting me walk the mile to the library with her so that I could pick out my own companions for the week.

Books were great friends. Small. Portable. Non-jugdemental. They didn't yell like my parents did. They didn't hit me or tell me that I was stupid like my middle sister. Books were never mad at me for not being able to keep up with the big kids. They were willing to wait as long as it took for me to come back and finish them.

Of course, it never took long. Once I learned that I could disappear into a book, I began to devour them as quickly as they arrived. As I grew into school age, I found that books never cared about the reader's tax bracket. Books didn't care what kind of house the reader lived in or if anybody else liked her. Books always liked their reader. To this day, I cringe away from ugly realities like bills and empty bank accounts and chronic illness and looming deadlines by heading to the library to check out a tote bag full of new words to read, letting their message wrap around me like a blanket that insulates from the icy winds of being a grown-up.

Not willing to give up the safety of the pages when the book ended, I developed a habit of slipping into the world of the main character. After reading Heidi, I became determined to make a beverage that tasted exactly like Johanna Spyri's description of goat's milk ("sweet, thick, foamy, with a spiciness as if cinnamon and sugar had been added"). I shook milk in a jar with sugar, cinnamon, a drop of vanilla. When that didn't produce the exact result, I added a little maple syrup and a drop of almond flavoring. I learned to knit (from a book with instructions and pictures) after reading of the handknit stockings worn by the All-Of-A-Kind-Family. The Little House series offered a wealth of instruction. I made rag-dolls and braided rugs. I fashioned doll hats using stems of grass gone to seed. If I could have found a cow, I'd have been out milking. My favorite color was calico.

Not all of my endeavors were successful. Although I researched long and hard, I never did figure out what kind of gadget was the cardboard hair receiver that Laura made for her Ma, but if I had, I'd surely have made one. Attempts at maple sugar candy made by boiling a cup of Log Cabin maple-flavored syrup were fairly disastrous. The stuff was quick to burn and stuck to everything, probably because it was made of corn syrup and maple flavoring.

I never noticed my lack of playmates again.

Last Friday, I received some astoundingly bad legal and financial news. "Jeez", I thought. "Why do so many things have to go sour?". Hmmm. Laura Ingalls Wilder's Sourdough Biscuit recipe has been tickling my curiosity for years. It seemed like a perfect moment to try a recipe that required a process of watching something go sour. There was consolation in knowing that this recipe needed and welcomed sourness.

Pulled out my disintegrating copy of By The Shores Of Silver Lake (and some potholders I wove from wool after reading Conrad Richter's The Town). Lacking crockery, I mixed up a starter in a plastic bucket. Or what I thought would be starter, anyway. Never having made it before, I wasn't sure what it was supposed to look like or how it should behave. It sat for five days on the counter, balefully seething, gathering wild yeast from the air. When it started looking flat, I gave it some sugar and white flour which perked it up for a few hours. Yep, matched my mood perfectly.

This morning, I followed the vague directions found in the novel. Cups of flour, cups of seething, weird-smelling sourdough, salt, soda, sugar, fat. Knead. The dough felt funny. Roll. Cut. They smelled odd. I almost threw them out three times before they made it to the baking sheet.

Out of the oven came the lightest, fluffiest, most delicious biscuits ever. They rose so enthusiastically that the sides burst open in breaddy grins. The smell brought people from all over the house, asking "What's that? Is it ready?". Rat Pup came in cradling her Glo-Worm. She lacked the words to request, substituting "Mmmmm! Mmmmm!", small pink fingers held up to receive a sample.

"You gonna make these again?" asked Pup Daddy.

Let's hope my sour legal news turns around equally well.