Spiderhead backs down

The crisis has subsided.

I’ve come to an agreement with Spiderhead. I reminded him of my invaluable presence on the property. I’m the one who got the city to install the bike rack outside, at no cost to him. I’m the one who called when water was gushing from a pipe sticking out of the boiler room into the parking lot. I’m the one who lets the window-jumping cat stay in my unit all day so that he doesn’t go bothering other tenants. Plus I’m the only one in the building with the smallest clue of what to do in case of an earthquake, which is pretty darned important given that this building is going to be one of the first to go – at least according to the firemen who taught the URM class (unreinforced masonry buildings) at Earthquake School.

This building needs me, and no one knows it better than Spiderhead. He’s agreed to raise the rent by only half of what he was going to raise it. Hence, I’ve signed on for another year.

The Return of Spiderhead

He’s been here.

How can I tell? The patchouli lags behind him for at least a couple of hours. It’s hovering outside my door now, in the tunnel leading up to my hidey hole.

I knew he was going to raise the rent as soon as I let his henchman in to repair the glass in the window. It got broken two years ago when his other henchman, working outside the window-well, impaled it with his shovel handle. Not wanting to break my chain of thought, I didn't say a word -- just calmly brushed away the glass and kept writing. I never once asked him to fix the star-shaped hole. In fact, I enjoyed the thin stream of air it provided, given that I can’t open the window without being pelted with mud-infused rain drops.

He kept threatening -- or as he might put it, offering -- to repair the glass. I told him it didn’t bother me. Another tenant had begged him for two years to fix a leak in her ceiling before he got around to it, so I thought I was safe. But I hadn’t decoded the formula yet: You want something, he can’t get to it. You don't want something, he’s all over it.

Too late, I realized I should have been begging him to repair the window all this time. But I couldn’t stave him off any longer. I ran out of excuses and finally had to let the henchman in to fix it. And now, sure enough, the rent is skyrocketing.


The window in question, post repair -- lower left pane.

It’s not always about bicycles

I have about eight things pending in my life right now and it’s driving me nuts. This must be what the polar bears feel like when they can’t find an iceberg to land on because they’re all melting from global warming.

On second thought, maybe things aren’t that bad.

One of the things, though, is that I’m at risk of losing my hidey-hole – the place I go to five days a week to write. My landlord – whom I will call Spiderhead to protect his anonymity -- is rumbling about raising the rent.

(While he was talking to me a spider lowered itself down from the rafters and landed in his hair. Normally I would say something, but in this case it seemed so appropriate. What spider wouldn’t want to live there? Prime real estate for the arachnid crowd. No threat of water or comb attacks. So now I know for a FACT there are spiders living there. Hence the name.)

Negotiations are in progress.

Sordid details still to come.

I’m so sorry, I don’t mean to play games with you or keep leading you on. When I made that promise, I neglected to look ahead and notice that today’s schedule would not allow me near a computer, any computer, until late in the day. And even now I’m not at my hideout, but stealing these two minutes to jot you a line from someone else’s command center. The pursuit of information for a newspaper article I’m writing took me way out past the airport today and various other far-flung industrial sites – in a perfect example of a schedule not suited to biking. Tomorrow I’ll resume my regular routine.
Kate Gawf, Girl Reporter