One of the crowning Kafka-esque absurdities of my county courts' custom of ignoring the procedural rights of tenants (see previous post for details) is that a tenant who files counterclaims has to prepare to litigate those counterclaims while at the same time frantically searching for a new home in our city's awful housing market.
And they have to find that new housing in one week, while at the same time preparing for a trial that will generally begin in just a couple of weeks. After figuring out from the court clerk's office that I really did only have one week to find a new place, my mother and I commenced a monumental fishing expedition. We drove up and down the streets of my part of town for several days, frantically writing down every address and phone number of every flat we saw advertised as vacant. I took pages and pages of hasty notes on legal pads that I often had trouble deciphering later.
On the first day of our search, we found a nice four-family building in a beautiful, wooded residential area just half a mile down from my current place. It seemed perfect. It had central air, central heat, a beautiful view, a well-designed interior, brand new carpets, a lovely kitchen (the first room I check out in any place), and a manager who lived on-site (thus having an actual personal interest in keeping the place in good condition). It was about 90 dollars more than I was already paying, and they were asking for a $150 pet deposit. It was the first place that day that I could actually imagine myself living in.
As I looked through thirty or forty more places, ranging from too expensive to totally uninspiring, it became more and more clear that that was the one front-runner. "If you really like it, you really ought to just put the money down and fill out the application; otherwise, someone might beat you to it," my mother said more than once.
By Friday, I had made up my mind. I called up the owner and told him I'd like to make an appointment to come down, fill out the paperwork, and put down the deposit. He suggested that I come by at 5:15 that day, and I agreed. I couldn't stop grinning after that conversation. I had done it. Despite the absurdities of a classist local judiciary and a bad housing market, I had found a place, and a better one than I had had. I always have a way of landing on my feet, I thought to myself more than once.
I held my cat, Woody, tightly in my arms, smiling right into her eyes, and gushed, "Good news, sweetie! We have a home, we have a place to go to!"
I sat at my computer and told everyone the good news. I called my mother to tell her. If I had had any cash to spare, I probably would have bought a bottle of champagne for the occasion.
Forty five minutes before my meeting with the owner, I received a call from him. He informed me, in his customarily curt manner, that someone had made a deposit on the apartment subsequent to my phone call. Somehow, I managed to wait until I was off the phone to say
"SON OF A BITCH!!!"
The entire renewed sense of safety and security and resolution that had built up in the few hours after I made the appointment were wiped out in a matter of seconds. I sobbed so hard I could barely talk, save for a few well-placed, shouted expletives. I called my mother and told her all that happened. She later told me that she had been on speaker, and thus my repeated shouts of assorted curses (mostly, however, "SON OF A BITCH") were made accessible to a broader audience.
Oh well, I have always tried to bring my art to the people.
She called the guy herself, and apparently expressed my displeasure rather clearly, because he called me a couple of minutes later telling me he had a "comparable" place he could offer me. The rent was the same, and the floorplan was "almost the same". It also sounded to be in a much better location. Grasping at straws, I decided to have a look.
My mother picked me up to see the place twenty minutes later. The "comparable" apartment was a fifth-story walkup in one of my favourite parts of town. Speaking in its favour were a $99 security deposit, free rent for the first month, and a gas range. The apartment was early fin de siècle, both in terms of style and vintage. It featured, amongst other things, a dumbwaiter, an intercom system that appeared to be the model immediately following the early tin-cans-on-a-string technology, a window air-conditioning unit that was probably from a fleamarket, a built in "dresser" with nonfunctioning drawers and nonopening "closet" doors. There was a garbage chute in the kitchen, but no disposal, and all of the rooms were quite cramped. In my desperation, I marshalled everything inside me to think of a way in which this place could actually work out.
Next.
We looked at a few other decidedly underwhelming places, and then I decided to go back to her house for the weekend. I needed time to regroup, and I wasn't going to feel comfortable in my as-yet-apartment with the possibility of unannounced intrusion by the landlord's employees.
We resolved to find boxes and resume the search the next day. I picked up an apartment guide to see if there was anything I might have overlooked (it was certainly easier than cruising the neighbourhoods and frantically jotting down numbers).
One place stood out. I had passed it hundreds of times on the way to university or downtown. It was a very well-kept-up highrise in the best neighbourhood in the city. I had never even considered it, because I was certain the rent would be astronomical. However, according to the apartment guide, it was right within my price range - only fifty more than I was paying already.
To be continued...
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