My mind, my posts these days --disjointed, scattered, hazy with a chance of sense-- today is no exception.
It took me four hours to pen a letter to our landlord. It took me so long because I was struggling between what I needed to say (in the requisite supplicatory tones essential to good landlord/tenant relations), and what I desperately wanted to say (which was to pointedly suggest that he suspend his slum-lording indefinitely and go fuck himself).
The latter is impossible of course, for a number of reasons. Mostly because our place is what you might call A DEAL in the current NYC housing market. Not a huge deal. Not a "lie-to-your-friends-about-what-you-pay-because-they'll-hate-you" deal, more like a "even-though-it's-a-vermin-infested-shithole-convenient-to-nothing-it's-still-hundreds-cheaper-than-other-vermin-infested-shitholes-so-don't-piss-off-your-landlord", deal. Not to mention how we could easily be replaced in seconds; thousands of wanton trucker-hat wearing hipsters would give up their shag haircuts for rent-stabilized digs in the 11211, so it's in your better interest to keep your big cake hole shut instead of cruising up to your landlord's gruel line and ask for some more.
The downside of having a deal is that you eat plenty of expenditures, and above all, never complain. We just silently fix the broken things, paint and plaster and plumb when necessary, and keep a hefty supply of fly/ant/roach/mouse traps at hand. We turn our only radiator off in the dead of winter because it spews boiling water all over everything, keep the windows shut in summer because there aren't any screens, we sweep up the candy wrappers and tampon applicators and empty dime bags from the hallway, and we fumble in the dark to find our keyhole instead of pointing out that pitch-black hallways are ridiculously unsafe and a violation of city code. And we certainly don't do anything coo-coo like insinuate the main entry door should have a lock on it --even after a neighbor was victim to a home invasion and sexual assault. We do not complain about noise or parties or fighting, about how there isn't a single operational fire detector in the whole building, or about how the kid in 2R throws projectiles at my dog while she quietly naps in the shade in the yard (that we reclaimed, at our expense, from its previous designation as 'building garbage dump', and pay extra to have access to). When we mentioned, once, the deluge of brown water that cascades down the kitchen wall each time the upstairs neighbor uses her sink, and had our landlord dismiss the issue by stating that the leak is, and I quote, "not possible", we did not question his logic. We agreed that the water must be a figment of our ungrateful, overly critical imaginations. We simply keep a bucket under the spot where the *alleged* water flows, emptying it's "not possible" contents whenever it's full. We pay our rent on time. We are model tenants. And until this rent cycle, we've never asked to be reimbursed for a single penny of the grand we've put into our little deal in order to make it inhabitable.
It was the repairs we made to the bathroom that made us finally cry Uncle. We justified eating all the previous costs by tricking ourselves into believing they were preferences. You know, we just felt like having a lock on the door instead of a four-inch hole. And the thousands of other holes in the walls, ceilings and floors? We were simply bored with the partial-lathing motif and tired of the 'skylights' into the upstairs neighbor's place. Hey, who says a sink has to have a faucet? We're just picky, right? Can't expect a landlord to make up for the fact that you're a picky-puss. Anyway, that kind of thinking worked for a long, long time.
Finally the years of water leaks in the bathroom/kitchen area (we had been assured were 'not possible') caused the ceiling to collapse and the bathtub surround walls to rot off of their particle-board substrate. Even then I McGuiver'd for a bit, hung a piece of cloth on the ceiling to catch the debris that fell each time someone upstairs showered, re-nailed the plastic surround walls to the rotten boards behind, caulked and caulked and bleached and Tilex'd and Ajax'd the bejesus out of it regularly. But the shower continued to ooze a rotten black hell-goo each time you used it. On several occasions I opened my freshly washed eyes to spy a healthy cockroach or water bug scurry behind the wall, once right over my face while I was attempting to have a bath in the 10" deep basin fronting as a bathtub. The last straw came during another soak: I pulled at a blackened triangle peeking out from behind the plastic (assuming it was just another piece of decayed chip-board), and released a USED SANITARY NAPKIN instead. Okay, if you didn't get the horror the first time... I was laying naked in the tub and pulled some motherfucker's used pad into my bath-water. (For the neurotic over-thinkers [particularly the women]...yes, the next logical thought is, why? Why the fuck would someone stick a used pad behind the shower wall? My answer: I don't know. Perhaps it had something to with the fifteen hypodermic needles I found behind there when I finally tore the whole thing down.)
Call us crazy, but our preference mind-game didn't work after that. We had supreme difficulty pretending that it could be a preference to want to have bugs and sanitary napkins and flaking ceiling bits and hypodermic needles excluded from one's bathing ritual --and we wanted our landlord to pay to remedy the situation. We knew that if we called and asked him to do so we would be told that it is "not possible" for said problems to even exist. We also knew that the few repairs that have been made in this building took five summons from the city and several hefty fines before anything even got underway, and months until completion. And I already spoke to the droves of hipsters for whom some bugs and old blood would be a meager concession if they were able to live within walking distance to the neighborhood see-and-be-seens.
Where did all this begin? Oh yeah. I had to write a letter to my landlord explaining why there were receipts included with the adjusted rent payment for repairs we had to do on the bathroom that we are sure he is sure were not necessary and/or did not exist. And it took me four hours.
Posted by Antigeist at July 16, 2003 09:06 PM