The landlord
It’s Complicated: Lit Up & The Writing Cooperative Contest
Somehow, I’m a beneficiary of housing discrimination. I say somehow because I’m a Russian Jew and historically that cuts the other way.
The perpetrator is Edgar Sanchez Romero, the ancient man currently hunched over the dishwasher in my kitchen. He’s fishing for a gasket with the arm he didn’t lose in a brief and bloody war in Bolivia. I often wonder where the other arm is. Like, exactly where.
When I first moved in, he told me about the war and about the country he left behind. There was a long pause and finally I said, “I love albondigas.”
The guy is obsessed with Russia. He’s obsessed with Vladimir Putin. He’s not shy about praising the autocrat’s despotic policies and hard-line views on cultural assimilation.
“Russia is for the Russians,” he paraphrases proudly in my general direction. “You need us more than we need you,” he says. The “you” he means is immigrants, and by now he’s balling up his sole fist to connote power.
Last week he called about the late rent check, muttering his usual string of what I suspect he believes to be complimentary Russian-sounding words: “A la Vladimirsky. Igorsky. Gorky Park. Hello! Yes, I do not have a check from you. Very well. Ciao.”
Edgar is always sauntering around the neighborhood in an olive sport coat and pressed slacks several sizes too large. If I run into him, we walk up the hill together. I run into him a lot.
Usually he tells me about the Latino immigrants who live in the US for forty years and never learn English. Or about the autobiography he wants to write one day, describing the conception of his ten-year-old son against all odds during an afternoon romp with his Peruvian housekeeper.
“I tell you, it was a moment like no other. My salami was swinging, twelve o’clock to three o’clock. I tell you no lie.”
I did not want to ask any questions about the salami.
I tell him a lot of personal things because he’s the only person I talk to in the daytime while everyone in my life is at work. I tell him I think people don’t know what to do next in life, so they make more people, and I don’t know what to do either, but I’m not gonna do anything crazy, just in case clarity arrives later.
“What if I just take walks and think about stuff, Edgar?”
He doesn’t really answer. We talk simultaneously for a while, he’s on about the dishwasher, I’m still ranting.
“I once read about a man who walked the same twenty-six blocks of Manhattan every morning after breakfast for thirty years, and some random rainy Wednesday he’d say, ‘Golly, I think I just had the best day of my life.’ Why can’t that be a legitimate pastime?”
Edgar grunts and drops his screwdriver.
I tell him about two of my cousins who have blood cancer. I hate them. They live far away.
He says the tenants upstairs are constantly clogging the toilet. He suspects their dog.
He’s running the dishwasher and it’s making the god-awful grinding noise. I turn to see his reaction.
His face doesn’t look right. It’s cherry red and there’s a vein forming like the Chunnel on his forehead.
I look at him stupidly for too many seconds and I call the paramedics and they arrive fucking instantly. They do a lot of stuff while I look on, irrelevant.
I know what’s going to happen but I still go down to St. Mary’s to wait and eventually they tell me.
I drive home really slowly and let impatient drivers honk at me so I can feel indignation and keep it a secret from them. It’s raining so I roll the window down and smell the air a lot, my head like a dog’s, hanging out of the car.
When I get back to the apartment my kitchen floor is a battlefield strewn with tools and dishwasher parts. I step over the detritus and brew a pot of coffee.
A while back Edgar gifted me a mug from his trip to the Galapagos, featuring the blue-footed booby (a bird that one must be of retirement age to discuss with a straight face). I knew then that the mug would outlive him.
I drink my coffee and cry.
I throw the mug off the balcony. It bounces off a eucalyptus tree and rustles down into a bush. I feel no satisfaction. I make more coffee.
By the time it has brewed, I’ve switched to gin.
