When Your Landlord Is Also Your Roommate, A Scumbag, And A Hot Couch Guy

For a short period of time I had a Hot Couch Guy not only as my Landlord but my roommate too. The result? A horrendously infuriating experience, and a ton of material for some entertaining stories. Here is my experience: First off, I have a permanent residence in Tennessee, and have been in Texas for the last couple of months on a temporary basis. That being said, when I came here I needed an arrangement for more than one month but less than one year. So like many other Americans, I went on the Craigslist and I found myself a room to rent. "What could possibly go wrong?" I figured. 

Ahem. Quite a bit apparently. It was me, one other tenant, and the landlord. I made the decision to move there quite hastily, as there were time restraints and I needed something to pan out quickly.

The layout of the house is a kitchen/living room combination in one small open space, the landlord's master bedroom and then the two other bedrooms to the left of it. That's the whole house, it's about 1,200 square feet and it was me, another tenant, and my hot couch landlord all crammed into it.

Upon moving in, my first night there, while he was out of the house for the two minutes a week he leaves, just as a courtesy I texted him asking if I could watch TV in the living room. At the time, I was doing it as a formality. In reality most people, after having spent $850 to live in a pretty small house, would assume that they are allowed to watch TV in the living room. He texted me back immediately with "I am actually going to be back home soon and I'll need the living room when I get home. I'm usually in there for the whole evening." 

Now that I laid out the foundation of the situation, you are probably thinking "oh that can't be fun" It got worse.

The hot couch landlord, not only lived at this house full-time, but apparently, claimed to, allegedly "work from home" I'm calling bogus on that since this is how his routine went: rolled out of bed 10am-11am. Slugged over into the living room, turned on the TV, and sat on his "throne" like Jabba The Hut. Occasionally he'd get up off his ass to go to his room and smoke pot and then sit back on the couch, and you would know exactly when he did this because he would be obnoxiously and aggressively coughing for about ten minutes after.

His schedule was very unpredictable. I saw him go to bed anywhere from 10:00 p.m. all the way to 3:00 a.m. with the tenants at the mercy of whatever activity he is doing. Depending on his choice of activity, me and the other tenant were possibly subjected to really loud noises in the middle of the night. One time, I heard hammering at midnight.

So basically, as I'm sure you've gathered, he had absolutely no consideration for his tenants who basically paid his mortgage while also putting money in his pocket, and enable him to do nothing with his life.

He was one of those fake gangster "baller shot caller look at my used 1991 BMW" kind of folks. if you ask him a simple yes or no question, he'll do this thing where he lowers his voice and answers like this: "Yeeeeeeeeeeee" or "Naaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhwwwww" he lets out his words lazily I guess to try and sound like a gangster? I'm not even sure why that's a thing but whatever. If you were to bring up something, like let's say for instance I say "I'm looking for an RV" or "I'm about to buy a new bike", he would always without fail say "oh I know a buddy with one of those"/"yeah I got a bike for sale homie" One time I called him out on it and the next day I said "Hey man, where's that bike at? I'm ready to buy it" He figured he'd get out of it by saying "Yeah if you want to buy the bike I got, that's top dollar man. That's gon' be like three-fitty($350)" So I said "$350 isn't bad, I don't mind paying that" And then silence. You can literally say you're looking for a German Shepherd puppy and he'll tell you "I could hook you up with one of those man I gotchu" But if you followed through and called him on it, it was always BS.

I'm not sure why he did that, but with my minimal psychology knowledge it came from a deep-seeded desire to feel important and validated.

Since the living room and kitchen are in the same space, he was always there when you were in the kitchen. If you happened to be in the kitchen cooking something after a long day of work, he would get on you about the littlest things, had excessive crazy rules that he did't even follow. I remember one time he just said out of the blue the 'paper towels are over there" in the middle of me cooking. Mind you, I was not done and had not started to clean up yet. So my response is "uuuh okay thanks" to which he said "...yeah, do you usually leave chocolate milk on the counter?" Basically hinting to me that he wanted me to clean the drop of milk I inadvertently spilled. Some time later, I saw a huge glob of milk that he left on the same counter OVERNIGHT. He also left a ton of crums and mess from cooking which he didn't clean for days at times, which is a good segway to my next point: Dude didn't even follow his rules. And this was a very common thing with him, he absolutely had no regard for the rules he made. I actually think that he had no regard for them on purpose, sort of to "flex" his authority.

You would think he was at least somewhat aware of how non-ideal his house was. You would think he is even semi aware that no one in their right mind would consciously choose to live there unless it was a last-minute choice and they literally had no options. Nope. He actually felt like it was a fine viable choice for a typical renter. I know this because he told me the story of the person I took the place of. Apparently they "went on a Buisness trip" that was towards the end of the month and just didn't come back. So he made the very smart decision to leave. But the scumbag landlord doesn't see it that way. He sees it as "Yeah that muthafuckah was on a trip and he didn't pay so I kicked his ass out"  -____- Well he saw me also "go on a trip" and I guess instead of realizing that I didn't want to live in an enclosed space with Java the Scumbag, he probably thought he kicked me out.

 I wonder how many tenants have to "go on trips" and never come back before he realizes that he's horrible to be around. One time he left a bunch of garbage in the neighbor's yard and the neighbor was rightfully pissed and of course Java The Slug had to act all gangster and escalate it to calling the neighbor "pussy boy" and the neighbor merely brought up that his financial situation must not be all that great if he has to rent out two rooms in his home, and he lost his shit and said "Come inside and look at my Audi, look at the thousands of dollars of renovations I do to my house blah blah blah" like you can tell that to get under his skin all you need to do is bring up money and materialistic things.  No one cares about his stupid Audi. He made fun of the other tenant by attacking the appearance of one of the girl's he brought home, and then literally the next day the landlord brought a girl with the same level of attraction over. The worst part is that he was cheating on his own girlfriend with her and told us to keep it quiet and don't tell her. So he made us involved in his immoral self indulgent life choices. His girlfriend bought over his kid once a week and he yelled at them the whole time and his kid isn't even two yet. He constantly yelled things like "HEY! DON'T TOUCH THAT WITH YOUR STICKY HANDS" Or "PICK THAT UP" He had an entourage of largely neglected pets: Three dogs, two parakeets, a 100 gallon fish tank, and a fish bowl with a gold fish in it. The parakeets were situated in the entryway two feet from the front door and got almost no attention. He paid those birds no mind and they were extremely neglected. Whenever they chirp out of boredom, he yelled "SHUT THE FUCK UP" I'm sure he had so many animals because no human wanted to be around him, but when it came to being a good accountable human being to his animals, he unsurprisingly fell short. I also saw him get pretty rough with his dog to the point where it yelped. He was on the phone one time with a customer service representative who happened to be a female like me and the sound cut out and she didn't hear him for one second, and he muttered under his breath, "dumb bitch heh heh" Which I was very offended by.

I never understood why he didn’t realize that the very nature of the arrangement was a recipe for disaster. When you’re literally home all day, your house is small, and you decide to rent your house to capacity, it’s going to get cramped. He constantly acted annoyed when someone was in the kitchen or hung out at the house. It seemed that he didn’t realize that he created the situation.

 If my house was earning me $1,700 in income just by having two tenants, the place would have to get pretty messy for me to complain. In fact, if there was a dish every now and then, I would probably just wash it and count my blessings that someone fell for my stupid scam. Also, for context, I own a home and I have rented to tenants as a landlord before so I know what it is like from both sides of the coin. Java The Prick is just a completely self-indulgent human being who lives only for himself with no regard for others and I’m glad I don’t have to deal with is HOT COUCH ass anymore LOL