Assessing The Damage

A Story by Willys Watson

ASSESSING THE DAMAGE

Very few apartment landlords are heartless. Most are simply businessmen providing a specific service. And, like most homeowners, they also have mortgages hanging, like the proverbial capitalist albatross, around their neck. Needless to say, these mortgages are met by keeping as many apartments rented out as possible. Few building owners ever relish having to evict anyone. And almost always, when they do, it is because a rent payer has gotten months behind in rent.

There are exceptions, of course. The renters of this apartment I stood outside of had fallen into the exceptions category. Too many neighbors had complained about them to ignore the reasons.

The landlord watched as I unlocked the door of an apartment recently vacated through a court-ordered eviction.

This owner, a middle-aged, good-natured man, inherited the building from an uncle the year before. And he was obviously ill at ease being an apartment building owner, and was better suited to run the uncomplicated dry cleaning business he owned. The building was for sale, but until then it was his responsibility.

When the American Nomad, those of us without the roots that home ownership provides, choose to pull up our stakes and relocate, by design or by necessity, we invariable have a common bond: we make the effort of leaving our rented house or apartment as clean as possible in the hope of receiving back most, if not all, of our deposit money. And you quickly equate minimum damage with maximum return.

Few bonds apply to those being evicted and, without monetary incentive, the end results can run the gauntlet of possible responses.

First impressions don’t always tell the whole assessing process story when damage is viewed as a whole. Here there are broken windows, busted light fixtures, holes punched or kicked in walls, a missing doorknob, doors badly damaged, doorjambs destroyed and kitchen cabinet doors ripped off their hinges.

First impressions told me a very young, very poor and very angry couple took their vengeance out on the apartment, the landlord and the world at large before they moved on. But sometimes what people leave behind is as revealing an insight into their lives as what they take with them.

Second impressions require a little more non-biased information and practiced perception to assess damage. A lot of the damage, it was quickly becoming clear to me, was brought on by the forced departure of this young couple.

The doorjamb to the large bedroom had been kicked through, rendering the doorknob lock and the slide bolt useless. Holes punched in the door left it unsalvageable. On the inside of the door you could see where a chair had been wedged under and against the doorknob, where the weight of angry force left the chair’s impression impelled in the soft plywood veneer.

Anger and fear doomed this door.

A few pieces of broken furniture, a few pieces of ripped women’s clothing, a small woman’s shoe, missing it’s heel, a framed, mangled picture of Jesus with his eyes poked out by a pen, and a hole punched through the closet door, all conveyed the same message.

And evidence to substantiate the message could probably be found in the pages of what must have been a young woman’s diary, started with high hopes and trusting love, now with half of the ripped out pages scattered across the floor.

In the smaller bedroom were fragments of the lives of two young girls. Discarded broken toys, a doll with it’s head ripped off, a framed Disney cartoon who’s glass had been smashed in, a few pieces of little girl’s clothing that had been torn apart.

Then I picked through a dozen or so frenzied, chaotic Crayon drawings of two adults, a man and a woman, several with children, where the woman is portrayed benignly and the man given an ever present, ominous status. The child artist must have known her father was abusive towards their mother and probably responded the only way she felt safe enough to.

The door to the bathroom had also been kicked in, making the lock unusable. Wedged between the sink cabinet and the bathtub was a child’s plastic toilet chair that had been likely kicked and cracked by an angry foot. And in the small dinning room two large cardboard boxes overflowing with empty liquor and wine bottles, and by now I had seen more than enough to assess different definitions of damage.

After the landlord left, I talked to the neighbors on both sides of the apartment, mainly to validate my conclusions. And they told me about the young woman screaming and crying sometimes, the children crying and the man yelling at everyone. And usually he would then turn the music up very loud or storm out of the apartment. And sometimes he didn’t return home that night. When he wasn’t home, they asked her what the problem was and she always told then it was just a silly argument, the kind young couples have sometimes. Still, the bruises on her face and arms she often had when she left the apartment told the neighbors that everything wasn’t typical.

The next morning I made two phone calls. One to the landlord about the cost of repairing the physical damage.

The second call was to childcare welfare services about the possibility of preventing further human damage, providing them with the names of the renters.

You see, Mr. Landlord, these were not all bad people. Victims are usually never bad simply because they are victims. My assessment of the real damage here is that only one of these persons was the problem. And his abuse, if not stopped, would be carried out again and again. And likely become more aggressive.