Punishment

During armed forces basic training, we would get assigned push ups on pretty much an hourly basis. Someone would do something stupid, like not call an officer sir, and we would be assigned push ups. Run too slow to mess? Push ups. Bedsheets not tight enough? Push ups.

There we were outside, all in orderly rows and columns stretched out along the ground in the push up position, and someone actually asked the Sergeant, why did they always punish us with push ups. The Sergeant, he says to us, you think of this as punishment? We don't give you push ups as punishments, we give them to you because you need them, and you just got the whole lot of you twenty five more.

Message

There's a message on my answering machine that I haven't erased yet. It's my landlady and she says, "your cheque bounced for March, you still haven't paid for April. I want you out of there by April thirtieth because they're going to unfortunately send the bailiff and he's going to take everything you've got in there."

It's now May.

After she left the message I spoke to her and I said that I understand the problem with having me as a tenant. My apartment is filthy making it difficult to rent out to new potential tenants. I have problems paying the rent. I tell her that I understand and that I'm willing to leave if she'll sign a Cancellation of Lease Agreement, two copies of which are on my dining room table, which would make it so that I am no longer financially responsible for the apartment after I leave.

She refused to sign. She said she'll sign that if she can find new tenants.

Every weekend she shows my apartment. Prospective tenants, they come in here, and when she's in the other room they ask me, why are so many people leaving this building? What is so wrong with it that almost half of the tenants are leaving or already gone?

And I tell them about my apartment. I tell them about the lack of electricity in the bathroom, the likely mould-filled cracks along the bathroom wall, the toilet that won't stop running. I tell them how the water comes out of the taps brown. I mention the silverfish that scurry out of and along the walls. The balcony with the rotted wood flooring and the rusty rails.

The landlady has yet to find new tenants for my apartment.

Needed

You ring the buzzer outside of his door and it will open eventually. The janitor, grey hair and wheezing lungs, is always there in his windowless flat, always with the telly on. Everything in there looks like it would be appropriate on the set of a black and white sitcom, the couch, the carpeting, the chairs. The only time I make my way down the stairs, through the garage, and past the boiler room to his flat is when I need tokens for the laundry machine. Rent cheques I just drop into his mailbox.

They took him away in an ambulance today, although they didn't bother with the flashing lights and the siren. The landlady found him when she came to collect the rent cheques. None of the tenants remember the last time they saw him. Maybe last week?

During the winter, when he was in the hospital for a month, they told him there he needed an operation, triple bypass surgery. His life, they said, depended on it. He opted against the surgery.