I don't know why I like this one so much, maybe it's the pigeons.


IT ALL HAPPENED AT ONCE

My family owns this crappy little strip shopping mall at fifth and Pecos. Ever since dad died in ’03 I’ve been taking care of it.

My official title is “property manager” but that doesn’t even begin to cover what I really do. Collecting rents is the easy part most of the time. I’ve got a great bunch of tenants in there right now and we all work together to keep the place up. Sometimes someone’s late on the rent, but I try to give them a little slack when I can.

The alley behind the stores backs on some scumbag apartments. The folks who live there use our alley as their personal dump. I take my flatbed trailer down there once a month and load it up with junk. Ripped up couches, disgustingly soiled carpet, and broken cheap furniture that doesn’t deserve to be called furniture are just some of the junk I pick up. I can’t let it accumulate because a) the homeless bums will move in and set up camp, including using the walls as a toilet, and b) the city will issue me a code violation which carries dire threats of huge fines and/or incarceration. I’d rather load the junk.

The roof started leaking last month and when I went up to asses the damage, I found a Bedouin Tribe of pigeons living around all the AC units. So I shoveled pigeon shit into industrial strength garbage bags for three days and pried dead bird bodies off of the non-working old evaporative coolers so we could get to the tar paper and do some patching. I had to take my clothes off in the garage when I got home, I stunk so badly. Also when I was lowering the eight bags of shit off of the roof onto my flatbed, my finger got caught in one of the lines and I almost ripped off the tip. It’s still purple.

The insurance company says it won’t pay a dime to get the roof fixed cause it’s a ‘maintenance’ problem, so it looks like I’ll be up there shoveling more pigeon shit soon.

Now I have one empty store down there that I’ve been trying to rent for a month and a half. I keep making appointments to meet potential tenants down there, but most of them never show up. While I’m waiting for them, I clean up the mess the last tenant left, patch nail holes, and install new plugs and sockets. Sometimes I take a book and read.

My friends tell me not to bitch about the stores, after all half the income goes to pay my bills. And I must say that there have been long stretches in the last five years when things run pretty smoothly, thanks to my efforts. Just not this month.

This month everything just seemed to happen at once.