CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT: Beauty and the Boxer

I was about to bid Miz James farewell, when we heard a tremendous crash from upstairs and the raised, angry tones of Bryan berating Mamie about something.  The verbal barrage went on for quite a while, interspersed with more thuds, thumps and crashes.  It sounded as if all hell were breaking loose up there.

"Does this happen a lot," I asked Miz James who didn’t seem fazed by the noise..

She raised an eyebrow.  "Uh, huh.  He has a temper, that Bryan.  I dunno how Mamie takes it."

            The third week in August, several people called to inquire about the apartment.  I told three of them that I would be at the house that Sunday between ten o'clock and two o'clock.  I duly arrived at the house on Sunday morning and sat on the front porch in one of Miz James's garden chairs to await the prospective tenants.

No one came. 

The ever-present Miz James, however, kept me well regaled with all the doings of the neighborhood until I could have screamed.  Bryan periodically exercised his lungs upstairs, throwing around his weight and God knew what else besides.  During a break in the yelling up above, I tentatively rang the doorbell.  Mamie answered the door with what looked like the beginnings of a black eye.  She came out to sit with us for a while.

"You can't go on like this, girl" Miz James told her, and for once I agreed with her. 

"I know," Mamie said.  "I'm going to give him the shove one of these days."

Finally, close to two o'clock, just as I was getting ready to leave, two young women walked up the street to the house.  One of them introduced herself as Giselle.  With light, coffee-colored skin and delicate features, she was quite a beauty.

Giselle introduced the other woman as her sister Barbara and told me that just herself, her two children and her dog would be living in the apartment.  I remembered my mother had taken a call from a woman who had seemed very anxious to know if I rented to people with dogs.  I didn’t see why not.  If it was a choice between having a #tenant with a dog – in this case, a boxer – or no tenant, the tenant with dog won hands down.

I showed Giselle around the #apartment, and she liked it very much.  She seemed calm and collected and also told me she was quite handy around the house.  She wouldn’t need to call me for minor things, such as a leaky faucet or a blocked toilet. 

“Who will paying the rent and the security deposit?” I asked.

“The Department of Social Services will handle the security and pay part of the rent.  I’ll pay the balance,” Giselle said.  “I get disability payments for my son, too, so don’t worry, I can afford the #rent.  Can you fill out the landlord statement, in case I get the apartment?”

“Okay, and here’s an application form for you to fill out too.”

After Giselle had filled out the application and left, I turned to Miz James. "Well, she seems okay."

"Ah, ha!  You see?  There you go already," Miz James remarked.  "Taking the first person that comes along.  That's not the way to be a #landlord."

"I know," I admitted, "but she did seem nice, all the same."

That night, I called the phone number for Giselle’s landlord, which she had written down on the application.  Her current landlord gave her a good reference, which included positive words like "clean" and "respectable."  I phoned Giselle afterwards to tell her she could have the apartment, dog and all.  She promised to deliver the landlord statement to Social Services the next day.

The following morning at work, I arranged with the #building #inspector and Mr. Catcher to inspect the downstairs apartment for the #security #deposit and #rental #certificate.  They certainly were getting a lot of business from this particular landlord.  Wim resigned himself to another trip to Schemmerhorn, but at least I had managed to coordinate the appointments with the building inspector and Mr. Catcher for the same time, so that Wim would only have to make one trip.

            Miz James moved out the last weekend of August.  This was fine by me because it gave me a couple of days to get the apartment ready for Giselle.  The day she left, I handed her a $475 dollar check for the security deposit.  She had been a good tenant overall, and the apartment was in good condition. 

Once she’d departed, however, and I had a chance to really look around at a year’s worth of wear and tear, I was disappointed at how much painting had to be done.  I spent the next three nights painting the worst rooms and touching up others.  At least Miz James had done a thorough job of cleaning – the stove and refrigerator didn’t need any work, and the semi-gloss kitchen walls had been scrubbed clean of grease.

The same weekend that Miz James moved out, someone vandalized the graveyard behind 51 Manson Street.  

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN: Feces and Filth

Luckily, the end of the month was a weekend.  Wim and I went to Schemmerhorn to make sure that Ray was leaving, and to clean the #apartment once he'd gone.  Thus armed with cleaning tools and supplies, we advanced on number 51.  We were pleased to find Ray in the process of moving things out of the apartment and loading them into the huge old station wagon. Wim and I sat next door on Shirley and Jerry's front steps to watch and wait.

The old station wagon was bursting at the seams by the time all the to-ing and fro-ing had stopped.  Without a word or a glance in our direction, Ray piled his children into the car, and it creaked slowly away up the street, listing to the left as always under the extra load.

Miz James came bustling out at that moment and followed Wim and I upstairs, eager to see for herself what condition the apartment was in.  She was not to be disappointed.  We could smell the stench, even before we reached the top of the stairs.  Bluebottles were also thoroughly enjoying the smell of feces and God-knows-what-else, judging by the hordes of flies that buzzed furiously in every room.

The first thing we did was open the windows.  Ugh!  How could they have lived in that stink?

Apart from dirty walls, the living and dining rooms were not too bad.  But, the bathroom

. . . ! 

            I stopped dead in the doorway.  The floor was strewn with used sanitary napkins lying face up, and there was a pool of what looked like pee around the base of the toilet.  Feces floated in the grimy bowl.

Holding my nose, I hastily flushed the toilet and escaped to find rubber gloves and a garbage bag to collect the offensive, bloody napkins.

In the second bedroom, caked on the floor and in-between the floorboards, was what appeared to be more feces – human or animal, I couldn’t tell.  I hastily opened the window, and Wim went to work with a putty knife. 

In the third bedroom I found not one, but two buckets full of urine.

"What is this!" I exclaimed.  "Don't they believe in using the toilet?"

Miz James, who had been poking around in delighted horror, bustled off downstairs, no doubt to regale Shirley with the disgusting news.  The #cockroaches were again very much in evidence, but an urgent call to a #pest #control company got me an emergency visit early Monday morning. 

This time, I chose a company called Action Pest Control, who advertised a lot on TV. They claimed that bugs wouldn’t stand a chance against their Ghost-Buster-look-alike “Action Man.”  They charged nearly twice as much as Greatest Pest Control – $160 for the initial visit – but follow-up visits were the same: $42.80.  I don’t know why I opted to go with them – Greatest Pest Control had done a good job previously – so I guess it goes to show what aggressive advertising can do.

Wim, Allen and I worked hard, scrubbing and cleaning all afternoon.  I was just about to attack the refrigerator, and Allen the oven, when Bryan dropped by.

"Hey," he said, sauntering in – a sexy figure in blue jeans and flowing, chestnut curls.  "Heard about the mess from Shirley.  How's it going?"

"Not so bad," I said, slowly straightening my aching back.  "You'll be able to move in tomorrow but  I won't be able to do any repairs or painting until Mr. Catcher from Social Services does the inspection in a couple of weeks."

"That's okay," Bryan said.  "Hey, I was gonna ask you.  Would it be okay if I put a fan up in the ceiling of the living room?  And I was thinking of putting sliding doors between the living room and dining room, like you have downstairs.  I mean, they'd stay if we left, and it wouldn't cost you nothin'."

"I don't see why not," I said.  "As long as you don't gouge holes in the walls, or anything like that."

"Oh, no," Bryan assured me.  He took a last look around.  "See ya."

"I'll leave the keys with Miz James!" I yelled after him.

"Okay!"

On Monday afternoon, a few hours after the "Action Man" had defogged the apartment, Mamie and Bryan moved in.  Wim met with the #building #inspector a few days later and with Mr. Catcher the following week.  I was delighted to learn that I was again eligible for the maximum amount of Ray’s #security #agreement – two months’ #rent – and Wim informed Mamie and Bryan that he would stop by the next week to make repairs.

Meanwhile, I received a phone call at work from Child Protective Services.  The caseworker told me she was investigating a neglect charge, which had been filed against Ray Molinard.  Hoping to somehow help Ray's kids, I told her what I had witnessed - the condition of the apartment, the cockroaches, buckets of pee, dried feces on the floor.  I suspected it was Miz James who had reported Ray to the authorities, and the next time I saw her, she gleefully told me that Ray’s next-door-neighbor-friends had also moved out.

"Done a moonlight flit," she breathlessly announced.  "I heard as how Ray and them 'ave taken over a #two-family nearby."

"Well, good riddance to them," I said fervently.  "So long as they stay away from here.  I pity their new #landlord, though."

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX: The Flimsy Fence

YEAR TWO

House Account:  $1,338.00

#Mortgage:  $513.48 - $547.29

The letter had little effect on Ray's children's behavior, but Miz James was somewhat mollified when Wim erected a fence so that only she, Princess and Desmond could use the back yard.  She grumbled a bit when Ray asked her if he could host a barbecue in the back yard for visiting friends and family on Memorial Day, but as she wasn't going to be home that day, she grudgingly agreed.

The fence wasn’t anything special: just wire chain-link with posts every few feet.  In no time, it was drooping tiredly between its supports as the neighboring children on the right side of the house – with whom Ray's kids seemed to be very friendly – yanked and leaned on it with a vengeance.

The owner of the next-door house, where said children resided on the second floor, was in the process of gutting the first-floor #apartment in order to #renovate it.  As a result, an alarming heap of trash and rubble was fast accumulating in the alleyway between the two #properties.  Miz James gleefully reported that "them kids" were playing in it and strewing garbage left, right and center.  This fact was borne out when I received a violation notice from the #Code #Enforcement #Bureau ordering me to clean up the mess in 72 hours, or else.  It wasn't even my mess! 

Indignantly, Wim and I went up to Manson Street and piled the mess onto the #renovating #landlord's side of the alley.  Then I wrote a stern letter to Ray, telling him to stop his children strewing trash all over the place.

The rumblings of discontent kept sounding from Miz James until they finally came to a head.  Ray had been living upstairs for five months when Miz James called one night to report that "them kids" had stolen her son's bicycle from her side of the basement, and that she had called the police.  The bike was found a little while later but, nonetheless, the fact remained that Ray and co. had violated their shared access to the basement. 

Thanking my lucky stars that I had only given him a six-month #lease, I wrote to Ray to tell him I would not be extending it and that I wanted him out of the apartment by the end of the month.  I heard not one word of argument from him.  Maybe he was used to being #evicted.

No sooner had I given Ray a month's notice, than Shirley telephoned from next door.  Her buddy Miz James had informed her that Ray was moving out, for which she was undeniably very grateful.  Shirley told me that her friend Bryan was once again interested in renting the place.  Apparently, his job was going well, and he could now afford the #rent; especially since the Department of Social Services had approved his girlfriend Mamie for partial rental assistance.

"Have Bryan call me," I told Shirley.  "It would be nice not to have to advertise and try to find a decent tenant.  He's a friend of yours, so I guess that's a pretty good reference, right?"

"Right," Shirley agreed.  "It'll be him and Mamie and their two young children.  I'll tell him to call you."

Bryan telephoned that afternoon.  "So, I hear you're looking for an upstairs #tenant again.  I'm still interested."

"Yes, I heard,” I said.  “By the way, why do you want to move, and when?"

"Soon as possible.  We’re living underneath Mamie's sister at her mom's right now.  Too close to family is like, you know . . ."

"I get the picture.  How about rent and #security?  The rent is four-seventy-five, as you know . . ."

"Social Services will pay most of it," Bryan told me,  "but we want to pay the security deposit ourselves, rather than do it through D.S.S."

"Okay," I agreed – stupidly, as it later turned out.  "When can we meet to sign the lease?"

We arranged that I would go over to their apartment in Schemmerhorn that evening. I found it quite easily.  Mamie, the girlfriend, turned out to be a pale, thin slip of a girl with a shy smile.  Whilst they perused lease, I looked around.  The room was neat and tidy and looked clean.  The two toddlers were nicely dressed.  All in all, it seemed as if Bryan and Mamie would be good tenants.

The next day I called the building inspector to inspect the upstairs apartment for the rental certificate.  Then I called Mr. Catcher to come and determine how much D.S.S. would pay for any repairs that needed doing.  Unfortunately, his next available appointment was not until the middle of August.

Meanwhile, downstairs, Miz James's lease was due to expire at the end of August.  Always diligent, she called me towards the end of July.

“Can I stay a little longer?” she asked, “I’m planning on buying a house within the next few months.”

I would be sorry to lose her – she wasn’t a bad #tenant – but I had to tell her I really didn’t want to look for a new tenant in the winter.   I knew from experience that not many people moved at that time of year.  Of course, the Jacuzzi was a good selling point, but I figured it would be easier to find a tenant in the late summer or fall.    I determined to place an advertisement in the Schemmerhorn Gazette, listing the apartment’s features and keeping the rent at four seventy-five per month.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE: Racial Relations

I arrived at the Manson Street house slightly early on Friday the 28th, but the rattletrap was already waiting for me, loaded to the gunnels with boxes, bags, and children.  It seemed to groan beneath the weight of several mattresses tied onto its roof, and the leftward list was more pronounced than ever.

Ray and children erupted from the car and eagerly watched me unlock the door.  We went upstairs, and after a quick look round I handed the keys to Ray and left them to it.

By February 22nd, I still hadn’t received a rental voucher from the Department of Social Services.  I heaved a gusty sigh when I heard that Ray’s case worker was none other than Mrs. Planet.  She must have moved up to the “M” section of the alphabet.

"Did you send in a rental certificate?" Mrs. Planet asked, when I finally reached her.

"Nooooo."

"Gotta have a #rental certificate from the City," she announced in a rather triumphant-sounding tone, "before we can send out vouchers for rent."

"What is a rental certificate, how do I get one, and from which department?" I asked.  "And how come D.S.S. didn't tell me they needed one before this?"

"Dunno.  Probably because you never had a new D.S.S. tenant before?  But call the building inspector. Send us a rental certificate, and we'll send you a voucher for the #rent."

I called the Schemmerhorn building inspector’s office.  It was much easier getting through to their ofices than to the caseworkers at D.S.S.

"Sure," they said.  "Come in, pay a ten-dollar fee for each #apartment you want inspected, fill out a form, and we'll call you to set up an appointment."

I asked if they could mail me the form to fill out and I would mail it back to them with a check. 

On hearing this request, the friendliness slipped slightly.  This was most irregular.  They didn’t normally do that.

I explained that I worked in St. Albans and couldn’t make it to Schemmerhorn during office hours.

Well . . . in that case . . . they supposed they could.

The form arrived two days later.  I filled it out and mailed it back with a check for $10.00.

The #building #inspector – not Mr. Bray this time, but an equally young-sounding, go-ahead man by the name of Ron – called a couple of days later.  I made an appointment for him to meet Wim at the #house the following week.  Unfortunately, this appointment had to be scheduled for the day after Mr. Catcher was inspecting the apartment for the #security #agreement.  Wim would be making two trips to Schemmerhorn, but it couldn’t be helped.

The #inspection by Mr. Catcher went off without a hitch.  The apartment was clean and safe.  As for Ron, the building inspector, Wim and he got on like a house on fire.  Recognizing kindred spirits in each other, they no doubt had fun discussing building techniques and #codes.  I sent the resulting rental certificate to Mrs. Planet at the Department of Social Services, poste haste.

It took about one month for Miz James to start complaining about Ray.

"That #tenant of yours!" she puffed into the telephone.  "I was hoping it was going to stop after a while, but it hasn't."

"What hasn’t?" I asked.

"His kids make fun of my kids all the time, callin' them racial names an' stuff.  Every time they go out, they have to hear it from them kids.  They're always outside, cussin' and messin' up the yard.  I wan' a fence put up so my keeds can be in the yard by theirselves."

Coincidentally, just that past weekend, I had taken a class on ethics-in-the-workplace and watched a dated but very interesting video documentary about an experiment in discrimination.  At an all-white school in an all-white town in the South- or Mid-West – I don’t remember which – the pupils had literally never encountered a black person, and one of the teachers decided that her class of ten-year-olds could benefit from experiencing first-hand what it was like to be discriminated against. 

At first, the children thought it sounded like a fun exercise, but they soon realized it was anything but.

The teacher sorted her students into two groups: the blue-eyed group and the brown-eyed group.  The first day, the blue-eyed children were informed that they were superior to the brown-eyed ones and that brown-eyed people were stupid and lazy.  Unlike the blue-eyed children, the brown-eyed children weren’t allowed to have seconds at lunch or to play for an extra five minutes at recess.  Any mistakes the brown-eyed children made in their lessons were pointed out to the blue-eyed children and ridiculed.  They were also made to wear collars so as to be easily identified as brown-eyed children from a distance, so that the blue-eyed children could easily avoid them.

It was amazing how quickly the blue-eyed children turned into utterly hateful, spiteful creatures.  They were soon taunting the brown-eyed children and making their lives a misery.  Several fights broke out in the playground.

On the next day, the roles were reversed.  The brown-eyed group was now superior to the blue-eyed group.  While taking some joy in now being the favored ones, the brown-eyed children were not as horrid to the now be-collared blue-eyed children as the blue-eyed children had been to them.  This was obviously because the brown-eyed children remembered what it had felt like to be discriminated against themselves. 

Another interesting point was that performance scores in reading and logic were better when the children were deemed superior than when they were considered inferior, thus proving that self-image can affect performance.

Anyway . . . "I'm sorry to hear you're having some trouble with Ray's kids," I told Miz James.  "I'll certainly write a letter to him today about the racial remarks.  Also, I'll talk to Wim about putting a fence up in the back yard.  I guess that would be a good idea, anyway."

"Okay," Miz James said in a grudging manner.  "But tha’s not all."

"Oh?"

"Those kids of Ray's . . . they take up the whole front porch.  I come home an' have to climb over them to get to my front door.  It's not right when a person can’t even make it to their own front door without fallin’ over people.  Maybe you should think about putting up a fence dividing the front porch, too."

This was a bit much.  "I don’t know about that,” I said, “but, as I said, I'll speak to Wim."

"And," Miz James continued, "the older daughter . . . Jennie?  She's real trouble.  Comes home on the weekends and raises all kinds a hell.  She's like fourteen goin' on twenty, that one, if you know what ah mean?"

I tried to sound soothing and understanding, but was finding this increasingly more difficult to do.  

“I'm sorry to hear that, Ms. James.  She's a problem child, you know?  She’s run away from home a few times.  That's why she has to live in a children's home."

"Tha’s all very well."  Miz James sighed heavily into the phone.  "But she's trouble an' I don't see why we should have to put up with it."

I broke in as she paused for breath.  "I will write to Ray and try to set him straight.  If the #racial remarks don't stop, maybe you could sue.”

"Humph."  Miz James didn’t sound at all mollified.  “An’ another thing before you go.  The water heater downstairs is leaking.”

Fantastic.  What did those run?  A few hundred dollars?  I added it to Wim’s to-do list.

Miz James finally let me go. 

With a sigh, I hung up the phone and started working on a letter to Ray.