Love Thy Neighbor (but Celebrate when they are Evicted)

We've spent the last year sharing a two flat with a mercurial nutcase that was finally evicted nearly a month ago much to our surprise and delight. Does it make me a bad person that I was happy- no thrilled- to see her ass tossed out on the street? Before you answer, consider some of her (and her sons) transgressions over the past year:

When we moved in, Nancy (her given name is actually Anasthasia but she goes by Nancy) had a huge and unsightly collection of personal belongings in our garage that our landlord promised us would be out before we moved in. The stuff- which included a ratty, stained 1970's sofa, an inoperable lawnmower, garage sale quality paintings, and a broken exercise device that may have been an Ab-Lounger- was, of course, still there when we moved in. Nancy insisted that it would be out by the first weekend we were there. Not surprinsgly, the junk stayed put for several weeks, before I took it upon myself to drag it out to the curb myself. The only snag is that the garbage company won't move furniture for free- you have to go a store and purchase a special tag to affix to it. Nancy promised to get on this right away.

Weeks went by and in the meantime severe rain soaked the already fetid sofa beyond recognition. Our garbage area is in our back alley right next to our garage, so every time we came and went from our apartment we had to look at the filthy beast and wonder when and if it might ever be removed. After repeated pleas to Nancy and the landlord, the landlord eventually bought the tag for it and it was mercifully hauled away- probably about two months after we initially moved in.

Before we move on to Nancy's other sins, it might be helpful for me to paint a physical portrait of her for you. Nancy is, I would guess, about 40 years old, rail thin, and with the empty hollow look of a heroin addict. She has one (very) wandering eye- so when she speaks to you, there is no way to make direct eye contact. Her idea of getting dressed up is putting on her best pajamas. I only saw her wearing anything other than pajamas or sweats on one ocassion. Nancy told us she worked in a law office, but the landlord insists that she is a waitress. Like everything else about her- there was no way to no for sure, because she's a pathological liar.

We shared a washing machine and dryer with Nancy in the basement. Nancy rarely did laundry- despite having a 13 year old son- and neither my wife nor I EVER saw her wash her sheets. But when Nancy did do laundry, she had the maddening habit of putting a load in the machine, but then failing to remove it- sometimes for weeks (yes, weeks!). So we'd have to remove her wet laundry and place it on top of the dryer- where it would sit, untouched for days if not weeks, getting moldy and disgusting. Strange, right? But wait, it gets worse. Sometimes she would leave the one wet and moldy load on top of the dryer for a long time, and then start a new load without putting the original one in the dryer (or moving it someplace else). She would invariably leave that one too, so we'd then have two massive pyramids of her laundry sitting precariously on top of the dryer- which made doing laundry ourselves quite a travail.

My wife, Jen is very dilligent about removing our laundry after its done- yet, nonetheless Nancy would sometimes remove one of our loads to make way for her own, and would put our stuff flush against a dirty wall, where some of our smaller items could slip down into a filthy black hole like crevice between the wall and the dryer- and could only be removed with great effort. Nancy also frequently took the liberty of using our detergent- we know this because she had the same empty bottle of her own detergent sitting down there for months purely for cosmetic purposes. Next to the laundry machines, sat a very small garbage can- which overflowed with various items she had discarded. The full can sat there spilling over until she was evicted just weeks ago.

A couple months after we moved in, Nancy mentioned to us that her sister would be staying with her for "a week or two." A few days after that, a woman who looked just as ghoulish and frightening pulled up in a 18 wheel tractor trailer moving van and began unloading heavy items of furniture and bedding into the apartment. The sister, who ended up staying for a few months, had a yappy dog that barked at odd hours of the day and night, but the dog's owner was even louder- and most of the time it seemed as though the two sisters were on the brink of killing each other, such were the screams and squels we would here coming from downstairs.

Nancy also had a deeply ingrained mail phobia- most likely because she disliked paying- or even opening for that matter the bills she recieved. We had our own mailbox on the porch- but the lazy mailmen would often just see the big mailbasket she had sitting on the porch first and throw our mail and her mail together in a big pile. The problem with this is that Nancy used the mailbin basically like a trash bin. She neglected to pick up her mail for months or weeks at a time, and would sometimes tear open a piece of mail, but then just throw it back into the basket nonetheless. So when our mail wasn't put in our box, we'd have to sift through literally mounds of her unpaid bills (many of which bore threatening final notice stamps) to find what was ours.

Periodically we'd sort out all of her mail, put it in a plastic bad and stick it on her door handle- but it never changed her behavior. After she moved out I saw one piece of opened mail sitting right on top of her mail bin that I could not resist reading. It was her social security statement- which showed that she had claimed taxable income between about 10 and 15k for the last dozen or so years- this despite renting an apartment that itself cost 15k per year. Where on earth is the IRS when you need it, for a good audit? Even by Nancy's standards, I could not believe that she would open such a piece of mail and then just toss it on the top of her mailbin where anyone could read it.

While she didn't want to open her own mail, Jen and I both strongly suspected that she or Peter stole two UPS boxes that were left on our porch for us, and one box that was left for our landlords. All 3 boxes were left by UPS in a part of our covered porch that is not visible from the sidewalk or street- and Nancy's defensive and bizzare responses when I mentioned the thefts to her made me strongly suspicious that she or her son had taken them. One of the boxes contained Jen's Chrismtas gifts from my family, as well as priceless momento's from my childhood- hair from my first haircut, important documents, etc.

Throughout the entire time Nancy lived below us we had a constant battle with her over her smoking habit. The landlord told us that smoking was forbidden in the house- though we frequently smelled smoke that would waft up into our infant son's bedroom. Nancy had told the landlord that she was a nonsmoker- but every time she'd pull up in front of the house, we'd see a cigarette dangling from her lip. She adamantly denied smoking in her house- and claimed that what we smelled was her son "burning smelly incense." Aside from the fact that only a complete moron would confuse the smell of incense with nicotine- how many 13 year old boys do you know that are into burning incense? We tried to catch her "in the act" numerous times, but she just wouldn't answer her door whenver we smelled smoke.

Nancy had a 13 year old son named Peter whom we felt very sorry for, so I tried to be nice to him by giving him Sports Illustrated magazines, baseball cards, and other little trinkets that I thought he might enjoy. We knew his mom was nuts and not much of a mother at all- and his dad only stopped by to pick him up occasionally. Not only that, but we'd hear his insane mother berating him with the worst language you can imagine on a near nightly basis. It was impossible for us to know what he was being yelled at for, but we assumed it was more his mother's stupidity and vile demeanour more than anyting else. But Peter was no saint himself- probably not surprising given the Wal Mart quality upbringing he was recieving. One afternoon a few months ago, we went down into our storage area in the basement- a large area where we have excess furniture, clothing, hundreds of books, files and other things- and saw huge puddles of smelly water and a ceiling that was all wet and had a few large bubbles that were about to burst all over our belongings.

We contacted our landlord who called Nancy on her mobile. Nancy said that her son, Peter, had overflowed their toilet that morning, but thought he had "cleaned it up." Actually, what he did was overflow the toilet and then just left for school without bother to alert anyone to the problem, with the result being that our stuff was literally swimming in their fecal jamboree. I confronted Nancy, and she backed off of her earlier admission when I informed her that she'd need to clean and pay for our damaged stuff. She tried to claim that he hadn't overflowed the toilet, but that it had just been "running" for awhile. Her and her son made an extraodrinarily half hearted effort to clean the basement to no use. We had to toss out most of our stuff and insist that the landlord hire a professional firm to sterilize the room. There was never any apology from mother or son. She could only say, "these things happen, you don't think we did it on purpose do you?"

Several weeks after that unpleasant incident, we came home one afternoon to find Peter and one of his young friends scrubbing the exterior of our garage with a sponge. I gave him a puzzled look before noticing the orange paint he was trying to scub off. "Some of my friends came over and shot up the place with paint ball guns," he explained. I didn't really care much- seeing as though we are renters and a bit of paint didn't bother me too much anyways, until I later noticed that the little bastards had also shot a holt through our (previously) screened-in porch, and had sprayed orange paint all over the interior of our mailbox. Shortly thereafter the next door neighbors came over to ask me about the boy- they had also broken one of their windows (you could see remnants of the same orange paint along the edges of the cracked glass). Nancy claimed that since it wasn't her son that had done the shooting, that they weren't responsible for any of the damages.

These incidents, combined with our constant complaints, combined with the fact that she was consistently behind or completely delinquent on her rent forced the landlords to finally, and mercifully ask her to leave. We believed this to be great news, and it was, only she decided to leave behind a huge amount of filth and detritus when she left. Apparently she already owed the landlords for rent and damages, so she had no incentive to clean the place in order to recoup her security deposit.

Just a couple days before Nancy moved some of her belongings out of her apartment (only what she intended to keep), we noticed that the dryer wasn't working. We contacted the landlord and they resolved to have it fixed- only we later realized that ComED had disconnected her electricity for nonpayment- the dryer had been hooked up through her apartment (with the washing machine connected to ours). The landlord had to pay her huge arrears to have it restored, but since it was a disconnect, we had to wait more nearly two weeks to have it restored- all the while we had to hang dry our wet laundry all over the apartment.

We soon began to smell an unglodly odoring emanenting from Nancy's apartment- not only had she left tons of old furniture and crap in the apartment- she also left a frige full of food that rotted and drew insects after her electricity was disconnected. The landlords left the doors to Nancy's apartment wide open for a few days to air the place out, so Jen and I went in one day to look around the mess, and aside, from the accumulated junk of a pack rat, we found Peter's paint ball gun- still dripping with orange paint.

After the landlord cleaned up the mess, some of the insects began finding their way into our apartment. New tennants moved into Nancy's apartment and had their movers put all of Nancy's junk in our common laundry room- where it remained for weeks, until the landlords gave most of it to charity. Nancy's second car- an old SUV that was inoperable and had sat beached next to our garage for the entire year completely filled to the ceiling with junk, was also mercifully towed away.

Nancy is gone now, but not completely forgotten, we still have a huge old desk of hers that is sitting next to our garage waiting to be hauled away. One day I took a look at it- thinking about whether I should just go and buy the tag so the damn thing could be taken away- I opened one of the drawers and found an ashtray overflowing with cigarette butts. As the Sundays once crooned, "just a little souvenir from a terrible year."