Shortly after cashing in on that equity, I was standing on a lawn of brown grass in front of a tired house just west of 441 and north of I-595. My Realtor, Daniel was in a pinch and needed to sell this eyesore fast. “What do you think?” he asked me as I noticed the faded pink paint was peeling from the exterior walls. “What’s this?” I indicated to rotting wood overhead in the carport. “It’s just some old wood,” he peeked in to see where I was pointing. “I’ll help you get this fixed up, we’ll get a tenant and you’ll sell it in six months once you grow some equity.” “This place is a dump,” I noted out loud. Once again, for the umpteenth time, he launched into the logistics of Section 8 housing and how he’ll help me find a tenant with subsidized checks from the county, that way I’m guaranteed my mortgage gets paid every month. “Easy,” he summated. He said that often.
In the back yard, the grass stood waist high, the pool needed a serious shock treatment and there was a dilapidated shed filled with trash and rusted parts of ancient tools and unidentifiable objects. Inside the house, there was a wood panel living room and the hover of stink. The floor in the utility area had the remains of broken and gooey linoleum. Everything needed a serious scrubbing, cutting, clearing, replacing....bombing.
We returned to the crunchy brown front lawn. My client turned friend turned broker was showing signs of stress. I hated to see him that way. “Will it really be of much help if I buy this? I can’t handle this alone, Daniel...” “Yes,” he showed a humbleness I hadn’t seen yet, “it will help a lot if you buy this property.” With huge resistance I agreed. “Okay, let’s do it,” I said with a tightness in my throat.
At my first property, the one I call, “Progresso,” things were going smoothly. For about a minute. Chase bought the house next door to mine, on the same day I did. Totally intentional; guess who’s brilliant idea that was? Chase, you see, was my boyfriend, and we started this investment nightmare together - as partners. He sold his house in west Sunrise for top dollar at the peak of the market and we used that money to start gathering inventory. My house was to be an investment and his house became our home while we waited for the Equity Fairy to come and grant us all our wishes. We talked about getting married during our four week adventure through Europe - I even wore a ring (for those who know me, know that was TOTALLY out of character. I don’t do THAT). In the end, we never did go through with tying that noose around our necks. But big dreams we still had together. Next to our little iron barred and barricaded sanctuary in the ghetto was a house on the corner where more than one illegal business was thriving. The owner didn’t live there, but we figured who he was and made offers to buy the lot. More than once. He never, for a moment entertained our offers. We plotted to maximize the land and develop the three properties into affordable, multi-family, “Green” and sustainable housing units. I wanted to do something positive for the neighborhood, rather than what so many other greedy investors and developers were doing; occupants were being squeezed out of their rentals to make way for tacky, over designed, over-sized town-homes. Many of which were never completed and most of those that were completed remain vacant today. But alas, I never was meant to use my design skills for such causes. Divine Intervention or again, lack thereof....
Tenants were already living in the house when I bought the Progresso property in June. “Convenient,” we were told to think and so we did. (Looking back now, I never felt like saying, “baah-ahhh,” so much in my life.) By August, the “convenient tenants,” were no longer able to pay their full monthly rent. They were good, hard working people in a bad spot. Already, their rent didn’t cover the mortgage, so from day one it was a struggle for me. (I was a full time student studying interior architecture and teaching private Pilates sessions approximately 20 hours a week.) Finally, they left on as good of terms as possible. Just after their decision to go back to her family in Pennsylvania, hurricane Wilma ripped through South Florida.
As the news became clear that we needed to swiftly prepare, I pressed harder than ever before, “Our roofs still have some spots that need patching,” I reminded Chase. After boarding up both houses and securing Chase’s weather distressed experiments/art projects, he climbed up first on our roof then mine to do whatever damage control he could. The winds were starting to pick up and the sky was swiftly darkening. “Hurry up, huuuurrrry uuuup,” I muttered as I stood holding the ladder waiting for Chase to appear from the back corner of my rooftop. Suddenly, a strong wind came and sharply changed direction, “CHAAAASE!,” I was surprised by the shrill in my voice. Not even a second later, the electrical pole on my property bent to the south and snapped back whipping power lines in our direction. “CHASE! GET DOWN HEEEERE!” He appeared, white as paste and shaking. “You don’t gotta tell me!” he hustled back. “Something really freaky is happening, Hun. Something just..... we gotta get in the....” while I was trying to finish a sentence Chase already saw something was off, ran into the street and turned a paler shade of white. He looked at me, “Holy shit!,” he turned his head back to the south, “HOLY SHIT!!!” he exclaimed again as he looked at me. An old ficus tree, about the width of our street was blown out of the ground from the first strong gust of wind. That’s what snapped the power lines and the tree landed on the front half of a neighbor’s house a few doors down and across. “Oh, Chase. We gotta make sure they’re okay.” Their car was flattened, the fence looked like crushed, metallic paper machet and the branches reached like a thousand tentacles in toward the front windows and door. A muffled voice came through the fallen foliage, “I’m alright, the house is fine! Don’t worry about me, y’all git ready for the storm.” Relieved that we didn’t have to face anything gruesome, we went back home and watched Wilma from the one un-boarded, westward facing window as it peeled our shed apart panel by panel.
After the family moved out, Chase and I practically moved into my house next door. Every spare moment was spent there preparing for new renters. We tore out and replaced water damaged walls, repaired leaky faucets, painted, installed an alarm system and cleared everything we could from the back yard that didn’t require a chain saw. A special project waited for me in the kitchen where the grease was so thick, it smelled like rotting carcass. Efforts to remove the odor took several buckets of bleach, steel wool and a lung transplant.
Chase was working on his MFA at University of Miami and is a brilliant, edgy photographer. Once the house was clean, he made it a studio of sorts where he created a huge, intricate art installation. I was the muse at the time and one night he instructed me to prepare for a shoot without any further explanation. He guided me onto his set and the camera started to flash. Dozens of different shaped and sized plum bobs hung at various heights from the ceiling. A Kravet tapestry that I purchased to funk up an old Queen Ann chair was rolled out on the floor and over various sized pillows and boxes. Broken mirror strategically arranged was propped up on the wall and Kravet landscape. It was a bizarre wonderland and I was invited to explore the absurdities. The photographs were later developed into 8’ x 4’ pieces as a part of his final thesis. Recently, he gave me a smaller image from that series as a gift. Today, it hangs in the living room of my Tree House. I loved the unpredictability of living with a fellow Gemini artist. Neither one of us ever knew what to expect upon arriving home.
Just a week before Thanksgiving, there was a knock on our door. An Amazonian sized, dark skinned woman with smooth features and a tantalizing accent from Trinidad came with her gorgeous twins to look at the house for rent. She and her family were displaced due to the storm. FEMA was providing housing vouchers for them, but it wasn’t enough to cover the mortgage. “It’s okay,” she re-assured, “we can pay the difference.” I wasn’t so confident in her words and felt a doubt that I couldn’t justify without a credit check. Then, I met the kids. They were fraternal twins, a boy and a girl around the age of eight. Sweet, intelligent and polite. I took the family to have a look through the house. We chatted and I asked the little girl what her and her brother’s names were. “He’s Jessie,” she pointed to her brother, “and I’m Jessica,” she thumbed herself in the chest. I froze. I think I heard myself stammer. “Jessie...?....and Jessica?” it was difficult to slow down my thoughts enough to speak. “Uh huh,” she confirmed and started telling me about where they were going to school as they were still dressed in their uniforms. I heard nothing but a soft ringing in my ears. “This is a sign,” I thought to myself, remembering vividly my imaginary, childhood friends. I saw them again in my mind’s eye just as clearly as I did when I was 5 years old. My friends were also fraternal twins with dark hair, dark eyes and olive colored skin. Sometimes I referred to them as, “Boy Girl.” But most of the time I would just call them both, “Jessie,” short hand for, “Jessie and Jessica.”
“It’s yours,” I unintentionally interrupted the mother who was speaking by then, “when can you move in?” “Wha? It’s ours? Just like that?” she asked with excitement. “Yeup. You are supposed to be here. Welcome home.” She turned to her kids and said, “We have a home for Thanksgiving!” Yeah, I know, a little “After School Specially,” for my taste too.
Meanwhile, at the Gemini Mansion, a tension was growing and becoming unbearable. I knew, since our return from Spain in early August, that this romance was soon to be over. Then, the day after Thanksgiving, Chase announced that his grandmother bought us all tickets to visit his family in Texas for Christmas. I had to make a choice. Do I continue like everything is fine and go through the holiday motions? Or break it off now? We had become simply room-mates and good friends. It felt dishonest to go see his family, knowing what I did.
My deadline was to be out no later than Christmas Day.
Daniel stepped in a urged that I save money versus paying exorbitant rent somewhere. His solution was for me to move in with Kia and her three behemoth, grossly undisciplined dogs. Luckily, rent was dirt cheap and my bedroom/converted garage was an escape from the slobbering insanity. With the equity I earned on the first property I was able to pay off all my credit cards, a six month premium for car insurance and part of the ominous student loans. My broker advised that I didn’t use any more of the cashed in equity toward my the debt from school. (A shame too, it would have paid them off completely.) “You take that nut and use it to purchase one or two more properties. That’s how you do this,” he schooled. I thought he had my best interest in mind, after all we were also becoming good friends. Weren’t we? In retrospect I now see that he had other priorities than friends and good intentions - like this house out west with the peeling paint, crunchy lawn and soupy pool.
December 29th, 2005, I signed the papers for the property I came to refer to as “1800.” I didn’t want to do it. Less than a month before, I found the voice to save myself from one mistake, but couldn’t seem to use it to save me from this one. Oh but the things I learned that you don't learn in school....
