There comes a time in a man’s life, a rare time, when he crosses paths with an individual with whom he just doesn’t get along. No matter how hard he may try to make things work, the course of life has deemed otherwise, and it is universally impossible. Despite how kind and gentle hearted you may be, everyone has this nemesis, enemy, nay, their arch rival that, deep down, they wish the worst upon. For me, this villain is my past landlord. Often, the disdain and hatred swings from both tree branches, and this was certainly the case here. To paint you a vivid and graphic image, think of the controversial blockbuster "The Human Centipede." My landlord and I’s relationship was much sh*ttier than that (pun intended).
For three years I was enslaved under this tyrant, dealing with his rules, demands, and deeds he bestowed upon my roommates and I. Rage and fury echoed off of my marrow as I listened to his utter bullsh*t and demands, but what else is a poor college kid to do? Undermine his damn authority, that’s what! It’s not that I hated my landlord as a person; I hated the idea of him. The lord of the land who tells me I can’t legally sell moonshine on his property, or that burning multiple couches on the front lawn is not a county-sanctioned bonfire and is in fact, a safety hazard and cause for eviction.
Who was this guy to tell my barbaric roommates and me that running illegal cock fights in the backyard will result in tenant “doomsday,” as he described it? Where did this guy get the nerve? After all, we were paying rent (usually on time). Unfortunately, my roommates and I learned the hard way that, when you sign a lease over to a landlord, you’re also signing away your soul, balls, and any general freedoms you may have. Sounds like the eight years of the Obama regime, but that’s neither here nor there.
For the sake of this tale, I'll call my landlord Sandusky. Upon my first few months at this establishment I eventually came to know as "hell on earth," Sandusky and I had many hiccups in our bumpy road together: Let's call these heated disagreements. Whether it was excess noise from guests, desecration of the front lawn either from above-ground pools or the great couch burning of 2013, or the fact that we had killed all of our next-door neighbor’s birds with a Red Ryder BB gun, we had officially pissed off our neighbors to the extent where phone calls were made to the owner of the land and to the county.
Evidently, living on the same street as what our next-door neighbor described us as “dirty buffoons” was too much to bear, as three families actually packed their shit up, sold their house and relocated.
Now that the block had been split up and the lawn destroyed by the flames of six piss couches, naturally the interior of the house was next. At the end of the first year’s walkthrough, Sandusky and his “professional” crew found upwards of $6,000 in excessive damages. With three broken doors, two broken toilets, a broken stove, oven, counter top, cracked floors, broken sliding glass door, destroyed dry wall, and I quote, “the carpets are f*cked,” my landlord had found an excessive amount of damages... and those are just the one's he found. “To be frank, I have never seen this much damage done to a home in your short tenure here.”
This is page five of the 35 walk-through document sent by my landlord.
Being the dumb, cocky college kids we were, we took Sandusky and his legal team to court and pulled off the biggest upset since OJ Simpson got away with murder. To this day, both myself and the state of Florida are in dismay as to how we won this case. This was just year one. For some odd reason, I decided to re-sign with my landlord and he decided to keep me on as a tenant. Huge mistakes on both parties involved. The next two years, many, many more tales to tell of debauchery, damages, and court appearances were to come. Stay tuned for next week's "Tenants vs their Landlords: Year Two."
Disclaimer: Now that my landlord and I no longer ruin each other's lives, we're cordial with one another and even go out for occasional beers on the first and third Mondays of every month for Bingo night. I don't think he is an absolute monster like described above; it just adds to the stature of the story.
