ASSYMETRY AND ENTROPY, A LOVE STORY BY RYAN GOSSEN

October, 2004

          I am the landlord. I am the one to whom the checks go, who says stay or leave, on time or late, broken or whole, and since rent is due on the first of the month in advance, the one holding the money. I see the same paint on the walls, the same view from the windows, I hear the same squeak in the bedroom door, the same microscopic contours of greasy crumbs behind the oven as tenants, but I see them differently, and in less detail. They do not become the furniture of my unconscious as they do for someone who lives among them, and when I stand in a room with a tenant, I know we are not standing in the same room.

          Before I had learned the true importance of screening tenants, I admitted a young lady who seemed less than bright, but loosely organized in appearance. The unit in back had been vacant for three consecutive months, and the buffer in my account was drained dry from covering the mortgage. This was right after the dot-com bust, and rents were going down all over town as developers stubbornly completed the multiplexes and high rise apartments they had filed building permits for during the boom. The construction industry was doing well as a result, and propping up a portion of the local economy, as the mid-low end residential rental market flooded with vacant, new units and rents sank all over town. Two out of my four units were empty. I was desperate for breathing, pulsing, rent-paying flesh.

          Jenny was a bleached blonde with giant platform stripper shoes and a micro skirt. It’s always odd to show an empty unit to a woman. Sometimes its awkward, frequently there is sexual tension, if only on my side. When I feel tension, I am reflexively charming, which can be misinterpreted as flirtation. Possibly, this has lost me a number of tenants, who are disturbed at the combination of sex and the obvious power dynamics between a landlord and a prospective tenant. Sex between employee and employer can be prosecuted as a felony, but between a landlord and tenant, its considered more of a domestic situation. I was not sexually attracted to Jenny, at least not in a normal way for me. She did not look as if she got exercise; her joints were loose, with low muscle tone in her legs and face. Smooth, creamy legs tapered upward without muscular definition, to the hem of the denim skirt, which revealed a tiny and brief explosion of pink when she bent over to pick her purse up from the floor of her car after getting out. Her hips rose into her waist without tapering and continued up her ribcage without a change in grade on the sides. She had large breasts which were loose without being pendulous. They moved around and naturally drew attention in the low-cut, form fitting top that showed a long line of cleavage.

          I scrupulously avoided looking into that abyss when she faced me, but I somehow came to a detailed awareness of her chest all the same. She seemed more than satisfied with the unit, price, and location, which surprised me because the six people I had shown it to in the past week had all expressed some disappointment, if not distaste.

          She gave me a partially completed application, promising she would get the missing information to me in the next few days, as she tracked down the numbers of former landlords. Her boss at the hotel said she made the amount of money she had written and that she was in good standing. She was enrolled in the local university as she had indicated, and the person who answered the phone when I called the number she gave as her most recent landlord positively gushed at her reliability as a rent machine. The credit check came back ugly, and I brought that up with her when we met to sign the lease. She looked down at the table as we talked and did not respond. It was shocking actually, I felt like I could have easily sent her to her room or taken away the car, but instead I had her sign a one-year lease at a slightly higher than market rent.

          The boyfriend, Cory, was easy to get along with. He had a friendly face, and I didn’t mind him staying there, even though he was not specified in the lease as a resident. The apartment complex next door was a bit of a slum, and part of me didn’t like having single female tenants living on that side of the building. Cory was a hip-hop DJ and had boxes of equipment and milk crates filled with LPs stacked around the one bedroom/one bath unit. When they moved in, the place was filled from wall to wall, half way to the ceiling with junk. This is normal. Personal possessions increase in volume many-fold when displaced. But these were never fully organized. In the months that followed, new possessions were added, but there was never a period of consolidation or purging. I came to know their living conditions, as I frequently do, when things break and I come to fix them. I have a policy of not entering without specific permission from a tenant unless there is an emergency. This shouldn’t be a personal policy, since it’s a law, but in all the rental properties I have lived in as a renter (thirteen), a landlord or agent of the landlord entered my residence at some point, to fix something or just to look around, without my permission. At two places, property managers even went so far as to order me to clean the interior of the place after letting themselves in when I was not home.

          One day I was watching a plumber feed a rotating line of pipe “snake” into the sink of the adjacent unit, when it caught on something unseen. For fifteen minutes, sweat rolled down his forehead as he pushed it in, pulled it out, pushed it in, unable to dislodge it. He turned off the rotating motor and we talked for a moment. We theorized that, instead of going down into the drainage pipe, the snake had made a wrong turn and come out into the bathroom in the adjacent unit, pushing the drain stopper out and catching on the edge of the hole or the stopper itself. I opened Jenny’s unit and the young plumber followed me in. The door did not open all the way, stopping against a pile of something between the door and the wall.

          In the dim, closed window light, it was hard to distinguish furniture from clutter, as personal possessions and trash blended seamlessly into formations that were larger than the furniture. The kitchen was the same pattern repeated in dishes and food. I noticed the Chihuahua immediately because it moved and made noise. In a three by three wire cage, the tiny dog jittered and twitched anxiously next to a wadded up blanket, bowls of water and food, and another, smaller Chihuahua that was lying in the blanket, vibrating, its eyes fixed on me. I was unacquainted with both dogs and had not received a pet deposit for either. The smell, of course, was the worst part. The young plumber had tried to maintain a professional demeanor, but I think it was the kitchen that shocked him. “Oh, holy crap… “ Plumbers deal routinely with the blackest, vilest, foulest human filth in the physical world, removing it from pipes with their hands. Disgusting a plumber is no small accomplishment. The carpet was, needless to say un-vacuumed, and there were inch-long, hardened turds two or three per square foot.

          Climbing over piles, I saw that the bathroom door was open and the light was on. “Hello??” I shouted a few times, craning my neck around to get a glimpse inside, prepared to recoil in case a strung-out human was waiting to throw something or shoot at me. The plumber stood behind me waiting and the door was open behind him. The white walls, the mirror, the countless bottles and tubes on the sink and the sink itself were splattered with what looked like black ink in the bright light. All the black streaks formed straight lines radiating from the sink like an iris in a hideous eye. A three-foot length of snake stuck out of the sink and hung into the bathroom menacingly. The entire tangled chord of a hairdryer was wrapped around it and bunched in its dripping teeth, the once white dryer dangling limply from the end.

          I was amazed at the blackness of the substance, which was of the consistency of oil paint. I stayed and untangled the dryer and cleaned the mess off the walls and sink and hair products with a bucket and a big sponge while the plumber finished clearing the pipe from the other unit. He left quickly and without ceremony, leaving behind an extension cord.

          The rent had not been forthcoming. From the very start, Jenny had paid only portions of her rent at a time, often a combination of money orders, cash, and handfuls of change. I kept careful track of these omissions and sent her reports itemizing her debt and late fees via email. She unfailingly responded with confidence that all would be paid soon. Cory, whose presence had always been sporadic, had stopped appearing. When I visited Jenny one night, she sobbingly explained that he was in jail “again”, and had in fact hit her. I didn’t know if there was a partial truth to this, or if she was explaining why she hadn’t paid rent, but we ended our conversation with the usual pledge of payment, and I decided she would get one more letter.

          The eviction went in the classical manner, with a heap of the tenant’s possessions on the city right-of-way between the property line and the street. By law, I had to hire a constable to observe the proceedings as my friend Steve (also a small-time landlord) and I carried bed sheet-loads of personal possessions mixed with filth. The constable charged $90 an hour and I had hired him for only one. This lent the eviction a shopping spree-like quality as Steve and I tried to grab as much filth and debris as we could. Plastic, leather, cotton, paper, and feces, all composting in undisturbed piles, thrown into the sheet and dragged out by the corners. The Mexicans who lived at the slum next door were attuned to the event and a dozen came out to pick through the pile. I had hoped to eliminate a significant portion of the proceeds this way, but very few things, the TV cabinet, a hair curler, a computer monitor, were taken. While going through the kitchen drawers, Steve found a ball of white powder wrapped in a square of clear plastic so that the corners were held together on one side by a rubber band. He brought it to the constable, an obese man whose gun belt was pushed nearly parallel to the floor by his gut. He had chatted ceaselessly as we worked, and now Steve handed him the bag.

          “What?”

          “Well, I don’t know, I just found it in the drawer, looks like… drugs?”

          The constable opened the bag and dipped his pinky into it. It came up white like baby powder and he touched it to his tongue. “Oh, no. This isn’t anything.” He said, replacing the rubber band, and dropping the bag into his pocket.

          In an hour we were able to move everything but the smaller articles of trash out, and the constable pronounced the tenants officially evicted, transferring possession legally back to me.

          It took me weeks to get the pile off the city right-of-way. For one thing, I didn’t know for sure if it was my obligation to remove it. It wasn’t mine, nor was it on my property. It was a horrible eye-sore, and the rain smoothed it down and made it look like a snow-mogul made of trash. But trash would have been better; there is something special about an eviction pile. This was someone’s life, a kind of corpse. It brought down the whole street. When I finally had it hauled away, there were rolled up carpets and blue carpet pads on top, which I had pulled up myself. The dog shit was too ubiquitous, the multiple stains too intransigent, and the smell too permanent. I spent a couple weeks installing industrial rated laminate wood flooring so that the place would never again accept such a horrible and personal imprint. After the unit was painted, it rented immediately.

          I gave Jenny to a collection agency, and they could find no trace of her. I saw her once in a café I frequent but did not make myself known. It was winter and she wore long baggy black pants and a baggy black sweater and little makeup. I was more inclined to hide than confront her, but she didn’t appear to notice me. I look for traces of her in tenants I interview, aspects of weakness and vanity, asymmetries in the face and voice that could be separated by the natural forces of entropy. I look for a center that can hold a person’s life. If I don’t find it, I feel my stomach fall out in a wild spiral, flailing black oil across a bathroom mirror, and I look for someone else.

Ryan Gossen is thirty-five years old, has not yet reproduced, and enjoys a good campfire. He currently works, maintains interpersonal relationships, and contemplates the strange curves that life has thrown him in Austin, Texas.