Renters From Hell

The day started out badly and after getting a great deal better ended with a bang…quite literally.

A friend called me a ‘drama queen’ after reading this morning’s blog.  Thanks friend.  The fact is:  I was sick with a migraine, the first real one I had ever had.  Nausea, blinding headache and dizziness.  Silly me, I decided the best way to solve that particular problem (after writing my blog) was to drive 30 miles to Gold’s Gym and work out with my friend David.  Bad idea.  Hillary met me after the gym to eat lunch at the French Market in Venice.  Bad idea.  My reasoning was that if I could just behave as normal everything would get better.

I am sure that my migraine was actually a combination of stress, high blood pressure and depression.  It followed soon after some particularly loaded conversations.  After I posted my blog the comments came thick and fast.  You guys were all so sweet to support and love me.  The reason I write this blog?   Because you are all there to read it.  To understand, to reach out, to condone and condemn in equal measures.

After lunch I went back to bed and slept deeply.   The phone woke me three hours later… my friends from England  arrived in LA but decided to stay elsewhere.  I can’t say I wasn’t happy.  I wasn’t in any mood for 10 days sharing my life with English people.  Laying in bed feeling so sick, the bathroom floor unwashed.

Woke up to an email from a disgruntled Malibu renter and his blousey girlfriend/fuck buddy.   I knew that we would have some sort of disagreement about the return of the damage deposit.  When he left the house he left it in a terrible state: broken coffee pot and coffee cups, 5 huge red wine stains on the carpet.   Thankfully Jerome was with me when I checked over the house and the moron was forced to admit what he had done.

They were the sorts of tenants who couldn’t do anything for themselves and were constantly summoning me to look at things they could have fixed… like the stove top they locked by accident.   As usual it is the cheap skate tenants who nickel and dime that seem to cause the most problems.   On the first occasion I was asked to go to the house the tenant was so drunk he couldn’t stand up.  I should have chucked him and his lady friend out there and then.   I was embarrassed for him.

When they, rather amazingly, asked to come back to the house I made it so prohibitively expensive… I knew they wouldn’t be able to afford it.   The letter I received from them was littered with quotes from this blog.  Well, blog on this bitch!  I was in no mood to deal with bullshit, no mood to be lied to or manipulated and certainly no mood to deal with a woman (not on the contract) the renter had confided in me he couldn’t wait to see the back of.

My anger toward these nasty, cheap people had the affect of shaking my headache and forcing me out of the house.

I walked briskly down Sunset.  I had my hair buzzed and beard trimmed at a barbers on Ivar and began looking for appropriate BEAR WEAR as I now intend, whilst I am in NYC, to attend the Urban Bear Weekend which will be fun-exploiting my tiny celebrity for a bunch of hairy bears and their bear cub boy toys.   A friend of mine suggested the Urban Bear idea as a kind of joke but it looks like a great deal of fun.  This may be my future!

Now all I need is a cub to drag around by the belt loop.

Anyway, by the time I got home it was time to get dressed and head to WeHo for dinner with Spencer my very intelligent British friend.  Over beef burgers and fries trying to understand the cultural DNA of the average citizen of the USA.   My new theory?  That the ‘puritan chromosome’ is not nearly as dominant or as influential in the American genome than the ‘wild-frontier chromosome’.  That the majority of people who live in the USA came from simple European ancestors who, for their freedom, had to combat rattle snakes, bears, hostile climate, native Americans as well as their brutal own.  The threat, real or imagined was always there.

Suspicious and mistrusting by nature these people believe that government is good for only two things PRISONS and THE MILITARY.  White settlers distrust Obama, discrediting his empathy.

After dinner Spencer and I wandered around WeHo and met a couple of handsome cops.  Handsome but dull.  We wandered aimlessly back to the car and outside the Abbey some young man threw a can of vile smelling alcohol at me from a yellow school bus yelling homophobic rhetoric.   The full can hit me squarely in the chest.   I can still feel where it hit me on the sternum.  At first in shock, I grew increasingly angry, then I buried the  anger under a seething fury, quietly determined that ‘they’ can’t hurt me, that they can’t hurt me any more.

‘Drama Queen’ that I am I sank into a pit of man hating quick sand.  I hated the entire crew of my Wednesday morning therapy meeting with their frat house homophobia, their cheating ways co-signed by a dodgy ‘therapist’.   These men miserably attempt to patch up their sham marriages to avoid alimony and see their kids whilst yearning after mistresses, transexuals and sophomoric freedoms.