Monday, 25th August 2003, 11:42am
An opinion by:
Noemi
Cooperatively Yours, by Noemi Lopinto
I live in a housing co-operative. I moved here two and a half years ago, full of optimism, floating on my soapbox about the values of shared space, community, low rent, and significant contributions to the community at large... Now, two years and three letters, one warning, countless meetings, three arguments with three hated neighbors, some dog poo, fallen laundry and absconded responsibilities later, I am once again ready for the rental market.
I now know I was chosen by this co-op as their fallback candidate, after much in-fighting and bad politics among existing members. Woe is me, those same shitty politics have come to haunt me now. My upstairs neighbor, G, is a desperately brittle, neurotic woman with a tiny, yapping black dog named--wait for it--Bozo. She is a very light sleeper. She wants me to wear slippers in my house, because my giant, hairy sasquatch steps apparently wake her up in the middle of the night. This is true. She calls me at 2 am, when I have gotten up to take a midnight piss, her voice weak with exhaustion, and asks me to please stop walking. She also wants me to stop bathing after 11 pm, because the sound of the shower somehow pierces through her Percodan. Another source of tension: she wants the back yard, which is right off my back door, clear of Sadie's toys. I want it clear of Bozo's steaming piles of shit. Every once in a while, she calls me to tell me that Sadie's tricycle is blocking the cement path again, and I either deny it is her tricycle, or say it belongs to one of the co-op's three other kids. Similarly, when I call her about the piles of round ( or worse, crushed) brown lumps clinging to the now-balding sod, she claims it was a neighbour's cat, or someone else's visitor's dog. It is a system.
On the third floor to the left are CL and CL, a pair of childless, petless, aging yuppies with a hate-on for my cat. The cat comes and goes, as cats invariably do, and this fact alone makes the CLs dyspeptic with passive agressive rage. The fact that they have to see him in the front hall, wandering our fire escape in the back, or walking along the fence to our backyard is now the cause of two nasty e-mails, and a final warning letter. One of the CLs happens to be the President of the co-op. Never one to underachieve, naturally the one person I piss off the most is the fucking president. In this last letter, which I try not to re-read because my doctor has ordered me not to, they quote the co-op charter, which reads something like this: "by virtue of being the anal retentive, power-drunk, life-denying petrified statues of yellow tallow that we are, cats are required to be imprisoned in a darkened, stuffy apartment with their stupid pet-loving owners who must suffer the consequences, so that no one living in an urban environment under ridiculously intimate circumstances must have to expand their emotional repertoire in any way. If you don't like it, leave." Signed, and I am not making this up, "cooperatively yours".
So far, I haven't responded to the letter, because I am still exhausted from writing my last epistle to the administrative council, contradicting, combatting and otherwise contesting their other complaint. The complaint was that I arrived an hour late for a "spring clean-up" whose surface patina is togetherness and community cleanliness, and whose seemy underside is a McCarthyist-like purge of tardiness. I have a meeting with the interrogators--um, excuse me--I mean the administrative council, on the 10th of August. At issue will, no doubt, be the mysterious reason for my late arrival for a jolly early Saturday morning of mopping, leaf raking, sidewalk sweeping and red brick-polishing with my light-hearted neighbors, with some mention of pet-control, and finally, my lapsed responsibilities on the finance committee.
Yes, I said finances. I am single-handedly behind the financial success of this community. I have to sign leases, fill out forms, do taxes, sort mail, and gag myself with a spoon on a regular basis. But lately, I have been feeling kinda... unmotivated, you know? My will to keep this place up and running is buried under a pile of letters; letters about cats, leaves, finances, children's toys, and dog poop. So they wrote me a letter about it, which I also haven't read. My only excuse for slacking off is: I hate you guys. I don't care if I run this place into the ground. I have never met a more petrified bunch of emotional retards in my life. But I will have to explain myself on August 10, and when I picture myself explaining my perspective in a reasoned fashion, I can't help but burst into hysterical laughter. It's all so pointless given their ferret-like obedience to rules and regulations. And let's face it, if ferrets can slaughter, this will be one. I envision two possible scenarios, both of which involve a healthy distribution of lube: Either I will decide to bend over and take it, in the name of a .01 rental vacancy rate and unenforced rent-control laws in the city of Montreal, or I'll show them an elaborate diagram of my ass with the co-op charter sticking out of it, as I pound the floor slipperless in the shower while simultaneously adopting stray cats all over the neighborhood. I'll let you know which one wins out....
Later,
Noemi
