But the next few days the icing on the cake had been applied when I received the following email from my landlady who flew herself off to Brazil without telling me she was going to leave and without having a reliable person to call in case of an emergency. And just my luck; it arrived on my birthday…“I need to explain something about the basement and your apartment- you have to get all those boxes out of the basement and clean out the apartment. It is a serious fire hazard; I spoke to a Chicago Fire Chief last Monday. If the house caught on fire it would be gone in minutes; the wood is 112 years old.
It is also very unhealthy to live in a mess like that. I suggest you get a storage space for things you absolutely must keep, and rent a small dumpster for the rest. I'm sure the majority of the stuff you will never use and a lot you don't even know where it is or what you have. Please do this as soon as you can, make it my birthday present from you. it just isn't safe- and I have to tell you, coming from a friend, I think you may have a hoarding problem- saving things might make you feel more secure or whatever... but I think you need to overcome it. I hope you have great holidays, and I'll see you next year”
I was crushed and I didn’t need an imposing person who was already a kook from the word get-go telling me what to do with all of my belongings, let alone claim she was being a friend to me, when all she cared about was my money!
And she always left things in the lurch or didn’t bother to tell me anything until it was too late. Nor did she finish tasks that she began either, like say for example the address on her home. It might have come in handy, for say an emergency that might have occurred.
And just my luck; on Christmas night 2003 the golden opportunity arrived! I was in my apartment talking to someone on my cell-phone when all of a sudden I smelled smoke, something to the effect of a roaring fireplace; I opened my apartment door to find that the basement window had been kicked open by a home invader! I made sure no one else was around, looked out the window and sure enough, I saw an incoherent man cussing and shaking his fist at me across the street in a parking lot.
I hung up with the friend I was speaking to and immediately called the police. There was trouble however. The police that responded to the call were unable to find the house due to the fact that there was no address on it! A routine phone call to the police department that was six blocks away would normally have taken approximately two minutes to respond to, but thanks to her mighty fine foresight, it took them approximately twenty-five minutes to respond!
I remember it was fairly cold that night, in the twenties temperature-wise and I stood on the porch in bare feet until they arrived. After they arrived, I took them downstairs to the basement portion and showed them the kicked-in window and gave them a description of the offender. The officers explained to me that I would need something to seal the window back up. I thanked them for responding and led them out of the house.
In the meantime, I went back upstairs and had noticed some mail of hers scattered upon a small table next to the stairway that led to the upper part of her home that included a citation from the city for failing to put a proper address on her home. That was in 2003. Nearly two years later, she still has put no visible markings on her home.
That night, I called my landlady up who was whooping it up in Brazil and didn’t seem to care what was going on back here. It was a waste of time and money for certain.
The next day, I went out to the hardware store closest to my apartment and found matching screws to the originals that were pulled out from the force of the invader. I used boxes to temporarily seal up the window from re-opening. Then I went back into my apartment and emerged with my crochet mallet and a claw hammer, plus some long nails in a jar on a shelf in the basement and busily got to work. I nailed the long nails into the crevices of the window, a sure seal-proof way to keep out would-be home invaders.
After that, I screwed in the screws into the original holes and fixed the window. When the landlady did get home nearly two weeks later, all she did was complain about my supposed mess and never thanked me for fixing her window.
But complaining was part of her mantra, anyway. For her to complain about something, meant that she felt she was perfect and could do wrong. She used the “fire hazard mantra” just as long as she could and as long she was able to. She changed the story at least half-a-dozen times, claiming that a Chicago fire marshal had visited my apartment and told her that my apartment was a disaster waiting to happen.
If indeed a fire marshal did inspect my apartment, he might have also noticed that the ceiling was a little low and that the heater was archaic, leading him to cite her for having an illegal apartment without a proper zoning permit to build one to begin with.
She was previously cited before, but all she did was have the family (her ex-in laws-how convenient) move out, wait another year and then re-rent the apartment out. She didn’t care much about the city or its ordinances; she only cared enough to rent out the space and make money...
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