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Al (Al & Karen) Tuesday, 10:00 a.m.
Avery Goode put his foot on the rung of the chair next to him and leaned his own chair onto its back legs. “Al, there’s a lot of people in this world who don’t care much about the rest of us.”
“True,” I agreed. I’d asked him where he was in July of ’67, and that apparently triggered a story.
“In 1966 I got hired to manage a small apartment building in Elmira, New York. Twenty units, all ground level. I did the on-site stuff for this businessman who owned the place. It was a good deal for me, since I could work at my day job and live rent-free.” Avery stroked his mustache before adding, “I learned more about people in the five years I spent there than you’d ever want to know.”
“Lesson number one: Some tenants are a pain in the keister.”
He pointed at me. “Exactly. The twenty-somethings you excuse with ‘He’s young,’ or ‘She doesn’t get it yet.’ For them, kids renting for the first time, it was a matter of knocking on the door and laying down the law. But my first ever tenant from hell, Ethel, was sixty if she was a day. Anyone that age knows that when people get shoved together into a space, they need to consider what’s good for everybody, but Ethel was too selfish—or maybe too dumb—to care.
“She came along in the fall of ’66, when I was still new to the job. She seemed like a nice lady, and she passed the background check the owner ran on her. Around Christmas time, she moved her son Charlie in. He was a little slow, but he did the heavy lifting while his mother fed him and paid the bills. It ain’t unusual.”
“We’ve got a few here with the same arrangement.”
Avery nodded and went on with his story. “The winter went okay. They covered the windows of the apartment with bedsheets, which didn’t make me happy, but Miller Apartments wasn’t exactly high-rent real estate. I figured she was probably on a skimpy budget, so I let it go.
“It was when the weather broke in the spring that Ethel became a real problem. First, she had Charlie drag this rusty old patio set in from somewhere, the dump, maybe, and set it outside their door. Then they added other stuff she called ‘outdoor décor,’ peace signs, five of the seven Disney dwarves, and three different Madonna statues. Since they sat outside to smoke, they set rusty coffee cans on the windowsills for the butts and ashes. The place looked like the set for Sanford and Son.
“Sounds like some lots around here,” I put in, and he nodded again.
“It ain’t easy, being a manager. You start by telling them nicely to clean the place up, but there isn’t much of a stick to go with the carrot. You can assess fines, but what if they don’t pay them? It’s hard to tell an older person you’re going to kick her out, knowing she’s got nowhere else to go.”
“A tough situation for you.”
Avery nodded. “I talked Ethyl into getting rid of most of the mess out front, but then another problem got brought to my attention. Ethel was a tender-hearted type, and she’d started feeding the local wildlife. She scattered grain on the lawn to encourage Canada geese to stop by on their way north.” He shook his head. “You know what those critters leave behind. Tenants couldn’t walk on the grass without stepping in gook. She also set out dishes of food for stray cats, raccoons, foxes, and even a bobcat, according to the guy who came in to complain. Now, I never saw any bobcats, but the animals definitely figured out where the easy food was coming from. When I warned Ethyl to stop, she put the food out at night and took it back inside every morning.”
Avery paused, and I said, “You had to evict her.”
“Yeah. I felt bad, but the tenants were up in arms, and Ethel refused to listen to reason.” Avery shifted in his chair as he came to the answer to my original question. “It was July when I filed the papers. I waited until Friday the 7th, because I didn’t want to ruin her Fourth of July week. It gave her time to find a new place by August, even if the court granted her a grace period.”
“You felt bad for her.”
“I did. A few tenants complained about the ‘sweet old lady’ in Building A losing her home, but most were relieved to see the pair of them gone.”
“Where did they go?”
Avery sighed. “I helped her find a place at a trailer park, and I talked real serious to her about abiding by their rules.” He sniffed once. “I never heard how that worked out, but my problems didn’t end there. Once Ethyl and Charlie were gone, we found a family of possums living in the crawlspace under their apartment.” Avery raised a hand. “Don’t ask me how they got there, but Charlie had torn up a big section of the floor trying to scare them away. Some outside climbing plant had taken advantage of the hole and grown up the inside wall.” He gave me a half-grin. “Ethyl must have liked it, because there were little American flags tucked in among the leaves.”
“What a mess.”
He sighed. “All that outside junk I’d objected to? They’d moved it inside, rust, mud, mold, and all. We ended up gutting the whole apartment, replacing two walls and all the carpeting. First, I had to call in an exterminator to remove the possums and make sure there weren’t any other critters in there, like rats.” His nose wrinkled. “You can’t imagine the smell.”
I repeated my earlier comment. “A mess.”
Avery was silent for a moment. “When people gripe about George and the rules here at B-Bird, I always recall how hard I tried to work with Ethel and Charlie, and how little it helped. Those two taught me it’s best to make rules and then stick with them.” He grinned, aware that his answer had been longer than it needed to be. “And now you know more than you ever wanted to about where I was in July of 1967.”
