I Paid My Rent On Time This Month

I paid my rent on time this month. Sixteen-hundred green-ass dollars, cash in hand. It was a good month to be my landlord, yes sir. 

Of course, because I forked over that sixteen-hundred dollars on time, I missed the cutoff date for my cellphone and they disconnected my service. That’s a crock of shit if you ask me. A man pays on time nine months out of the year and you turn off his phone the first chance you get. Makes me ornery as all get out.

Anyway, since I had to scramble and scrounge up the dough to get my cellphone turned back on, I couldn’t pay the electric bill when it was due last Thursday. I figured, what the hell, I get my check on Friday and I can pay it then instead. What’s the worst that can happen being a day late?

I’ll tell you what the worst thing that can happen is.

Five-thirty that very Thursday evening, I’m in the shower scrubbing grime off my skin from a long day on the job, working that cloth through every nook and cranny, when all of a sudden the bathroom light went out.

This is it, I thought. My house is officially being haunted by the ghost of the last bastard who couldn’t afford to live here. I peeked cautiously around the shower curtain expecting to see a floating spirit with bills in its hands and Xs over its eyes, but what I discovered there was even worse. The hall light that had been shining under the door wasn’t glowing either.

Those money-grabbing shit-heads had cut my electricity.

I slept in despair that night with my naked ass on the outside of the blankets because it was too hot and muggy to lay in bed with no AC or fan to cool me down. The only solace in my suffering was knowing I’d get it all squared in the morning and would finally be caught up on everything that needed catching up on. 

Well, if the Lord Almighty is up there somewhere, he sure as shit has it out for me. I called up the electric company on my dying cellphone and told them I’d like to settle the bill and have my power restored. I said it calmly, too, in a mannerly way that my Mama would’ve been proud of. And you know what those no-good bastards said to me?

“Sir, it says here you owe for this month’s bill as well as last month’s bill, so you’re going to need to pay both of those if you want someone to come out there and get you fixed up with electricity. There’s also a one-hundred dollar reconnection fee.”

If that ain’t a kick in the balls, I’ve never known what it feels like. How I owed a full bill’s worth of money for the few days of electricity I’d used this month was beyond my understanding. Not even Aristotle, Socrates, or the great and powerful Magic 8 Ball could help me with that one. 

Turns out the amount of money I needed to get all of that taken care of was exactly as much money as had been deposited into my bank account overnight. Hard to know whether that one was a blessing or a curse.

What I do know is that, because I had to use all my money to restore the electricity I never asked them to cut off in the first place, I didn’t have the means for a proper grocery trip—or an improper one, at that. It was nada for breakfast and nabs for lunch, but hell, some people don’t even have that. With groceries being as high as they are, it ain’t like I could’ve afforded much else anyway.

Still, even with this hefty amount of rancid dog-doo on my plate, there remains a light at the end of the tunnel so long as the truck doesn’t need gas, the wind doesn’t blow too hard, and I don’t catch a stomach bug or trip down the stairs and survive the fall. It’s a dim light and a narrow tunnel, but it’s there.

Shit—I have to believe it’s there.