[An oldie from my old Web site, TheZeroBoss.com. Originally published to the Internet on November 29th, 2004.]
Once upon a lease, my family found itself in the financial grinder. An unexpected increase in child support for my first daughter became retroactive, leaving us for an ironic nine months with our sole source of income reduced by one-fourth. I sat down at the end of October and calculated the impact on our expenses. Conclusion: We wouldn’t be able to make our rent come December. We needed either to hold up a bank, or move – immediately.
The move was, of course, a shoestring affair. Even though my mother- and brother-in-law were moving in with us to pool resources, we were beggars, not choosers. But there were certain absolutes. We needed five bedrooms and two bathrooms. We had an upper-limit in terms of rent. Above all, we needed a good landlord – one who wouldn’t blanch (as many did) at inviting four adults, three kids, and a teenager to squat on their property, and who would be good, if not saintly, with repairs.
And so we met Patric – our doomed, drug-dealing landlord.
We thought we had struck renters’ gold. He was an amiable guy a few years my junior, with well-kept curly black hair and a smile that said, “Dude, everything’s negotiable.” The house he owned, at first blush, didn’t seem workable. For one thing, there was an open staircase leading up to the second floor – an obvious hazard to the little ones. Patric immediately promised to build a railing – and build one he did, immediately after we inked the lease. After that, he did what we thought all good landlords should do: he faded into the background, cashing our monthly checks and stepping out of the shadows only when summoned.
We had our suspicions about why Patric was so laid-back. One day I asked Kim, “Don’t you think Patric’s a bit of a…well…”
“Stoner?” she replied.
“Yeah.”
“Oh, totally.”
Naw, I thought, probably not. That’s just a silly stereotype. In the 1920’s, marijuana made you a homicidal maniac; now, it made you an apathetic loser. The stereotype didn’t fit Patric, anyway – he was always active, always tackling the next project. He was just…at ease. Consistently.
The bamboo was harder to justify. Spring came, and the short stalks outside of our kitchen window sprang up over 15 feet tall; by June, they were growing through our deck and splitting the planks. Why anyone would have planted that noxious, barbarian weed there except to camouflage an illegal cash crop was beyond us.
We had no way of knowing who planted it, though. Patric? The former tenants? Or had it always been there? Our neighbors were quick to blame any oddities on the former tenants. We were quarantined from our neighbors’ house to the east by a thicket of blackberry brambles – which our neighbor later told us he planted to separate his kids from the loud partying and lawn filth of the pre-Patric household. Other neighbors confirmed that our abode was a dump before Patric took it over. To them, he was the local Solomon, raising an eyesore and building a palace – and boosting their own property values in the process.
Former tenants, bad. Patric, good. A comforting deduction for all concerned.
Not that it was anything more than a curiosity to us. Growing your own stash is no crime against humanity. The “war on drugs”, to us, was more than a colossal waste of money – it was a harvester of tragedy which, like Prohibition before it, turned a normal human activity into a bloody criminal enterprise. My only concern was leftovers: if someone had planted marijuana on the grounds at some point, who’s to say a plant or two wouldn’t survive a mild Seattle winter? All we needed was a police officer to wander onto our property with some concocted probable cause and spy a pot leaf amidst the bamboo forest; we’d find ourselves swarmed by federales and CPS agents before you could say “reality TV”. It’d make for a great episode of Cops – so long as it happened to some sorry motherfucker in a wife-beater, and not me.
After ransacking the bamboo for signs of stray cannabis stalks, we stopped speculating about what was properly our landlord’s own private business. Until the roof started leaking. Right above our bedroom closet. I had lived in several houses over the years, and had seen some strange malfunctions, but never had I known a roof to spring a leak over somebody’s wardrobe. Patric, as usual, was promptly on the scene. He spent a dog’s age on what Kim and I both thought should have a simple repair; we considered shacking up in a hotel until he could assure us that the roof wouldn’t cave in and kill us in our slumber.
The patch job failed. The roof started leaking again.
And Patric disappeared.
Kim left him a message about the roof. When he didn’t return her call after a week, we knew something foul had occurred. June’s rent check went unredeemed for the month; our sense of dread grew. We withheld July’s check until Patric poked his head out of the rabbit hole – or someone showed up with a damn fine excuse on his behalf.
Someone showed up – but he was just as perplexed as we were. I was on my way home from a business trip when Kim called. Sitting in St. Paul-Minneapolis International, preparing for my flight sipping a “Minneapolis Martini” – which, judging by taste, was four parts vodka and two drops food coloring – I lifted my brain out of its pickling solution when I heard my wife say, “Our landlord is here.”
A sense of relief filled me. We’d prepared for the worst; maybe, I thought, this would turn out shiny-happy. “Patric’s there?”
“Well…no,” she said. “Unless the part of Patric is now being played by a middle-aged Asian man.”
His name was Mark, and he introduced himself to Kim as the owner of our house. This was, to say the least, a mild shock. To be fair, Patric had indicated that he was “finalizing” the purchase of the property. But he framed this as a mere formality. In truth, Patric was in the early stages of a lease/purchase; Mark showed up because his rent check – Patric’s check, our rent minus a modest $50 that Patric tacked on to defray repair costs – never arrived. For seven months, Mark had had no idea that Patric was subletting to our teeming brood. I can only imagine what went through his head when he found us camped out in his house like we had a lease or something.
The upside was that I spent zero time on the ride home thinking about what would happen if the engines failed and my plane went down in the Montana foothills – I was too worried about whether we’d have anywhere to live when I landed. Fortunately, Mark would prove an even more casual landlord than Patric. Within a week, we had a new lease (and this time, we demanded our landlord show us the deed before we signed).
But Patric remained off the radar until mid-July, when June’s rent check finally cleared our account. Kim went on-line and examined the bank’s digital image of the check.
It was Patric’s name. It was not Patric’s handwriting.
Kim called the police in the town where Patric lived to file a missing persons report. Obviously someone had done him wrong and robbed him blind in the process. The detective at the other end of the line let her go on for five minutes before he stated flatly, “I don’t need to file a missing persons report, ma’am.”
“Well, yes, you do,” she insisted. “Didn’t you catch any of that?”
“I don’t need to file a missing persons report, because Patric is dead.”
We knew this in our hearts. Hearing the words, however, was a hammer-blow. We had waited five weeks for the thud of that other shoe, and when we finally heard it, it made us metaphysically nauseous.
The detective wouldn’t answer Kim’s questions about our landlord’s fate. “I just can’t believe it,” she told him, shaking her head. “He was such a nice guy.”
“Yes,” the detective said in his best more-than-meets-the-eye tone. “Patric was a very nice guy.”
When he interrogated Kim about how well we knew him, and whether we knew where to find his woman, our thirst for answers went into overdrive. We fired up a Web browser window to see what we could piece together online. Compared to the cop, the Internet was a loose-lipped stool pigeon; within three minutes, we knew everything we needed to know – and all the anomalies of our house suddenly made sense.
When he wasn’t training to be a landlord, Patric ran a trucking company with his brother. Puget Sound Energy tipped off the authorities that the business’ electrical consumption had suddenly tripled. When the police arrived, they found three semi trailers filled with cannabis plants. (The power was for the heat lamps.) Authorities made no immediate arrests, but told the brothers not to wander too far.
A week later, an Oregon police offer pulled over a motorcyclist on Interstate-5 for driving in excess of 90 mph. As the officer approached, the cyclist drew a pistol. Before the officer could react, Patric was on the ground – knocked off his chopper by the bullet he put in his temple.
We called our bank, which discovered that the rent check was cashed by Patric’s father – doing his best in grief, it would seem, to settle his son’s affairs. I’d love to say that we did the human thing – that we tracked down Patric Sr., commiserated with him, found out who his son really was. The very thought of doing this, at the time, made me want to assume the fetal position. A part of me wanted to cling to the scant memories it possessed of Patric, to keep its conceptions and conclusions unsullied. I was full on reality, and couldn’t stomach another bite.
Mystery solved, there was nothing for us to do except keep the grounds. Our new landlord sent his contractor out to re-patch the roof over the closet, where Patric & Co. had cut two square ventilation holes so that the scent of cannabis didn’t overpower the house. To this day, though, I haven’t managed to take a shovel and a set of clippers to the bamboo (though I may soon, as it’s begun to make threatening gestures toward the children).
The only thing worse than being the target of tragedy, is watching helplessly as Fate conducts a drive-by shooting. A gentle, hard-working, attentive, selfless young man died, haunted by the specter of a stiff federal sentence for a victimless crime. It’s one thing to read about such tales in a paper or on a web site – where they are, though real, tinged with the abstract. When they invade your life like this, they leave a mark that never rubs off.
Some would argue that Patric’s life was in his own hands, and that his death was his own decision. Considering that federal sentencing guidelines could have put him in jail for most of his natural life, this logic is at best myopic. Today, a man named Ron Ridenour awaits federal sentencing in Montana on charges of marijuana trafficking; he faces five to 40 years behind bars. Ridenour lucked out and drew a lenient judge, critical of mandatory sentencing, who will likely give him the minimum. We’ll never know where on the roulette wheel Patric would have landed. Stacked up against the possibility of spending 40 years in prison, death dons an attraction it wouldn’t otherwise hold for a rational man.
There is no addendum to this tale. I have no idea what happened to Patric’s brother. Even the original articles in the local papers have evaporated from the Web’s archives, leaving just a handful of people who can recount the story of a nice guy who carried the label of “drug dealer” to his grave. Every once in a while, when the kids go to bed and the house goes silent, Kim and I will sit in the living room, rum and Cokes in hand, and remember the kind support we received when things got desperate. For us, no matter who claims this place as theirs, this will always be Patric’s house.
