It Happened Again Today

I finally got a bottom apartment, something my son and I had been dreaming about for years. I was previously living on the third floor and the stairs were an issue after I became riddled in pain with arthritis. The summers were relatively okay but the winters were a nightmare for me. I could barely walk up the stairs in the winter. I had to find a bottom really fast.

The opportunity to move presented itself last August. My current landlord was gracious enough to let me out of the lease. She had somebody in mind who would take the place immediately but I would have to be out for September 1st if I was going to move at all.

So began the ordeal of finding a place. I definitely wanted to be in a new place before the winter set in. I knew I just couldn’t take another winter climbing those stairs.

I have written all about my apartment search before, so I won’t bore you all here, but suffice to say when I found the current place I am living in, I thought it was a dream come true. Here was my chance to have a beautiful bottom apartment with both a front and back yard.

When I visited the apartment, it was very clean and well kept. I loved it immediately. The young girl who greeted me at the door was very personable. I asked her why she was subletting and she told me she was going onto bigger and better things.

Later, when I signed the lease, the new landlord told me she lived with her sister. The sister decided to move out to live with her boyfriend, so the house was now too big for Dawn to take care of on her own. I suspected also that Dawn would not be able to pay the rent on her salary alone.

The downstairs neighbour I had when I lived on the third floor was a raving maniac. She began complaining about me the minute I moved in. I worked the midnight shift at the time and the princess didn’t like that I can home late and walked up the stairs to get to my apartment. It disrupted her routine. She didn’t like that I walked on the floors in my apartment either. I said to the landlord, I am a big woman, what am I supposed to do fly across the floors? The landlord told me to ignore Rachel she too thought she was crazy.

Rachel had complained about every tenant who took the upstairs apartment. Nobody was to her liking. She even made several complaints to the rental board and lost every one of them. Just to give you an example of a complaint, she claimed that the 18-month-old baby who lived above her at the time walked too hard on the floor. She lost the case of course! I guess she got tired of losing cases and losing her money because she never complained to the rental board about us.

However that didn’t stop her from ringing our doorbell and constantly complaining. She was also evil. My son’s friend came to visit one evening and he left his bike on the communal second landing. He didn’t feel like carrying it up yet another flight of stairs. The bike was nowhere near Rachel’s door but when he left our place to go home, he found that his tires had been slashed. Even though we couldn’t prove it was Rachel who did it, we knew it was her. The next time she saw my son, she didn’t say anything. the smirk on her face said it all; in her mind she had won a major victory.

She got so vicious and unreasonable that my son had no choice but to call the police on her to have them tell her to leave him alone. This seemed to work because she left us alone after that, but we were left with such a bad taste in our month that we couldn’t wait to get out of there. All we wanted was to live in peace and quiet along side our neighbours.

For the most part, the neighbours are great in this new place. Leopold next door is a lovely elderly man who I chat with every chance I can get. People further down the street look out for me. And the guy upstairs has two cats of his own. Pearl, my cat, loves to go up and visit with them. She walks right into their house, as it was her own.

My neighbours are great, but is it quiet around here? I hardly think so. It appears that the former tenants may not have been as quiet or as squeaky-clean as the neighbours thought they were. When I first came here I was plagued with mail addressed to all kinds of guys at this address. Okay I thought, so the girls had boyfriends, so what. But, there were more than two guys, there was a bunch of them, if I can believe the mail addressed to this house number. Again, it is not my business so why think about it right?

It became my business when bailiffs started coming to my door. The first time, I came home and saw a notice in my mailbox stating that if Tony Logostano didn’t pay his 345 dollars debt within 48 hours, they would come and seize furniture.

I was petrified. I never had anything like this happen to me before. I did not know what to do. I spoke to Leopold who said not to worry, “when they came just show the lease and they would leave.” Someone else told me just to call them up and explain that I was the new tenant. So I did, and then I thought everything was corrected, until it happened again.

This time it was a bailiff’s card for a Chris Tucker, and again I called to say I didn’t know a Chris Tucker and I was the new tenant living at this residence. Was that the end of it? Would I be writing this piece if it were?

Every couple of months the City of Montreal goes through a new bailiff. They come bothering me about these two men, only never at the same time. One month it is Mr. Tony Logostano and then the next month it is Chris Tucker. Every time it happens I tell the bailiffs the same thing, I don’t know either of these guys.

Today it happened again. I was sleeping and somebody was pounding on the door the first thing in the morning. I refused to get up out of my bed to answer. When I finally did go to the door to check my mail, it was the darn baliff again for Chris Tucker. I called them up yet again and told them I don’t know Chris Tucker. He thanked my for calling but will he tell the city to stop bothering me with these bailiffs every couple of months – of course not.

So much for living in peace! I am beginning to think that the previous tenants, Dawn and her sister, were not that quiet after all. Furthermore, their boyfriends weren’t either. I think they both left to dodge the bailiffs and left me with the problem!

Addenum: I was finally able to call the City of Montreal for both of these guys and explain that neither lived at my address. Finally, I have peace!