I am going to fight my landlord Jason. I believe I have both the commitment and the all-consuming fire of hatred to accomplish this task. This piece of shit rolled up on my building two days after Christmas to let me know that men with jackhammers would be personally turning my apartment into the fucking soundtrack from Birdman 11 hours a day, 6 days a week for who knows how many months so that he can pretend to the California Housing Board that he hasn’t been in direct violation of earthquake code and thus openly inviting all of us to a Certain Grisly Death Party since the early 1980s. Actually he didn’t roll up on my building. What rolled up was one 8 by 11 sheet of printer paper letting us know “the deets” that was left taped to the wall by our mailboxes with an air of unapologetic cowardice. Jason was the one who, when we let him know that something died in the wall right after we moved in, replied that “he hadn’t smelled anything” the last time he had been there a month earlier. YEAH JASON, THAT’S HOW THE FUCKING DUAL NATURES OF TIME AND MORTALITY WORK.
Last June, on that one day where it was 118 degrees in the Valley, our unit lost power. When the repairman that Jason begrudgingly fucking rolled out of bed at 4pm on a Thursday to call to prevent us from literally dying and thus producing more corpse smells that Jason would claim not to have smelled finally waltzed over to our circuit box he informed us, with the horror of someone realizing the call was coming from inside the house, that the wiring in the unit was so fucked up and uneven that he was surprised the building hadn’t completely exploded. Oh, and to get to the circuit box outside to learn how fucked up the wiring was, he had to battle and kill one angry black widow.
Whenever we are too noisy about how often our apartment fails to be an apartment, Jason sends Gus over. Gus is Jason’s “handyman,” a career for which Jason’s definition is “just some fucking guy who owns a hammer and is from some age/country/political leaning that leaves him disinclined to believe anything a woman has to say at any given time, no matter how low the stakes.” From what I can tell, Gus is kept on retainer primarily to answer his cell phone from some nondescript job in Santa Clarita that he can’t possibly make it back from in time to be remotely helpful, or, if he can’t think of the name of a far away city fast enough, to come by our apartment three separate times, all of which I have to take off work to be home for, accompanied by an ever-increasing entourage of equally unqualified men to conceptually, but never physically, figure out how to fix a window so that the pane is not literally hanging out of its frame and threatening the lives of the hapless 80-year-olds passing below on their way to go not understand the stamp machine at the Post Office next door. The thing about Gus which is unfortunate is that he’s very kind and likable, like your favorite uncle, if your favorite uncle is either Armenian, Russian, or Greek (it’s far too late for me to ask). The reason this is unfortunate is that Gus is the closest possible proxy for Jason I have. It’s possible I haven’t seen Jason’s physical form since we signed our lease. Jason might not know where our building is. He definitely doesn’t know what I look like. Gus is Jason’s emissary for all things, and he’s shorter than me, and I think he has a weak knee, so it’s really a tragedy he doesn’t suck as bad as Jason does because I would have both the access and ability to fight Gus easily.
I do still think I could take Jason though.
Here’s how I see it. My landlord Jason does have several advantages:
My Landlord Jason’s Advantages
- embedded in a robber baron-esque ruling financial class
- strengthened by the compound apathy of his tenants, who have been weakened by years of his endless incompetence and neglect
- hard to track as he is literally never in his office at any point during the work week as far as I can tell
My Advantages
- the endless rage of a thousand suns
- justice, destiny and God himself are on my side
- strength and survival instinct sharpened by months living in an unpredictable environment controlled by a madman who surely wants me dead
It may be a tough fight, but I’m confident of my chances.
Now off to email Jason about the guys who have been freebasing heroin in the parking lot off of a discarded child’s tent.