CHAPTER THIRTY: Indoor Incendiaries

YEAR THREE

House Account:  $2,123.00

Mortgage: $549.38

Saturday, July 2nd.  Wim and my mother had driven to JFK airport to pick up Frederica, who was coming from South Africa to stay for a few months.  She was bringing with her a five-year-old boy called Shane.  His mother, Frederica’s neighbor, had recently died, and Frederica had adopted Shane.   

While I hung out at home waiting for them to arrive, Shirley phoned.

"I thought you'd like to know that Mamie moved out last night.  She's gone to Florida."

I was taken aback. "Oh. Nice of her to tell me!  Thanks, Shirley."

Frederica arrived later that afternoon.  We took one look at each other and burst into tears.  It was so lovely to see her again.  

Shane was adorable.  He was small and blond with a spiky haircut and an impish little face.  I soon discovered that his mischievous looks matched his nature, but for now he was being a perfect little gentleman, meeting his auntie for the first time.  Andrea and Bronwyn took to their cute little cousin at once and dragged him off to explore the house and grounds.

I gave Frederica a humongous hug.  “How are you, Frederica?”

She hugged me back just as hard.  “I’m fine.  Doing much better since I had the op a year ago.”

The operation she was speaking of was major bypass surgery to take some strain off of her failing liver.  She had been suffering from chronic active hepatitis since she was 10 years old.  For some reason her immune system mistakenly identified her liver as an enemy and was constantly trying to destroy it. 

I looked doubtfully at her puffy calves and ankles.

“Yeah, that’s one side effect,” Frederica admitted.  “Water retention.  I have to take water pills all the time and get vitamin K shots regularly.  I’ve got three sizes of clothes because I never know when I’m going to be thin or fat from the Cortisone.  I don’t need to take my medicine all the time, now, though.  Just when I feel I need to.”

“So, do you think you could be growing out of the hepatitis at last?”

“Maybe.  I’m in my mid twenties, so I’m a bit old, but it could happen.”

“I’ve got so much news to tell you,” I told Frederica as she unpacked her case.  “Like about this house I own?  Mummy says I’m a slumlord, but it’s my tenants who are the slummy ones.  They’re so bad, it’s hard not to look like I’m a #slumlord.  It’s horrible, Frederica.  Don’t ever become a #landlord, no matter how much they pay you! 

"Anyway, what about you?  How’s your business going and stuff?  What are you up to these days?   We’ve got to catch up, you know?  It’s been a few years.” 

“My screen printing business is pretty slow, right now.  It’s hard to keep it going when so many times I just don’t have the energy, or I’m sick with something.  I’m really looking forward to having a good rest for three months, lying out on the deck in my thong, helping Mummy  . . . .”

Mummy came in just them. “Come sit down in the living room, Ferge.  I’ll rub your legs for you, and we can talk about my summer camp.”  She cared for some nine- to twelve-year olds during the Summer vacation and was looking forward to planning arts and crafts and theatrical skits with Frederica.  

Andrea and Bronwyn with Shane in tow, gathered round eagerly to hear what activities were in store for them.  Auntie Frederica was a favorite of theirs.  It was she who had instituted the candy tin during her last visit nearly three years ago.

Over dinner, I told Wim the news about Mamie moving out.  He wasn’t too surprised.  We'd suspected that Mamie might be doing a moonlight flit one of these days. At least I'd already received July's rent from Social Services.  Now I had the rest of the month to fix up the place for August.

Wim and I went over to Schemmerhorn the next day to inspect the #apartment.  The first thing we saw was that Mamie had never replaced the upstairs front door.  Bryan had kicked it in during one of his rages.  Next we noticed that the gas heater in the dining room was disconnected.  What’s more, the ceilings in that room and the adjoining living room - which last time I looked had been painted white - were now a delightful shade of sooty black!

Giselle came upstairs at that moment and informed me that there had been a recent fire in the apartment.  The electric company had disconnected the gas heater and the pipe that went up from it into the wall.  When something major happens like that, you'd think the tenant would let the landlord know about it, wouldn't you?

As if the lounge and dining room ceilings weren’t bad enough, the ceiling of the little room leading off of the lounge was even worse.  It was so black that no white showed at all.  Cobwebs hung ominously everywhere, coated in grease.  All we could think of was that Bryan and Mamie must have indulged in indoor barbecues – and greasy ones, at that!  It was the only way the ceiling could have got that way.

A walk through the rest of the apartment revealed more #damage.  All in all, there were three broken windows, three broken doors, a broken kitchen cabinet drawer and door, two missing light fixtures, two missing smoke alarms, missing switch plate, missing towel rack, broken toilet tank lid, and filthy walls throughout.  

Not surprisingly, there were no door keys in sight.

I turned slowly on my heel, surveying the damage with dismay. 

Wim bustled about taking notes. "You'd better get Catcher in here quickly, so I can start work."

I nodded and gloomily descended the stairs to the porch.  

Shirley was waiting there, wringing her hands and looking apologetic.

"I'm really sorry 'bout this, Stacy.  I mean, especially since I was the one who recommended Bryan and Mamie in the first place.  She didn't used to be like this, believe me.  She just got into a bad crowd, lately."

"You weren't to know," I told her.  "She was a good tenant for the most part but she still owes me a month's rent from last September, plus some from October."

Shirley looked surprised.  "You knew she got a check for fourteen thousand dollars in February, didn't you?"

"No!" I exclaimed.  "From where?"

"I don't know.  All I know is, she got this check and we cashed it at our bank for her 'cause she didn't have a checking account."

"Oh," I pondered.  "Maybe it was from Bryan.  She did take him to Court for beating her up."

"All's I know is, Mamie went through that money in a matter of weeks."

"And I saw none of it!  She told me in February she'd pay me the money she owed me as soon as she got her tax refund, and that's the last I heard from her.  If I'd known she'd just got fourteen thousand dollars, I'd have been a bit more persistent." 

I trudged back upstairs to clean the stove top and kitchen sink while Wim pottered about.

On Monday, I called Mr. Catcher.

"Hi," he said, remembering me.  "Sure, I'd be glad to come over to the apartment.  Hmm, let's see        . . ."  

I could hear him paging through his diary.

Unfortunately, he was only free in a couple of weeks. Wim wouldn't be able to start work on #repairs until after that.  

However, I could still advertise and show people around the apartment.  

I called the Schemmerhorn Gazette and put an ad in the paper, keeping the #rent at $475.00.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE: Grave News and Other Pranks

One night a group of late-night revelers knocked over about seven hundred gravestones in the cemetery that lay behind the house at 51 Manson Street.  The news story was reported on the television and radio news and in the newspapers.  

A day or two later on September 1st, I was on the Interstate, driving Andrea and Bronwyn up north to spend a few days’ vacation at a dude ranch, when I turned on the radio, just in time for the news broadcast.  I almost ran the car off the road when I heard the first item. 

". . . the Schemmerhorn cemetery vandals have been arrested," said the announcer.  "Justin Parker and . . ."

"What?” I exclaimed loudly.  “That's Mamie's brother's name!"

". . . Mamie Parker of fifty-one Manson Street have been taken into police custody for the vandalism of . . ."

“Wow, Mom!  What are you going to do?” Bronwyn asked, her eyes wide on hearing the names of my tenants on the news.

Shaken, I drove the next few miles, my thoughts racing a mile a minute.

“I can’t do anything about it, right now,” I said, eventually.  “Your Auntie Frederica and I played some pretty naughty pranks when we were little.  But we were just kids.  Mamie and Justin are adults.  This was probably just a prank on a larger scale, but still . . . seven hundred gravestones?  Come on!”

“Mom, tell us about some of the things you and Auntie Frederica used to get up to,” Andrea asked after a few more miles had rolled by.

“Yeah, we’ve still got a ways to go,” Bronwyn put in, “and you know we’ll start fighting soon and asking ‘are we there yet?’  Tell us a story to keep us occupied.”

"Oh, all right,” I said, seeing the logic in this.  “Let’s see.  You know about the time we set the grass dump on fire, but did I ever tell you about the time when your Auntie Frederica and I pretended to be girl scouts collecting for a rummage sale?” 

“Ooh, no.”

“Tell us.”

"Okay.  Well, it goes like this . . ."

One Saturday, Frederica and I were messing about at home in our quiet South African suburb with nothing to do.  I was twelve years old at the time and was painfully shy, except around Frederica, whom I bossed mercilessly.  She, of course, even as a six-and-a-half year old, was very outgoing and, for some strange reason, totally worshiped the ground I walked on even though I regularly beat her up.

Being the ringleader of our little twosome, and thus in charge of coming up with ideas of things to do, I suggested we pretend to be girl scouts collecting clothes for a rummage sale.  It would mean knocking on doors in the neighborhood and talking to strangers – totally against the rules of our protective upbringing – and this awesome idea did give us pause for a moment but, hey, the danger was part of the fun.  Frederica, of course, was all for my idea.

We sauntered casually down the street, nerve endings jangling beneath our oh-so-cool exteriors.  The naughtiness of what we were about to do made me feel more alive.  The adrenalin was pumping and everything seemed to me to stand out in vivid relief, sharper than before, as if I were a shortsighted person wearing corrective eyeglasses for the first time.  I began to notice details, such as the pinkness of the bricks of the apartment block we were headed for, and the lacy, black iron patterns of the balconies. 

After the brightness of the day outside, the foyer of the #apartment building was dingy and felt damp.  Being the eldest, it was decided that I would do the talking, and after a whispered consultation on the stairs, we knocked on the first door we came to.

It was opened by a man of about fifty years old, wearing a greasy vest, dirty cotton pants, and badly in need of a shave.  Through the open door we caught a glimpse of a dark, stuffy apartment beyond, cluttered with small tables piled with knickknacks and tall lamps with fringed shades, more suited to a psychic maiden aunt than to the seedy character lounging before us.  

Not to be put off, however, and trying not to breathe in the acrid odor of sweat which wafted in our direction, I valiantly launched into my spiel in an artificially  bright and cheery voice, though I started to falter a little towards the end under the man’s bold stare.

He looked rather dubious on hearing the news that we were girl scouts on a good deed mission and shook his head. 

“Sorry, I don’t have nutt’n’,” he rasped in a hoarse voice, undoubtedly the result of too many cigarettes.  Frederica and I chose not to pursue the issue.  We were just thankful to get out of there.

A mite subdued by this first failure, but not to be swayed from our dangerous adventure, we knocked on the next door.  It was flung open with great ebullience by a middle-aged, blonde, housewife type.  

This was more like it!  

She cheerfully believed our story and invited us in while she searched for something to give us.   We chose to hover in the doorway, warnings about not going into strange houses too powerful to overcome. 

The housewife returned in a moment and handed us a man’s tweed jacket!  

Frederica and I looked at each other in unspoken agreement, stammered our thank yous, and dashed for the stairs.

Once outside on the street, we wrestled with our consciences, feeling incredibly guilty.  The more we thought about that nice woman giving us the jacket under false pretenses, the worse we felt.  It was awful!  What in God’s name were we going to do with the jacket?  We obviously couldn’t take it home.  We also didn’t want to throw it away because that would be even more guilt-provoking.  Frederica suggested we give the jacket to the first poor African we saw who looked cold.  I leapt at the idea as a good way to assuage my guilt.

The first African we came to didn’t appear to be either poor or cold.  However, he would have to do.  He was astonished when two young, white girls waylaid him and offered him a free jacket, out of the blue.  He accepted it in pleased surprise, put it on, thanked us effusively, though somewhat suspiciously, and went swinging away down the street, singing.

His happiness didn’t do much to lessen our guilt, but it was an experience to reminisce and laugh over to this day. 

Andrea and Bronwyn were suitably impressed by my story, and I must admit I was feeling a little less stressed by the end of it.

“You guys were pretty naughty, weren’t you, Mom?” said Anthea.  “Deceiving little old ladies, burning up the yard . . . whatever next?  We’re not nearly that bad.” 

We had reached the dude ranch by this time, and as soon as we checked in I phoned my parents and Allen to tell them the news about my gravestone-tipping tenant’s arrest.  There was nothing I could do, of course.  Allen promised to keep an eye on things at 51 Manson Street, but I knew it was going to pray on my mind for the duration of my mini-vacation.

                                                             * * * * * * * *

When the girls and I returned home after a somewhat relaxing few days, albeit sore in the rump from horse riding, I rushed over to Schemmerhorn as soon as I could to learn the latest on the gravestone-tipping saga.

Bryan answered the door and laughed at my anxious questions. 

"It's okay," he assured me.  "The police let Mamie go.  They only charged her with trespassing."

"Phew!" I breathed.  "What does she weigh, anyway?  All of ninety pounds?  I thought it was a bit strange that she could be responsible for knocking over seven hundred gravestones."

"Right.  Her brother's doing some time for it, though.  Look, Mamie's not in, right now.  Was there anything else?"

"Yes, well, uh, I apparently haven’t received a voucher for September's rent."

"Oh, er, I dunno.  Maybe you should call Social Services?"

"Do you have your portion of the rent for me?"

"Nooooo, not right now.  Can you come back in a few days?"

As Bryan disappeared inside, Giselle came out of her apartment.

"I hear you had a nice welcome to Manson Street, hey?" I said ruefully.

"Oh!"  Giselle rolled her eyes.  "I came here with all my stuff, ready to move in, and there was police and TV cameras and God knows what else outside the house.  I didn't know what was goin' on!"

“Well, thankfully this sort of thing doesn’t happen every day,” I said.  “By the way, do you have the @rent for me?” 

“Oh, yeah.  Here you go."  Giselle handed me a money order.  “How do you want to work out getting the rent in future?”

 “I’ll come by on the first of every month between five and six p.m., to collect it. Would that be okay?”

“Yeah, that’s fine.”

When I phoned the #Department of #Social #Services the next day, I was told that as Bryan had been promoted at his job, Mamie was no longer covered by Social Services.  

According to Bryan, he had been promoted, but the very next day he was laid off.  

Would Social Services listen?  No.  They said they would resume covering part of the rent the following month, but gave me some story about Mamie not having enough money in her account to cover the rent for this month. 

What did that mean?

I never did receive September's rent, and in October, I only received $325.00 from D.S.S.  Mamie and Bryan, of course still claimed they couldn’t afford to pay the $150.00 balance, so I was relieved when Social Services suddenly declared that as of November they would be covering Mamie's rent in full.

I also had a frustrating time the first couple of months trying to collect rent from Giselle.  I stopped by the house on the first of the month as arranged, but she was never home.  After several wasted trips, twenty-five minutes' drive each way, Giselle agreed to send me a money order every month for the rent.  This proved to be a much better idea.  The money orders usually arrived a few days late, but at least they arrived.

The next four months at 51 Manson Street were generally peaceful, except for a leak in the attic, which resulted in Wim gingerly mounting a ladder to replace a portion of roof.  He has a great fear of heights, does Wim.   

Then Giselle called to complain that the front porch was crumbling.  She was right.  Wim had to basically jack up the house, replace the foundation, and construct a whole new front porch.  The total cost came to $806.76. 

Meanwhile Action Pest Control had not lived up to its name. The #cockroach #infestation, courtesy of Ray Molinard, wasn’t as bad as the one Natasha had caused, but  it took the Action Man five follow-up visits to completely eradicate the roaches.  The previous pest control company, Greatest Pest Control, had managed to get rid of them in three. 

What's more, Action Pest Control recommended that I continue with monthly visits indefinitely in order to prevent another infestation from occurring. 

“Monthly maintenance is a good idea,” the Action Man told me when we happened to meet one day at the house. “Especially in this neighborhood, with the type of tenants you have living here.  It only takes two roaches, and in no time you’re right back where you started from.  Prolific little buggers, they are.”  

He grinned at me with a lascivious leer. 

I was inclined to agree with him.  However, the man was just too smarmy for words, and I had heard that Greatest Pest Control had merged with another reputable company and was now charging only $29.96 for maintenance visits. 

Sorry, Action Pest Control, you ain’t gett’n no more action heah. 

“I’ll think about it,” I told him and then signed up with Greatest Pest Control for monthly maintenance.

                                                             * * * * * * * *

In April, Mamie finally gave Bryan his marching orders.  She also promised faithfully to pay me last September's rent, plus the balance of October’s rent, as soon as she received her tax refund.  I wasn’t too surprised when April turned into May and May turned into June, and still the money did not appear.

CHAPTER ONE: Tenant Horror Stories - Profits of Doom - The Wannabe Landlord

Hi. My name is Anastasia Scuttlebutt and this blog is about the trials and tribulations I went through with my tenants. Are you ready? Here goes . . .

************************************************************************

Suddenly everyone had advice for me, the main trend being, "Don't become a landlord, whatever you do," "Tenants are nothing but trouble," "You'll only regret it," and so on, and so on.

Having led a somewhat sheltered life, I naively considered most people to be basically nice. I couldn't understand why everyone was so negative about my idea of becoming a landlord. But without fail, as soon as I mentioned my impending landlorship, a lip would invariably turn up at the corner in a knowing smirk, followed by the "I wouldn't be a landlord if you paid me" routine.

Funny -- out of all the advice-givers who professed to know so much about the subject, none of them was a landlord. I mean, if I'd met someone who'd actually been a landlord, with a horror story or two to tell from personal experience, it might have made me pause for a moment in my headlong dash to become one. But there again, I'm headstrong and stubborn. Being fixated on my goal, I brushed them off with a, "Yeah, yeah, you had trouble with your tenants, but I won't have tenants like that."

Anyway, what was the problem? What was all the fuss about? How bad could it be? I was a tenant, my parents and friends were tenants, and apart from the occasional blocked toilet, we weren't any problem to our landlords. And so what if I could only afford a house in a poorer neighborhood? The tenants there were just regular people too, right?

Not that I had a lot when I was growing up, either. Born in England, I spend the latter half of my childhood in South Africa, where my parents emigrated to start their own trade-show (exhibition) business. I was eleven years old, tall, skinny, pale-skinned, and shy. My five-year-old sister, Frederica, was the complete opposite. Outgoing and vivacious, she tanned easily, was never at a loss for words, and was a constant show-off, even when no one else was in the room. Oh, how I envied her self-confidence and her ability to stand on the knuckles of her toes. Alas, I was born the most un-supple child in creation, much to the frustration of various gym and ballet teachers throughout my childhood. Frederica also inherited both of our parents' talent for art, singing, and acting, whereas I had only managed to inherit an offshoot of the creative gene by being kind-of good at writing.

Divorced from my moody father a year after we arrived in South Africa, my young, attractive mum married a six-foot-four, skinny, red-headed Dutchman named Wim (W-uh-m). Wim was full of fun and loved the outdoors -- though I wasn't too keen on his passion for fishing because I felt sorry for the fish. He also loved me and Frederica as if we were his own. He cheerfully got up with us in the middle of the night to look for meteors, paid us a penny per garden snail -- which nearly bankrupted him when we collected buckets full -- and had Frederica running around the back yard (garden) with a container of salt, trying to sprinkle some on a bird's tail so it would let her catch it. Good with his hands, Wim was the one who built us a treehouse and made me a pair of stilts when my old ones wore out from constant use.

At first Wim worked with my dad, building exhibition stands, but he soon launched his own stand-fitting business. Although it would later become the largest stand-fitting company in South Africa, building up the business took time, effort, and expense. Frederica and I never lacked for anything, but during a learning-how-to-cook phase, I soon learned how to make a chicken last for three meals.

When I met British-born Albert, he was in his final year of medical school and hankering to move to the United States, having served a successful internship there. Soon after I married Albert at the tender age of nineteen, we moved to England and worked our way slowly through the U.S. emigration process. During this time, Albert worked as a psychiatry resident (houseman) at a country institution, and our daughters, Andrea and Bronwyn, were born a year apart. Although we lived in an apartment on the edge of the rambling, old mental hospital, salaries for housemen were pitiful, and I became quite adept at bouncing checks.

Three years later, we finally made it across the Atlantic, but salaries for psych residents in the States were not much better; no more bounced checks, thank goodness, but money was tight. Things grew still more tight after we divorced a year later.

Forced to return to work, I found a babysitter and got a job working as a dental claims rep at an insurance company.

I hated it.

I then tried my hand at selling advertising, but being still painfully shy, I hated that job even more, though I quite enjoyed the attention I received from many of my male customers. I actually received a couple of offers from married men to engage in some nooky at a nearby motel, which I declined.

The girls and I lived in a subsidized apartment complex. Although our apartment was huge, I didn't much like living there. The upstairs neighbors had two young children who delighted in racing up and down the entire length of their uncarpeted apartment, dropping heavy toys and moving furniture around at six o'clock in the morning.

Andrea and Bronwyn, on the other hand, loved it, and their social lives improved tremendously. Many children lived in the apartment complex, which was surrounded by playgrounds, plenty of grass for ball games, trees for climbing, and long, interconnecting paths for safe bike-riding. At the end of the day, mothers would stand at the back doors of the apartment buildings, yelling out their kids' names. Panting children, invariably grubby, but happy, would appear from all corners to be gathered inside for their supper, and silence would settle over the neighborhood with the approaching dusk.

Being subsidized housing, we also had a kind of unofficial single mothers' club going, useful for babysitting and sticking Bandaids on each others' children's scrapes, whichever mother's building was closest to the accident scene. Life also perked up for me, as I had started dating a man called Jim, who owned a hot tub and engaged in interesting hobbies like ham radio and flying model airplaines.

Meanwhile, life as a dental claims rep was not very lucrative. I was now thirty-one years old. It was time to better myself.

I took a couple of night classes at a local college, with a view toward embarking on a nursing career. But then Andrea slammed her finger in the louver doors of her bedroom closet, angry at being told to clean her room. As I watched the doctor maneuvering the bone back through Andrea's fingernail and stitching up the red, pulpy mess, I managed to reassure my daughter that the doctor was still waiting for the anesthetic to take effect, while my stomach let me know in no uncertain terms that I was way too squeamish to be a nurse.

I began scrutinizing the Sunday papers and noticed that the legal field offered pretty decent salaries. I began imagining myself as a kind of Perry Mason-type of legal assistant, helping wily attorneys solve interesting crimes and celebrating courtroom victories. By this time, my mother and Wim had immigrated to the United States so they could witness their grandchildren growing up. Regretfully, Frederica had to stay behind because of immigration laws. Although she had been ill for a long time with liver disease, she was holding her own, ran her own screenprinting business, and was involved in amateur theatre with Daddy, who was by now on to his fourth wife.

I found myself a half-day data-entry job so I could spend time with the girls in the afternoons after school, and Mummy babysat while I attended night school three nights a week. Nine months and one paralegal certificate later, I clawed my way into the first job that I interviewed for and settled down to a steady pay-check and a growing savings account.

In a couple of years, I had amassed enough money for a downpayment, and interest rates were low. Now was the time to buy a house, venture into the world of landlording, and hopefully earn some extra money. Visions of sugarplums emblazoned with dollar signs danced in my head at the idea of tenants paying me monthly rent that would amount to more than the mortgage payments. Whether I lived on the top floor of a two-family house -- no more living underneath people, thank you very much -- and rented out the bottom floor, or lived elsewhere, collecting rent from two sets of tenants, my bank balance should grow steadily. I was already imagining how I would spend all that money. Maybe I would even get rich. The sky was the limit.

By this time, I had been dating Jim for nearly five years -- madly infatuated the first year, simmering gently the next two, and then slowly declining. I hadn't felt able to break it off because of hurting Jim's feelings, especially as his ardor had been increasing whilst mine was cooling. It was quite a relief when we finally broke up after one fight too many.

The hunt for a house began . . . . . . .