A Tenant's Horror Story, And All The Bad Things I've Wished Upon Her Shitty Landlord

Summer Brennan / Via The NY Daily News

I have a rich and vibrant fantasy life.  In this life, I live in a world where nothing bad ever happens to good people, and justice always prevails. It's a world where we don't give heart transplants to war criminals, and no one ever opens a golf umbrella on a city street.  This is a world where I spend every day sitting in a golden meadow, surrounded by puppies, eating delicious enchiladas and counting my Powerball winnings.  And, it's a world where Summer Brennan gets her rent-controlled apartment back just before her scumbag landlord, Robert Lewis, goes to prison, where he gets shivved on the first day.

I don't know Summer Brennan, but I've read about her plight on her blog, Fight My Evil Landlord, and again in the Daily News. In January, while she was in Mexico, she was evicted from her rent-controlled Park Slope apartment, even though she'd always paid her rent. Everything she owned -- clothes, furniture and family heirlooms -- was thrown into bags and taken to some sketchy storage locker in a remote, undisclosed location. And even though the eviction was THROWN OUT IN COURT, she still doesn't have her apartment back. Nor has she been able to collect any of her possessions.  For the past three months, she's been sleeping on a friend's couch and living out of a bag with only the things she'd packed for her Mexico vacation in January.

Though I've never met her, I've decided that Summer Brennan is almost certainly a goddamned angel, and is probably the last person in the world to deserve this horrible parade of criminal injustices.  She works at the UN, and I don't know for certain what her job is, but I bet that it's something where she travels to remote African villages and teaches children with AIDS how to sing.  Or maybe she prosecutes sex traffickers.  Or she works on an initiative to make it legal for Saudi women to drive cars.  It's part of that elaborate fantasy world I mentioned earlier, but I just know that it's something really important.  Summer Brennan, you are really, really awesome. In fact, because Summer Brennan is such a kind and generous person, she's probably too nice to spend all of her free time thinking of elaborate revenge fantasies.  That shit is beneath Summer Brennan. She has better things to do with her time than plot revenge.  She's too busy finding a cure for pancreatic cancer, I bet.

I, on the other hand, am not above wishing ill to Summer Brennan's landlord.  In my fantasy dream world, Summer Brennan will come to know vengeance, without getting her gorgeous manicured hands dirty. Here are just a few ideas of what's happening in my imaginary fantasy world right now.

• Summer Brennan develops telekinesis, which allows her to unlock the door to her apartment, and to transport all of her possessions back to her pad, using only the power of her mind.  As that is happening, Robert Lewis falls into a vat of lye, and is unable to get out.  He dies immediately, and his melted, sludgy remains are divided up into little boxes and mailed to other evil landlords, so that they understand that cautionary tales are serious business in the alternative universe that is my fantasy world.

• Robert Lewis contracts drug-resistant gonorrhea from a hooker, and the painful, burning urination is too much for him to bear, so he stops consuming fluids and becomes extremely dehydrated.  He falls onto the subway tracks one day, and giant rats devour half of his corpse before the G-Train comes ('cause it's so damned slow), and crushes him.  Summer Brennan, on the other hand, meets George Clooney on a flight to Europe (she got the upgrade, see?), they fall madly in love, and she just moves into his house on Lake Como and forgets all about that stupid fucking apartment.

• Summer Brennan gets a call from a lawyer in Idaho, who tells her that a random stranger, with whom she'd crossed paths many years ago, has left her a fortune -- all because she comforted him on a turbulent flight to Dagestan.  She uses the money to buy a giant house on Prospect Park West, and sets up a legal defense fund for Slopers who are wrongfully evicted by their landlords.  Also, she finds out that she's been awarded a Nobel Prize for just generally being an all-around nice person.  Some judges at The Hague decide that Robert Lewis will be forced to apologize to her in person at her brunch in Sweden where she's awarded the prize.  On his way to Stockholm, however, Robert Lewis's plane crashes, and he is forced to cling to an iceberg in the North Atlantic until his limbs freeze and he drowns in a watery grave.

Those are just a couple of the possibilities, mind you.  I'm sure there are others.  In fact, dear FiPS reader, I'd like to invite you to join me in my special little fantasy land.  If you can come up with an appropriate revenge scenario, why not share with all of us by posting in the comments?