Life With A Werewolf

Clean Up Effort

          Ever get talked into something you immediately regret? That sort of thing, whether it's helping a neighbor or helping your friend, that's just far too much trouble than for what it's worth for anyone. It's not illegal or anything. It's just that whatever it is, whether that job is something to do with lawn maintenance, car care, or something gross, it's going to take you far more effort than what you want and get you farther involved than you ever cared to be. This is what happened to me recently with our resident hulderfolk.
          Charles and Nancy had decided to move. Leave the house, further down state to another werewolf area. Something without Nobility troubles and meth-head vampires running around. They found a nice place to rent, and attempted to sell the house here.
          I admit, I was intrigued. What and how does house sales work for a mythical creature? Do they sell the home to humans, or do they attempt to sell it to another mythical? I can see a real estate agent, walking around with a clip board pointing out several items. "And the doors here are tall enough for an ogre. The walls are thick and dark colored so any pesky mud or blood stains just wash right off! Neighbors are used to strange noises from the last family of mythical creatures who lived here, so they don't even ask questions!"
          Of course, Nancy wanted to try to sell the house herself. This lead to an entire debacle of her being too busy to show the home, too busy to answer questions, and it sitting on the market for six whole months. Then she got the 'brilliant' idea of renting it.
          If you have a home you want to sell, I always say go ahead and sell it. Don't rent. Renters aren't always careful with your property. Plus, a lot of property management companies are more than happy to collect your money and just let your property go to ruin instead of actually maintaining it. There's way too many hands, especially hands that just don't care about the quality of work they give you. Plus, everything always comes back on you. It just doesn't seem worth it in my eyes.
          The "For Rent" sign went up close to Christmas. They had a renter for a grand total of twenty one days. Twenty one agonizing, yard destroying, 'let's see if we can pour bleach on the lawn to spell funny letters' days. Twenty one 'I like hip hop and rap rock from 00's so now everyone else does at 3am' days. Twenty one 'it's fun to drunk drive at 2 in the morning blasting my stereo' days. Twenty one 'cops kicked in our door again' days.
          You know it's bad when a cop comes by and tries to ask Crash if he could find a reason to our new neighbors. He tried to disguise it as a joke, and even laughed at it, but I could see the desperation in his eyes. He wanted them gone. I don't blame him; we all did.
          By the time the cops had enough evidence to drag the neighbors from hell away in handcuffs, the once gorgeous home looked like a war zone. One of the bay windows in front was smashed out and hastily covered with plywood. The former tenants literally poured bleach on Charles' proud lawn. Apparently, they were trying to spell out 'Hi Neighbors!' But it came out looking more like 'Hiney Bears'. I still to this day don't know how many joints and beers it takes to get to the point where you're so drunk you make that mistake.
          I'd only seen Charles cry one time, and that was out of torture for the love of his estranged wife. This time, though, when he saw what they did to his property, he did shed a tear. Then he gave one of his infamous Charles threats. "May a horde of rats gnaw on their toe nails!"
          I had swung by just in time to hear the threat. I'd also seen Charles then smile at me. "Neighbor! Hi!"
          Trouble. "Hey Charles, how ya holding up?"
          His shoulders sunk down in his over priced designer shirt. "Not well. our hooligan tenants have decided to give our beloved home a not-so decorative remodel with spray paint and body fluids."
          Thanks Charles. Thank you so much for the extremely graphic description. At that moment I wished I still drank. "They were all sorts of trouble," I said. "The kind of people who appreciated their liquor more than their own lives."
          Charles nodded thoughtfully. "When Nancy found them, they said they could pay. They didn't have the money for a down payment. Swore they would pay. Never paid first months rent, kept swearing they would pay."
          "Where did she find them," I asked.
          "She said they were being forcibly removed from a movable domicile for a minor financial disagreement with their landlord. Nancy said they had given her a solemn oath that they had learned their lesson and would be no more trouble." He gritted his teeth at the end of it, staring down at the destroyed lawn. He was opening and closing his hands into fists.
          "An oath is only as good as the man who makes it," I said. "To some, their oath isn't worth the breath wasted on it."
          He gave me a dark look for a moment, and I held up my hands. "I'm not trying to preach to you, I'm sorry."
          Charles glared for a moment at me, still opening and closing his fists. Then, his shoulders fell, and he looked back at his destroyed lawn. "I'm not angry at you. You are correct. In troll culture, the ones who do this are dealt with very quickly. But, humans, you seem to get away with everything sometimes. It gets upsetting."
          Then came the question he was burning to ask me. The one I dreaded and was subtly trying to avoid. I was giving every subtle clue that I was leaving. I glanced at my watch four times. I took a step towards the car. I even unlocked my car. Still, Charles turned to me, his eyes full of hurt and said "Would you be willing to stay awhile? Help me clean up?"
          I wanted to grit my teeth, to stomp, to shout and scream. I wanted to run screaming to my car shouting 'LALALALALALA I'M NOT LISTENING!' Then stomp the accelerator and take that Topaz around the corner to my house at ninety. But, I didn't do any of those things. I did the reasonable thing one does for their neighbor.
          I smiled the classic 'I really don't want to do this' smile and said "Sure! I'll be glad to help you."
          That was the start of an extra long weekend.
          The stench hit me fifteen feet from the front steps. Liquor, despair, and shit. It smelled like a truck stop bathroom threw up inside the building after a bender at the worst bar in town. As I climbed the porch steps, I found that the smell was only seconded by the sight.
          The floor was covered in a sticky substance that had to be the remnants of a beer. The walls in the living room had been spray painted. I wasn't sure what the intended design was, but I knew it would require far more liquor than I intended to consume to read and understand them. The kitchen was splattered with a red substance that could have been blood, spaghetti sauce or ketchup. I didn't know which it was, nor did I want to know.
          As we moved upstairs, the smell of fecal matter and despair grew stronger. A thick musk like someone hadn't bathed in days. When we rounded the top, there was a pile of dirty laundry left at the top of the banister. The bathroom....well....it's disgusting.
          Using a turd like a crayon, someone had wrote the words 'fuk u' on the door. Someone else had given the toilet an upper decker. If you're unfamiliar, that's when you crap in the tank rather than the toilet bowl itself. It can ruin the toilet. Thankfully, these genuises didn't flush, but instead just left it floating there, like a departing gift.
          Poor Charles. He went through eleven different emotions of anger and hurt. He had no idea where to even start with things. How can you say no to that? To abandon anyone at that level of despair? I mean, besides just hiring a hazmat team to come burn down the house so you can rebuild it?
          We went outside. I put him on the front lawn, told him to start calling people to replace the window. Then, I went to the nearest Dollar General and bought out every kind of household cleaner they had. My credit card still hates me.
          Afterwards, we went to work. Starting on the top floor, we grabbed gloves and began to throw out every single thing those jokers had left us. Nothing of theirs was kept. Clothing, the few random pieces of crusty furniture, the actually expensive looking liquor bottle, nothing.
          Of course, as Charles began to clean he also began to talk. To tell me stories as we went room to room. Some of those stories are not fit to print here. I swear, hulderfolk or not, I'm going to sit him down one day and pound into him the concept of TMI!
          A lot of the stories he did tell though, was sweet ones. Like how he originally proposed to Nancy. Him trying his hardest to come up with the perfect phrases, to say the right things. He had the ring behind his back, right there at the bottom of the stairs and began, well, talking for ten minutes straight. He kept going, he was so nervous. She finally jumped up, kissed him hard to shut him up and grabbed the ring box out of his hands and shouted 'yes, I'll marry you!' How they planned their honeymoon by buying up a bunch of random postcards on the internet and taped them to the wall. They closed their eyes and literally just threw darts at them until they hit a tropical location. How, when money got tight, he began to gather wild flowers and berries for alternative food sources until things picked up again.
          All of these stories and others he told as we cleaned, working from top to bottom. I tried to be sympathetic, but I was a bit dizzy from the cleaners, which only added to my usual grumbly demeanor. It took us four days to get the house clean. Took almost that long for a contractor to get the window replaced.
          I pulled a couple of things away from that though. First was, a house is more than a collection of things. It's a collection of memories inside a building. When you rent a building out where you lived, you're essentially renting those memories out to someone else. Memories the other party may or may not cherish, and usually don't.
          Also, I learned that sometimes the act of doing something like cleaning a home, isn't just about getting things clean physically. It's about cleaning things mentally and spiritually as well. Charles felt a whole lot better after such things and even got Nancy to move back into the house with him. He's still working on the lawn. I hope he gets new sod brought in or something, cause driving by the lawn and seeing 'Hiney Bears' every single time I go to the store makes me giggle. I feel bad for it, though.