I was renting a room in this woman’s house. She had knocked down some walls and built others and converted a regular house into seven rooms and two bathrooms. She took the garage for herself and rented out the seven rooms. I think I was paying $400 a month.
So I had 6 other housemates or tenants plus her. Amazingly, I got along with most of them. I lived there for four and a half years and there was a little turnover. About every 8 months or so someone would move out and a new person would move in. Near the end, out of the original housemates when I moved in there was only two of us and 5 new ones.
After almost 4 years there, a new guy moved in. I should say here that the landlord was not too picky about who she let move in. I moved in without a job and she let other jobless people move in and in fact the guy next to my room was bi-polar and never got a job. A Vietnam vet lived at the end of the hall who suffered from depression and he never worked either. And a couple of other mentally ill people moved in but this was a private home not a board & care or anything.
The thing was that I soon got a job and I was disabled but there were at least three guys who had no disability and never got jobs. And they didn’t have cars.
It was 5 men and two women at the end. After four years she let this guy move in without a job. It was a huge mistake to let him move in. I actually made friends with him. He had some kind of foot problem that made him disabled. He was always talking about getting surgery to fix it but he never did. But this guy was a bad guy. The list of the problems this one guy caused was long. The rest of us were getting along before this guy moved in.
The first two things he did when he moved in was try to get us all to chip in on illegal cable. None of us wanted it. We could have got like 200 channels or something but we would have had to go through a lot of hassle to install it in each room. But he kept hounding us and pressuring us. None of us got it.
Then he wanted to install cameras. And he actually installed two cameras. One camera covered the front porch and door so he could watch us coming and going on his TV or whoever came to the door,.
And the house was set up with one single hallway with each room off of this hallway. He installed a camera in the hall so he could see us as we left our rooms or came home. We had told him he couldn’t do it but he did it anyways. It was insane. We complained to the woman landlord but she couldn’t or wouldn’t do anything about it.
Another thing about this guy was bizarre. He made tons of phone calls. And he would call service people and just berate then and browbeat them and abuse them. And he would somehow keep the poor customer service people on the line for like 45 minutes or even an hour. Just cussing and intimidating them. He had some power over them that the poor guys would just let him yell and say whatever he wanted but they wouldn’t hang up.
I saw and heard him do this almost three dozen times. That was crazy too. Just going in circles with them.
Then he didn’t have internet and I was the only one who got along with him but he convinced me to hook up his computer to my dial-up. This was 2004 when AOL was the top provider. He hooked up his computer with cables to my room and anytime he went online I could not use my own internet or my phone. So a few times a day he would tie up my line for an hour or more. I was trying to be a nice guy but I was a sucker for letting him do that.
With all the cameras people started hating him so he started scaring and intimating people. And it worked. Most (but not all) people were scared of him. He threatened people. He got in several loud arguments with a woman in one of the rooms and threatened her and she called the police on him a few times.
I drank a lot of soda so I kept the empty cans in bags outside in the side yard beneath my bedroom window. He wanted to run a cable through the side yard for another camera and asked if he could move my cans. I said no and he moved them out back anyways which really pissed me off. But I was as intimidated as everyone else. And we had a back porch which doubled as a kitchen and without he even telling the landlady he moved 6 or 7 large pieces of furniture on the porch.
I had a TV out on the back porch and he hooked it up with cable without my permission.
He did other stuff too but those were the main problems. Finally the landlady had enough. She had someone serve an eviction notice and tape it to his bedroom door. But he refused to come out of his room to read it so if she took him to court he could claim he never got it. And that’s what happened. He had food and a bathroom in his room and he holed up in his room. We never saw him. He had no job so he just stayed in his room. When we knocked on his door he wouldn’t answer. But he could watch us on his cameras.
Somehow, the lady finally forced the eviction. I was pissed at him but we had been friends somewhat but while he was moving out he caused arguments with people. Finally, one guy stood up to him and they were going to fight but something happened and they didn’t but he got challenged in front of everybody and the other guy was this tough Mexican guy who had been in prison and would have hurt him.
He finally moved out but the last thing he did about after a week was call me up. I had stood up for him and let him use my internet and I was the only one who had been friendly to him and he called me up and said, “Fu*k you” and hung up. Real classy.
But that wasn’t the last we heard of him. The landlady, who had given him a break in the first place and let him move in, had converted the back porch into a kitchen. She always used the cheapest possible contractors. Well, this guy noticed a few violations and turned her into some agency in our city. The city had a lawyer who gave her a notice saying she could not legally rent out her home until those violations were corrected. It would cost thousands of dollars. And the end result was that we all had to move out within two weeks. All seven of us. What a bast*rd. I found a small room somewhere else and it ended up OK because a few months later I moved into my own studio. But that guy had balls. And not in a good way. What a loser. Never saw him again.
