One Year of Reality and How It Nearly Killed Me: My Life Behind the Scenes by Deborah Wolff Read Free Book Online

and much nicer than the dorms and apartments I was used to in college. It needed some work, but I knew I wanted it. The place where I was living at the time was a house that had been rented out, bedroom by bedroom. I had to share a bathroom with my neighbor, which also doubled for the kitchen and dishwashing area. So that apartment in Venice Beach was like a mansion. It was perfect. But it was pretty expensive for just me to rent. I didn’t have enough money for it because I had just started looking for work and didn’t have an income. Still, I had to have the place. I could envision the epic parties I would have and the friends I would entertain there. At the time, that was my barometer for any place I looked at. Was it big enough to entertain friends? It was.
    There were three bedrooms, so I immediately got two roommates. I advertised in the local paper, and the first two people who responded were my first two roommates.
    I did use that apartment to its fullest for about fifteen years. I had monthly poker parties, and Christmas, Thanksgiving, and Easter dinners with friends. I even had casino night parties that would kick off the Christmas season. Casino nights were always my friends’ favorite party of the year. I would have blackjack tables, craps, and roulette as well as Pai Gow. Everyone would receive ten thousand dollars of Monopoly money to play with. In the end, there were winners and losers, but everyone walked away with some sort of prize or party favor. I enjoyed doing all the cooking and preparing for these parties. I felt like I was living my poor, urban version of
The Great Gatsby
. I also loved being close to the beach, and would take evening walks to look at the beautiful homes and meet some wonderful people who lived in the neighborhood. I started to make roots and figured that I’d found the place I’d be for the rest of my life. Maybe not in that apartment, but somewhere in Venice Beach.
    Rick, my landlord, was a wonderful man. He let me do anything I wanted in my apartment, from paintingto buying new appliances. We didn’t see each other often, but we did have great conversations every now and again for a couple of hours at a time. He would put on a picnic once a year and I would get a chance to visit with him and his friends. He was a school teacher, very funny and just about the most honorable guy you could ever meet. He raised my rent only once in fifteen years, and he didn’t care that I’d had about twenty roommates over that period of time (another story for another time). I paid on time, took care of my place, and made sure he was informed of any problems. He didn’t need to even come down to look at the apartment, because I made sure to take care of everything. I lived in the apartment below, and there was another tenant above me who had been there for a very long time as well. And compared to elsewhere in the neighborhood, our rent was incredibly low. Rick told me that he didn’t care about raising rent; it was more important to him to have good tenants. He also knew that I wasn’t making a lot of money, so he didn’t want to jack up the rates so much that I’d have to move out. He only had three tenants in that duplex in his entire life. I used to joke with him about getting his will done and making sure that I’d get the place when he passed on because I had been there the longest. Well, it was a valiant effort on my part, suffice it to say. He never had a will—or at least not one that could be found.
    The last year that Rick was alive we had only a handful of conversations. But each time we spoke he would talk about a nagging ear infection that was, I believe, ultimately part of the cause of his death. It was a shock because he wasn’t much older than I was, and I’d had no idea that his condition could be fatal. He probably hadn’t even known. One of his dearest friends called me to let me know that they had found his body. But they couldn’t find a will of any kind in his