Hello, friends!
This week was an emotional crazyhouse. Tuesday, I finished the stuff at my father’s old apartment, which I write about in this week’s essay. On Thursday, I had a curriculum meeting where I ended up losing my cool and going on an emotional diatribe that I’m told was “amazing” and showed how “brave” I am. The quotes come from what close colleagues told me. I just felt like a crazy person. I don’t know if it helped, but it may have.
Welcome to the 132nd installment of Gauthic Times, the newsletter about my writing, my life, and my last adventure at the apartment I grew up in. If you’re a reader who subscribes via Substack, my website, or Patreon, your encouragement helps motivate me. I’m not breaking any records but I’m thankful to have any audience.
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***
This week saw only 1,800 words added to Project: Moons. I only wrote Sunday, Wednesday, and Friday. Too many crazy and emotional things were happening, as well as two nights of basketball, which were emotional for G because of reasons. The thing is, though, what I wrote this week came streaming out. For each session, time stopped as I wrote. That felt good.
I finished my Superman drawing.
I was originally going to add text above it that read, “You have to get through me first.” I didn’t like how it felt. I really do need to learn better shading and coloring. But as someone who’s self-taught, I’m happy with the end product. Or the current end product. As I learn more about coloring, I’ll probably go back and finetune some of this.
I also did some quick jotting about a Gabby Ray comic book. I have a preliminary idea for a storyline for the first few issues. Whether I ever get to it depends on if I have the time with everything going on. There’s only so much time for my creative world in my current life.
***
This past week marked the end of an era. This week I finished dealing with my father’s old apartment, which also happens to be one of my childhood homes. The apartment was a three-bedroom, third-floor apartment in an old house in New Bedford. We moved into the apartment in October 1988, when I was 11 years old. Prior to that, we lived in a one-bedroom apartment that was used as a two-bedroom that was located directly next door in a six-apartment tenement. My father moved onto that street in 1974, after my mother moved there. I had many adventures during my childhood there. And one last one this past week.
After moving him to an apartment in the complex where I live in the town next door to New Bedford, I still had plenty left to do at the old place, which I’ve chronicled somewhat. This past Tuesday was the day we scheduled the junk removers to come and take out the last of the stuff. The company came recommended from the movers and was very good. They came, bringing a dumpster, and the adventure began around 11:45.
They were probably about three-quarters of the way through when I heard a strange voice from the back of the apartment. Then my father’s old landlord appeared with his son, who was somewhere between 9 and 13. This is a guy my father has said that he didn’t trust. He had reasons.
Reason 1: Upon buying the house, he upped my father’s rent to more than double what he’d been paying. He did no work on the place. He didn’t fix anything nor even made the premises safer. Plaster in the front hallway was falling off the wall. My father had a mouse infestation–which meant the apartment building had a mouse infestation, for around a year now.
Reason 2: These are old apartments and had old, large space heaters. There was one space heater in the dining room that was supposed to heat the entire five-room apartment. The lady downstairs from Dad had an issue with hers. She called the landlord who sent a guy to fix it. The guy looked at it and said it needed to be replaced. It was too old to be fixed. The landlord told the man to fix it, he wasn’t going to buy a new one.
Reasons 3-10,986: Other things that had happened and not happened. Bad attitudes. Things like throwing trash that the city didn’t allow into a bin and when he was told the city didn’t accept it, said, “I’m the landlord. I’ll do what I want.”
So here this guy is in the flesh, telling me how good a man my father is and how much he’ll miss him. Then he starts asking about the various things in the apartment that he wanted done. There was a lot of mouse poop everywhere. When my father went into the hospital for the first three months of this year, the mice took over his apartment. I cleaned what I could but as we moved, we found a lot of mouse dookie. He was getting on my case about shit (of the non-mouse variety) that didn’t concern me. Soon, the landlord’s fix-it man arrived. He looked like Tommy Chong. Fix-it Chong was as nosey and bothersome as the landlord.
I told the leader of the junk removers that I would be out in my car. He agreed that would be a good idea. No long afterward, he approached my car to say that he was mostly done but that the landlord was trying to get him to do things that we hadn’t discussed. The junk guy was uncomfortable and about to leave. He’d admitted to not having 100% finished but promised to come back another day.
Pissed off at the landlord, I told the junk guy he didn’t need to, wrote out a check, and gave him and his minion their tips. Then he gave me a tip.
“That guy’s trouble,” he said. “If I were you, I’d get outta here.”
Message received, my friend.
Hearing John Williams’s Indiana Jones theme in my head, I drove away from my childhood home. I’ve decided that’s where my part there ends. Had the landlord not shown up and been a bother, not overstepped his boundaries, the job would’ve been 100% completed. But he didn’t know when to fuck off, and now whatever’s left behind is his problem.
Now, I wonder if there’s a way to make an anonymous complaint about a landlord, because I have stories….
***
This week I finished reading Amie McNee’s We Need Your Art. I found her when someone I know shared a video of hers on Instagram and I liked it a lot. Her book came out a couple of months ago and I finally got it. It’s a really good, inspirational book about creativity. She makes a lot of good points about being unashamed about creativity and how the world is set up to work against creatives. While I do feel some of her ideas are a little too naïve, overall, I agreed with most of it and may try to utilize some of what she wrote.
***
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Gautham: Bill Gauthier.com 
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