Chapter 1: My Landlady is an Undercover Fed

This is how I began my story months ago, in the midst of all the craziness. It sounds frenetic because yeah, I was frantic at times. I was trying to squish the background down to a few pages to get to the substance of the story. Now that I’ve stabilized, I’m trying again. After you read the first chapter below, you can read subsequent rewrites. There is more cohesion to them, now that I understand what’s going on.  

My Landlady is an Undercover Fed

(And so is my roommate)

Or housemate. We don’t share the same bedroom, only common areas, kitchen, bathroom, laundry facilities, pantry, and it was great for a while. Until I started noticing things. 

The mobile home that I lived in was beautiful. One could not have guessed from the inside that outside, it was manufactured upstate and shipped downstate. The residence I moved into was spacious for a pre-made house, bigger than the ones around it. Inside, it was richly renovated, with uneven hardwood floors that mimicked real trees. The kitchen fixtures were new: the cabinets high for tall people, the hanging microwave even higher so that I could not see the tray, earthy granite countertops, picture frame table dressings, Moroccan rugs under the dining room table and the living room coffee table.

The curio cabinet showcased dinnerware and all forms of alcohol that I did not understand, Jack Daniels, crystal wine glasses, wedding gifts that Lorraine had yet to use. She said I was welcome to use anything.

My bedroom was an invitation to a homeless creature and I grabbed it at first sight. Sage green linens on the bed, which was set right of the door. No bedframe. Cream colored comforter with Chinese characters scrawled in rust, a black night table on the far side of the bed between it and the recessed space where a closet was meant to be. The dresser matched the black hole black of the night table. Inside the closet pace, a matching IKEA floor-to-ceiling shelf filled the entire recessed area into the wall. There were no closet doors. Instead, a plastic ivory bar was hung with rings from which black nylon curtains hung. The windows faced west.

Outside, there was a wall-sized bush that separated Lorraine’s mobile home and her neighbor’s. In the far corner from the bedroom door was a white nylon fabric wardrobe with plenty of hangers. Nice ones, too. Why the recessed space meant for clothes was filled with a wall-sized shelf and a portable wardrobe bought for when closet space was tight I did not question. Actually, I needed more shelf space that hanging space so this setup was perfect.

The floor was newly installed. I loved it. Asthma prevented me from living in carpeted homes, and trying to find a room in a house or apartment that had hardwood floors on my budget was difficult. The walls were painted in robin’s egg blue. My favorite.

Next door between the master bedroom and my bedroom was my housemate’s room. It was slightly larger than mine. The good room always gets taken first. Across the narrow hall, two steps away was the bathroom. Rustic tiling, shower curtain hung for a seven-foot basketball player.

Before I tell you the things I noticed—it’s important that you practice the same vigilance so that you do not find yourself trapped in a house surrounded by federal agents—please allow me to step back, for I really need to catch my breath.

The last few months have been an archetypal action-adventure movie. The only difference is that it’s fun watching the poor slob on the screen running around for dear life without anyone to help him. When it happens to you, it feels as if you are going to die. If you are lucky that is.

If you live, you will understand what Godot was waiting for.

Even if you never wanted to.

I never did because I was too happy waiting for nothing and doing everything. That was me as a child, bouncing around until it hurt. I was lucky, I never hurt too much but maybe others did. I don’t know, or I did and I didn’t care. Or rather, I knew the difference when to care and when to move on.

Somewhere along the line I lost it. That ability to move on. I got clogged on in the trivial, I magnified the minutiae, I inhaled deep regrets that should have been tooted out as applesauce is that does not agree with a toddler.

“Don’t notice so much,” my mother often told me. I couldn’t help it. Noticing is the foundation of progress. And I have always been a progressive liberal. Too progressive some say. Overly liberal, others claim. So much so that my friends are libertarians.

I raced through school with an enthusiasm that was marred pretty much with only the fact that it didn’t last long enough. I went to college then grad school, then did my postdoc, you get the picture. Had I gone slower, I wouldn’t have enjoyed it as much. Huh? That’s me. The negatives of any positive are a direct consequence of my happiness, and any reduction in my discontent would have been proportionately matched by a decrease in my happiness, such that I preferred the extremes.

Greater happiness paired with greater sorrow outranked moderate happiness coupled with moderate discontent.

Such was my utility function, the first that will explain why, when I discovered that my landlady was a federal agent, why, I did not hightail it and run out of there but instead stood my ground, dug a trench into her newly renovated hardwood floors, and battled it out while on all sides of me the enemy spun a web so voluminous its incompetence was insured by layers of stupidity that when stacked against each other translated to this:

At the universal level: Where an enemy has relatively unlimited resources, and you have no money, no job, no friends nearby, then in the end and in the beginning, they will win.

At the particular level: where the strongest government in the world has its most elite federal agents on a mission to smash you into the pavement, it does not matter that you are lucky enough to find a pothole to keep from being smeared into smithereens.

Eventually, that is your end. If you be so foolish to fight the mightiest nation in the world. Remember, only one country came out victorious in war with America the Beautiful. Maybe it was that heritage that pulled me through. Who knows. I only know that I speak one language, English. That I believe that I live in the greatest nation in the world, even after my government, whose President I love so very much, beat me up with an insensitivity that would have even made that harshest of judges on American Idol cringe.

Then, my government spit me out when it had no further use of me. That’s when I picked myself up, dusted off my only decent suit that I had been using for interviews after being so long out of the job market, and decided to get back into the ring. For if you think fighting nine rounds with the government is rough, you have not lived through the last eighteen years with me.

Those were the best and hardest years of my life. I was in the only long-term relationship in my life. It lasted eighteen years. Although I wanted it to last another eighteen years, fortunately for me I did not get my own way. I finally pulled myself out of a relationship with the only man I ever loved and likely the greatest love of my life. And each pull was like a screaming wrench to my heartstrings because they were made of elastic and were durable with each stretch and snap of my heartstrings.

Each time I thought I could take no more of days fixing oatmeal, potato, defrosting whole wheat bread, orange juice and tea, followed by some chores, a walk within mmm, seven or eight blocks where I lived for I did not have a car, then home to do some more cleaning and attend to the list of things left for me to do, I rallied myself for another day of neutral repetition. It took me a while to understand why battling the government was so similar to my days of doing nothing, when the principle for which I fought was freedom. Freedom in spite of my fear. 

The first ten of those eighteen years, I was in academia, student, postdoc, lecturer. For the last eight years I did not have a job. For a mind like mine, you might as well lobotomize me and go watch the celebrity news on your flat screen because that would have been more merciful: ending me at the beginning, than letting me die by epsilons those eight years. You would not have seen anything, I mean I was certainly dying because I sure as hell was not living, but you could not have noticed for it was even less imperceptible that watching your fingernails grow. But it was there, the process, its results, so irrefutable you could not have noticed had the results been displayed on a billboard in New York Times. Only the message took near a decade to deliver that the obviousness got lost in sheer “doing-nothingness” state, if that makes sense.

It’s as if the word “Help!” were to be flashed on a Times Square Billboard one letter at a time but so slowly that the “H” was left hanging, “H--” and everyone in the square got tired of looking and walked on and the newly entered into the square or the few who continued thinking about it asked themselves, “H—ello?” “Hi?” “Hey there?” In other words, the urgency of the message never came through because it came through too slowly. “H—ee—l—pp--!” Snore.

Seriously, Ssal is dying because she is doing nothing with her life except tending to the ones that she loves. Huh? Wouldn’t this be the ultimate reason for living? One would think so, except if one were able to care for the masses, then caring for the individual one. at. a. time. is so inefficient it goes beyond thinking how long it would take to care for all the individuals one vaccine or scientific discovery could do in an instant.

That was my dilemma. Like the prodigal son, I had squandered what god and prosperity had endowed me with and when famine struck, I was left to my own devices.

The details of having failed for doing nothing for the last eighteen years so clearly set my path for my unprecedented battle with the government of goliath proportions, epic when you have no weapon but your mind—the one that I did not use for better during the past eighteen years, over half my life ago—but hey, David only had a boomerang, right? I mean, correct?

My battle with the government started immediately after I wrenched myself from an eighteen-year relationship. It’s so painful to think about, it made my experience with the federal government seem like a joke, for I certainly laughed a lot, deliriously sometimes with my new partner in battle, Steve. He laughed a lot too, a loud laugh that made everyone in the room look, and then quietly think, thank goodness I’m not him. But that never stopped him from laughing, which is why I loved hearing him laugh so much, even when he got on my nerves. Not really.

I had just found a job, too, quite proud of myself. Being out of the job market that long with such a promising resume made me seem like a joke. No one took me seriously. It was either, “We want someone who will stay, not leave us after we’ve trained them.” They had no idea what a stable rock I was for the last two decades. Or it was, if you read between the comments, “We want someone dedicated, not a dilettante who has the luxury of practicing as an attorney years after she passed the bar.” It was not until I had engaged my foe that anyone realized how seriously I was about the law. For law and order are ideas that I cherished, before I saw those endowed with protecting order abuse the law.

What did I want to do in the long run? I was asked during my first interview, to which I stuttered something about partaking in the firm’s profit share. Considering that the firm was wholly owned by the bossman, who incidentally, was the one interviewing me, that sounded quite lame. I had done my research the night before, when I had been called in for an interview, but there did not seem to be very many good answers for this very obvious of interview questions. It seemed a bit less lame than, “I want to argue in front of the Supreme Court on one of these issues: Civil Rights in terms of equality that eliminates discrimination even though I will never benefit from affirmative action, healthcare because no one deserves to wait longer in an emergency room because they do not have health insurance, freedom of speech because Americans are way more squeamish about sex than violence.” How would a workers’ compensation case ever get to the Supreme Court of the land? So I gave the profit sharing answer that was suggested in the “How to Land a Job by using these 100 Best Answers to the 100 Most Obvious Interview Questions Ever”.

I didn’t get the full-time job, but the independent contractor position instead. I was happy with that, as it could swing me into a permanent position elsewhere. Things were good, as I looked at the cuffs on the sleeves of my suit. Thought I had removed all the lint from my suit prior to my interview, peering closely at why the lint would not pull off. Oh, I realized, it was not lint sticking out, the threads of my suit were fraying I had worn it so many times even if not recently. My best black suit was almost ten years old. It fit pretty well considering. I had a few that fit better but those were stuck at my ex’s place. I choked on that word, even in thought. “Ex,” how do you call someone whom you’ve been with for almost two decades an ex when you will always love them? And definitely no less tomorrow than today. I stopped picking at the threads of my suit because I was only making the threads longer.

The day I got offered one job, I got offered a second. Life was wonderful. I had finally picked myself up by the scruff of my neck and was ready to conquer the world, a decade or two late but ready nonetheless. This called for a celebration. But with whom, I chuckled to myself. I had spent the last ten years laser focused on everyone else except myself. I had let friendships slide by until friends became acquaintances and strangers looked more familiar than my acquaintances. But no more. I knew how to say no. I was going to hoard my time for myself. Even if it killed me. Little did I know how often I would be repeating that to myself in the near future.

So there I was, a middle-aged woman, a cougar almost, beginning her career. Single, having to find roommates, driving a rental car, with no one to celebrate with except my mother. I called her first, she was proud of me. I smiled at her support, which was always there. The comfort and the security only a mother could give.

Had some interneting to do, so I set off looking for a Starbucks or a Coffee-Grind. Somewhere young and hip, I needed to feel alive. I did feel alive, as I drove my car to the Westside on a Friday evening. I looked at my dashboard, which warned me: 51 miles to empty. That’s plenty, I laughed. The windows were down and the wind cut my cheeks sharply so that I wanted to feel more. I felt footloose, free, and no longer in need of refueling.

Part 2. Meet Steve Patina

I rolled along the ten freeway going west, going as far west as Horace Greeley urged. I was almost at the end when I heard a roar of a bike coming up on my left. A rider sped by with the wind maxing out his jacket like a sail, fullblown and free. I looked at my speedometer. I was only going eighty…five. And he was long gone. I hit the accelerator and it the steering wheel. Where was the damn horn? Was it one of those side horns or button horns? My left hand steered while my right groped for the—there it is. a loud honk.