I am exhausted, and it is way past my bedtime.
I just got off the phone with my husband, who told me to take a Benadryl. It’s one of the few drugs I can safely take to sleep. I don’t do it often.
Please note I am already defending my Benadryl choice. Please note I live in constant worry and vigilance that a Benadryl might lead to something else.
I don’t believe that. Taking a Benadryl has never led me anywhere. It’s not a gateway drug. What I’m worried about is you judging me about taking one, because the awful little Puritan in my brain says people like me should suffer, and lack of sleep won’t kill me.
Don’t worry, little Puritan. Tonight I’m suffering without your help.
Now seems a good time to mention how much I hate this.
The prevalence of suffering is the biggest problem I have with life on earth. I don’t understand the need for it. As far as I’m concerned, we should all be doing everything we can to alleviate suffering in ourselves and others.
But we don’t. Suffering exists in countless ways. One of those ways is watching a person ruin their lives because they’re an active addict. And for once in my lifetime, I am not that person. For once, I am on the other side.
It is terrifying.
I can’t decide if I can take off my shoes. I am in a state of high alert. I want to be dressed properly if I have to call the police again. I don’t want to look slovenly, I want to look like a person they want to protect.
Pro tip: I also dress up for the emergency room. It’s shocking how much it helps.
My phone is charging in case I have to call 911. I have a hammer within reach and a canister of mace. I considered loading a rifle I keep here, but it hasn’t been cleaned in at least forty years.
“Maybe don’t load the gun,” my husband says.
“I’m not loading the gun,” I reply.
Ironically, I feel like I did when I came out of rehab. My proximity to this situation must be activating it.
If you were to talk to me in August of 2015, you would have picked up that I thought life a bleak and unnecessary affair. After generously being given the chance for a do-over, I wasn’t at all certain I would stick around.
I thought about killing myself for 58 days straight.
There was definitely no god, but it wasn’t just an absence of god. I didn’t believe in anything. I didn’t believe there was such a thing as a human soul. There was just my brain, which at that point was virtually useless.
Life is stark and brutal, and when I finally, mercifully die, everything will stop. Being alive is pointless.
Well, I got more help. Things have improved. I believe if not in a god, some kind of connecting force in the universe which runs through us all.
And in January of this year, I had the privilege of holding my mother as she drew her last breath. Every time I experience the death of someone close to me, I am faced with the inevitability of the human soul.
Tonight has disabused me of this notion.
I grew up in this huge Victorian house, which is also a small apartment building. I inherited it for my lifetime and told myself I would give it a year to see if I could run it with a profit. I knew it would take time to decide if I wanted to keep it.
For most of my life I was as tied up emotionally with this house as I was with any person I loved.
This has changed. I still am connected to it, but I don’t want to keep it if it’s something which drags me down. If it’s something which brings in a few dollars and gives me, my family, and my close neighbors some joy, then I want to keep it.
If it pulls me down, I don’t. But I’ve uncovered another factor which I didn’t expect and may be as important as anything else: the tenants.
Most of them are Black. To my horror, I’ve realized if you’re a low-income person of color, the ability to get safe, affordable housing is almost impossible.
There’s an entire language real estate people use to keep Black Americans out of buildings. Chief amongst them is “quality of the tenant.”
This phrase has been used repeatedly to me by more than one person in the business. If I want to get higher rents, the quality of my tenants is of utmost importance. If I want to Airbnb any of it, the quality of my tenants needs examining. Sometimes it’s said to me with a knowing look.
Just so they’re clear.
I rarely use the word, but I’ll tell you what: witnessing the undeniable racism in housing is a humbling experience.
I’ve always been aware Black Americans face obstacles with housing. I remember when my mother first rented to a Black man, and one of the tenants moved out because of it.
But it’s hit me in a much different way now that I’m in the rental business. It’s even worse than I thought.
Anyone who ever bristled at the phrase white privilege would be well advised to spend a week with me down here. By the time you leave, I guarantee you will be using it.
My grandfather bought this building around 1950. He was in a group of about six white men who lent each other money at 6% interest. They accumulated property.
A Black woman my age is unlikely to have profited from generational wealth as I have. Due to policies including redlining, her grandfather wouldn’t have the opportunities mine did.
This is especially true where I am, in the American South.
One woman who lives here was unhoused before she arrived and has a son under a year old. She walks to work because she has no car.
She takes the baby out frequently for walks in his stroller. He has the sweetest smile on earth.
Her son, such a happy baby, is being given a shot at a good life due to his mother’s hard work and perseverance.
Her son is my most important tenant. If you believe all men are created equal and everyone has a fair shot at life, please understand you cannot get it if you don’t have a safe place in which to grow up.
If possible, I must keep this place. If I don’t, it cuts down on the amount of housing people like she can access.
The history of rampant racism in real estate is long and far from over. If we (and by we, I mean white landlords) as individuals don’t take some responsibility for what’s happened, we’re part of the problem.
Having said all this, I’ve made another discovery: being a landlord isn’t easy, cheap, or fun.
I’ve always been on the tenant side of landlord/tenant disputes. When I lived in New York City in the 1990s, I once received a rider to my lease which stated a legalese version of,
“By signing this document, I give away my right to a rent-controlled apartment.”
I called my landlord and said,
“You must be joking,”
I was told they were a group of lawyers. I’d never win a fight against them. If I didn’t sign the rider, I’d lose my lease.
My response was to alert all the tenants in the building and start a tenant association.
We won. No riders were signed.
My mother was a landlord my entire life, and I helped her at the end of hers with some of the business side of things. But until I became entirely responsible for this place, I had no idea how hard it was.
Now, granted: I have a special situation. This place was both my home and an apartment building. And my mother was too busy to pay much attention to maintenance, so it’s sort of like managing the Titanic on dry land.
I’ll just say it’s shocking how much money I keep spending, both on utilities, taxes, insurance, tree trimming, and trying to hold it together. I am by no means rolling in dough. I am short on cash at the end of every month.
When I have a night like tonight, the idea of keeping this place seems insane.
I must evict someone as quickly as possible, and may I just mention—they’re white. And the only other time I had to evict someone else this fast, they were white.
Just saying.
I’m not familiar with crystal meth.
Cocaine and heroin are New York City drugs. Not too many people are cooking meth in their apartments.
But I am all too familiar with the behavior of drug addicts. And because I am an idiot, I didn’t do a background check on a young couple to whom I rented an apartment recently.
My idiocy has resulted in endangering myself and everyone here.
When I walked into the front door this evening fresh off, of all things, a bridge tournament in the picturesque foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, I walked straight into the set of a horror movie.
Except the horror movie was in my house. There was a smell like rotten eggs. I didn’t understand at first, but I’m pretty sure over the weekend this place might have become a pop-up meth dealership.
At first I thought a mouse had died in the wall, or there was food rotting somewhere.
It took me a while to figure it out. But when I realized what might be going on, the rage that flowed through me was immediate.
I stepped into the hall and was faced suddenly with one of my tenant’s “guests.” He’s her new boyfriend. The one I rented to is in jail now.
Words flew out of my mouth.
This was a mistake. I’d already seen another of her guests. He had facial tattoos; no biggie, except these tattoos were, shall we say, specific.
I am here without Secret Service, who does not play bridge. And Sunday was the day before my birthday.
I spent the first few minutes after midnight on my birthday with a searchlight, walking the perimeter of the house along the sewer line. I needed to eliminate other reasons for the smell. I’d turned off the gas lines out of an abundance of caution.
And there was a moment when it was like being lost in a maze. I am sitting on close to four acres of property, and a copse of trees and brush had developed in an area I needed to check. For a few seconds, I was disoriented. I had to find a way out.
That put me over the edge. That put me into nervous breakdown territory. I started muttering out loud,
“I am not doing this. This is not going to be my life.”
I went back inside, and made a follow-up call to report the smell was not a broken sewer line.
The next morning, of course, the smell was gone. The tenant knew I knew. We got to play this game:
I know. You know I know. And I know you’ll pretend I don’t.
When I told her she had to leave, there were tears, approximately fourteen it will never happen agains, swears that nothing was going on except she told her friends not to be loud and they were.
I said,
“There is nothing you can say to change my mind. You are in violation of your lease, and you need to leave ASAP.”
This is what I’ve learned on the other side of drug addiction:
It is terrifying. I understand now why people disparage us and don’t want us around. I get it. We are scary people when we’re using.
And, we are the lie.
I knew this already, but the point was proved once again. There are so many lies we must tell they’re not lies to us.
When the tenant told me a whopper, I looked at her and said,
“I have cameras.”
I watched her eyes, as she searched for the next lie, or a way to wiggle out. There is only the next lie.
But here’s what put me in the existential void:
This is terribly sad. She has nowhere else to go, and she can’t stay here. She is ruining her life as I watch.
I tell her what helped me. I tell her she needs help. I don’t know if it matters or not.
This is what kills me. I know she’s suffering, and it’s going to get worse, and she’s either going to jail, or die. Or worse.
There are worse things than death.
But I also know this: that happy baby upstairs needs a safe place to live.
Telling her to leave is the easiest choice I’ve ever made.
Ohhh….damn. I was an apt mgr many years ago in Oakland, Ca. The owner specifically instructed me not to rent to black people.
I was appalled by that and when a young very conservatively dressed black woman who claimed to be a bank teller applied, I was eager to defy the owner and his racism and accepted her as a tenant. To my horror, she subsequently moved her pimp in and they proceeded to party 24/7 with a shit load of “friends” who brought their “party favors”. They didn’t pay their rent either.
I had to evict them which was scary but they finally left.
What remained behind was the most disgusting, vile collection of used condoms, filth, overflowing toilet, stench and a stinging slap in the face of disrespect. I should have checked her out and I paid a huge and nasty price for my arrogantly naïve decision to forego the usual safeguards in the tenant approval process. Cleaning that place was one of the most wretchedly nauseating things Ive ever had to do… the memory is permanent as is the lesson. You have my empathy.
thought you might find this interesting
https://www.vogue.com/article/personal-essay-quitting-xanax-martha-mcphee?src=longreads