I feel seen by the man who emptied my apartment after I was evicted

It does’t take much to recognize a fellow traveler

This year has been rough. I broke my ankle on the property where I lived and they found a reason to evict me. The stories we hear about evil money hungry landlords and their management minions is absolutely true…sad but true.

I had lived in that apartment for just over 4 years. It was a safe landing space after my kids and I returned from an extended adventure in Ecuador and Mexico. I had not planned on returning to the US for a very long time and hoped my kids would fall in love with the wilds of the Amazon, or the cosmopolitan feeling of Mexico City, maybe the crystal-clear waters of the Yucatán, alas, they longed for consistent Wi-Fi for gaming and a mall with all the “normal” stores. I admit I waited too long to try and escape the bubble we exist in here in the US. My kids were 12 and 15. The trip was fun and they for sure expanded their understanding of the world we live in, but after three and half month of travel and three weeks of hiking Mayan ruins, swimming in freezing cenotes and eating our way through Tulum Mexico, they wanted to go home.

I had to find a place to live and fast. When I left the US, we had sold almost everything we owned and moved out of a five-bedroom house with a large yard on a cul-de-sac, and I didn’t want to go back to managing that, along with raising two kids on my own. I knew we would find an apartment; they wanted one with all the amenities, tennis and basketball courts, a pool, and gym. I wanted character and charm and a good school district. Sadly, it’s hard to find all that in one place around Los Angeles, California.

I found this apartment online and rented it sight unseen. It was a cookie cutter complex, advertised as “family owned and operated” with a wonderful community, even though it was as basic as they come. Fake wood floors and cabinets that looked the part, pretty much what every “upgraded” apartment complex looks like these days. (They are all basically owned by the same corporations — even if they pretend to be family owned) But my kids were happy, so I was happy.

Coming back to the US could have signaled a failure for me, but I decided to make it my come back. I was going to live on my own terms from now on. The apartment wasn’t large nor small, three good size bedrooms, two stories with a Romeo and Juliette balcony off the primary suite. It was dark but had a nice patio. I bought some new, albeit cheap furniture — it worked with the new but cheap flooring and settled in.

I hung my giant tapestry of the Unicorn, surrounded my new couch with all of the mismatched-yet somehow works — together side tables, trunks, chairs… Laden them with my alters and tchotchke’s. Buddha’s, Ganesh, crystals, books and tarot cards and set about creating my new life.

We spent the summer driving to the beach which was only 20 minutes away and exploring our new little tony town about 30 miles outside of LA. The kids started their new schools and things were working out nicely. I met my neighbors, all very nice people. A few families, but mostly corporate types and young couples.

About 10 months in Covid hit and suddenly our world shrank, like everyone else’s did. But our apartment worked. We could still take the winding mountain drive to the beach, go hiking close by and I was grateful we landed where we did.

After the lockdown lifted, I noticed a lot of people moving out and one day an older man moved in about 3 doors down. I am one of those people who says hello and so I did. It was evening and he asked me if I’d like a glass of wine. Ok, fyi I never turn down a glass of wine, so I said sure. He invited me into his place, and we sat on his patio and chatted about why he moved (divorce), what he did (real Estate), his son…ya know neighbor stuff. You may be wondering why I would go into this mans house. Well, he was my neighbor in a crowded apartment complex, if I ended up murdered, it wouldn’t be hard to figure the who dunnit.

About an hour goes by and the wine must have started hitting him because he starts to lay into is ex (why do men do this?) and how lonely he was, and I started to realize it was time to head back to the safety of my own little abode. So, I stood to leave, and he tried to kiss me. I played it off like he was going in for a hug goodbye and made my way to the door. He asked me three times if I wanted to see the art in his bedroom. Seriously, three times I said no and squeezed past him to the front door.

Scurrying in the dark to my apartment I breathed a sigh of relief hoping I hadn’t now made it awkward. I had given the man my phone number and later that night, around 11pm I get a text from him. “Are you up? Wanna hang out?”. I ignored it and the next day around 11am sent the “Hey I was sleeping and for the record, I’m not looking to connect with anyone right now, let’ just be neighbors!” To which he replied, “Oh that text wasn’t for you”. Ok, I thought cool, we are good.

Fast forward through 3 years of uncomfortable encounters, awkward exchanges with this man. He was one of those men that would force a conversation onto anyone he saw, save for me and my neighbors would often try and avoid being seen by him. Oddly enough, after covid the vibe of the place started to shift. Many of the longtime residents started moving out. It turns out that there were many evictions and the complex started doing short term rentals, corporate rentals and the type of people that moved in were’t really down to be neighborly.There was a small contingent of OG’s still about and we enjoyed comparing notes on our “friendly chatty neighbor”. He always had all the tea and I’m sure attempted to spill a lot of it about me. I noted some of the new tenants giving me the side eye. Men, especially older men do not like to be rejected. And I was paying the price for sure.

Mind you, besides refusing a kiss and a polite no thank you text, I almost never engaged this man.

This man was a champ when it came to making “old guy inappropriate comments” I was outside throwing the football with my son and he felt compelled to tell me “You throw like a girl”, to which I responded, “Thank you” and continued throwing quite well I might add. He made a pass at my neighbor’s daughter who is barely 21 as well. Oh my…When he would see me taking out my trash and no one was around to harass, he’d tell me “Your son should be doing that!”, forget that my son almost always does it and who is this man to tell me what my kid should or should not be doing. He was always just up in everyone’s business. Who parked badly, who didn’t pick up after their dog, who was being evicted. You could here his voice from the bowels of your apartment with the windows and doors closed. He would shout across the parking lot to anyone going or coming and unless you pretended not to hear him (This was impossible) one could be stuck for a good 15 minutes just listening to him yammer.

Which is why it makes sense that on the day they hired a man to clean out the leftovers in my apartment after I had been rushed out, he felt the need to accost this man and regale him with how horrible of a person I was.

The reality is, I left a lot behind. I figured, since they forced me out unnecessarily, they could deal with everything I couldn’t take or didn’t want. My eviction wasn’t really about non-payment of rent. From the moment I notified them that I broke my ankle on their property and would be pursuing a personal injury case if they wouldn’t work directly with me, they looked for every reason to try and get me out and make my life there miserable.

Oddly enough, I had already been planning on moving when my lease was up later this year. But when I broke my ankle, I lost 3 months of work and my savings, so I was tight on cash flow. I was awaiting a check by mail to make rent when our mailboxes were robbed, and I wasn’t going to able to make my rent payment until after the 5-day period. They pounced on that opportunity and even though there were mitigating circumstances, the courts always side with the corporations.

The whole experience was traumatizing. Moving was overwhelming, painful, stressful and cathartic. In some ways I realized that the last 4 years there had been chaotic. I hadn’t chosen this place consciously. I found it out of desperation in a hurry. When I landed, besides a new couch and mattresses, I had just pulled out all my old stuff that I kept from my past and strung it about in the hopes that the faster I unpacked, the more grounded I would feel. I never felt grounded surrounded by the baby poop-colored walls, the dark cabinets and floors and the speckle brown and beige carpeting that never felt clean no matter how many times I vacuumed, or steam cleaned them. It was dark all the time and felt more like a cave with almost no natural light. It made me want to hide inside and sleep. Maybe I was trying to hide, trauma bonded to this purgatory I created.

So, when I was moving out, I decided to leave a lot of my past baggage behind. Books, boxes of “things” still in the closet, mementos from past relationships, decks of tarot cards that I no longer loved. I did leave behind a gorgeous wooden dresser I’ve had since my 20’s. The past, I left it where it belonged.

My next door neighbor and I became friends. She and I would have wine on our front steps, chat and take care of each others pets when one of us was out of town. On the day they were clearing out my past, she walked up to find our neighborhood “Ken” railing on and on about me to this unassuming man who probably just wanted to get his job done.

She arrived as “Ken” was saying “I work in real estate, she should have never done this, how horrible.” Forget that this man relished in my unjustified eviction, and that pretty much everyone in this complex who wasn’t a short termer hated the management for some reason or another… she stopped, and the moving man looked at her and said “Oh no, I know her, I can tell by what she left, she is a gypsey, a traveler. I have read some of the books she left behind, no, I know her, she is not bad, she is just moving on.”

Indeed fellow traveler. I am.

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This one is on me - However…

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