I admit it and find myself guilty. Despite wanting, wishing, and trying to be Tyler Durden I am far closer to Edward Norton's Nameless Narrator in "Fight Club". I crave a certain degree of stability, of sameness in my life. I can ride high on the crest of the chaos of my Sometimes Writing Career like a drunk in a glorious cycle of bingeing and drying out. But secretly I craved that modicum of stability that makes day to day existence moderately tolerable.
Last four years I found that stability in my shitty apartment in a nice neighborhood, bordering one of Scientology's armored compounds and the Hollywood Hills. Admittedly the entire building is rundown and falling further into decay with every year. Sine I moved in the faucets leaked, the carpeting stank and starts to shred whenever its cleaned, the toilet breaks in one fashion or another every year, roaches have populated the walls since before I moved in, something like twenty Mexican families are crammed into three downstairs apartments, their teenage spawn stands out on the stoop every night selling dope, and the current Manager is clueless knob who is never around.
But this shitty apartment was my source of relatively cheap stability until the first part of this month when my stability and sanity were put upon (which is why I find myself in Indiana right now).
Like I mentioned before my apartment -- along with the entire building has been infested with roachs -- since I moved in. Probably before. Now when I first moved in I told the first Manager, this really sweet guy named George who was pretty plainly from some slice of Eastern Europe who spoke no English about the problem, and a month later he was gone. Supposedly he wasn't there really as a manager; more as the family obligation until George's own brood scammed their way onto Section 8. Well, in the span of a year we managed to go through three more building managers who would each promise to do something about the problems rife in my apartment and then would do nothing.
After Manager Number Whatever I gave up. I got the message. This was one of those Buildings.
Hollywood is full of Those Buildings. Typically owned by someone of an immigrant extraction from Eastern Europe when we knew it as the East Bloc, or Korea. They are old buildings that fall under Los Angeles little known Rent Control Ordinance. Consequently they can't hike the rent and handcuff people into bad leases year after year the way the Landowning Class with newer Buildings in Los Angeles. And, because of the fact that they can only raise the rent three or four percent a year, these lovely specimens of the property owning class Do Nothing. They don't maintain their buildings, they do the barest minimum to comply with the law, and try on a routine basis to toss out older tenants so they can raise the rents for a new vacancy. Not quite True Slumlords, but more like Objectivist real estate Pirates.
This pretty much sums up my building which is run by a company, ROM Investments, which for all intents and purposes feels like a not all that run front operation where everyone makes their rent checks out to a person instead the company. And, like I said, I got the message: We Do Not Do Shit and if you want to do anything, do it yourself.
So I did. Dealt with the roach infestation as best as possible for three years, fixing what could be and needs to be fixed, and when the laundry room was monopolized for four days by two people, or when the Sons of those two people where doing pretty blatant hand-offs to meth heads parked below I didn't complain.
I doubt I would've complained anyway. When it comes to apartment buildings and complaining I take a hands-off approach. Yeah, you can spend every day cataloguing the misdeeds -- perceived or real -- of your fellow building dwellers and hanging on the bell of your Manager, but why? What does that do, or prove? What kind of way is that to live a life? I'd much rather go out and have fun with my friends then sit at home whining about everyone else.
Which brings us to my neighbor. Lets call her Heather because that's her real name. Great looking girl, nice, and for a while one of the few neighbors I had that I was actually neighbors with. She never seemed like one of those people that went about whining about everything and everyone else. But there were hints. College student in her mid-thirties, obsessed with attaining a position in academia, displaying the more obnoxious trends of college liberalism. I.E. the need to poke their academic noses into everyone's life.
Frequently, with enough vim and vigor to supply Berkley for entire hour of energetic activism, she used to complain about the roaches and the maintenance problems plaguing the building. Recounting how she would call day after day after day to complain to ROM Investments, or Orly and Carmen (the two namely faces that owned the building and ran ROM Investments) about the roaches, or the rats (never saw them in my apartment, but the one I saw in the garden was a field mouse, okay, not a rat, darling), or the this or the that. Occasionally she tried to recruit me in her bits of building activism. At this point I generally stepped back and played the roll of Uncle Owen -- the guy who stays at home and doesn't get involved.
Not because I resented Heather vigor, or because I didn't want things fixed, but because I knew they never would get fixed. How did I know? Same reason I know that the Petraeus Report is bullshit before it is ever written and that the nation is stuck in Iraq until George Bush leaves office -- because the people in charge want it that way and that simply crying about it will not change a thing. Especially when you cry to the people in charge.
To Heather's credit she finally got up the nerve to call the Los Angeles County Health Department about the roaches and all. However like most good, Sixties style college activism it whipped around and blew up in an innocent man's face. Mine.
The why and how exactly I got pinned with causing a roach problem that had been plaguing the building before I moved in. Its the vicious bit of FUD planted in someone's mind that grows and grows until the ugly information tumor somehow is just assume true. I am pretty sure I know the who though.
A quietly vicious little shit of a man who ostensibly manages my building but who never seems to do much outside of collect the rent. A guy named Eric.
Since we had gone through a succession of managers at my building I pretty much ignored them and expected them to be fairly weightless, incompetent, and incapable. Eric certainly lived up to that. Strangely he reminds me of "Band of Brothers" Lieutenant Dike. He is not an outwardly bad person on the surface, but he is also not cut out to manage a building. Mainly because he's never around and impossible to get in touch with. I spent $240 on locksmiths when I locked myself out of my building twice, it took an entire weekend for him and the management company to fix a clogged toilet, and the dude even lost my rent check. Which was a money order, and pretty impossible to replace.
I always got along with the guy to a degree though. I thought I did. Look, I am not one of those people that constantly thinks someone is out to get them. Much like the Complainer set, the Out to Get Me Set is a horrid way to live. Yet I started to seriously get the vibe that Eric was harboring something against me and probably wouldn't mind getting me out of the building. Why I still do not know exactly.
See Eric is the lowest kind and also the most populace type of person in Los Angeles. The snake. All nice and appropriately powerless ("Oh, I don't really care," he would protest later, "I am just the messenger). The millisecond you square your shoulders and walk away he's ripping you behind your back and probably spreading bullshit about you. A metrosexual cowardice, the inability to speak man to man to someone.
A couple days after I finished work on "Poker Run" I got a call from Eric telling me I had to "do something" about the cleanliness of my apartment. Huh? I had been working pretty close to sixteen hour days for more than a month trying to get "Poker Run" running and to keep it running throughout production I had barely seen the inside of my apartment in those days. My fridge was vacant except for a bag of chips and a couple beers. His retort was the last time he had been up to my apartment there had been dishes in my sink and he saw roaches everywhere. Yeah, my apartment has a roach problem, has had since I moved in, and its something I fucking TOLD HIM ABOUT.
The nut and kernel of the conversation was that "someone" (Heather) had called the L.A. County Health Department and that the Health Department would actually make them do something about their building. The entire conversation was couched in thinly veiled allusions that would always comeback to me as if I was commanding the roaches to invade the building like Andrew Ryan commanding a Splicer Army. He even insisted that there were only Three Apartments in the Entire Building that had roaches... which is simply delusional.
Reflecting back that phone conversation with Eric was like watching the first interview with X Republican spokesman whenever spin is required on a topic. That first interview sets the spin and the lines you hear parroted over and over again until the news cycle burns itself out. In this case, however, its a drumbeat of "roaches" and "uncleanliness" instead of "Cut and Runners".
I should have taken it all more seriously than I did at the time. Should've caught on to what was going on sooner, especially when Heather started slamming her door every time I walked by a couple days after she talked to Eric. Should've figured out I was being singled out as a target; the source; roach zero if you will.
The next three weeks was a circus of extermination, attempted extermination, and ultimately failed extermination. Turns out that creatures that have been around for twenty million years and that have been allowed to nest in a building indefinitely are a might hard to get rid of. Really hard to get rid of when you only spray and fogged a couple of apartments at a time instead of say the whole building.
Keep in mind none of this was being done because the Management of my building had had a come to Jesus Moment. They were being forced to by the L.A. County Health and I could smell that they were a might un-happy about being forced to part with money. I saw what was going to come next, but I really did not want to see it.
Shortly after the 1st of August I came back from a night out with friends to find a notice taped to my door. Three Days to get rid of the cats I had been caring for since my now ex-girlfriend had been detained in Canada and clean my "filthy apartment" that was causing the roach infestation.
That cat situation I expected. Technically I shouldn't have pets even though I had gotten a verbal "OK" from the previous manager. They had been left for me to taken care of and I had admittedly grown a bit attached to them. Reluctantly I made arrangements to move them to an undisclosed location.
The "filthy apartment" thing threw me. Since the circus of extermination had started I had cleaned my apartment before and after the exterminators visited. Plain and simple it was bullshit. I called up Mister Manager Eric and asked him what I had to do to satisfy the Three Day Notice. He was befuddled and said he didn't know. Yeah, the building manager didn't know what to do to satisfy a three day notice he had left for me. I think he basically expected me to just move out at that point. We settled on me writing a letter affirming the cats were gone from the unit and that I had cleaned everything multiple times.
My main focus was on traveling with two cats, safely, cross-country and accumulating enough money to do this with. Yeah, that's like I love animals I love animals more than most humans and I tend to go out of my way to do something for a pair of cats that I wouldn't do for anyone else.
I was shaken, beaten up, and in crisis mode. The last thing I was thinking about was the letter I had just written or the response to it. Then I got a call from the Grand Pooba, the owner of my building, the Ayn Rand of property management: Orly Maciborski.
From the second I anwered her phone call I knew this would not be over quickly and I would not like this. First clue is she was screaming at me through a thick Eastern European accent that dripped of over-entitlement. I instantly imagined someone who had grown up under Fascist enforced Communism and who came to America, and saw the American Dream as a license for unfettered, Objectivist Capitalism; rules and laws be damned, America was something to be mined until the mountain collapsed.
Orly started off by screaming and concluded by screaming. Along the way I was threatened was eviction multiple times if I wasn't going to move out. Screw the fact that I had satisfied the conditions of her three day notice. Orly wanted me out because I was causing the roach problem (gee, wonder who passed that gem along). Orly even had Draco moment, threatening to "destroy my credit for ten year!" with an eviction judgement (the idea that you have to actually go to court and face the accused, you know, all that due process stuff, was automatic in her mind, convinced of the rightness of her cause or at least secure that she could buy a proper outcome in court).
At this point I wanted out. I wanted to hit the button on the escape pod and get out. I really wanted to move right then and there even though I had no money to do it with. I left a note saying that if the management company did not find my apartment "up to their standards" I would give Thirty Days Notice upon my return from Indiana. I was throwing in the towel a little easy, but I also wasn't going to hang around somewhere I wasn't wanted either. I high-tailed it to Indiana to attend family business and awaited the dread phone call Orly Maciborski.
Surprisingly somewhere in Texas I got a call from Miss Maciborski. This time she was relative calm, almost sweet. God, I hate it when people do that when they already showed you their true colors. I expected them to tell me my apartment was still not clean, blah blah blah. Instead she told me my apartment was clean (well, no duh) but she still wanted me to give Thirty Days notice. And to that I said no and told her I would deal with the roaches myself upon my return.
Again I sort of relaxed and I was stupid enough to think it -- this massively silly crisis that had eaten my life for the past month and a half -- was over. Nope. A week later I got another call from Orly Maciborski telling me that the Health Department had come through again (and implied that they had entered my apartment without my permission) and had found my apartment to be "unsanitary" ad that she would take a Thirty Day Notice from me on September 1st to avoid further legal action.
This got my back up. How can an apartment be clean one day and "unsanitary" four days later when no one had occupied it? And how did they get into my apartment in the first place without my presence or permission? Okay, I once more call bullshit.
You know, if they had continued to dispute the cleanliness of my apartment and ask for a Thirty Day notice on the Friday they supposed inspected my apartment I probably would have given it to them. At that point I wanted out of the mess. But to comeback and try to run a game on me? Oh, no, that doesn't fly with me.
I have chosen to stand and fight. I've filed complaints with the Los Angeles Health Department and the Los Angeles Housing Department. And, probably, I am going to be facing down the barrel of an eviction fight when I get back home. I could be homeless in a month.
Sometimes though a fighting for whats right is worth losing everything.
Keep it Sexy, America.
P.S. If you are really that fascinated by my case you can read my complaint I filed with both the Health and Housing department
here and view photos of my "filthy" apartment
here.
Labels: Apartments, Eric Martin, Hollywood, Los Angeles, Orly Maciborski, Renter's Rights, ROM Investments
