A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Drunk Tank

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Bet that headline caught people’s attention, and no, it wasn’t me heading downtown for a sleep over either. It was one of my tenants, twice in two days matter of fact.

So here is some quick background for you before I start telling you the tale of my latest tenant story. I started dealing with a few organizations with in the last few months that deal with people hoping to transition from places like the drop in centre and various other places along that line. There are a lot of people in the city who just need a hand up to get pointed in the right direction and our shared accommodation properties are an ideal environment for some of them. Unfortunately, only some as was readily apparent this weekend, not everyone!

The young lad who resembles the headline actually immediately got off to a bad start with me when I initially started to sign him in. When I explained the rules about no smoking in the house, no problem, when I explained no drugs in the house, no problem, it was when I mentioned no drinking the wheels started to come off. Now when I tell new guests about the no drinking rule I explain that I really mean it is not a party house, a couple beer after work, no problem, flats of beer lying everywhere, problem.
I didn’t manage to get that far with the young lad before he explained to me that he likes to get drunk as often as possible. In retrospect, the top of my head should have been smarting from the rap on the head that huge red flag should have provided.

Now I had been working with his support worker for a few days to try and set something up for him, so my common sense jumped out the window and my desire to help let me overlook this. I had been warned he needed some guidance and strict rules would help keep him on the right path, so I re-explained my position to him about drinking at the house and believed I had come to a reasonable understanding with him. You know the standard “these are the rules, if you don’t like them, don’t live here”.

The interesting thing about these shared accommodation properties are the mind sets of many of the individuals. As a rule, they almost flat out refuse to tell me when anyone breaks my house rules, unless it directly affects them. That was how I first found out he was a problem when my phone rang at 11:30 at night and then 1:30 in the morning. It appears my young friend was drunk, belligerent and keeping everyone awake.

Normally my phone shuts off at 11:00 and restarts at 7:00 in the morning, but for some reason it didn’t happen that way. My thoughts are if there is anything that big of an emergency they should be calling 911 first and I can pick up the pieces the following morning. So the following morning I headed on down and strangely enough at 10:00 this individual was sound asleep, while the other individual in the house he drank with, I must have just missed. After waking him I calmly (yeah right) explained my position to him and notified him that if anything else occurred and his name was mentioned, he was gone. Common sense mistake #2.

I also discovered via the scuttle butt from the other tenants that he had been in jail for a few days for missing a probation meeting and had only been released a day or two prior. Every day I learned a bit more about him just to keep me on edge. It appears his return to freedom required a mandatory celebratory drunk. Perhaps yet another red flag?

Now after talking to his support worker they informed me that our young fellow was trying to get into another housing program that would have more supervision, stricter rules and most likely onsite workers to control the environment. His upcoming meeting was scheduled for Friday morning at 10:00am and it was important to keep him aware of this(for selfish reasons at this point as it would give him a home and I didn’t have to feel bad about potentially kicking him out on the streets).  So I volunteered to leave him a note reminding him or talk to him if I ran into him.

Because the shared accommodation properties have common areas for all the tenants, I don’t have to announce my visits with 24 hour notices as per Landlord and Tenant laws, so I commonly show up and have a quick look around the common areas to make sure everything is under control. It was during this one visit I dropped off a note for him and stuck it between the door and door frame, so he had to see it when he arrived home.

Just to keep better control over the place I made it a point of randomly dropping in quite a few times over the next couple days and noticed my note never moved, which made the other tenants along with myself presume he may have been having another sleepover downtown. So I contacted his worker again and let her know he had disappeared once more, so using her contacts finally after about five days we found out he indeed had ended up in the Remand Centre. We both assumed he would be there for a few days, so I prepared his eviction notice, just so it was all nice and legal and then promptly became swamped with a new property just coming on line.

So Friday rolls around, I still haven’t dropped off the 14 day eviction and the worker calls me to tell me our young project has shown up looking for his end of the month income assistance check. Even more of the story comes out now that this individual is quite aware of how the system works. You get drunk, disorderly or whatever it takes to get held in jail for a while, and then you get out in time to retrieve your government check so you can repeat the drinking cycle.

My plan was to drop off the eviction at the end of Fri day as I was still working on a property and had a deadline to get it ready for August 1st, so end of the day rolls around and I head over to the house. What do I find when I arrive? My other tenant and my young buddy sitting in the living room with young buddy obviously hammered. There are beer cans all over the coffee table and then I notice a pipe and marijuana all over the table, at this point I am mildly annoyed (perhaps mild wasn’t the correct word there) and I tell him he has five minutes to leave. OK, I admit it, that isn’t exactly the way the landlord and tenant bylaws are written, but what he didn’t know at this point really wouldn’t hurt him.

Now normally he is just off a little bit, but when he drinks this fellow can only be described as whacked. He didn’t look very happy with my chat with him or my demands that he be gone in five minutes so I told him I would be back and he needed to be gone. So I promptly went to my vehicle and called the police and explained the situation.

Within about 40 minutes, a car pulled up with a couple of officers and I explained the whole problem to them, including the drugs in plain site on the table. Now due to Landlord and Tenant bylaws, their hands are tied as far as far as helping me remove a tenant who hasn’t broken the law. They even explained how they couldn’t come into the property without proper reason. Unfortunately, over the years I have learned far too much about the Landlord and Tenant rules and explained the common area set up of my property and then tossed in the kicker of how I needed them to come in to ensure my safety. This worked perfectly for them.

Into the abyss we entered! When the fellows had seen the squad car pull up they had been sitting on the front balcony smoking (finally they were following some rules!), and they promptly vanished into the house itself. I assumed they rushed in to hide the drugs and straighten up a bit, but I assumed incorrectly, it looks like my lad had just gone in for more beer. There were the drugs and the pipe just lying on the table.

I re-explained my position to him and by this time, he was a bit more belligerent, so the officers asked to see some id from him. He wasn’t able to produce any, so they asked him to stand up so they could search his pockets and they found some stubs from his monthly government check which they used to identify him and lo and behold discovered he had another warrant of some type out for his arrest. So they were now able to cart him away for what I thought would be several days. By then hopefully new accommodations would be found for him and he would be out of my world.

This brings us to Saturday morning, which is when I collect rents from several of our properties. One of my tenants from the property calls from the neighbours to tell me buddy is back, is threatening him, has been punching holes in walls, breaking screens and causing general havoc. I quickly finished up at the house I was at and headed over to see what was actually taking place. Since I was sure this wasn’t going to go well, I called the police on my way over re-explained everything and they once again were sending a car over to visit.

Are you still with me? I know my stories tend to go on and on, but we are getting to the good stuff!!
So it’s Saturday morning, just after 10:30am, when I show up at the house, and surprise he is already quite drunk. After he left Friday there was still about a dozen beers and a large bottle of Jack Daniels in a bag that were all unopened. When I arrive the bottle is over two thirds empty, so I was sure I would be off to a great conversation with him if I could keep him focused long enough.

As I walked up to the property, I could see the remnants of the spline that holds the screen in place lying on the sidewalk, so I was already “edgy”. Once inside, the other tenant who was threatened showed me the holes in the wall in his room, so I quickly escalated past edgy. I confronted the drunken fellow and politely asked him why he punched my walls, threatened the tenants and broke my screens. Ok, I better confess, I might not have been that polite.

He started to get annoyed and said he was leaving, so I followed him out and kept “talking” to him to stall him until the police arrived. I was also kind of hoping I could get him to try and swing at me which drastically escalates my options as a landlord. Usually I can push someone’s buttons quite well, so I must be losing my touch as he wouldn’t fall for it. Finally out of the blue he says to me “I’m going to buy a guitar!” Then he turns and starts walking down the street. Really how do you counter something like that? I mean when someone has the overwhelming urge to suddenly go buy a guitar you really just need to let them go for it. Especially when you are busy trying to grasp exactly how messed up they truly are!

Just moments after he left the three police vehicles showed up and just like the previous day, all the officers were great. They understood my problem, I understood how they were limited to what they could do and they definitely wanted to help me which I appreciate.

I explained how he just left, and described his clothing for them, the direction he went and his unique haircut (apparently due to the fight he had the other night they had to shave portions of his head to clean up some cuts and abrasions). I’m pretty sure he is the only person in North America with that particular style right now.

So one of the cars went off looking for him (I couldn’t think of any local guitar shops in the area, so I suggested they start by heading towards the pawn shop several blocks away). Sure enough within about ten minutes, they found him and brought him back. After discussing with the officer my options, I was able to complete a 24 hour eviction for the tenant. If you ever have a tenant who threatens you as the landlord or one of the other tenants in your property, you can immediately issue a 24 hour eviction which greatly accelerates the process.

By this time, he had agreed to go to the drop in centre which the officers were prepared to take him to, but to cover my bases I also had to give him his copy of the eviction and explain he had 24 hours to pack and be gone. Even in his drunken state, he was able to understand he could stay for 24 hours. Unfortunately, this part of landlord and tenant bylaws worked for him and against us. So we had to leave him there.

After more conversations with the officer, they suggested I leave; there was nothing else left for me to do, other than get more frustrated. They said they would gladly come by around noon tomorrow if I liked to assist his departure if necessary. They also said they would be sure to make additional drive bys of the property to check that nothing was getting out of control.

I had to walk down the street to collect some more money, so I walked down, finished my collections and as I walked back to my vehicle my drunken friend was perched on top of the banister of the front deck, which is about ten feet off the ground, with beer in hand. Just for fun, I thought I would grab a picture on my cell phone to send to his worker, but before I could take it, buddy fell flat on the ground. It was probably the best part of my day! He wasn’t hurt or anything, when you are that drunk your body is like jelly, but he sure looked confused about his sudden change in elevation.

I did drive off at that point giggling all the way. I had a few more things to take care of in the area and made a few more drive-bys myself, but all appeared quiet. It was around 5:30 that the officer I talked to earlier called me to inform me they found him wondering around the streets still quite intoxicated and I didn’t have to worry about him destroying the house that night. They couldn’t tell me, but reading between the lines, I was pretty sure he was going for another sleep over at the drunk tank.

Its stories like this that Karen and I continue to find ourselves involved in. I guess it’s just a matter of continuing to write about them, sharing some of the humor (and the pain!) with other landlords and friends and then eventually putting it all together as a collection of stories. Anyone interested in getting some pre-orders in?