(7) Vlad the Landlord

I razzed Vlad about not repairing the brickwork on the garage for two years. Vlad was my landlord.

His people came from a cold cave in the mountains. They owned nothing but a small bag of onions, a wooden crucifix and a picture of Hitler. Life was hard.

Canada beckoned. There was so little in the villages anyway. Twenty years and Vlad was a multi-property landlord in the heart of sprawling Toronto, North America’s fifth largest city. He bought beaten Edwardian houses in assaulted neighbourhoods. Three storey properties, subdivided into rooms and smallish apartments.

I didn’t mind the genteel poverty, the immigrants, quirky artists, lunatics and student neighbours. Across the street was a giant chestnut tree that bloomed beautifully every spring. Vlad’s rents were slightly lower than average, too. I even got a little agriculture project going.

When they were knocking down Massey Harris I slipped around there one night with my friend’s pickup truck and brought back some scrap bricks. I used them to make a raised vegetable bed in the back yard and to edge a garden beside the door to my apartment at the side of the house. I put in potatoes, tomatoes, a half dozen corn plants, and kitchen herbs. Nothing too crazy, just a nice bit of creative urban gardening. This being Toronto, raccoons could be a problem; they’d get at my plants or go in the basement now and then. Vlad hated raccoons.

With Vlad’s tenants it ends badly most times. If Vlad was running a restaurant, say, or any other kind of business, he’d have gone out of business in the first five minutes. Tenants complain to the bylaw officers. They fine him sometimes but he isn’t capable of being a better landlord. His own house, I was there once, it’s a hundred years old, too. Held together by coats of paint and bits of wire.

“Steve, no good you live alone, why no start family?” His idea of a conversation starter. His social skills were about that good.

I did move out eventually. After Vlad murdered the second raccoon, I’d had enough. He used an open can of tuna and a porcelain dish with an inch of water in it. He cuts the end off an old extension cord, sits it in the water and plugs in the cord beside the furnace. One-hundred-and-ten volts.

Going to get my bike next morning, I thought the raccoon was asleep like a last-call drunk with his face resting on the bar. The electricals in the house were late Jazz Age. Vlad could have burned us to the ground. Why wouldn’t he just fix the rotting storm door at the back end of the basement?

It wasn’t that kind of operation, Vlad and Son. His son was big, creepy Peter with the overlapping history of criminal convictions and head injuries.

“Steve, every day I go church pray drugs. Drug ruin son’s life.”

Vlad would come around and bother me without calling. I always knew if he’d been in the place when I was at the magazine because it was like somebody walked around with an aromatherapy spritzer full of kolbassa juice.

Once, I was surfing the web and he knocks on the door. Time again for the annual pre-winter ritual wherein he drains the air from the steam heating system. The rads are huge cast iron things with decorative feet. Like the rest of the place, they’d be something if you scraped them and repaired them.

“Steve, why you always on computer, work so much?”

I told him he could go ahead with the rads and went back to my laptop. Pfffssssst, went the kitchen rad. Pfffssssst, went my tiny bathroom with the squeaky floorboard in front of the mirror. Vlad clumped into the hallway and pfffssssst went the hallway rad. He came into the living room and pfffssssst went the rad under the window.

“Vlad,” I said in annoyance.

He had my favourite coffee cup and was holding it to the steam valve. The cup was full of rusty black drainings, like a toxic latte.

“That’s my cup.” I said.

“Well, what else I use?”

One day, I came home from work and discovered he’d helped himself to half of the bricks I’d used for edging the garden. He took the bricks out of the ground and used them to repair the garage wall. The stucco had fallen off years before. Where there had been a dozen rotten bricks you could now see my scavenged bricks had been cemented in.

“Cheapskate,” I muttered.

Vlad was the subject of a lot of muttering. He never spent any money on anything. We asked him to repair kitchens, washrooms, drywall, running toilets, loose stairs, basement mould, the front door. He’d mumble something about the gypsies or the injustices of Communism or German occupation or Russian liberation or the ruthlessness of the partisans who hated both or how hard it was when he came here. He smelled like booze often enough to boot.

The garage was tumbledown, narrow. Inside was a grey 1979 Ford van. Inside the van was the even older lawn mower. When he or Peter would come over to cut the grass they’d open the garage door, pop the hood on the van and hook booster cables up. The van would roar into life and be driven forward enough so the side doors could be opened to get the lawn mower out. Reversing the process, they’d put it back.

The lawn mower would vomit blue puffs and the smoke used to hang in a layer over the yard and sidewalk. He should have just dumped the gasoline on the grass and burned it off.
I whipped out my phone and gave Vlad a piece of my mind about the bricks. I sounded mad and was righteously glad I to. Vlad was an idiot.“Why’d you take the damn bricks from my garden?”

When I got home next day and was unlocking the door, I could see Vlad had been there. There was a row of brand new, factory-fresh bricks stuck in the ground around my garden.
That night I was in bed reading a copy of Wallpaper magazine. The lights flickered. I figure that’s when the raccoon went for the tuna.

copyright Stephen Caulfield, 2009