A General "Hello" (Meanwhile, My Landlady Is Crazy)

Hello, ornery women! I have been a member of this site for a long time, but up until now I have not posted anything. I believe I was busy with "stuff" and further sidetracked by "things". Mea culpa. I look forward to posting and reading other's posts until the world is wrapped in a giant hug of a post.

Meanwhile, my landlady is crazy.

Very, very crazy.

Not crazy in a fun way. She's not "wacky neighbor" type of crazy. She's not of crazy that's a little quirkly, yet strangely endearing.

My landlady is categorically bat-shit insane.

Before I go into the particulars, let me give you an idea of what we're dealing with:

My landlady is ninety-four years old, but doesn't look a day over two hundred. She's about three feet high, and dresses in the classic "crazy-old-lady chic" style: housedress, sweater, orthopedic shoes- winter, spring, summer, or fall. Her crowning glory is a helmet-sized wig of brown curls that makes little to no effort to hide her actual white, thinning hair. A friend has remarked that my landlady looks not unlike Bathilda Bagshot from Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows. She is originally from Poland, and has gotten by on about three words of English: "hello", "cash", and "now". In her spare time, she enjoys rooting through her tennant's garbage, fixing vacuous gazes upon passerbyers, and waiting for death.

Her crazy first manisfested itself to my roommate while I was on tour. She accused Dana of paying her rent with a counterfeit one hundred dollar bill (she refuses to accept checks). Her proof? A photocopy of a one hundred dollar bill with a stamp from the bank marking it as counterfeit. That could be from anyone, argued my roommate (and rightly so). Our landlady rebutted with a barage of malicious, vaguely coherent crazy threats to which my roommate could only reply with stunned promise to repay the money and a hasty retreat to our apartment. I'm pretty sure she cried, but did not tell me as much.

We never paid her the one hundred dollars we did not owe her. She asked about it a few times afterwards, but otherwise accepted our rent money without further episode. We assumed that her crazy mind had driven out the notion, and life continued on as normal.

This afternoon, I was in Manhattan putting in hours at my new catering job. After the event, I checked my cell phone messages. There was one from Dana:

"Hey, La. Please call me back as soon as you can. I'm having an issue with Mrs. [Landlady], and...well, let's just say I called the police."

By the time I was on my phone I was literally steps from our building. No yellow caution tape, no traces of a struggle. All was eerily quiet. I ascended the stairs, not knowing what I would find.

Nothing greeted me in the stairwell. I enterred my apartment, found my roommate to still be alive, and asked her what had happened.

The power went off soon after I left for work. A circuit...thingy did...something and Dana had to go down into the basement to...make it better. The technicalities are not important. The basement was locked, so Dana went to Mrs. [Landlady] to get the key. Mrs. [Landlady] refused to let her in the basement and left my roommate to sit in her powerless apartment. She called her lawyer friend, who informed her that Mrs. [Landlady]'s actions were, indeed, illegal and that my roommate should call the police. So she did. When the cops arrived, Mrs. [Landlady]'s batshit truly took flight. She screamed to the cops that Dana was not as innocent as she looked, pulled the counterfeit bill card, and flatly refused to let Dana into the basement without the presence of a police officer.

All this because my roommate wanted the power back on.

I do not know what secrets my landlady is hiding in that basement. It chills my heart to think about it. I keep with me only two comforts: 1.) according to Dana's lawyer friend, we have the law on our side, and 2.) our landlady is a frail, hobbit-sized old woman, and if it came down to it I could totally take her.