Toronto Landlord and Tenant Board

So many roommates… so little time…

Tick tock tick tock Time goes by… so slowly…

except when it accelerates, like the last weekend of summer scudding into the chilly shadows of responsibility and consequences. I face the dark-suited members of the Rent Tribunal on Monday at noon. For the little matter of my

being late with the rent for four months. In a row.

Lest you think this is serious, let me bray with defiant laughter as I tell you about the 10 years previous that I was NOT late with the rent, and do they count for nothing? Am I only as good as my last performance?

Let me tell you about every month paid up within the month, and if that doesn’t herald the advent of pull-up pants and a Beatrix Potter training spoon, what does?

Let me enlighten you about a shadowy global conspiracy: a secret underground organization dedicated to the provisioning of bad roommates, that allegorical repletion of vapid millennials who stand, like the self-styled “Phoebe” in the last shot of All About Eve, smirking the smirk of the damned as they clutch the object of their desire: my now-turned-brass-monkey balls, rendered cold and sterile as a witch’s twat.

Scene: The final smirking Phoebe struts offstage, having effected my spiritual collapse, but I manage to lift my aging goomer* head, as always, to croak:

Next!

Oi ve voy. Next is Mr. March, who goes mid-month to visit grandma’s house, tra-la, tra-lay, and is eaten by a wolf.

I’m just guessing about the wolf, but his cheery goodbye is the last I see of him. He doesn’t return with the April rent, he doesn’t answer the phone, and when I message him online the message is immediately marked “read”, which I immediately understand as meaning: “read by his captors”. He’s vanished. Is he abducted? Intervened? Amnesiac? Done in? Do I care anymore? Next!

The next, current iffy choice gets arrested before moving in, which leads me to take on his iffy one-night-stand girlfriend as roomie – anyone, darling, anyone will do! – only, miracle of miracles, the current one turns up again, released on bail! It’s rainin’ iffy roomies!

Too bad I wrote to the welfare office to cancel his funding! Does it get any better? You bet it does! To wit:-

I was snarky with my friend. I told my snark, my friend did end. Oops!

Cast your memory back, if you will, to the night before my appearance at Estreat Court, a mediaeval label for a joyless public shaming which currently does not involve entrails and a wheel, but rather a sharp slap on the wrist from Your Honor for my failure to hunt down my other friend—for I have learned to rotate them so as not to wear them out so quickly—and frog-march him to 51 Division. I imagine holding my torch triumphantly aloft as I do so, like one of the villagers in Frankenstein.

My hapless friend, for whom I was surety, broke on a July Friday the promises he made to Her Majesty forty-eight hours before, leaving me holding the bag of hapless. He’s just been released after serving his sentence, which tells me that four months at large plus a whole cartload of drugs in your possession yields thirteen months in captivity for lack of stick-to-it-tivity, it’s right there in the Charter!

This is my failure, what I could not imagine, try as I might: “Halt, vile absconder! Peace Officer Roddis commands you to accompany him forthwith to the common gaol!” Elmer Fudd, in drag, could issue this order with more red-meated authority than I.

But I digress. That fateful night before my estreation – a word I just made up – I call out my other friend – that’s friend number 1, if you’re keeping track, and you really should – on some supremely prissy judgements he’s making about surety friend (#2). I get, in Dorothy Parker’s words, the frankies.

I am frank with him. High as a kite frank. Snarky frank.

I snark at him via text, “Are you by any chance turning into one of those Tut, tut – aren’t I wonderful tut tut aren’t they a loser sanctimonious bores? Because it sure sounds like it.” It starts there and builds to delirious, Wagnerian levels.

I’m on a roll. I tell them in no uncertain terms and I lay down the law, then for extra measure I give them a piece of my mind. I hesitate, drawing my snark warmly about me—then press “Send”.

Immediately I regret it. I work through the night, feeling vaguely nauseated about my toxic SMS and ponder my obnoxious sense of humor. Maybe I should have added an “LOL”? Maybe a couple?

At the proper time, I don my estreating clothes and head to court.

It is during our court break time from being estreated when I get a text from snarked friend conveying his offense at my snark and announcing, as drama queens do, be they gay or str8, his intent to block my number.

Block my number!? Holy Facebook, it’s Mean Girls, but – with boys! What will they think of next? Flavor drops for water?

Turns out he’s been holding a grudge for two years about the time I snapped at him while he was stripping some paint in my dining room. Two years! I manage an apology, the one that sounds sincere on a good day, but snark friend telephonically storms off in a sanctimonious huff for, in the end, it’s str8 dudes who are the sensitive ones, not us tough-as-nuts gays. Lordy, no!

So, two years ago I snapped and said something cunty. “WhatEVERRRRR!” I think, in tune with the Mean Girls vibe. Who will cut me a great big bleeding side of slack? Not he!

But how will he survive without my Sunday psychotherapy as he upgrades his fifth simultaneous house, texting me hysterically to complain: “We dropped the chandelier while installing it. Now we’re going to have to have a crystal specially made!”

OK, fine, WhatEVERRRRR. Block my number, honorary Heather-cum-Holly-Golightly! Off you go lightly, back to your bitch mistresses, at least the ones who are female.

Here, take your pick, old pal: Lie in the bony death-clutch of the shrieking crack-banshee from hell, or loll in the dull-as-ditchwater snuffle of your tediously faithful high-school sweetheart as you sing the Sesame Street Songbook.

For whoever the fuck it may be this week who tells you “come to Momma”, they can’t prevent me blowing, in your general direction, what may sound like a kiss.

My verdict from Estreat Court: Her Majesty commands me forthwith to top up her already bulging coffers with fifty bucks, not five hundred. No good deed goes unpunished, but Her Majesty knows a really good deed when she sees one, and punishes me just enough.

Apart from all that, pretty uneventful. Maybe I should get friend number two to move in with the guy on bail?

Yes, no?

You remember that “Gay Agenda” the right is always on about?

Well, I found this week’s update. It’s even worse than you thought…. Blessed Judy, Mother Of Liza, pray for us now and at the hour when we attempt “reverse cowgirl”.