Page Three
may 29, 2008 greenfield
At the time that I signed up with the Deparment of Mental Hell in early 2007, I was both mentally and physically completely worn
out from eight months of harassment from the other tenant in my building (a.k.a. the mafia-chick, psycho-chick, crime-chick, Judith). And from endless phone calls and long speeches trying to get something done about it. I knew that the landlady would evict me if I complained directly to her, as she did not like me and she did like the other one. I called every legal aid agency, mediation service, disability agency (and more) in Western and Central Mass, trying to get someone to intervene on my behalf and avoid a direct confrontation between the landlady and myself. She hated discussions with me. Having no luck for eight stinking months, I finally gave landlady a letter of complaint, and that was just two days before the DMH sent me my first case manager, a “temporary.” Ten days after I gave the landlady this letter, the sheriff’s department brought me a notice to quit. This is illegal in Massachusetts, to evict a tenant after they have made a complaint. But this landlady, in all realms of her life, never troubled her bleached head one iota about what was legal and what wasn’t.
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Update 22 July 2009: That’s what’s called a retaliatory eviction. But landlady could afford a very slick attorney, and I could afford no kind of attorney at all. On July 13 of 2007, the date of our trial, I, naïve and unrepresented, let myself be talked into signing an agreement to leave by a certain date in exchange for some money. What convinced me to forego my trial and appeal was that the slick lawyer told me the psycho-chick was moving out at the end of August. I naïvely believed him. She didn’t go. Not in August, not in September, not until Christmas day. I should have gone ahead with the trial. I should not have believed a word that slick, lying lawyer said. I had $7000 worth of cross-complaints against the landlady, illegalities all. I could have won. But I did believe and I signed an agreement and I had faith in the DMH to help me (which they didn’t), and I lost everything. The landlady’s hatred, the psycho-chick’s hatred won out against anything I could use to defend myself without a lawyer of my own. These two women despised me, and I despised them back. The difference is that I could despise them without setting about to destroy their lives. They, being insane, had to destroy me. Nothing less would satisfy either of them. The harassment from the crime-chick continued unabated until the day she finally moved out to her new house: Christmas day, 2007. Here’s some of the holiday hell from that year
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read… Spite and Malice… Braonwandering…
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all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2008-2012 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated. all rights reserved.
