honesty

All right, here's the scoop. The real scoop. The reason why I've been tired, and why my dreams are bad, and why every muscle in my back and shoulders and neck is wound tighter than the cover on a steel drum. It's not my job, and it's not relationships, and it's not loneliness, and it's not dishes.

It's my apartment situation.

I'm bad at talking about things that are really bad, okay? I don't like to do it. Call it pride, or stubbornness, or embarrassment, or a basic inability to ask for help, since I've been trained by a lifetime of taking care of other people to ask for nothing for myself, at least in the big big stuff, or some serious control issues that make me feel I have to have everything taken care of before I can mention it. Remember this past spring when I was starving because I couldn't afford anything but cereal and I lost twenty pounds and my skin was all pallid and all my joints hurt and my hair was falling out in clots but no one knew until it was over? Or did I forget to mention it here, even after the fact? And the whole time I knew there were people right around me, and all over the country, I could ask who would sell their livers to give me money if I needed it, and all I had to do was ask, but I wouldn't ask. And yes, they all yelled at me when they found out. But I had to do it on my own, right? I was in medical debt over the top of my aching head from the headaches the previous December and cat emergencies and whatnot, but by golly, I was going to do it myself. And I did, and then I promised I would never, ever do anything so stupid as live on cereal without telling anyone again.

Well, I didn't lie exactly, because I'm not starving, in fact I'm eating pretty well, but things have gotten bad again, not with money but with my apartment, and they got bad and I didn't tell anyone how bad and I've been drifting around in this spaced-out haze for months now and I guess it's time to break it loose and tell you, because the not-telling is starting to feel like hair falling out and clogging the drain in the shower.

You all know, if you've followed my blog for any length of time before this year, that my landlord SUCKS. He's the King of Sucky Landlords. He rules supreme in an unchallenged universe of sucky awful horrible lazy absentee greedy landlords. Before this summer it was kind of like a game, like a sneaky amusing game of chess, where I would shuffle my pawns and my bishops around to keep him distracted, and maybe throw a few impressive moves with my queen, and then wham slam the knight in around that beautiful L-shaped corner when he wasn't looking and trick him into being a good landlord, and then laugh up my sleeve at him when it worked and surprised the hell out of him and backed him into a corner of Having To Be a Good Landlord. I kept a little mental scorecard. Point me. Point him. Point me. Point him.

Like last winter when the three contributing tenants -- me, Jim, and Kevin -- knew he was going to try to cheat us out of our legal right to central heat in another frigid South Bend winter, and before it even got cold, we hatched a plan and one night we all gathered on the porch and Kevin called Santos and demanded that he come right away to see about a (legitimate) leak in his kitchen, and when Santos came, there (surprise!) all three of us were waiting for him, and I said, faux-casually, "While you're here, I thought we might talk about the heating situation for this winter," and the three of us bargained for sub-legal temperatures in our apartments and made him promise to keep the heat at 63 degrees, which he reluctantly did, and you could tell he hated it because he couldn't make one promise to one of us and then say something different to another of us because all three of us were sitting right there listening to him. And so for the rest of the winter I was the Heat Brigade, since I had a key to the basement where the thermostat is (what? why? I have no idea, that's the most idiotic place for a thermostat I can possibly imagine, but there you have it), and I would periodically go down and check it to make sure it was still set where he said it would be, since sometimes he would go down and lower it.

And that's just one example. Just one. I'm not going to elaborate on the three generations of people who briefly moved into the efficiency across the hall (and by three generations, I do mean three generations at once, and that included a two-year-old child), into a room the size of maybe your kitchen, if your kitchen isn't that big; or the three or four times I called the cops on the next couple who moved into the same efficiency because the man was beating hell out of the woman, and then I called Santos, but he wouldn't evict them, although that's turned out all right and now the woman is my friend, of sorts; or the time the three-hundred-pound icicle on the side of the house this spring fell and pulled away all the electrical wiring and when Santos stapled it back on the house he neglected to check that all of them were there and so missed the fact that the ground wire was GONE and ignored my multiple calls about surging and dimming electricity in every tenant's apartment for weeks in a hundred-year-old 60-amp house with all the original paper-wrapped wiring and so we had ungrounded electricity for a MONTH before he had someone check it out, once he decided I wasn't just a dumb girl confused about the workings of her freaking fuse box; or the time this summer when the guy across the hall KICKED IN the basement door where a bunch of my stuff is stored, and where a bunch of my stuff then went missing, and the upstairs neighbors were using a ladder from said basement up to their windows as a BACK DOOR when they locked themselves out and then left it there all day and all night for a week or so, so that anyone who wanted could have helped themselves to my windows too, until Kevin at my request hid the ladder in his apartment so that at least no one could just help themselves to it whenever they wanted, and the landlord, despite my many many many phone calls, took himself a MONTH to bother himself about that basement door and then when he did he didn't actually fix the broken jamb, he only padlocked it so that it's still only half-ass-fixed.

No, I'm not going to elaborate on any of that stuff. What I'm going to elaborate on is the stuff that really bothers me. And that's the downstairs neighbor.

Tracy is nice. She's quiet, her friends are quiet, her boyfriend is quiet. But I hate her son.

The very first time I met this shitty little son of a bitch he asked me my age, if I had kids, and if I had a boyfriend, and then told me he was available -- after informing me he had a criminal record and no job. Promising. He then proceeded to try to bum rides off me, which I refused to grant him. The moment he moved in with his mother, bad things started happening around the place, things we'd never had problems with before. Tracy's car got broken into. In our little back parking lot. The next-door neighbors had a break-in in their garage. My neighbors across the hall started seeing their bikes disappear off the back porch, even though they'd sold him one of theirs. The screen over the window where Slouchy (I started calling the worthless piece of trash Slouchy) stayed started disappearing, and I would hear Tracy come home and unlock her door and then demand in a startled voice, "How did you get in?" Garbage started littering the lawn, and I would watch Slouchy come home late at night and throw whatever he was holding in his hand -- pop bottles, Styrofoam containers, plastic bags -- into the yard.

He was creepy. I didn't like the way he looked at me. But his friends were even worse. I would sit on the porch at night for a few minutes of quiet before bedtime, and his friends would start showing up, and the way they eyed me sent the creeps crawling up my spine. I would hear them muttering about me through the windows, and then you bet I beat feet up to my apartment -- at my own house. Not to mention their pot parties when Tracy wasn't home. I had to shut my bedroom window some nights because the weed smell was so bad. They were loud. They were rude. They were mean-looking and horrible.

But then there's the part that's really the straw that's breaking the camel's back, and that's my downstairs doors. The one that's used has two locks on it now, I mentioned that awhile back. But the thing is, the fucking doorjamb is broken. Broken. Did I mention broken? The wood on the inside of the jamb is split like a bad tooth. One good shoulder shove and the whole thing would give way. I could break down that door, and I'm just a skinny white girl. I've been worried about that door for months, and for months I've been bugging the landlord to replace it. The wood is split, Santos, I said. He came and had someone drive a nail into it. A NAIL. Even I know that if you're going to try to hold two pieces of wood together, you need a screw, and believe me, I'd already tried, with screws three inches long, and it didn't work, so what the hell is a nail going to do? So of course it didn't hold, and the wood went back to coming right apart like tectonic plates in California, and when the plate that holds the deadbolt in place slipped -- because yeah, when he installed the deadbolt, he put the hole for it and the plate for the hole right OVER the split in the wood -- and I called him about that because then the deadbolt wouldn't lock, he just came and pulled off the plate so that the deadbolt could turn right into the bare hole. Great.

So it's been worrisome and scary enough, with a fucking thief and creepo downstairs with even creepo-ier friends who are always hanging around, and yes, I do sleep with a loaded shotgun under my bed, but not with the assumption that I'd ever have to use it, I was just thinking I was being kind of irrational, but then something happened about a month ago that made me think I WOULD have to use it and since then I've been kind of haywire, because I might be all gung-ho about the Second Amendment, and I might have made up my mind since childhood that I would use deadly force in self-defense if it were necessary (but only then), but I never had to face the actual possibility before and I never wanted to, because who wants to take a human life, and it really messed my head around because I shouldn't have to face that.

What happened was that my across-the-hall neighbor Lu forgets her keys a lot, and so when she's gone she tends to leave the downstairs door unlocked, which I hate and so I've talked to her about it before and complained up the wazoo to the landlord, to some teensy effect, but I can't control what she does after dark and I don't always hear her leaving so I can't always run down the stairs and lock the door after her. So one night about a month ago I was getting ready for bed in my bathroom, which is right next to the entrance to my apartment (weird setup, I know, but that's what you get in these charming old houses-turned-apartments, and despite all this crap I really do love my apartment itself), and I heard someone coming up the stairs and then there was this banging on my door. It's usually only Lu that does it, so I hollered, "Yeah?" before looking through the peephole, and then a ghetto man's voice I'd never heard before answered.

I went into instant terror mode and snapped, "Who are you looking for?" and they said, "Brian." "No one by that name lives here," I said sharply. "Check downstairs." And then I went to the peephole and saw a tall bald young mean-looking hood I didn't recognize standing in my stairwell and he started banging on Lu's door, only she wasn't home, and I could hear one or two other guys on the stairs behind the first guy. They pounded on the door for maybe a minute and I called, "You have the wrong door. Check downstairs." And he glared at my door, and then they sneaked back down the stairs, turned off the stairwell light, and closed the door very very quietly behind them.

I had my shotgun in my hands by then. I stood there with my ear to the door and listened -- the good thing about this old house is that it's very, very squeaky -- and didn't hear anything, so I quietly opened my door, slipped down the stairs in the dark, and popped the lock. This was before the deadbolt, and that lock was no real comfort, but it was better than nothing. My heart was pounding so hard I could barely breathe as I tiptoed back up the stairs and into my apartment and locked every lock I had and stood just inside the door, gripping my shotgun and listening.

And two minutes later I heard them trying to get back in. And I remembered that the day before I had seen three guys walking down the alley behind my house while I was talking on the phone on my porch, and they not only did a double-take, they actually walked a few steps backward to stare at me until I glared them into going away, and the guy I'd seen in the stairwell looked like one of them. I heard that door shaking in its jamb and I knew they were pushing very, very hard -- not quite the shoulder-shove it would take to break in, but they sounded pissed. And then they started pounding on the door. They pounded on that door for three minutes while I looked at the gun in my hands and realized that it might actually come to making a decision, right there, right then, that night, because my upstairs door might have been locked but I was only kidding myself if I thought it couldn't be kicked in, and there was no one else home, nobody I could shout to for help. And I squared my shoulders like the good cop's daughter that I am, and got ready.

But they went away. I listened for a long time. And then I went and put Patsy away and sat around shaking and I don't think the following haziness has really quite left me, and the dreams have gotten worse since then.

And when I called my landlord about it, he blew me off. I'm a single woman living alone, I had just had possibly the most terrifying experience of my life, he's an associate pastor at his church, and he blew me off. Then I really started getting spaced-out, and the dreams weren't just bad, they were nightmares, every single damn night, and the door hasn't been fixed.

Not only that, but things with Slouchy have gone downhill too. The other week I came home from work to hear him slamming his girlfriend against the wall in his room adjacent to the porch and her pleading and screaming, so I didn't even get to go inside after a really freaking long day at work before I had my phone out and was calling the police. I've gotten really good at calling the police and calmly giving them directions to which apartment is causing the problems. And the cherry on the whipped cream is that I was the only person home at the time, so he knows good and well just who called the cops on him.

And the Sunday before last I woke up from a nap and was heading out for dinner at Meg and Phillip's when I saw the porch swarming with cops all dusting for fingerprints and Tracy on the porch with her head in her hands and Slouchy and his creepiest friend there too and Tracy said she'd had a break-in. I talked to Lu about it later and said they were blaming it on the ex-girlfriend and Lu snorted eloquently and told me she's seen Slouchy climbing in through the windows. So this nasty worthless little piece of shit is stealing from his own mother, and if that's the case, who's safe? Because nothing's sacred to someone like that. So I called Santos about that, and he blew me off again, mumbled something about if things like that keep going on he'll talk to her about getting rid of the kid, blahblahblah. "Do you understand why I want that door fixed?" I said. Nothing.

Of course he's promised to get the door jamb replaced, and now there are two two-by-fours lying on the porch, but they've been there since last Thursday and now I think they're just a part of the ghetto decor, like the pop bottles and carryout containers and lunchboxes littering the yard. Not to mention that on Saturday, in a demonstration of the insecurity of the second downstairs door, the one that's never used and is only there for heaving furniture up the stairs, and is only held in place by a hook, Lu just YANKED it open from the outside and the hook gave like a candle being pulled out of a cake, so now that door is just ready and waiting for anyone who wants to climb up through it. I called Santos about that one right away, demanding a deadbolt on it, and he promised it would be done on Monday, and as of this morning, past the deadline, nothing had been done.

AND Slouchy is still living with his mom, despite all my faithful and irate reports about his behavior from what I've seen and what everyone else has seen. Even though Santos had called me on Saturday for help interpreting a legal notice he'd received that day telling him the cops had founds massive evidence of drug activity in the apartment when they were checking out the break-in (duh), and he'd better get it taken care of FAST or they'd sue him and fine his ass $2500 a day for each day it went unmanaged.

Lu's plumbing, which had been on the fritz since Saturday, though, that had been taken care of yesterday. Not my locks, however. I wasn't surprised, but I felt a little sick.

I don't think I sleep anymore. I think I just kind of lose consciousness. My muscles hunch themselves in bed, so that when I wake up I feel like someone's been rolling them up tight with a crank.

The thing is, I'm under lease, and in Indiana the laws are designed to protect landlords, not tenants. So I feel trapped.

And it's driving me slowly crazy. I need my peace, I need my rest, I need my home to be a sanctuary, a place where I can leave all my stress behind, I shouldn't be glad to come to work because I feel safer there. I have nowhere to recharge my batteries, I spend every waking and sleeping moment jumping at shadows, and I'm just...exhausted. Utterly and thoroughly drained and exhausted. My only insurance that I'm not going to get hurt by someone is scary ghetto Lu, who calls me her Rainbow and warns everyone that comes around to leave me the fuck alone or they'll answer to her. Because my Pastor Landlord doesn't give the littlest molecule of the tiniest hair of a dead rat's ass about my safety.

It's bad, folks. It's really, really, horribly, terribly, creepily, stress-beyond-all-imaginingly bad. If it weren't for Simon sleeping on my bed again at night I don't think I'd have any sanity left. I don't remember what a good night's sleep feels like. I don't remember feeling safe at home. I don't remember a time when every muscle in my body didn't make my bones ache with how tightly drawn they are.

I want out.

There. Now you know. I've told you before it was over and something's been done about it. I'm writing a long, strongly worded letter to Pastor Landlord. I'm going to figure this out. And I'm going to get the hell out of here. Because I really, truly, seriously, can't take this anymore. I can't live like this. It's worse than starving on cereal.

Please, please pray for me. Or if you don't go in for that, do something else -- focus positive energy in my direction, or whatever. That counts as prayer to me too. Or if you happen to see me, give me a hug. I'll probably burst into tears on your shoulder, but if you don't mind that, it might help.

So there's some honesty.