My landlord’s got a new girlfriend and I can tell she’s trouble. I saw them walking down the road tonight to get a slice of pizza. She was in these black skin-tight shorts and he was in that same old baseball hat that hugs the skull like balding dudes like me and him like to wear these days. She kept on having to pull the little black shorts out of her crack as they walked ahead of me. I just paid the rent yesterday, so now he acts like he doesn’t know me.
My experience with the landlord is that he has a bluebird made of plaster on the back wall of his front porch. He also has a kitchen sink, and easy chair, and a large roll of copper tubing on the same porch. Once a month I go to his house across the street, usually in the cover of darkness, and leave the largest check I write every month in his mailbox, in the process committing a federal crime.
His experience with me is that I leave that check and he let’s me live in this house that he got for a steal, and that he occasionally fixes a leaky faucet.
Under my landlord lives a British guy named George of whom I know little. He loves Princess Diana and hate Charles and Camilla. He takes my recycling out to the curb, usually three days before the city picks it up.
George works for the landlord and, according to the neighborhood homeless guy, handed in his two-week’s notice a few days ago and is moving on to greener pastures. What I know of George, he was likely semi-homeless once as well, and he is recovering from colon cancer.
What I know of the homeless guy is that his name is Leroy. I know that and that he once played guitar in a band that played a jukejoint that was in the woods out in Stockbridge. The band played Prince-type songs and some Kool and the Gang stuff. Leroy can’t play guitar now because he has arthritis in his hands. He can’t lift very heavy stuff either after he was recently diagnosed with scoliosis while in the hospital for an emergency appendectomy. He works occasionally for the Methodist church down the street and he tells me that he will be taking over for George, working for the landlord, once George’s two-week’s notice is up. It’s good that George has a succession plan, although I doubt Leroy will be able to pick up my recycling bin and move it to the curb. I will have to do that now.
Leroy is the one who first let me on to the fact that the landlord’s girlfriend is trouble. He didn’t let me on to her being the landlord’s new girlfriend. The landlord is in his sixties. Trouble is in her twenties. He looks at her like a young man would look at his new girlfriend. She talks to him like he’s a landlord. He owns my house and hers and most of the houses in the neighborhood. He’s got money. I think she lets him pretend that she’s his girlfriend. I have figured out how things work in the neighborhood.
Leroy says that she’s always in those skin-tight shorts. Even in colder months. She has blonde hair and I don’t think Leroy wants to believe she is “with” the landlord, or so he says. I don’t know if she is with him, but it seems like it is so.
She’s trouble though and I want to tell the landlord. She dances in her window at night, across the street, and sometimes takes off clothes. I feel that she is looking at me sometimes. I feel like we have something between us because she will not speak to me when we see each other on the street. She also entertains a police officer who doesn’t park near her house. He doesn’t park near her house because he doesn’t want the landlord to see him seeing his girlfriend. The girl works as a waitress, or a dancer or something at night. She’s always around during the day.
She walks slowly past my house when the landlord is not around and it is daytime, and when the doors are closed I catch her trying to cut through the glare of the porch windows to see what is beyond. She reminds me the homecoming queen at my high school, the one I would’ve gone to the prom with had she been willing, and if I had ever asked. What I knew of her is that her name was Layla and she lived in a mobile home community over off the two roads with the same name. What I knew of her is that I spent a summer thinking I loved her. Then she was in the hospital. Then she was gone. Not dead, but gone.
She was trouble too.
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