Dancing on the Edge of Ruin

Landlady Flora and her son (who it turns out is co-owner) have put this house I live in up for sale.  They want $400,000 for it, which is paradoxically both a low price for West of the Rivers and more than the house is worth.  So has begun a new and steady process:  realtor-conducted tours of my apartment.  The realtors are polite to me, and work with me to make sure it isn’t too horribly inconvenient, and the people they bring through are friendly and inoffensive, but it’s distasteful regardless;  aside from the interruptions, it makes me feel as if I’m a serf or a slave waiting to see who his new master is going to be.   In the current economic climate, potential buyers are thrilled to find out that the upstairs apartment is already filled by a tenant who (as far as they know) has no plans to move out.  That doesn’t mean they aren’t planning on raising my rent, of course…

The neighbors, meanwhile, have flat out asked me if I’m moving or staying.  Since I don’t have any definite plans either way, and since any answer I give them will quickly make its way back to Flora, I just smile and say that apparently I’m staying because they haven’t told me they’re throwing me out yet, and leave it at that.

The yard sale of all the garbage that was in the house and the garage lasted three days and moved an amazing amount of the stuff off the premises.  (Rag-picking through each other’s crap is one of the favorite pastimes of all the fat old ladies around here, right behind cutting down trees.)  Not included in the merchandise moved was Nipper’s huge plastic cage, the one I bought at considerable expense from the local PetSmart back when she wouldn’t stop peeing on the carpet, and which was one of the only items that Faye didn’t take with her when she left.  Flora’s daughter, who was organizing and conducting the yard sale, was very interested in it…   until I told her that she was perfectly free to sell it as long as she gave me the money. Then it disappeared back into the garage, out of sight.  Later she asked me if I wanted to keep it, and told me that if I didn’t, they were going to put it out for the trash.  I told her that was OK.  It was on the curb with the rest of the trash for precisely the time it took me to leave the apartment and walk to the library;  by the time I came back, it was gone, and the rest of the trash was untouched.  I have no doubt that it’s sitting cozily in her house right now, or in the house of one of Flora’s other children, and they believe me none the wiser.

I have purchased a new air-conditioner, of the same BTU rating as the old air-conditioner.   It is plugged into one of the five hot/neutral reverse-wired outlets, which remain unaltered, despite three requests on my part to the landlady’s son to have the problem addressed.  Five years after it first occurred to me to do so, I have also cobbled together a plywood and fabric cover that sits over the opening of the stairwell, preventing all of the cold air from the ancient air-conditioning unit built into the wall above it from draining directly down the stairs.  We have dubbed it “the airlock”.  It’s ghetto, but it works.  With both air-conditioners running and the closet doors closed, the majority of the apartment is rendered livable:  a small, cool, Internet-connected oasis-fortress, hidden atop an empty shell laved by gathering waves…