Category — Landlord Biz

To report an odor of gas, please call the East Ohio Gas Company (EOG).

Question: Has anybody ever donated to EOG?  On the monthly EOG bill, there is a space for voluntary contributions. Who gives to EOG?  EOG has an ego problem.

I give to EOG.  And it hurts.  I don’t give charity; I give dollars for heat.  Not-news  department . . . Cleveland has long cold winters.

Emily, a former tenant, asked if I would pay her $66.24 EOG bill, because she had moved and the gas company was still billing her for stove gas.

I wasn’t going to pay Emily’s bill.  I pay the apartment gas bill but typically not the tenants’ individual stove bills. I volunteered to call EOG for Emily.

EOG wouldn’t talk to me because I wasn’t Emily.  Fine.  I don’t enjoy talking to EOG.   This dispute was between EOG and Emily, EOG said.

Or maybe the dispute was between Emily and my new tenant, Elizabeth, who was possibly using Emily’s stove gas.

I told Emily I would call Elizabeth.

Elizabeth — the new tenant — said to me, “I’m in this apartment only three days a week. I use the toaster-oven and microwave.  I don’t even use the stove!  It’s off.”

Impossible, Emily told me.  And she added, “Somebody incurred a sixty-six dollar bill. It wasn’t me!”

But you can incur a $66.24 gas bill just by glancing at your stove, Emily.  There is something called a “basic monthly charge.”  Right now that charge is $19.63.

Emily wrote me several letters, the last one ending: “See you soon in court.”

I smelled an odor of gas.

I received a 25-page small-claims lawsuit.  Emily wanted her gas money back, plus double her security deposit, for a total of $1,150.71.

The magistrate, plus Emily, Emily’s dad and I, met in a hearing room at city hall.  The dad was OK; he parked next to me and didn’t “key” my car.

I had a letter from EOG, explaining who had service when and in who’s name.  I won because of that letter.  An EOG secretary  had done me a favor.  Her letter was not from the pre-approved letters’ templates, she explained.

Thank you, EOG.  I  pledge $___.  

How much should I give?  Double chai?

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[Goys only: Chai (life) equals 18.  Double chai is 36.]

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Please see the post below too.  It’s fresh.

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This insurance agency used to be a witch’s store.  Before that, it was a deli.

Here’s the store’s story, as told by Mr. Landlord. [Please click on the video to continue.]

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A modern apartment is easy to paint. You just roll the drywall.

Prewar apartments, however, can take two days or more.  You need to cut-in at the baseboards and at the mullions, and sometimes it’s smart to use two shades of white to contrast the woodwork and the walls.

sSteve — a West Side apartment painter — has more words for white than Jews have for fool. Steve talks about antique white, Navajo white, pearl white, bone white and pure white (a.k.a. hospital white). [Fool in Yiddish: nar, shlemiel, shmendrik, shmegege, yold.]

The big question at Lakewood Paint and Wallpaper was “Oil or latex?”  Another pertinent question was:  “Is Dutch Standard the same as Dutch Boy?”  No, Dutch Standard is from Canton, Ohio.  Dutch Boy is the nationally known subsidiary from Sherwin-Williams, Cleveland.

Bill, a paint salesman, made regular calls at Lakewood Paint.  He said, “I would stick with an alkyd [oil].  You kids will try anything.”  He looked at me.  “Let me ask you something.  Are you a Yehudi?  That’s a word only one of us would know.  What’re you doing here?”  (On the West Side.)

“I work for my old man.”  (I was 26.)

“Four years of fun and game at college,” Bill said. “Now look!”  He studied my painter’s clothes.  “There are only two Yehudis at Dutch Standard.  Me and another guy.”

. . . Yehudi Ha-Rishon (The First Jew).  That was a Hebrew school primer about Abraham.

Yehudi Ha-Shayni (The Second Jew).  That was Bill, who wandered the Northeast Ohio paint-store circuit in the 1970s.

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A man with a strong Israeli accent called. I thought he wanted to rent a store.  A lot of prospective store renters have foreign accents, particularly Middle Eastern.

But the Israeli wanted to talk music. He wanted to sell me a Yiddishe Cup ringtone.

Then I got a call from Elias, who wanted to open a bakery.

“You would be my second Elias!” I said.

This Elias – like the first Elias — was Lebanese.

I’ve also rented to Eli, a driving school operator.

Christian Arabs are often Eli, Elias, or Mike. Or Sammy.

I rented to Shaukat Ali.  Not a Jew.  (Not a Christian either.)  Ali was a Pakistani computer repairman.  He began wearing all white, growing a beard and praying in his store.  He lost some business.

Widad called.   I asked Widad if that was her first name.  Yes.  She wanted to open an Arab restaurant.  She said, “Have you ever been to the Middle East?”

“Israel,”  I said.

No biggie.  Most Arab store owners are just trying to make a living.

I once attempted to talk Middle East politics with an Arab tenant.  He said, “That’s over there.  I’m here.”

Wadid wanted to sign the lease right then.  I said, “Whoa, Widad” (to myself).   I said, “You’ll need about $100,000 for grease traps, exhaust hoods, upgraded electrical service, architectural drawings, two ADA-approved bathrooms and a fire extinguisher system.”

The restaurant didn’t happen.

***

There were two Ivans, both Croatian shoe repairmen. One was small and friendly, and the other was terrible.  He banged so relentlessly on his anvil he nearly drove the photographer next-door nuts.  I had the walls soundproofed.

But we purposefully did a shoemaker (a lousy job) on soundproofing the shoe repair store.  To soundproof a room correctly, you have to float a new wall and stuff the crawl space with fiberglass, and it still won’t work.

A friend considered opening a cupcake shop.

Cleveland is not cupcakeville, I thought.  I said, “You can go broke with a trendy concept in Cleveland.”

You don’t need cupcakes.

But if you do, there is an excellent Hungarian bakery. You drive by this place for years and don’t even notice it.  Tommy’s Pastries, Madison Avenue, West Side.  There is nothing in the display windows.  Tommy’s makes a zserbó, a chocolate/walnut/apricot dessert.

Zserbó is the Cleveland cupcake.

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Bandleader Walt Mahovlich told me about Tommy’s and zserbó.    (Pronounced ZHAIR-boh.)
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Here’s an amusing new video — and free singing lesson — from Yiddishe Cup’s alternate drummer:

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Please see the post below too.  It’s fresh goods.

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The tenant — a poet — said she liked the way the sunlight glinted through her living room blinds onto the hardwood floor.

“But what really got me,” she said, “was your company’s Craigslist ad about ‘a closet big enough to park a Mini Cooper in.'”

I liked her. She liked my copy writing.  She thanked me for “two wonderful years.”

Another tenant — a waitress — interrupted the landlord-poet lovefest. The waitress, standing at the poet’s door, said another tenant — a third person — had just stolen the waitress’ skirt from the laundry room dryer and was wearing it.

“Wearing it in the building?” I said.

“Yes.”

The skirt was a full-length, tie-dyed orange, green and red hippie shmate.  The skirt’s owner — the waitress — was  26.

The thief was a middle-aged black woman who wouldn’t answer her door. Not even when the cops showed up.

Meanwhile, I was also dealing with a drunk who had run her faucet all night, on purpose, and had called my manager a “pig.”

That woman got an eviction notice right then.

I decided to phone the black woman about the tie-dyed skirt.  I got her boyfriend.  Good.  He was on the lease; she wasn’t.  I told him the skirt thief had to be out in three days.

“Don’t put me out!  She’ll go,” he said.  He was a solid tenant, other than he left cigarette butts all over.   He was 69 and “country” — from Tennessee.    On his rent checks he wrote rant instead of rent in the memo line. (Another poet?)

“She can’t stay more than three days,” I said.

“Can I ask, sir, why is that?'”

“I rented to you, not her.  The woman is not on the lease.”

I didn’t bring up the stolen skirt matter; that would have complicated things. But I wanted to say: “The next time your lady friend steals clothes from the laundry room, tell her not to wear the skirt in the building!”  Out in three days.

My poet tenant enclosed a poem with her final rent payment.  It began:

The way the forecast told of dark clouds,
drizzle, seemed more true than the way
the sun lit hills of trees, dull golds, rusts.

[by Karen Schubert]

I read that poem about 10 times.  I concluded it was a “winter is a-comin in” poem.   The drunks and skirt thieves were a comin’ in for the winter.

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Reminder: This blog is updated twice a week: Wednesday and Friday mornings.  Please see the post below too.  It’s kind of  fresh.

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This is the most acclaimed animation yet from the guys over at Challah-Barbaric.  This movie may appear like a navel-gazing indulgence, but it’s not.  It’s magical.

Should I rent to a Stripper? is the lost collaboration between Fred Flintstone and Maimonides. It is a guide for the perplexed landlord and tenant.

The two main characters — a sleazy guy from Yiddishe Cup LLC and a bug-eyed naïf — turn the nasty, grim, cutthroat real estate world into something even grimmer — and very robotic.

The landlord is so pompous at first.  Then he’s more so. But the young lady draws forth a bit of the landlord’s humanity and even a Chanukah song lyric.

After the movie, the couple goes for drinks and has an affair.

2:57 minutes. United States, 2010
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[The first paragraph in the capsule movie review (above) is lifted, in part, from John Ewing’s Cleveland Cinematheque calendar.]
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This blog is updated every Wednesday and Friday morning.  Please check out the post below. It is recently hatched.

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Before I hire a building manager, I interview the candidate at his residence.

One man’s house had no front stoop, and he had four dogs in the living room.  There was hardly any non-dog space in that house.  We wound up in a bedroom on the third floor.  There was a big bird up there.

How about a doormat that says “Got beer?”

I once hired a woman with that doormat and she worked out well. She was a steady worker and controlled her drinking.

Ethnic factory workers are usually solid too.   Too bad they don’t exist anymore.

Ethnics or factories?

Both.

Benny Artino, a building manager, worked the day shift at Eaton Axle. His wife, Betty, was the world’s best cleaner.  She wanted to be buried with a can of Comet.  I gave Betty an unlimited cleaning budget.  She liked to vacuum the halls every day.  I didn’t try to stop her.  Why would I?

When the Artinos’ son Paisan bought an apartment building in Tampa, he asked my advice, and I said: “Buy the biggest building you can afford.  You might have one boiler and one roof for multi-suites, or you can have the same  one boiler and one roof for a double house.”

One of my worst hires was a cocaine addict. She ran up my Home Depot account with charges for an air compressor and tool box.  The gift certificate $50 was over the top.   She fenced the items.

After I fired her, I went to Taco Bell to reconsider.  My father had given an employee a second chance after she had ripped him off, and she had repaid my dad and stayed on the job.

But my custodian — the coke head — had told me, “I have a few shopliftings but I never stole from people.”  Was I not people?

I stuck with fired. I didn’t say, “You’re fired.”  I said, “If you turn in the keys this weekend, I’ll pay your moving expenses and give you four-hundred dollars, and I won’t call the cops.”  Sometimes it pays to pay people to move.

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My favorite manager, at least to listen to, was  “Roy Hamilton,” circa 1978.  (“Roy Hamilton” is a composite of  several former building managers.*) . . .

Bert, little bitty buddy, I’ll tell you one thing I done: I had this old car, couldn’t get it to do nothing.  I pushed and pulled and beat on it.  Then I throwed it over a cliff by the Rapid ravine. I said, “Let’s throw over a car.”  Me and my boys done it.

My old lady was against it.  She was the biggest woman for churchgoing you ever seen.  She thought she was better than me.

She was skinnier than a stick. Totally emancipated.   And ornery.  When she got money, that heifer, watch out.    Man, I didn’t dig her.

She’s still here, on Madison,  over a jukebox.  She breaks 100 on a good night at Mahall’s [bowling alley].   She came at me with a mouth full of beer.  Got all over the floor and balls.

She’s got claws. They all do.  Bert, there’s a lot of good-looking heads out there just waiting to nail you to the cross.

She makes me sick. Ferocious of the liver.  That’s a situation.  Nobody comes between me and my beer, but that broad somehow does.

It’s all in the numbers.   Course it is.  I ain’t asking for much.  This upcoming  repression is going to be  so bad it’ll shake your teeth loose.  I  just want to be reborn the poodle of a rich lady.  That’s my next life.

Little bitty buddy, you got a number?  Ain’t nothing but 1, 2, 3.   Give me a number.   What’s the new rent on apartment 34?  $235?   That’s my number.  You just gave me a number!

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* “Roy Hamilton”  is mostly the real Roy Hamilton, a Tennessee-born building manager who was a painter at Midland Steel (Cleveland). He died in 1984.   Note:  I lifted several lines (in the first two paragraphs of this “Roy Hamilton” saga ) from Arkansas writer Charles Portis, to get in  gear.

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1 of 2 posts for 10/20/10.  Please see the post below too (which was technically put up yesterday).

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Ted Budzowski was my dad’s favorite building manager.  Maybe because they were both Teds.

My dad was “Ted” at work and “Toby” at home.  Ted Budzowski was “Ski” at his day job (crane operator at Republic Steel) and “Ted” around the building.

Ted Budzowski could have treated me like a silver-spoon son of a boss, but instead he invited me down to the mill on family day.  I didn’t make it to the mill for some reason.  Everything was air-conditioned at the mill now, Ted said, including his crane cab.

I eventually caught a tour of the mill with the Society for Industrial Archeology.  The slabs of molten steel coming from the furnace looked like creamsicles.  Big red melting blocks.

My dad and Ted talked in a clipped cadence, like telegrams.  Ted would say, “The kid [tenant] is hanging on by the grace of God.”  That meant pay up.

“That tenant is a troublemaker,” my dad answered.

“The kid better not raise a rumpus.”

“He’s thinks he’s cute.” Toby said.

“Yeah, tell it to the judge,” Ted said.

“Give him an eviction notice.”

Ted had two Stratoloungers in his living room, an Okinawan mongoose-and- cobra souvenir, and a tree-stump occasional table, which his son had made. The son lost $8,000 on tree stump tables, which never caught on big in Cleveland.  The good news was the son also was a retired career solider.

Ted Budzowski, 1978, age 63

Toby and Ted were about the same age.   Toby was from Kinsman Road, and Ted had grown up in Youngstown, Ohio, near Cowshit Hill (a real place).  Ted’s kids had made it out, just like Toby’s.   Ted’s second son worked for the phone company.

When Ted retired to Texas to live near his military son, I hired Buck, a hard case who had grown up in a Tennessee orphanage.  Buck didn’t like certain people, particularly sons of bosses.  Buck thought many routine tasks — cleaning up after tradesmen, watering outdoor plants — were not part of the job.

Buck frequently got “porky” with me.  (That was West Side talk for “argumentative.”)  Ted, on the other hand, had always been helpful.  Ted would tell me when my tire pressure was low.  He could sense low tire pressure.  He thought about tire pressure.  

For his last 15 years, Ted’s HQ was probably his Stratolounger in San Antonio.  He didn’t check back with me, except for an annual holiday card.

Meanwhile, Buck was raising prices unilaterally on odd jobs.  He never asked what I thought the job was worth. Who was bossing whom?

I had a hard time bossing around people older than myself.

That changed. I got older.
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1 of 2 posts for 8/25/10.  Please see the post below too.

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The meanest, baddest landlord in America is John T. Reed, a West Point grad in Alamo, California.  In Reed’s world, if you’re a day late with your rent, you’re on the curb with your cat and kitty litter.

Reed lost a ton of money in real estate, and made a lot of money writing about it.  I’ve read most of his books; he’s a good writer and smart.  (There are many savvy landlords but not many can write.  They’re too busy at target practice.)  Reed shows you how to twist tenants’ arms until they say: “Here’s the rent, sir, and it’s a day early!”

Reed claims you can mail it in — not the rent, but your on-site supervision.  Reed, living in California, owned apartments in Texas, so he sent postcards to his tenants, instructing them to drop dimes/postcards on his custodians and their job performances.

That long-distance supervision doesn’t work.  If I don’t check my buildings  at least once a week in person, the buildings will turn into dumps — Magic Marker on the mailbox labels, the exit lights burned out, and 100 cigarette butts on the stoop.

Nothing gets done if I don’t show up.  The painter, his back goes out until I show up.  I’m better than a chiropractor.  The Yellow Pages directories pile high in the lobby until I show up.  The grass doesn’t get cut until I show up.  I understand all that.

I say to my building managers: “You need to take care of this right away.”  And I show up.

I conduct exit surveys. I ask my former tenants if my buildings and managers are good.  The ex-tenants, long gone, are totally honest because they face no repercussions from building managers.

Here is a sample of  former tenants’ replies:

The apartment flooded.  It was not my fault!

I didn’t know I would need air conditioning in Ohio. And there wasn’t any!  [From a Californian.]

Water pressure — terrible.

Workers parked in my spot, and I was paying for it.

The marijuana smoke from the alley was very strong, and spending the summer with the windows closed was not acceptable.

The favorable comments, you don’t want to hear.  Too self-serving, too bubbly.

Maybe I should write a Nice Guy Landlord handbook.  That’s a niche John T. Reed won’t fill.  My title: How to Manage Apartments and Jam with Your Tenants, with accompanying CD featuring the songs “You Tore Out My Window Screens, Now my Heart?”, “I’d Like to Go Month-to-Month with You, Baby” and “I Can’t Find the Handle (To Your Refrigerator of Love).”

John T. Reed could be my sound man at real estate conventions.  We could share a booth. Do a good cop/ bad cop thing and split the profits.

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1 of 2 posts for 7/21/10.  Please see the post below too.

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My father, Toby, owned a modern “apartment community.” The complex was “garden-style,” meaning three-story buildings grouped around a parking lot and pool.  The buildings had mansard roofs and looked like McDonald’s.  The place had an Anglo name.  Jamestown.  Should have been Jonestown.

The development looked genteel but wasn’t.  One guy peed in the heating ducts and poured aquarium gravel in the toilet on his way out.  Some tenants used the hollow-core doors for karate practice.

A high school wrestling coach, who was also a multi-millionaire, bought the complex and turned it into condos in 1977.  Worked out for everybody.  As the banker said to Toby, “You made your money, and he made his. Be happy.”

I used to repair the complex’s roofs, mostly replacing lids on vents.  The lids were called Jap caps because of their coolie-hat shape.

There is no more peaceful place than a roof top — at least a flat roof.  You can see everybody, and nobody can see you.  That’s why cops in The Wire go on roofs so often.

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“I’m in real estate.”

I say that whenever I don’t feel like saying “I’m a landlord.”  If I say “I’m a landlord,” people often hear “I’m a slumlord.”

I don’t sell houses or flip properties.  I collect rent, evict people, charge late fees, and look for cats in apartment windows so I can charge pet fees. Does that sound like a slumlord?

When I vacationed at the Michigan alumni family camp, I introduced myself at the meet-and-greet as a landlord and klezmer musician.  People laughed at the “landlord” part, particularly the campers with advanced degrees.  “Landlord” was so bad it was good. “Klezmer” was cool — the arts.

I came across a Yiddish anti-landlord song in the klezmer business. “Dire Gelt” (Rent).  The lyrics, in brief, are: “Why should we pay rent when the stove is broken?”

I’ve heard that line before about the broken stove.  Not often.  It’s usually “My bathroom ceiling is falling in.”  It’s all about water damage in the landlord biz.

And it’s occasionally about animals.

What bugs me: tenants who ask for a hotel room because they saw a mouse.

Mice are good people. I’ve had mice in my house. I don’t run to a hotel every time I see a mouse, and my bank doesn’t give me a reduction on my mortgage payment.
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1 of 2 posts for 4/21/10.  Please see the next post too.

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A tenant almost sued me for icicle damage to her body.  A falling icicle grazed her shoulder.  She said it was a 25-pound icicle.

She wouldn’t have won.  There is no law stating I control the weather.  But she might have endlessly bugged me, so I told her to take some money off her rent.

There is no way to prevent ice buildup unless you put a heating cable in the gutter.  And I’m not going to do that.

Icicles: Ice==ik=uhls==.  I’ve seen six-foot icicles.

Icicles are in the playoff series, nature division, along with cardinals, sycamores and lightning bugs.

At the Webb building on the West Side, the icicles look like Niagara Falls in stop-action. The alleyway in back of the Webb building should be declared a national sanctuary for icicles; it is so frigid and dark back there.  The alley is a mile from frozen-over Lake Erie and gets no sun because apartment buildings dwarf it on each side.

A college film crew shot a crime/action movie in the alley.  They strewed litter to make it look worse.  (They picked the litter up afterward.)  They spread rock salt to melt the snow and ice.  Use the snow, use the icicles. Work with it.  Dueling icicles.
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2 of 2 posts for 3/3/10

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I miss eviction court. Hopefully, the feds will let landlords evict again. Supposed to be Sept. 3, now — the date to reopen the evictions courts nationwide.  We’ll see.

I do my own “forcible entry and detainers.”

That means evictions.

First, I serve the deadbeat tenant an eviction notice. Technically, that is a three-day notice.

Then I go to the court, and for $125 fill out another piece of paper, called a “forcible entry.” On the form, under the “second cause of action,” I write: “Tenant owes back rent.” I used to write novellas: “Blah, blah, wherefore plaintiff prays for damages and the cost of this action . . .” A waste of time. The tenant is broke; you’re not going to get anything by writing more.

I occasionally lose a case — usually on oddball stuff.  Like when an AIDS victim claimed I didn’t rent to him because of his illness. I didn’t know he had AIDS. We settled for $620. I was fine with that. You know what a real discrimination case can cost? Five-thousand dollars, for starters.

Another AIDS victim wanted to move from the fourth floor to the first. I didn’t want that; the guy was always late with his rent, and I would have to repaint his old suite and his new one. He got a lawyer who said I was discriminating. I said, “Can I help you with that couch?” The tenant moved to the first floor and died a couple months later.

Lawyers say past rent is “recoverable.” Yes, the rent is recoverable, but try to recover money from somebody who’s broke. Not recoverable.

The courts have determined that accepting late rent “effectively waives strict compliance with the rental terms.”

Strict compliance?  Who’s into strict compliance? I accept late rent payments. I don’t say to tenants, “Oh, it’s the eighth of the month, I can’t accept your rent.”

I sometimes hire a lawyer for legal complications — matters beyond the workaday. For instance, the city wanted to ban basement dwellings because the mayor thought below-ground suites were a throwback to the dark ages when custodians lived underground and stoked coal-fired boilers. My lawyer brought a stenographer to the city hearing. The city guys were impressed with that. Also, a group of ethnic babushka landladies — who owned basement rental units too — were there. Afterward, they thanked me for stymying the city’s effort.

Quasi-legal advice:

1. Do not discriminate against people with kids.  Federal law prohibits it.

2. Do discriminate on age — on the young side — if you want. But be consistent. For example, you can prohibit adults under a certain age, say 22, from your apartments. That means 18-to-21 year olds can’t live in your buildings. That reduces the partying and potatoes stuck in the toilet drains.

3. When you try to evict a party animal, you need to quote verbatim from the Ohio Revised Code, Section 5321.05 (A) (8).  That’s the part that ends “conduct yourself in a manner that will not disturb your neighbor’s peaceful enjoyment of the premises.”  You have to use that exact language.

Peaceful enjoyment. That’s the goal.

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My father told me that when he graduated college in 1938, he wanted a job — any job.

I, on the other hand, wanted “meaningful work” when I graduated in 1973.  “Meaningful work” was a popular term then.  I first heard it from Lawrence Kasdan, the Big Chill director.

I tried being a bricklayer.  A “brickie.”  I got a joiner, mortar and mason’s trowel.  I knew another Jewish bricklayer, who talked up the profession.

My father said incredulously, “You want to work with your hands?”

Just a thought, Dad. I learned a bit about roofs, radiators and hot water tanks.

Whenever my father had tools in his hand — which was rare — he was often loud and profane.

It’s not innate — Jews swearing with tools.  I know a couple Jewish car mechanics and Jewish fix-it guys.  It’s all about how you were raised.  My dad gave me arithmetic workbooks in elementary school.  For fun, I plotted graphs.  In high school I got fast on the abacus.

If you want a number, see me.  Here’s one: the rent on apt. 1 at 1409 Marlowe Avenue was $80 in 1965.  Now it’s $525.  The rent has approximately kept pace with inflation. Eighty dollars in 1965 is $540 now.
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2 of 2 posts for 1/13/10

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I sometimes get rent envelopes with flakes of floor varnish inside.  Tenants also occasionally send dead bugs.  Sometimes they send poems.  The most common enclosure is a Post-It stating “the bank has screwed up my bank account again,” and that’s why there’s only half a month’s rent.

One tenant sent me a padded mailer stamped FRAGILE.

I held that package at arm’s length, pulled the ripcord, and thought about the Unabomber.

Tick tock.  There was a watch inside.  It was a chromatic watch; the face had C-C#-D-D# instead of numbers.

The tenant wrote he really appreciated his apartment and said his dad owned the Chromatic Watch Company.  I could also get a watch with Circle of 4ths or Circle of 5ths if I wanted.

I dropped off two Yiddishe Cup CDs at the tenant’s door as a thank-you.

I used to give all the tenants gifts. It was a hassle and expensive.  I gave everybody a box of Malley’s chocolates at Christmas.  We would make sure the tenant was home; we didn’t just put the candy by the door; somebody might steal it.

I gave up on it.  The candy man routine was costing me about $1,000/year.  Very few people were thanking me.

Also, I used to take the building managers to Miller’s Dining Room for dinner.  Then Miller’s burned down.

We tried an Italian place after that. It wasn’t the same.  Miller’s was the gentile response to Corky & Lenny’s deli.  The seasoned waitresses at Miller’s circulated with huge platters of sticky buns, corn sticks and muffins.  No pickles. My building managers — who were all older than me then — really like the small-town Ohio vibe.  The favorite main dish was chicken a la king.

I would thank the managers on behalf of my family, including my dad, who was usually in Florida that time of year.

Maybe I should do those dinners again.

I probably won’t.  Now I’m older than most of the managers.  The younger custodians like the cold cash.

Miller’s was fun.  The young people would have liked the sticky buns.
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1 of 2 posts for 12/23/09.  Please see the post below too.

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We sprayed a tenant’s suite for cockroaches, and it didn’t work.  The tenant wrote a letter demanding we do it again, and if we didn’t, she would put her rent in escrow.  She worked at a law office.

We sprayed again.  Then we sprayed the whole building.  About a thousand dollars’ worth of spray.

She still had bugs.  So she called the city building department, which sent out its newest, most gung-ho inspector, who decided we needed to point the chimney and plane the boiler-room door in the basement, and fix up everything in between.

Then she complained again.

So we brought in our cockroach “bomber” guy, who zapped her apartment, including a direct hit on her coffee maker. A dozen cockroaches scampered out.  She had gotten a used coffee maker from her boyfriend.

That roach-infested coffee maker set me back $2,000.

I planned not to renew her lease, but she told me she was not renewing her lease before I could tell her I was not renewing her lease.

That bugged me.  Her boyfriend annoyed me too.  As did her 20-pound bond, legal stationery.  She wasn’t even a lawyer.

On move-out day, she and her boyfriend put the mattress and air conditioner on the treelawn.  I had to move the items to the dumpster.  Mattress moving is seriocomic wrestling; A/C pick up is clean and jerk.  And I didn’t deduct anything from her deposit.

She was OK.  Her only major negative: that she had dropped a dime (X 20,000) on me.

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Treelawn, two paragraphs above, is Cleveland talk for the grass strip between the street and the sidewalk.  Odder:  Akronites — Akron, Ohio, residents — call the treelawn the devil strip.
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2 of 2 posts for 12/9/09

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Terry wanted to sell Notre Dame paraphernalia from an empty store I had across from St. James Church.  He had just come back from South Bend, Ind., with a carload of merchandise.  [Terry isn’t his real name.]

He sang in two church choirs, knew the bishop, and knew the town’s development director, Kelly.  He knew the mayor too, FitzGerald.   And probably knew the former building director, Fitzgerald.

Terry wanted the rent lowered.

I couldn’t figure out if he had any money.

He kept talking choirs.  He sang in two — St. Ignatius and St. Malachi.  That wasn’t money.

I told him my building manager sang in a choir too — a Ukrainian one. “Call the manager to see the inside of the store,” I said. “He lives in an apartment right above the store.”

“You own the apartments above too?” Terry said.  “I’m looking for a place.”

That was a bad.  Maybe Terry’s car trunk had all his worldly possessions, plus the Notre Dame gear.

I told him I had a vacancy upstairs. “Too bad about Notre Dame’s final twenty-two seconds against Michigan,” I said.

He didn’t want to talk football.  I couldn’t blame him . . . Michigan and Notre Dame.

Terry didn’t rent — the store or the apartment.

I’ve only had a couple commercial tenants who also lived in the building.  I had a photographer who lived in the basement of his shop.  That was free living quarters. The photographer installed a dishwasher, stall shower and kitchen.   He was down there for decades, and the city never looked.  That photographer should have had a bumpsticker: “Thank God I’m a Morlock.”  (In the 1980s, ethnic bumperstickers were a fad in Cleveland. “Thank God I’m Slovenian” was the most popular, I think.  “Thank God I’m Jewish” was special order.)

I had a barber who lived over her store.  She paid extra.  Her store had a window sign: “Fighter Chick Parking Only.”  She was a lesbian Puerto Rican cage fighter who got along with everybody.  (She’s still there, but doesn’t live in the apartment.)

I had a Chinese tenant who lived beneath his meditation and “healing arts” studio.  He lasted 10 years.  (He didn’t live under the store all those years.  Only after his divorce.)   If you develop a following, you can make it in a business like healing.  Yoga is another field like that.  Charisma-driven.  I have a yoga store that seems to be doing well.  The owner is very outgoing.

I had a tenant who re-sold children’s toys.  She left me a basement of orphaned Fisher-Price kids.  A whole basement: the kids, plus broken schoolhouses, gas stations and school buses.  Also, Little Tykes picnic tables and Big Wheels.  I wish she had left a Fisher-Price dump truck.
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2 of 2 posts for 11/25/09

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The phone number at AAA Window Shade Co. was 221-3700.  The proprietor, Joe Villoni, started there at 13, and was 87 when he pulled the last shade down.  Seventy-four years: same job, same location.

He quit in 2003 because nobody was buying window shades anymore.  Everybody was into $5 mini-blinds at Home Depot.  My father,Toby, and I had kept Joe’s rent low because Joe never asked for anything.

The store’s wood floor had a grooved path circumnavigating the huge window shade—making machine. That apparatus, and possibly the whole store, belonged in the Henry Ford Museum.

I always liked Joe — and the other old-guy tenants.  I was just a baby, a pisher (pisser/youngster), to these guys.  Another old tenant, Jim English, gave me a metal Phillies cigar box full of screws.  I appreciated the cigar box more than the screws. I was in my twenties and collected anything older than myself.

An old custodian, Jeanne Saunders, left me several novel manuscripts when she died. She had one lung, a great disposition, and a tough life; she should have written her life story and gone easier on the long, lanky cowboys and gladiators.

Another old custodian, Mary Kubichar, produced a concert for Yiddishe Cup.  It was at the Beck Center for the Performing Arts on the West Side.  That was the first — and last — West Side Yiddishe Cup concert.  (West Side means “not a lot of Jews.”)

Mary was from western P.A.  (You need to say each letter: P. A.)  She never married.  After retiring from Higbee’s department store, she became a super volunteer at her church and the Beck arts center.  So when she told the arts center to hire Yiddishe Cup, they owed her.  The concert turned into an appreciation party for Mary. (She died the next year.) Even the publisher of the Cleveland Plain Dealer showed up.  It was a very big deal.  We played a couple Slovak pieces for Mary.
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1 of 2 posts for 10/28/09.  Please see post below too.

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I knew a building inspector who could smell rats.  That’s what he claimed.   He didn’t have to see the droppings.

I knew a custodian who could jimmy almost any apartment door with a credit card.

My dubious talent is figuring if a tenant has skipped out or not.

First, the tenant hasn’t paid his rent. That’s a given.  I knock loudly on the tenant’s door.  No answer.

I yell “maintenance” a couple times, and bring out the master key. I yell “maintenance” a third time, and I step into the apartment.

A couch, a bed . . . always. Skippers leave behind the heavy stuff.  TVs too.  Everyone upgrades his TV on move-out.

Some small items stay behind: beer bottles, pennies, unopened bills.  Usually enough to fill three or four garbage bags.

The stove: cooked.

The refrigerator: always missing a couple crucial shelves.  Why?

Underwear and socks . . . gone.

No socks, no tenant.  The guy definitely skipped.

Some of his clothes are jumbled on the closet floor. Decent stuff too.  Skippers are usually too anti-social to take items to Goodwill.

I found a tux left behind.  The guy was 6-4.  I had the pant legs shortened.  (He wasn’t a skipper.  He was a dead man. And his place was clean.)

I enjoy wrecked apartments. So would most people, I bet.  It’s like staring at a car crash.  Most of my building managers like trashed apts.  (Some managers make extra money on the cleanups.)  One manager would gleefully phone me with on-the-scene reporting: “It looks like a cyclone went through here crossways!”

The rat hole tour isn’t for everybody. One young manager passed on a good show.  “I’m creeped out,” she said, standing in the apartment corridor, while I went into the suite.

What’s to be creeped out by a few bottles of beers, cat urine and cigarette butts?

Afterward, I sometimes phone the skipper to make sure he’s definitely gone.  I say, “You out yet?” No lectures about housekeeping.

Nobody likes to be criticized on his cleaning skills. And he might come back for his DJ magazines — and me.
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2 of 2 posts for 10/28/09

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I had a store tenant who sold gravestones and pistachios.  His main window sign read Porter Monuments and a smaller sign was Pistachios.

Not a good sign.  He went under.

I had a tenant, the India Food Emporium . . . Indian spices, Indian bread, Indian music.  Then came the Marlboros and malt liquor.  Went under.

You want a samosa with that 40?

I got a call from a prospective tenant for a headlight removal business.  Not a bad concept; headlights are tricky to remove.  The caller repeated, “Head lice.”  I was still OK with it.

Yiddishe Cup/Kiddush Cup/Klezmer Cup/Some Kind of Cup.  Nobody knows our band’s name.  All klezmer bands really have the same name: A Klezmer Band.

Sometimes clients hire us after they’ve attended a fun out-of-town wedding with a klezmer band.  I ask, “What band?”  They say, “A klezmer band.”

There is only one klez band with a name: the Klezmatics.

Yiddishe Cup probably stole a gig from the Klezmatics.  An East Coast college promoter booked us because she thought she had heard us on the radio.  What radio show was she talking about?  She couldn’t remember.  We’ve been on Cleveland and Cincinnati public radio.  My guess is she heard the Klezmatics on NPR, googled klezmer, and somehow came up with Yiddishe Cup.  So she hired us: A Klezmer Band.
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2 of 2 posts for 10/7/09

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Arvids Jansons.  I got a desk when he left.

Argero Vassileros.   Nickname: Argie.

Michael Bielemuk.  The Professor.  He had three rooms with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves.

Maria Malfundido.  (Not her real name but close enough.)  A kleptomaniac.  She stole light bulbs from the hall so we glued the bulbs into the sockets.

Zenon Chaikovsky.  Building manager and Ukrainian musician.

Saram Carmichael.  A black transvestite who solicited customers from her second floor window.  The johns waited at the bus stop outside her window.  What is a Saram?

Stan Hershfield.  One of the few Jews on the West Side.  He was raised in an orphanage and loved the word bubkes (beans), as in: “Stratton, I have bubkes so don’t hondle me about the rent.”  [Hondle is haggle.]  When Hershfield painted the wood floor in his kitchen, he beamed, “Only the best, Stratton, Benjamin Moore!”

Malfalda Bedrossian.  She was never late with her rent.  Put that on her tombstone.

Chris Andrews.  He made up for his regular name by sleeping in a coffin.

Merjeme Haxhiraj.  An Albanian who talked me down $10 on her rent every year.

John “Chip” Stephens.  A Chet Baker-like figure — in looks, music and name.  He played jazz piano all day and was so good he landed a tenure track job at a university in Missouri.
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2 of 2 posts for 9/30/09

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