Lord of the Vile

Every year, I get a little homesick at least once. I miss the quaintness of small town life, with the light traffic, Mom and Pop diners, tiny strip malls, and weekend road trips to the nearest shopping mall with brand name stores. But there is one thing I am always glad I don't have to deal with anymore...landlords.

Down here in the south, most apartment buildings are managed by companies and you rarely, if ever, have to deal with the landlord banging down your door at the exact minute your rent is due, or conveniently disappearing when your pipes freeze, or, in my case, just being really creepy.

My senior year of college, my best friend and I, in desperate need of a place to live off-campus, moved into a tiny two-bedroom apartment on the second floor of a really old house. We're talking from the 1800s, but that's neither here nor there. The landlord of this house was a hippie dentist who had his "practice" on the first floor. By hippie I mean he kept his long gray hair in dreads, braided his beard, and said things like "far out" or "groovy," and by "practice" I mean he had a dentist chair and other random dental equipment, all of which looked like it was from 1972, in one room of the horrifyingly cluttered first floor. We could never figure out why anyone would allow this man with dirty dreads to lean over their mouth using equipment that probably had been purchased secondhand. Rumor has it that he just recently had his license revoked, which makes me wonder how the hell he was able to practice dentistry for that long in the first place, but again, I digress.

Hippie Landlord immediately took a liking to us. At first, he was nice enough and we were friendly. He offered to pay us to help him clean up the third floor/attic which he had started renovating into a large studio apartment. We obliged and spent an entire afternoon vaccuming and scrubbing. Soon after, he would randomly stop by at weird hours, usually half drunk, and overstay his welcome by talking for far too long. After a rather strange evening of him sitting in our living room, slamming Amstels, voicing his close-minded opinion on gay sex and anal tearing (a total WTF!?! moment), we eventually learned to recognize his knock and stopped answering the door.

One night, a group of us met at our apartment all dressed up to go to dinner and Hippie Landlord stopped by unannounced as we were leaving. As my roommate and I exchanged irritated glances, he commented on how beautiful we all looked. I bit my lip trying not to laugh at his googly-eyed glances at all of us. He then turned to my roommate, looked her straight in the eyes, and told her he would love to take photographs of her in the attic. I lost it and ran into my room so he wouldn't see me in a fit of hysterics. I laughed until I cried, listening to my roommate tell him in an extremely disgusted tone that she would have to pass on his offer.


From that moment on, we avoided Hippie Landlord like the plague, talking to him only if absolutely necessary. Unfortunately for my roommate, after I graduated, she moved in with our friend who lived in another apartment in the same house, and had to deal with him for another whole semester. Adding to the creep factor, we recently realized, upon analyzing his tenant history in the four years we lived in the town and the few years after, Hippie Landlord rented to only females. There's no doubt in my mind that he had his reasons for choosing to rent only to girls. If only those attic walls could talk!