And Here's To You Mrs. Robinson

The next tenant in the Dragon House was recommended by a friend.

Janet was a single mom, with a good rental history.

You bet we checked her references carefully. Her current landlord told us she was always on time with her rent and they had positive things to say about her at the convenience store where she worked. That seemed good so we accepted her application.

She ended up being our worst nightmare.

The den mother to two teenaged boys, she wanted to be their best friend instead of their parent. As far as we could see, there were no rules. The cool mom, she wanted to hang around with their friends, to the point where it was seriously inappropriate.

It reminded me of the movie The Graduate, where a young college graduate has an affair with an older married woman. Only in this case, the young men were in high school.

Janet’s parenting style, if you could call it one, was to open her doors to all the kids in town and let them do what they wanted.

Our beautiful little house turned into a party house. The neighbors would call to tell us that there were kids on the roof in the middle of the night, drinking and throwing bottles. The police became very familiar with the family’s antics.

So did we. Each time there was a complaint, we would take our official clipboard and visit Janet. After a review of the rental rules, we would give her an ultimatum that she had to stop causing problems with the neighbors or we would evict her.

It was an empty threat.

The Landlord-Tenant Act in our Province is very lenient toward tenants. We couldn’t serve her notice because of noise complaints from the neighbors. The complaint had to be from another tenant in a building we owned.

The town didn’t have a noise bylaw, so we were unable to use that as a way to get her out. The only way we could remove her was non-payment of rent, or if she did something illegal.

Janet would sleep with any guy who looked at her twice.

One of the tradesmen we hired to do repairs on the house called her a ‘piece of work’.

When my husband was repairing the sink in the kitchen, she walked in wearing a skimpy nightgown. He refused to go there alone again.

She didn’t care what people thought. Answering the door in a housecoat with a shirtless teen standing beside her, she would greet us with a coy smile. I was sure she was sleeping with her teenage son’s friends.

Halloween was a nightmare. It got so we dreaded holidays as they approached. New Year's Eve was coming up and we contemplated our options, including camping out in front of the house in our RV.

In the end, it was a new boyfriend that lured her away.

He wanted her to move in with him and she gave us her notice. We spent the month holding our breath, afraid he would realize what he was getting into. We worried he would discover the truth before she moved but it worked out in the end. She moved out and we breathed a sigh of relief.

When we reviewed what went wrong, we thought about how good her references were. Then we realized — her landlord at the time gave her a good reference because he wanted her to move.

He wanted someone to take this problem off his hands.

If he had given her a lousy reference, she’d never leave.

It’s crazy what you discover when you become a landlord. Two different trajectories were being revealed. People were either on their way up in the world or spiraling down.

Lesson learned. Ask for references from several different landlords. Don’t just trust the one where the tenant is currently living. They’ll say anything to get the tenant out.

This is a fictional series that explores the challenges of being a landlord. It also reveals the idiosyncrasies of various tenants. Some of the scenes are based on true experiences.

The Dragon House, another story in the series.

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This story also appears on Medium by Tree Langdon, the author.