2 Bed, 2 Bath, Pets Okay, Free Laundry, and Lovely Swimming Pool... Cheap

I bought my house seventeen years ago from a drug dealer. Not a big time, Miami Vice kind of drug dealer, but a desperate, slovenly, trailer park trash, hooked on his own stuff, kind of dealer. When I had looked at the property the first time, it had been tidied up a bit, and the pool was a deep azure blue. On the day I took possession a couple of months later, the pool was half full and the color of Kermit the frog. The interior of the two main apartments were a warren of trash filled rooms that smelled worse than they looked. For some reason the third apartment was completely empty and in good shape. I found out later that was probably because they had just cleaned it up after it had flooded during the previous light rain.

After weeks of making my new apartment habitable, I turned to renting out the front apartment to somebody who would pay rent. On the day my friend Dennis was to take possession of that apartment, the rabble that was supposed to be moving out, was still piling trash bags of belongings into a beat up van even as Dennis' movers pulled up. They had waited until after midnight to start moving, and after they were gone I couldn't figure out how they knew what was valuable enough to take and what was just shit to leave behind. It all looked the same.

I'll never forget the look on Dennis' face as he walked in the front door of that place, nor the actual tears that he shed as the odor hit him. The apartment looked and smelled like one of those cat ladies homes that you always see on television. The ones that reporters like to refer to as 'A House of Filth', only these guys didn't own cats. They managed to stink up the place with their own filth. I consoled Dennis as I grabbed a shovel and a push broom. Together we started at the front door and worked our way out the back door, pushing and shoving all the piles of crap ahead of us. Finally, after a couple of hours, we had got down to the actual bare floors, and Dennis was ready to move in. Unfortunately, I now had a bunch of garbage piled six feet high in my side yard that eventually filled a dumpster to the top. Dennis ended up living in that apartment for thirteen years. It couldn't have been that bad.