"How I got evicted," by M.A. Rediker

We all know that recycling is important to lesbians. It is how we worship. We tend to the earth.

On Sunday, when I leaving Sue in Dudley to head back to our home in Boston, we loaded up the back of my truck with recycling from the Wedda house, as Dudley doesn't have a recycling program. I drove all the plastic and aluminum back to Brighton and carried it all into the house, where it sat blocking the cupboards all week.

On Wednesday night, after having gathered all the trash and our own recycling from our OWN house, I sat on the kitchen floor for about ½ an hour SORTING it all into various paper bags.

Thursday morning, before going to the gym, I was taking it all out to the curb when Crazy Lady (our landlord and upstairs neighbor, Mary) decided to come out and do hers, too. She was going to be away for the day, to the senior center. She didn't want me putting the barrel or the recycling bin out because she wouldn't be home to rush outside and put them back in the garage the minute each receptacle was emptied. She took all her trash out of the barrel and put it in 1 big bag to take to the curb, and I carried all my trash and each recycling bag to the curb with no barrel or bin.

Just seeing or talking to Crazy Lady most days is enough to drive us mad.

She has an amazing gift for sensing when I'm freshly out of the shower and buck nekkid. When my nekkid aura is in the air, that is usually the precise moment she will ring the doorbell. I was lucky this particular morning, though. She called instead. She asked if I would come right down to the basement so she could show me something.

Twice. Twice in 1 day I've got to deal with her.

I told her I'd just gotten out of the shower and would need a few minutes to get dressed. She was messing up my routine! I had to decide quickly what I was going to wear. As it was St. Pat's... I had to find something GREEN which, well, limited my wardrobe tremendously. Not to mention I like to take my time, lollygag around when deciding what to wear.

Finally dressed, I went downstairs, thinking that she'd found something ELSE we'd managed to hide from her in the basement and wanted to fuss about. The basement is spotless and empty, other than, say the washer & dryer, and a metal shelf for our detergent and a few boxes she allowed us to put on a table top. No, wasn't that she'd found something else I'd hidden, like it was the previous week. It was just that there were a small number of tiny, brown rust spots on a white sheet she'd just washed. She was angry because now she'd have to throw it away. She thought the city had turned the water off and then back on, so she wanted to warn us, before we did a load of whites ourselves. I'm thinking "You called me down here for that? You couldn't have just TOLD me on the phone???"

I sat down to eat my breakfast. The spoonful of oatmeal was just about to enter my mouth when the doorbell rang. "What in fuck's name...?!" I ran to the back door, and she wasn't there. I ran to the front door, which is a pain in my ass. It's a very old door, and it's not a tight seal. There's a good storm door, but with the cracks in the main door, it doesn't make much difference. It's MIGHTY drafty. I was RIPSHIT last year when she replaced our tiny mail slot with an ENORMOUS one. She was worried about the mailman placing our magazines and junk flyers between the storm and main doors because they didn't fit thru the smaller slot. Maybe somebody would STEAL our junk mail. Egads! So this new, enormous slot, that's an increase in MY oil bill, after all. I was pissed when I was unsuccessful in my attempt to persuade her to NOT make the change. To deal with the draft, I have a towel on the floor lining the door, and Sue's beanbag blockading it for extra insulation. Yes, I know. Suzy Safety (my GS alter ego... "Safety first, Rebellion second," right Skip?) has been trumped by my miserly side. I threw the bean bag aside, pulled the towel away from the cracks and opened the door. She's standing there with Sue's Sunday Boston Globe, which had... not been missed at all during the course of the week and sat on the stoop. Crazy Lady had taken a pillow out to the curb to throw away (Crazy Lady throws more pillows away than... I don't know! Does she get a new one every 2 weeks???) and saw the paper on the front stoop. Apparently, she felt I needed the week's old news immediately!

I looked at the paper. I looked at her. I looked at the recycle pile on the curb. I questioned aloud if I should just go put it in the recycles. It's old news now. It's not like I'm gonna read it. I dismally thanked her and took the paper inside and put it in the basket for next week's recycling, annoyed that she AGAIN disrupted my morning for something completely unimportant, irrelevant. Would the world come to an end if the paper sat untouched on my doorstep until Saturday or Sunday? Or better, why didn't she just take it down to the basement and put it on our dryer, which she normally does when we're away? She must have felt I'd want to READ it straight away! That had to be it!

I was finally ready for work. I put my coat on and went into the office to put something away. I saw the garbage truck backing up to our curb. Crazy Lady came FLYING down the stairs and ran to meet the garbage crew.

"This should be good," I thought. She's had feuds going on for YEARS now with the garbage and recycling crews.

She stood there talking to the man. She pointed at the trash. Then she pointed at the recycles.

"No she DID-ENT!" I thought!

Yes, she DI-ID.

I WAS HORRIFIED AND ABSOLUTELY LIVID when he picked up my recycling bags and threw them in the garbage truck. I wanted to smash out the windows, throw myself out through gaping holes of glass and grab them from his hands. I ran to the front door and was hampered by the difficult lock, the bean bag and towel that I had so carefully replaced after receiving the Sunday Globe from Crazy Lady.

I slung my briefcase over my shoulder and went running through the house to go to the back door. Entering the bedroom, the briefcase hit the doorjamb and fell off my arm. Following the laws of physics, it maintained it's velocity and forward trajectory while submitting to gravity. It made contact with my broken wooden filing cabinet that serves as Sue's bedside table.

When I bought the thing in the early 90's from KMart, it was broken. I bought it in Bangor on my way back to Boston after xmas, so it was just EASIER to keep it than return it. It was functional, after all, even if the top front "plate," which keeps the sides of the cabinet "pulled together" was broken. It sometimes made the top drawer sag a little, but worked. Sort of.

The briefcase flew into the top front plate and shattered it. As I ran thru the kitchen, I heard the smashing, splintering sounds of the wood and the tumbling of the drawers.

My fury was just building.

I ran across the back porch and met her at the bottom of the steps.

I lit into her. I couldn't help it. I did. I yelled and yelled at my landlady.

"WHY did you do that?!" I demanded to know. "Recycling is very important to us!" I yelled that I'd spent a LOT of time working on it that week. Then, horrified as what I was doing sunk in, I yelled an apology at her, saying that I was sorry, I was taking all my anger out on her. She wanted to know what I was angry at.

"Sue's Dad is dying!" I yelled.

Then she yelled back at me about her own health issues (she had a procedure done the previous week that Sue's sister, an MD, said was not a serious) and about her poor son's dog Buddy, who had 2 toes amputated last week. She was stressed about those things. (You're comparing a dog toes to Sue's Dad's dying?!)

I just wheeled and kept yelling over my shoulder that I was late for work and had to go back inside to get my stuff. She angrily yelled "Have a nice day!" and I yelled, "You, too."

OK, I've always thought I had the patience of Job.... (Mom always said that....) We always thought Sue, being the Scorpio, would be the one to lose it with Crazy Lady and light into her. I have to admit, although I'm STILL furious at Crazy Lady, it felt INCREDIBLY satisfying to vent it at her. She's been driving us crazy since the moment we moved in!

On my way to work, I called Sue. I thought she'd relish the story, want to live the satisfaction vicariously. After all, after Crazy Lady discovered a rug I'd rolled, wrapped in garbage bags and hidden in the basement BEHIND a closet 2 weeks ago (24 hours after I put it there), Sue's response back to me, via cell phone text message, was "Tell her to stick the rug up her ass."

Sue was NOT amused by the story. (And I STILL am amused by it, despite the fact that I'm still pissed at Crazy Lady because she had no right to do throw our recycling away.)

We GOT this apt because "something happened" and Crazy Lady was suddenly afraid of her previous tenants and refused to renew their lease. They lasted just 1 year. I'm sure I know what happened. Crazy Lady drove her tenants bonkers. Like me, one of them snapped. That we've been in this apt, what, coming up on 4 years... her son keeps telling me he & his sister want to give us xmas bonuses. I know that is why the rent has not gone up. She could be getting at least $4-500 more for our apt than what we're paying.

Sue's response was not what I expected.

"Oh my god! This is the LAST thing I need to think about right now," she told me from her cell phone at her Dad's house. "Crazy Lady is now going to be afraid of US and not renew OUR lease! I'm not going to be in the mood to be looking for a new apartment this September." Then she paused and said, "Well, we'll just move to Dudley." She & Bev are inheriting her Dad's house and it will take at least a year for them to go thru all the crap before they can sell it. "We can live in Dudley for a year."

"I am NOT living in Dudley," I thought angrily.

Sue called me back a little later in the morning, much more rational and supportive. She said she was joking about living in Dudley. Maybe she was getting over the angst of my having yelled at Crazy Lady. Maybe she was finally hitting the vicarious thrill of it all.