I think I've got your number

562 Tenants of the world, unite

2006-01-16T11:04:00.000-08:00

I'm long gone from 562 7th Street, but the saga continues. A current tenant has organized his complaints in a slightly more coherent manner, with fewer references to his wardrobe but more damning pictures, at Serious Danger. I wish him the best of luck; he'll need it.

Oh and.

2005-06-07T20:46:00.000-07:00

It occurs to me that I left on quite a cliffhanger. The short of it: She didn't cancel our lease. Not only did she forget that threat, but apparently she became totally belligerent when LP explained, in late May, that we would be moving out.

Seems LP told Gloria that some of her landlady practices were illegal; Gloria replied "You're illegal!" LP also called her a slumlord, but Gloria didn't know what that meant, so then they had to have a time-out so that LP could define it. At least this has been a learning experience for us all.

Bringing it all back (Home)

2005-06-07T20:27:00.000-07:00

I know, it's been too long. It's been so long that I got de-linked from one of two sites that ever linked me. Somehow, miraculously, though, it hasn't been long enough for people to forget that this thing existed. I've been bugged about blogging at least twice, and I'm pretty susceptible to peer pressure.

So. We're moving out at the end of the month. I'm happy never to have to fight with Gloria again, sad to leave this neighborhood behind, and pissed off about my security deposit, which is lost to the ages. I imagine it's tucked snugly into the Trembicky war-crime blackmail fund.

Speaking of which, last week we acquired a free DVD of the new show by the guys from the State. (Bear with me; I promise I'll earn that segue in a second). The State was to sketch comedy what Sassy was to magazines back in 1994; three of its creators, Michaels Ian Black and Showalter and David Wain went on to make Wet Hot American Summer. This new show is called Stella and features the three of them running around the Upper East Side in suits, driving into telephone polls and pouring tea tree oil on people. It's like a metrosexual Three Stooges, and at the risk of sounding like a Comedy Central shill, it's genius. Why is this relevant? Because in the first episode, the three (SPOILER ALERT) accidentally kill their landlord, who is then revealed to be (ANOTHER SPOILER ALERT) Joseph Mengele. I bet few others in the audience will identify quite as strongly during that big disclosure.

Shit

2005-04-20T13:40:00.000-07:00

I think I just became the one millionth blogger to use "This joke isn't funny anymore" as a headline. I wonder what I win.

That joke isn't funny anymore

2005-04-20T12:24:00.001-07:00

Gloria and Walter came into my place today to "fix the bathroom." I figured this meant more plaster. I was wrong.

Within five minutes of her arrival, a hideous crashing sound came out of the bathroom. I ran into the kitchen to find drywall all over the floor. "Are you OK?" I asked.

"Oh yes, darling," said Gloria. "We are just taking wall down."

I think I did a really admirable job of not losing my shit. Calmly, I asked what happened to Keith, the workman she'd promised to bring in. Wasn't he going to do the job? And either way, what happened after the drywall was all taken down? When would it be put back up? Would we be able to use our bathroom in the meantime, or were they planning on literally removing the entire wall?

"Is not your problem," said Gloria.

"It sort of is," I said. "I pay the rent. It's my bathroom. I have a right to --"

And the shouting started. "Miss! Is not your problem! Why are you always giving me so much trouble? I drop dead right now!"

I was good; I didn't even reply, "Please do." Instead, I went back to my questions. "When will it be repaired? That's all I want to know." In the middle of this, the phone rang. It was LP. "Great timing," I told Gloria. "It's my roommate. You can tell both of us when the wall will be fixed."

"Who?" said Gloria.

This set me off. I don't shout much; I'm too attached to the sense of superiority that goes along with keeping cool in the face of someone sweating and growling. But some things are too much to bear, and one of them is Gloria Trembicky.

(Oops. I outed her. Finally. Future Park Slope renters wise enough to Google before signing a lease, be forewarned.)

I yelled about how it was her job to tell me when the wall would be repaired. Gloria yelled about how I'm an idiot who is trying to give her a heart attack, and then yelled about how she wasn't going to speak to me ever again. On the phone, LP yelled, but I was too busy yelling myself to notice what she was saying.

Finally I announced that I was going to call 911. According to the housing authority, calling 911 is the proper recourse to take if your landlord becomes verbally abusive. I've never done it because it seems so insane and petty, but it was 2 PM on a Wednesday, so surely I wouldn't be pre-empting too many robberies from getting reported. I dialed. There was a long moment of dead air. And then, faintly, under a horrible screeching fax-moden noise, I could hear a recording say, "You have reached 911..." Faulty connection or flaw in the system? I'll never know -- I went back to yelling.

"Get out!" Gloria finally shouted at me. "Get out! You go!"

"This is my apartment," I pointed out.

"Fine! Then I leave! I pack up and go!"

While she ranted, Walter stood atop the ladder calmly depositing chunks of my wall onto my floor. I wasn't about to clean up the mess myself, so I slunk out into the living room, shaking with anger and figuring I'd have it out with them once they swept the floor. I called 311, but reporting them didn't make me feel much better. I even tried the local precinct, figuring I could talk to Officer de Jesus, who had a crush on my subletter this summer. Maybe seeing his uniform would have some effect (maybe it would scare the dejesus out of them!). But he didn't pick up.

As I was seething, I heard Gloria's doorbell ring. She was still destroying my bathroom, so I went downstairs and got the door. A girl about my age with gorgeous dark hair was standing in the hallway. "Are you looking at an apartment here?" I asked.

"Actually, I'm a realtor. I'm showing one."

So I gave her lowdown. I'm not sure it will have any effect -- if the renter likes the place, the realtor will get her cut no matter how bad the landlady is. But she looked fairly ethical, and she seemed sympathetic. I finished my speech by bringing her into my place to see the landlords. Walter sniped at her; Gloria called her "sweetie."

Finally, after the realtor was packed off with the keys to Apartment 7 and the majority of the wall was swept off the floor, I asked Gloria if I could speak to her. "It's not OK for you to talk to me the way you just did," I said as politely as I could manage. "I have a right to know what you're doing to my bathroom. You can't yell at me for asking questions. And if you do, every time someone comes to look at an apartment in this building, I will tell them what a terrible landlady you are."

"Fine!" she said. "Then I am cancelling your lease!" And we both slammed our doors.

Cheap and Chic

2005-04-12T10:56:00.000-07:00

STERI-FAB: Bactericide - Sanitizer - Fungicide - Mildewcide - Insecticide - Deodorant - Germicide - Viricide

and

PERMACIDE P-1P: For Homeowner Use Both Indoors and Outdoors To Control Fleas, Brown Dog Ticks and Lice On Premises

The inside of my closet is a complicated ecosystem. Gloria long ago forbid me from using my over-door hanger, claiming that it was damaging my bedroom door, so I've been keeping all manner of bags and hats and scarves in a thick layer on the closet floor. The closet is tiny while my wardrobe is large, and so the bag/hat layer tends to be draped in cotton dresses and pleated skirts that have flung themselves from their wire hangers in despair. Shooting up through the fertile mix is one kitten-heeled pair of boots that seemed like a good idea when I spotted them priced at $5 in the Salvation Army in Williamsburg shortly after moving to New York, but that subsequently revealed themselves to both hurt and retain a disturbing amount of moisture whenever it was wet outside.

On Friday, I opened my closet to find two spray-bottles containing the formidable-sounding substances listed above, nestled in among the accessories. They were under a black skirt, on top of a green leather hobo bag. LP is the most responsible roommate a girl could ever have: she'd ask before touching anything in my closet, let alone storing liquids that end in "-cide" there. And these bottles looked industrial-grade, like the sort of thing only someone who was planning to clean a shitload of apartments would own. I grabbed each one by its gooseneck and marched next door.

"Gloria, why were these in my closet?" I asked when she answered my ring. She looked different: she'd had her hair done. It was cut close to the head and heavily styled, like a pixie cut -- very mod, and very bizarre on the head of an eighty-five-year-old slumlord, but somehow also insanely chic by any unbiased haircut standard.

"I do not know, dear," she said, examining them. "Perhaps the other girl put them there."

"I'm pretty sure she would tell me if she were storing industrial-grade insect killer in my closet," I replied. "Maybe they're Walter's?"

"No, no. But maybe somebody else's." She retreated back into her own apartment as she spoke, but then, as the door was shutting, she popped out again. "Miss! I like your shirt. Is very pretty."

I liked my shirt too. If there weren't sixty years and the unbridgable gulf between good and evil separating us, perhaps we could have been shopping buddies.

Correction

2005-04-11T20:25:00.000-07:00

Two eagle-eyed readers have pointed out that I confused Ruth Gordon with Bea Arthur in a previous entry. I'm worried that Gloria might be turning me into an ageist, someone so opposed to little old white-haired women that I think they all look the same. I do find myself narrowing my eyes at anyone on the subway platform in orthopedic shoes. Sometimes I suspect that the Walter-shaped men ambling up the local sidewalks are being that slow on purpose.

But the worst was a dinner I had two weeks ago with an elderly relative, a rabbi who was born in Hungary. He's as wise and kind as a very old religious figure ought to be, but every time he opened his mouth, I expected him to deprive me of half my monthly salary and then deny me my right to a hot shower. He explained the Talmudic interpretation of the Terry Schiavo case, and all I heard was "Is fine temperature! If shower is hot, you burn yourself! You are so young, you do not know: is better like this."

Finally: a federal offense

2005-04-11T20:08:00.000-07:00

Our mailbox hasn't locked for months; neither my roommate nor I has the key. Last week, on my way out the door to run some errands, I flipped open the mailbox lid. There was one piece of mail inside, a letter from the housing department for LP. When you call 311 to complain, they send you a letter acknowledging the complaint and letting you know that it has been catalogued. This winter we called 311 about the heat constantly. We have complaint letters all over our apartment, falling out of our purses and sticking to the floor. At this point, I'm a little sick of them, so I figured I'd leave this one and grab it my trip back upstairs once the errands were done.

When I returned to my foyer and opened the mailbox, the letter was gone. It was mid-afternoon; LP wasn't due home for another three or four hours. I suppose one of my neighbors might have gone through my mail, but why? It's not like they don't all have their own acknowledgements of complaint from the housing department. Really, there's only one explanation for the letter's disappearance.

I wonder if Gloria and Walter know how illegal it is to commit mail fraud. I wonder if I should say something.

The name is an anagram

2005-04-08T08:33:00.000-07:00

I went on vacation and when I got back my roommate told me a story. Our bathroom ceiling, the one that leaks, leaked all over the floor one night. The predictable uproar commenced, and Gloria called in the plumber. He did exactly what he did the last time she called him: he poked at our pipes and the pipes of our upstairs neighbor, and then he said he couldn't find a thing. My roommate suggested that maybe Gloria should get a new plumber.

"Oh no, miss," she said, her eyes shining in the dim light of the hallway. "There is something special about this plumber."

"She said it like she had a big trump card," explained my roommate later, "like there was something she was about to say that would change everything I felt about the plumber, something so obviously important that I couldn't possibly argue with it."

"This plumber," said Gloria, "he is also a priest!"

When we moved in, I made lots of Rosemary's Baby jokes. It's still the scariest movie I've ever seen (though perhaps because the last time I saw it was on a date with a guy who chose the "congress with the devil" scene as a good time to try to unzip my pants). If nothing else, comparing our place to the movie allowed me to romanticize New York; look at us in our Brooklyn Dakota! And Gloria does look a bit like Bea Arthur in the movie. But my roommate got creeped out and asked me to please stop, and then I managed to scare myself thinking about our long hallway in the middle of the night, and now I try to reference our apartment as the scene of a horror movie as rarely as possible.

So I guess it's good that the power of god is on our side. I'll try not to wonder about what sort of priest makes a living as a mediocre plumber, and next time the pipes break, I'll see if he can exorcise them.

As for my roommate, she wins the snappy response award. "The plumber is priest!" said Gloria.

"Yeah, well, I'm an atheist," said LP.

The man

2005-03-23T08:12:00.000-08:00

Gloria told me that the man would come by to paint my ceiling on Monday. "The man, and not Walter?" I ventured hopefully.
Yes, the man and not Walter. Walter said he didn't want to do it. (I'm very proud of Walter for finally putting his foot down after 107 long years of servitude.)

So I stayed home all day Monday, and of course no man came by. Tuesday I spent the morning at the library, where I got a call from Gloria announcing that the man had come and wanted to paint my ceiling. I called her back outside.

"Man is here to paint another apartment, so he does yours too," said Gloria.

"I'm not home," I said. "You told me to be home Monday."

"OK, he paint another time," she said.

"Fine with me. Give me a time, and I'll be home," I said.

"I will. Later, miss," she said.

The man often promises to come by and then doesn't show. He's always very nice about rescheduling, though he generally fails to show up at the new time, either. Gloria tells me that this is the way of the man: no one can control him. Apparently, he is like the wind, fluid, intangible, and completely invisible to the naked eye.

Ukraine in the membrane

2005-03-21T22:08:00.000-08:00

My grandfather was from the Czech-Hungarian border (it switched halfway through his youth due to World War I). He failed to pass much Hungarian on to my mother or uncle, but he did instill in them a veritable encyclopedia of baffling old-world ethnic stereotypes. These generally have to do with small Carpathian towns that specialize in horse- or child-thievery. The one about the Ukrainians, though, is less specific. Basically, a Moldovan might try to put your puppy in a stew, but while you're trying to wash the paprika off poor traumatized Rover, those wily Ukrainians will steal your wallet.

Obviously, I think this is all hogwash (also the sort of thing a Ukrainian might steal, if you don't keep your hogwash barrels sealed nice and tight). But I do feel like I'm acting out some sort of ancient ethnic tension every time I vie with Gloria. We only even know that she's Ukrainian because Natasha, the tall Russian who used to live downstairs with her girlfriend Amy, recognized the language in which Gloria shouts at poor old Walter. Then one day Gloria took it upon herself to shout in English at Natasha. She repeated the charge to me recently: "They are two women who sleep in one big bed, and one is going to have a baby? What kind of people are these I am renting to? These are not good people!" And then Natasha and Amy moved out, but not before trashing their former apartment.

So maybe it's not an ancient ethnic tension. Maybe she's just a bad person. Though I do recall once, as a child, being told at an elderly relative's knee the following old-world adage: "Everyone knows that the old ladies of Kiev like to rent to lesbian couples, then become horrified about the nature of their relationship despite having owned a brownstone in a historically lesbian neighborhood for the last FORTY YEARS."

Ukranian onion cutlet (serves 3-4)

2005-03-21T21:57:00.000-08:00

Cutlet:
6-7 big onions, chopped
5-6 eggs
6-8 spoons semolina flour
1 can sardines (optional)
salt and pepper

Mix above in large bowl. Shape mixture into patties and fry in oil.

Sauce:
2 onions
2 carrots
1 liter tomato juice
sugar and salt to taste

Chop and fry onions and carrots. Add tomato juice to pan. Boil cutlets in sauce for 15-20 minutes.

(recipe courtesy of Svetlana, foxy Ukranianne and short-shorts enthusiast)

Lyrical Ballads

2005-03-04T11:51:00.000-08:00

About a month after we moved in this summer, we threw a party. It was named "Gloria! Gloria!" and our invitation was all about raising the roof without waking up the landlady, who lives in the apartment next door to ours. Luckily, our walls are thick: we heard no complaints, and I'd like to think that this is because we actually didn't disturb them.

I can't remember whether we played Laura Branigan's "Gloria!" at the party, but for the rest of the summer it was our theme song. My roommate and I were going through a karaoke phase at the time, and some of my fondest memories from August and September involve the two of us in various bars, belting out the following, incredibly appropriate lyrics. For the sake of readers new to the Gloria T phenomenon, I'd like to perform a close reading. Comments in brackets, as follows:

Gloria, you're always on the run now
Running after somebody, you gotta get him somehow

[To be honest, Gloria has only run after us about the rent once, so the start of the song maybe isn't so apt. But they lie a lot about their background, have mysterious accents, and moved here from Austria in 1952, so we think they might be hiding from some sort of Nazi war crimes tribunal -- "always on the run now" indeed.]

I think you've got to slow down before you start to blow it
I think you're headed for a breakdown, so be careful not to show it

[This is clearly a reference to her constant threat "You want to make me have heart attack?" which is an all-purpose response to such questions as "Can we do something about the brown stuff coming through the bathroom ceiling?" and "Why do I need to consult with you every time I want to take a shower?"]

You really don't remember, was it something that he said?
Are the voices in your head calling, Gloria?
Gloria, don't you think you're fallin'?
If everybody wants you, why isn't anybody callin'?

[Yesterday, in a discussion about our building's lack of heat, we told Gloria that she had fifteen apartments full of angry tenants. She replied, "So let them all move out!" We asked if she really wanted her entire building to empty itself, and she said, "I find new tenants! This is nice building! Easy to find new tenants!" But babe, if everybody wants you, why are so many of the units in this cheap and lovely pre-war brownstone so often empty? And more importantly, why is everyone always so eager to move out of here?]

You don't have to answer
Leave them hangin' on the line, oh-oh-oh, calling Gloria

[This is a nod to her practice of shouting "Leave me alone!" and hanging up when you call her about maintenance problems]

Gloria (Gloria), I think they got your number (Gloria)
I think they got the alias (Gloria) that you've been living under (Gloria)

[Why did she tell me she was Austrian if she and her husband speak to each other in Ukrainian?]

But you really don't remember, was it something that they said?
Are the voices in your head calling, Gloria?

[As in, "Gloria, can you please put the hot water back on? Gloria, why is it so cold in my apartment? Gloria, my ceiling fell in!" Seriously, that's a lot of voices]

A-ha-ha, a-ha-ha, Gloria, how's it gonna go down?
Will you meet him on the main line, or will you catch him on the rebound?
Will you marry for the money, take a lover in the afternoon?
Feel your innocence slipping away, don't believe it's comin' back soon

[Gloria is married to a little old man named Walter. He looks like he died two or three years ago and speaks in a querelous falsetto. Every so often, when you catch him in a the right mood, he's rather charming, but for the most part he's as mean as his wife. Walter sleeps in the basement and pees in a bucket, which we often catch him emptying onto the snow pile in front of our building. Because Gloria doesn't appear to allow him to sleep in her apartment, people have speculated that he isn't really her spouse, but perhaps her brother. And there are those who think he's her brother/spouse, as if they are some sort of evil Babylonian god-couple.]

And you really don't remember, was it something that he said?
Are the voices in your head calling, Gloria?
Gloria, don't you think you're fallin'?
If everybody wants you, why isn't anybody callin'?
You don't have to answer
Leave them hangin' on the line, oh-oh-oh, calling Gloria
Gloria (Gloria), I think they got your number (Gloria)
I think they got the alias (Gloria) that you've been living under (Gloria)
But you really don't remember, was it something that they said?
Are the voices in your head calling, Gloria?

Are they, Gloria? Are they?

NB: I feel a little weird and morbid adopting poor Laura Branigan's name as my handle on this site. But I don't want to use my own name, and the song is just such a major part of the Gloria mythos. Laura, if you're out there, just know that it's a tribute, not a slander.

Back in the USSR: A Mission Statement, of Sorts

2005-03-03T15:10:00.000-08:00

It started out a funny joke. Gloria, we told everyone, was our ker-azy landlady. She was a hundred and eight years old and had been squired around by Stalin back in the old country. When we first visited our fairly big, fairly sunny two-bedroom, it was occupied by a pair of Russian grad students. They seemed unaccountably frightened of Gloria, but we took that as a result of their post-Soviet upbringings. After all, Gloria had hugged us when we signed the lease! She'd settled us in her kitchen and told us about the hardships of making a new life in America in 1952! Obviously, she was nothing but a sweet old lady with a cute, if vaguely menacing, Slavic accent.

Obviously. It's nine months later, which means it's March, which means it's regularly 30 degrees out in Brooklyn. Which means that an unheated brownstone hits 59 degrees in the sunlight. I know, there are much, much bigger housing violations in this city. We live in on a tree-lined street in a neighborhood full of lesbian moms whose three-year-olds want to grow up to be civil rights lawyers. Everybody in this building other than the landlady and her ancient husband is a young, urban professional; as indie rock or as relatively broke as some of us might be, we're technically all yuppies. But yuppies get cold just like anybody else.

Ultimately, though, the point of this blog isn't just to whine. There are other landladies who fail to adequately heat their apartments. But Gloria is unlike any landlady -- or any other old lady, period. She yells. She slams doors. She threatens heart attacks. She called the girls upstairs sluts and my roommate a "wild jungle beast." We once witnessed her assault the guy from the first floor.

As such, welcome to the Gloria T blog. Especially if you're in any way connected to the Brooklyn housing authorities.