My Sketchy Landlord

Today's song of the day is "Roxanne" by The Police. 

Today, on the Morning Breath, we were talking about nightmare fuel landlord stories. It started with the story of a guy I met that told me the heat in his apartment hasn't worked since November, and the landlord hasn't done anything to fix it. That gets to be kind of a big deal when we get wind chills near -50.

^{Good clean Canadian living...}

My story is a little different. For this, we go back to when I first moved to Edmonton to go to radio school, back in 2003. Now, the school I was going to didn't have residence, so it was up to students to find accommodations. They did, however, offer a website where people could list rooms they were renting out, or apartments. I tried with a few places, but had no luck, until I found a room upstairs in a house about 20 blocks from the school, which is pretty good for Edmonton. The rent was reasonable, so I said I'd take the room, and was ready for my adventure in the big city.

^{What could go wrong in a place like Edmonton?}

First of all, turns out that this place was in the heart of a real shady neighborhood. Turns out the area around Rexall Place, not the cleanest of places. Second, the house was a dump. This lady I was moving in with was in the early stages of training to get her own episode of Hoarders. And third, she had an alarm system on the house, which she refused to give me the code to, meaning if I didn't get home by a certain time, I was essentially locked out. Despite all of this though, I moved my crap up the stairs, and settled in to my new life. Oh, she also had a runt of a dog named Penny. Remember that. It's a key point.

^{When I could get in the house, this is the first thing I saw...}

Things were ok for about the first two weeks or so. I was settling in to college, getting to know my classmates, etc... Really, I didn't spend a lot of time at home. After that though, I found out that the school's housing website does not screen their listings. A mirror got broken in the house. It was a mirror that probably should have been hung on the wall, but instead was just sitting on the floor, and the woman who owned the place found it broken one day. Naturally, she blamed me, and not her spastic little dog. She told me I'd have to pay for it, I said no, because I didn't break it, she got all hysterical, and we didn't talk about it again. Until she found a lamp broken about a week later. Again, she pinned it on me, and again I hadn't touched the thing. This time, she flipped out. She started screaming about how all I was doing was eating her food (never happened once), and breaking her things (again, false), and watching her TV. That last one was true, but only because I didn't know I wasn't supposed to. She was yelling at me through tears of what I could only guess were insanity.

^{It was like this, but with longer hair, and a stupid dog.}

I had no idea what to do. I was paying a decent amount to live, part time, in a house with a crazy person. I was mulling it over that I should probably give my 30 days and get the hell out of that place, when I happened across something incredible. I was looking in the paper for apartment listings in the neighborhood, when I caught a glance at an ad for an escort. You know, those ladies who will accompany you out on the town for money, and would never, ever, never have sex with you for a little extra? Yeah, one of those. Now, there were two reasons this ad stood out to me. This was before I had a cell phone, so I was still able to remember phone numbers, and the phone number in the ad was definitely hers. Reason number 2? The ad had no picture, but it did have a name. Penny.

^{That God damn dog...}

That's right, my landlady was an escort, who used her stupid yappy dog's name as her pseudonym. Naturally, that was the last straw. That night, I called up my buddy who had a Jeep, and we grabbed everything I owned and got the hell out of dodge. I stayed at his place for a couple days until I could line up a new place to live. I heard from her once after that, she told me she was going to sue me for rent and the things I "broke". I told her I saw her ad. She hung up immediately. Never did hear from that lawyer.

And that, my friends, is the time I lived with an "escort" named Penny. And no, before anyone asks, I did not sample her services. That's gross. -DLB

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