Watchlist by Bryan Hurt

Author:Bryan Hurt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2016-03-10T05:00:00+00:00

Buildings Talk

by Dana Johnson

We called him That Fat Bastard Fatty Arbuckle because he was fat and that’s all we had. We thought about trying to be above it. I know it’s unoriginal and ignorant to point out the fatness of a guy that huge. But he just looked like every little thing Essex Properties Trust was doing to us. The rent being raised first 3, then 7, then 10 percent for the last two years. The shady utility company they switched to in the middle of my decade there, with all its hidden “fees,” so that the cost of a five-minute shower set us back like twenty bucks a pop. I’ve lived with so many dudes to keep living here, the latest one, Franklin, he didn’t even know of a time when stuff that was free, now costs. It’s like trying to tell some fifteen-year-old about how back in the day getting your luggage on the plane cost you nothing, because it shouldn’t have. Like the parking spot that used to be free, all of a sudden costs $150 a month to park my car that only runs some of the time. All this after the romantic years, the years when no one wanted to live in downtown Los Angeles, where your shoes slipped in blood and spit and urine and vomit, where you yelled at your dog not to sniff the needles in the gutter, because, in fact, you knew exactly where they’d been. And so they courted us, the first in the building. You’re pioneers! they said all chummy and enthused, like they were letting you in on some great real estate deal, when all they were doing was making sure they didn’t have any empty apartments. They even gave us duffel bags with the building’s logo on it: Banker’s Loft Since 1905. If old building management sniffed the vague scent of us about to jump ship, move to some other building that was trying to fill their apartments, winking and blowing kisses at would-be tenants with other useless but seductive merch, they got all Please sir, please don’t go on us. Begged us to sign a new lease. No rent increase.

But Fatty Arbuckle. He was the most recent in a line of building managers. The others would last a while but kept being shown the door, word was, because they didn’t know how to strike the balance between being nice and making money. Me, I hated him from jump because he looked like a dude in costume. And even my roommate Franklin hated him. “He is so not pulling that off,” he was always saying, but Franklin was a guy with his own fashion problems that I’ll tell you about in a minute. But this new manager: you’re asking for resentment and hostility if you’re the kind of person who wears a pocket watch and you’re on the shy side of thirty. Old-timey rounded collars with thin ties, bow ties sometimes. Suspenders on days when he seemed

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