The Dzioba Problem
My time at 309 Garrou Ave has come to an end after 15 years of being a resident in the town of Valdese.
My time here started 15 years ago when my former room mate, Doug Foster, got us evicted from the house we were renting in Connelly Springs and he just decided not to tell me what was happening until 2 days into the 10 day grace period the landlord had given us to get packed up and move out. I had lots of disposable income at the time, so why not ask for help? In a panic I called Alex’s mother because I didn’t know what to do or who to turn to. With the help of her husband, Alex, and some of my other friends I managed to get everything packed up and into a storage unit near where I was living and then I went to the Dzioba’s house to stay until I found somewhere to go. After a few no go looks at nearby apartments, one of which was an old abbey that was being converted into apartments that looked really shabby, Alex’s mother came up with the idea of buying me a house and me renting it from her. At the time I thought this was a good idea so I went along with it.
These are a few of the images of the house as it was when I moved in. I thought this was going to be my forever home, a place where I’d happily spend the rest of my life, living and working as a citizen in this sleepy little town. I still remember Alex’s grandmother, the person who actually fronted the money to buy the house, wheeling and dealing the seller out of the bedroom suit in the master bedroom because it was shown with the house. I had a feeling that when I woke up the first morning in this house and witnessed a pack of beagles running wild through the neighborhood that living here was going to be interesting.
On the day the house was inspected, I thought the inspector had a nice ass.
Was happy the realtor we dealt with was a lesbian. I was pretty proud of Alex’s family for working with a gay person but I guess I should have known better.
I experienced a lot in the time I lived here. My first flight to another state, love and loss, picking myself back up when I was at my lowest, developing some unhealthy coping habits, and a couple of health scares on top of it all. Near the end of my time there, I just gave up on finding love and tried to go with the whole ‘let it come to you, don’t look for it’ mindset and decided to just be a hedonist in the meantime.
I also would enjoy this view on my daily walk to and from work. I’d often pause on the bridge that runs over these tracks and reflect for a moment, thinking about the potential that could be just around the bend. I’d just be in the moment while the world went on behind me.
Then the nightmare that was 2020 and Covid-19 happened. I didn’t know how this was going to play out and I didn’t know if I even wanted to go on living in such a world where I was made to be afraid of everyone and everything. Then I met Chris Radley, but that’s a story in a different post. I spent much of 2020 doing a few cosmetic changes in the house, since I was spending a lot of my time isolated when I wasn’t going to work.
In what was my retro games room, I cleaned up this messy corner with a pair of nested side tables from IKEA.
A bit more organization in the retro game room.
This corner of the living room needed a change.
The last piece of my sectional that I had. I have a fond memory of sucking a dude off on it and a not so fond memory of laying here when another dude started ejaculating blood on the other section (he had recently had a kidney transplant that wasn’t done healing but he was in no mood to wait. He mentioned none of this before coming over, by the way.) The other pic was after I got rid of it. A lovely woman who was a Navy veteran came and took it after I advertised it on Facebook marketplace. I helped her cram it into the back of her Subaru and watched as it left for its new home.
I wanted the piece at the bottom built with some modifications to be my new entertainment center, but we’ll add that to the list of things that I asked for but never happened.
Chris took the time to get to know me and encouraged me, after a bit of prodding, to get back in touch with my biological family. I knew he was right and I knew that I had to. Something in my gut, something deep in my soul was telling me to listen to him, to pay attention. So I did and I’m so glad that I did. Over the last couple of years I’ve reconnected with a few of them, found out all the family drama I’ve missed in my 20 year absence, and made peace with the face that I’m related to some scummy people that I’ll likely never see again. Then last year, around my birthday, is when the Dzioba Problem began.
It had been a yearly tradition that Alex’s mother would take me out for lunch for my birthday since I didn’t really care much about celebrating it anymore. Not since my biological mother died anyway. But this year, 2022, I’d have to say that my birthday was straight up ruined by this woman.
After I get in the car and we start heading to where ever we were going to eat, she goes off on a tirade about getting paperwork from Social Security about when she was going to retire. I sat there listening intently wondering what any of this had to do with me when she finally got to the point: she wanted me to buy the house from her so she didn’t have to pay taxes / insurance / upkeep on it anymore. Come again? There wasn’t a better time for you to bring this up? The only thing that had been in the way of upkeep in recent years was replacing the central heat and air unit, and I had to be a complete bitch about that to get that to happen. So not only did she decide that it was cool to dump her problems in my lap, but she thought it was a good idea to do it on my birthday. On top of all that, she left her wallet at home and I ended up having to pay for my own birthday lunch. I was reimbursed after the fact, but I still feel like that was a shitty thing to do. When I asked her what she wanted for the house, I was quoted $150,000. I knew then that I was going to have to move because there was no freaking way I was going to pay her that much. I tried to put it out of my mind but spent the next few weeks fuming.
All of this was also going on while Alex’s grandmother was deteriorating from dementia. I know watching a loved one fade away like that is rough, believe me I know. But I didn’t think dumping all this in my lap was fair and I still don’t. We’re not related and I never really considered myself part of their family, no matter how hard they tried to include me. It just never felt right, I always just felt like an outsider that they pitied and took in. I certainly didn’t feel welcome or wanted after I found out that they all voted for Trump in 2016. That’s kind of when I knew I needed to cut ties with these people. But that’s a rant for another time and place.
Then came this year.
In spite of what I knew to be an inevitability, I decided to take on a few projects around the house in hopes that it might persuade Alex’s mother from her decision.
Actually started this one last fall. The carpet on the front porch was rotting and I knew it was up to me to remove it since I knew they weren’t going to. I had planned on covering it with garage epoxy but now I’m glad I didn’t waste the money.
Before and after of the sink and faucet replacement. Didn’t really cost me much, thankfully, but I’d always hated that shitty cream colored sink from day one.
These were pictures I found online. I wanted to replace the front door with something like the first picture (beige door) and put a frame around it like the second picture (blue door). Again, glad I didn’t waste the money doing any of that.
Found this beauty back in October at a local thrift store for a mere $15 and couldn’t pass it up. It went perfectly under my desk.
Rewarding myself later that same day with a mug of hot chocolate with a couple spoonfuls of vanilla ice cream after putting the rug down. Fat boy shit.
Then came time for my birthday again this year. Alex’s grandma had been moved into an assisted living facility earlier in the year and around that time his mother had texted me to tell me that we needed to get together to talk about the house and future plans. I don’t know about you, but where I’m from we don’t just dump something like that on someone and leave it hanging without a lot of context and explanation. Until the meetup, I couldn’t sleep and couldn’t really eat anything because I was sick with worry that I was gonna get screwed and boy was I right. We finally met up and had lunch and this is what I was presented with:
I looked these over at lunch of whatever day it was and I was not happy. Did this bitch think I was made of money? Just like the rest of America I’m living from paycheck to paycheck, I’m not rolling in money by any stretch of the imagination. And I’m certainly not going to dip into my 401k ever again; not for her, not for anyone. Option 4, by the way, was cooked up while we were sitting there at lunch after I protested the other 3, not that it makes it any better. The line ‘late payment cancels contract’ didn’t sit well with me or anyone else that read any of these cards. Shit happens, life happens. This isn’t helping me out, this is setting me up to fail. This is fixing the game so that you win.
Oh and in the third picture, the lines ‘we need to pay for Eda’s care’ and ‘$6,000 a month’ were written when she was still alive and in assisted living / hospice care. I didn’t see why I should have to flip the bill for the healthcare of a woman I wasn’t related to and didn’t really know much about. Taking care of her was not my responsibility and I certainly wasn’t going to step up to the plate to do it when Alex’s unemployed mother could do it, she just didn’t want to. If you can provide care when one of your children is sick then you can take care of your ailing mother. If my teenage self could take care of my dying mother then so could you, but then again I already knew you had ice water running in your veins so what did I expect?
Summer came and went and it was an even more unpleasant experience than normal with all this hanging over my head. When September arrived, it unfortunately came with the death of Alex’s grandma. I had a little spark of hope that maybe, just maybe, all this talk of me buying her house would be over with, but it wasn’t. She still wanted rid of it and again, it all came down to nothing for her but money. I was being stuck with this because she’d made more than one poor financial decision over the years causing them to go bankrupt twice. The culprits? Their daughter’s wedding and repairs on their house. Not the house I was renting, but their house. But by all means, make me feel like a burden and a piece of shit because I ask for the bare minimum of you doing your job as landlord and fixing messed up floors, broken windows, drafty doors, and fixing the air so I don’t die during a heat wave.
I took this the day after my birthday, September 30, 2023.
The day of his grandmother’s funeral, I at least had the pleasure of the company of this lovely lady from Canada. Even though we play on different teams I consider her my Canadian girlfriend, haha. I like her a lot more than the rest of Alex’s family because she’s not uptight and rotten. She actually makes me feel seen and wanted and cared about and loved more than the rest of them ever did. She also recently clued me in to the truth: that their family isn’t as close knit as they make it out to be.
The year drug on and I searched and searched along with biological family, coworkers, and friends for somewhere to go to no avail. Around the beginning of November, I started packing my things and finding a storage place to house 15 years worth of stuff until I found a place to live.
Some storage places were expensive and others were not. The cheaper ones were not local and not terribly secure. I eventually found one and me and the biological family and some friends started making trip after trip, bringing boxes of stuff and stacking everything as best we could. I made sure to get daddy’s stamp collection out first as I could feasibly live without the rest of that stuff, but losing that might have been unbearable for me.
At the time of this writing, I still haven’t found anywhere to live on my own near work yet, but I’ve heard a lot of rumblings to just sit and wait as the housing market is going to burst “soon” but we will see. I’ve been allowed to come and stay with my sister, again, until I am able to find somewhere to go.
As November passed at a breakneck pace, I made a plan and put it into action starting on December 1st. This was the first step:
Step 1: told my now former landlord on December 1st that I’d be out of her house by the end of the year.
What I didn’t tell her, and what we were able to accomplish, was that I planned to be out before Christmas. I’ve been out of her house since the week before Christmas. I’ve been at my sister’s place since the 16th of December.
The second step was to cut off all the utilities. That was a lot easier than I thought it would be. I’m still waiting on the bill from the Town of Valdese to arrive and I’m afraid it’s been lost in the holiday shuffle. Word to the wise, if you don’t have to move during the holiday season, don’t.
Step three was put into effect 2 days ago and apparently worked out better than I could have dreamed. I texted the landlord and it went like this:
You see, step three of the plan was to not tell any of Alex’s family where I went. I still don’t have any intentions of telling them where I am exactly. Not like it’s hard to figure out in this day and age. I was asking an honest question there at the end, what would you need to send me? Like seriously? I took care of my own shit at the post office without your help. If anything gets lost in the mail, then I guess it gets lost. I’m absolutely livid about the possibility that some of the things I’ve backed on Kickstarter and games I’ve purchased from Limited Run might now show up, but I really don’t trust them to give me what’s mine so I plan on tracking it down my fucking self. After texting her, I made this Facebook post and set the privacy settings so I could make sure that everyone involved could see it:
I wrote it that way because I don’t trust her to not be a litigious individual and try to blame all the damage in the house on me. I asked, repeatedly, when this or that would get addressed only to be met with “we’ll get to it when we get to it” each and every time. And don’t even try to come at me with the whole “well you wouldn’t let us come over” defense. Every other landlord I’ve had came over and fixed their shit whether I was home or not, so why was me being home a requirement/necessity? Did you think that I was going to accuse you if something was missing? Shows that we apparently have a mutual distrust of each other, doesn’t it? Anyway, I digress. The final step of my plan was to give Alex the option of whether or not he wanted anything to do with me after all this was over. That’s when I discovered that he’d already made that choice before I could speak. He had blocked me on Facebook and left my Discord server. Bitch, if you were going to leave my server, you could have at least taken your server boost with you, I don’t need your pity fuck. It kind of pissed me off that he beat me to the punch, but I guarantee you I didn’t lose sleep over it. My Caucasian curiosity got the better of me the next morning at work though, and I got my answer:
So there you go, 20+ years of “friendship” down the toilet just because you’re so weak that you can’t deal with someone not liking your mother for selling them up the river to save her own hide. That’s fine because I have a few more things to say on this matter.
Ever since your divorce, I’ve watched from the sidelines as you just constantly let it make you a more and more bitter person. I’ve never been in that situation before so I knew I had nothing to offer in the way of advice but tried to be supportive as best I could, but there’s only so much toxicity I can take. If you can’t see that your attitude and your actions are pretty fucking terrible then I’m not going to do anything to help you.
You single handedly ruined tabletop RPGs for me because of your constant need to feel powerful in a world where you are powerless, spoiled countless movies and TV shows because you’re fucking inconsiderate, and you’re so pathetic and fragile that you’re threatened by the Barbie movie because of its portrayal of toxic masculinity. Maybe be by yourself for a long time and work on that shit, otherwise I hope you have a long and empty life with no one to keep you company but your children and your horrible family because no longer will you be allowed in the presence of my light. Do not send me another message, anywhere, because your pleas will fall on deaf ears. You and your parents live in a vacuum and the three of you deserve each other. I hope you enjoy living the rest of your life in their shadow and living your life by their rules. Find someone else to be your emotional tampon. Your numbers have all been deleted and blocked, and anyone you send my way will be met with the same. Do not involve others in our beef.
Oh and when they both start to get sick and die, have fun dealing with that misery. Honestly, you did me a favor by leaving because I’ve been trying to think of a way to get rid of you for years.
So that’s that. After 15 years of playing by the rules and doing what I’m told, I still got fucked over by people I trusted and called “family”. If I had it to do over again, I’d have made a deal with the old landlord myself to catch up what Doug was behind on and kicked his sorry ass out and maybe I’d be in a better place now.
So now here I sit, back at my sister’s place after 20 years. Back where I was deposited after my parent’s deaths. Back in my hometown. Back at square one. The river of time has surely been relentless as the town and her place are both shadows of their former selves. Much has changed and yet much has stayed the same since I left. I am confronted, daily, of the horrors of the past and yet comforted by them at the same time. Better the devil you know than the one that you don’t and all that I suppose.
The last thing I’ll say is, don’t make a deal with a Dzioba. It will cost you a lot more in the end than you can afford.
The last time I had the pleasure of taking this walk in early fall, 2023. I’ll miss the view, and the potential.