It HAPPENED AGAIN to be continued post...

To make sense of this post please read THIS ONE and then THIS ONE first…

There are patios and then there are PATIOS. We managed to acquire one of massive proportions upon moving into our new place MUCH to my pleasure. For over a month it was completely covered in boxes and ‘furniture’ (childhood toys and memorabilia, chairs without seats, tables without their legs etc…) but eventually, all of these items miraculously disappeared into the closets and cubbyholes of our house. A Vancouver winter had left the deck covered in scum and caked on dirt but that day the sun was shining and the moment felt right – it was time for some good ‘ole power washing!

There’s nothing I love more than a high-powered hose with an attachment that has some sort of ‘power-jet-stream’ function on it. I often envy those that actually get paid to do this for a living; stripping off grime to reveal cleanliness has so many rewards! After planting my flower boxes and hanging baskets I gave it a good sweeping and slug the hose up onto the deck. I then proceeded to start the much needed patio cleanse. The deck had a slight lipped edge to it, making it difficult to get the water to wash off the sides and instead the water and soil slowly funneled and hence plugged its only outlet… a 1“ x 1” drainage hole. In the blind joy of the jet stream I failed to notice this until about 50 gallons of water had backed up around the hole. In vain I tried to scoop out the dirt with my fingers, but realized that the problem had fused itself in the drainage pipe, situated in the carport below.

Earlier that day I’d noticed the ‘white girl’ wondering around the yard and back alley. Her strawberry blonde hair hung in stringy chunks around her face – unbrushed, unwashed for god only knows how long. She wore a pair of soiled men’s denim pants and an oversized royal blue soccer jersey. Her eyes had the hollow look of ‘crackhead’ to them… no colour, just deep dark pupils of blackness. They were set deep into a squished up childlike face, thickly peppered with freckles. She’d peak around the corner of the alley and up the short length of the fence to the basement door below. A loud ‘come HERE’ whistle from Eddie and she quickly trotted up to carport, like a dog with its tail between its legs. As usual, at around 1pm there were horrible yells, bangs and slamming doors from the suite below. One-sided conversations floated up from the floorboards… “NO! NOooooo! FUCK YOU EDDIE! Please! PLEASE don’t make me sit in the alley!” and “What AM I to you! A F---ing DOG? You can’t treat me like this!” and “What cha gonna do HUH!? HUH Eddie?! You gonna hit me you big man??! Do it… DO IT! Why don’t you just kill ME!?” I chewed my peanut butter and banana sandwich slowly, shaking my head back and forth in disbelief. Afternoons like this happened every other day – the screaming, the fights, the mild beatings. There were scads of crying sessions as well… but the kind of crying an 8 year old uses for attention more than actual anguish or pain- the boo-hoo-hoo-hoo kind of bawling – fake and tearless. You know… the type that stops and starts when someone is looking or paying attention? It gets pretty old after 20 minutes.

I stared down at the 10 x 10 foot puddle that had formed around the hole. I could hear water drizzling onto the concrete below and decided to go take a look. Hopping down the back porch stairs I rounded the corner and pushed open the door that led to the carport below. Fully opened the door barely cleared a figure sitting cross-legged on the ground. It was the girl. She held a takeout container to her mouth, shoveling into it some sort of Asian noodle. There is a type of comedic timing that we often only see on cheesy TV sitcoms – the kind that rarely - if ever, happens in real life. Well in the mere seconds it took me to stop the door from slamming into the wall again, my mouth dropped open, eyes wide with horror at the sight before me. Looking upwards I watched as the drainage pipe twitched and then BURST open – spewing a MASSIVE explosion of black water into the air! Trying to jump up in time to avoid the 50 gallons of liquid was futile, and the girl – situated about a foot away from the pipe above was instantly soaked. Pushing past her and apologizing profusely, I tried in vain to reconnect the pipe. My attempt only made things worse, shooting the mud out even further. Hearing the commotion, Eddie appeared in his doorway to find the both of us covered in mud and water. The girl said, “It’s OK… I’m fine.” I told her again how sorry I was and that I was pretty much finished. I retreated to my unfinished deck upstairs feeling horrible… welllll, not really horrible but more so embarrassed as this was the first and only interaction I would have with the girl.

Later that day I saw her ride away with Eddie, perched precariously on the crossbar of his stolen bike. She had changed her shirt but her jeans and hair were caked with the dark potting soil from my planters. Sure that they were gone for the evening I grabbed the key to the storage room we had in the carport. I had noticed that the door was ajar while down there trying to fix the pipe… Turns out I didn’t need the key as the door was unlocked. I peered inside and was pissed off yet saddened by what I saw. A lone 100-watt light bulb burned away, flooding the dingy room with light. The soaked soccer jersey was tossed into a corner. A water bottle filled with yellow liquid. A plastic dustpan filled with cigarette butts. An empty drug baggy with white residue. A crack pipe. A pair of dirty tube socks. Our things had been moved around to make room for a makeshift bed – a grungy blanket and overstuffed toy bear as a pillow made that obvious. This was no longer our storage space but a drug addicts bachelor suite. She’d even tried to hook up our vintage TV to our old VCR… Now what? I thought… I wish there was a handbook on how one should handle such situations. I closed the door and locked it. Back upstairs I rearranged my pretty plants and organized our inviting patio, all the while the scene of the exploding pipe played over and over and over again in my head…


AGAIN this is to be continued…

deadshits...

our australian friend showed me this the other day... i was pissing myself at some of the stuff he said... good stuff to start off your weekend!! *d

Yes... It happened AGAIN...

Every 5 minutes I hit the refresh button of my browser. Logged in to Vancouver’s Craigslist ‘apts/housing for rent’ section, with critical info entered into the ‘search for’ field, I waited patiently for JUST the right living conditions to appear on my screen… painfully this situation didn’t appear for 2 weeks! 2 weeks of skimming through fake scam advertisements and misleading posts… overpriced basement suites and useless property management firms that never emptied their voice mailboxes. Finally something within the highest range of our budget had come up. I sent off the critical first contact email…

Hello there Scott,
In regards to the 4 bedroom house located at 55th ave. between Fraser and Main St.... we are interested in viewing the house if we could?
We are a hardworking professional couple looking to for a 3 bedroom rental home in Vancouver. We have decided to move as our current home has become questionably safe, and the street we live on has become extremely noisy over the last few years. (right on Knight Street) We are looking for a quieter place to call home!
We are looking to move for May 1st or 15th or earlier if need be. We have references upon request.
Thank you for your time, Dalyn (day-lynn) and Zoltan
604-722-6xx1 anytime
(I attached the perfect picture of zol and I as well. I find this helps…)

I received an email shortly thereafter and zol took the phone call from a ‘Scott’ later that evening. (my hubby’s a PRO at this kind of conversation!) The overwhelming response to the placed add, had Scott in a tailspin. He certainly didn’t want to interview all of the applicants. We learned from the phone call that he was doing for his landlord what we had done for ours after the fiasco of Dawn Barton - taking over the job of the landlord due to his severe language barrier and finding decent tenants him. Though we’d yet to see the house, we felt good about our prospects just based on the 10 minute phone call. We could view the house in 2 days. I of course, immediately started packing…

Wellllll… it was PERFECT! Very rough around the edges, but nothing paint, a few throw rugs and all of our cool stuff couldn’t cover up. A tad far from where we’d have preferred to be, the house was situated in ‘Little India’, but worth the drive. The house was huge, had tons of storage, a massive deck and a ‘very sweet Filipino family’ that lived in the suite below. After a painful week of waiting for Scott to give us a call, he finally did saying that we’d had the place right off the bat – he just forgot to tell us… leaving me amongst newspaper, boxes and mental agony for 7 days. After realizing I was pregnant he really thought the place was best for us, that and the fact that we enjoyed fixing our home up and were use to dealing with a non-English speaking landlord. That weekend we met the landlord, shook hands and the place was ours.

I can’t really explain the scope of what it’s like for us to move. My husbands 40 plus years of collecting a very WIDE scope of things has left us with an amazing collection of items, rendering our home a museum of the 1950’s 60’s and 70’s. Packing it all up and moving it safely to another location requires skill, dedication and a close friend that has no idea of what he’s gotten himself into till its too late. When asked if he’d mind ‘helping us move’ that Friday… poor poor sweet Jess had no idea what he was in for. His day was spent with my husband emptying a storage garage we had decided to give up and also the contents of our previous house into a 2 ton truck... it only took 3 trips to get not quite everything! The day was long and hard… and running on a muffin and bottle of water Jess of course became confused when my husband said, “I use to have a TV collection…” upon lifting the 10th vintage television set into the truck. “So how many does it take to make a collection?” he later asked me… “Eleven?”

While unloading the truck at our new abode, the downstairs tenant Eddie and his friend started to help us take the boxes up to our patio. Our landlord was there and helped as well. We were uncomfortable with the assistance, (more-so embarrassed at the amount of stuff we had) but after saying “NO need to help!!” 5 times we just gave in and let them lug away. An hour later the deck was full and we thanked the unwelcomed help. Later that evening as I was unpacking the kitchen, my husband came in with a distraught look on his face. From the rafters of the garage he’d managed to knock down some sort of ‘pipe’ fashioned from a coke can. “It had all these little holes poked on top…!” “Oh sweety, it’s probably just for weed!” he then pulled from his pocket a tiny tiny zip-lock baggy and I could tell straight away it hadn’t been used for the ‘green stuff’. “oh…. hmm”. This discovery coupled with the brief conversation with the old coot next door earlier that day… “Oh God, you’re not moving into THAT house ARE YOU?” our high-winded spirits began their agonizing float to the ground. Could this all really be happening to us AGAIN we asked ourselves?

Within the next month we began to notice things we hadn’t in the excitement of moving in and claiming the new place as ours… like say, the sketchy looking white girl that was always hanging around, violently freaking out on Eddie everyday at around 1pm before his kids came home from school... The homeless man that banged on my back door looking for Eddie... The police that came looking for a fugitive they believed was hiding out downstairs… The ‘transactions’ that happened right outside my kitchen window in plain view involving fists full of cash and little baggies with white pebbles in them… The man sleeping in our garage at 2pm… (who'd obviously been eating take-out, drinking beer and smoking cigarettes right next to our highly flamible antiques we had stored in there...)
Or say the massive pile of expensive bicycles in the backyard? Some were just remnants of their former selves, a frame with a deflated wheel, or a wheel with missing spokes… a bike would show up one morning and be gone by the next, curious… waking up to a repeated BANG BANG BANG one morning we looked out our upper window to see ‘Eddie’ smashing a lock off of a new bike. “oh” we realized… now we get it. Our backyard was a bloody chop-shop…

Don’t ask me how, but I know what crack smoke smells like. It floated up from the basement suite with full force one afternoon – the air thick with its sticky, choking sweetness. I immediately drew my hand to my belly, wondering what damage our unborn child would possibly procure from the fumes. Opening all of the windows, I sat down and thought about our new situation. What the heck was going on!?? The people before us HAD to have known what was going on downstairs, there was no way around NOT knowing unless you were legally BLIND and couldn’t smell. Trust me, there’s just NO WAY the smell of crack can be confused with a Filipino curry. Why would Scott have done this to us? My husband and I discussed our unfortunate situation at length and decided that taking action was far worse than dealing with it. We had learnt this from our previous experience and never wanted to go through that again. Though they were crack dealers and bike thieves’ - at least this time the downstairs tenants were quiet and polite. With a blind eye to the chop shop and plugged air ducts for the crack smoke, we had decided to wait this storm out… oh and what a storm it would be... to be continued…