Robber Baron

By Fallton Havenstonne

Todd Hamrone was exhausted after a long day of work. His bones and muscles ached with fatigue. He carried himself like he had weights on his arms and legs as he trudged to the front door of his one-bedroom apartment.

He would rather live in the vicinity of Glebe University, which was in Arlington, Virginia, rather than on the outskirts of it. Five years ago, he was pursuing his physics degree there, and even took a class taught by Dr. Stanley Birnbaum, a well-respect scientist and inventor. He learned a lot under his tutelage, weaving his scientific knowledge into the sci-fi novels he wrote, but Todd never managed to finished his degree. He got caught up in an experiment conducted by Dr. Corbin Prevelle—a psychology professor that had been administrating a drug called Xona to his volunteers—a drug that had put a student in a coma.

During the experiment, Todd started noticing changes in his behavior. Even though his grades and physical health were improving, his anger and temper began to spiral out of control. He would get into fights with his friends and peers at the gym, and would have uncontrollable outbursts in the classrooms and on campus.

After the third strike regarding his erratic and hostile behavior, the university finally removed him as a student. He ended up working odd jobs to support himself, and went from apartment to apartment until he settled into his current place. One month ago, his new landlord, Boris, left a notice on his front door. Just when things were getting better for Todd, his whole world came crashing down when he read it.

“In the next leasing term, your rent will increase by $400 a month, amounting to a total of $2,200 per month for the year of . . .”

Miserable greedy robber baron! Todd shouted in his head.

To get some answers about the exorbitant rent increase, Todd bombarded Boris’ office with phone calls until Boris’ secretary finally answered him. She said that the rent increase was to stay competitive in the market, as well as to cover the maintenance cost of the building. Todd laughed. He knew that was just PR lingo to hide Boris’ insatiable greed. After the previous owner sold the building to Boris six months ago, everything went downhill. Repairs and maintenance went by the way side. The roofing, plumbing, landscaping, and HVAC units had fallen into disrepair.

Todd tried looking for other apartments around Glebe University, but there weren’t any one-bedroom apartments available (within his budget, of course). He wished he could’ve moved back into the apartment he had lived in when he was an undergrad. The price was affordable, and the landlord treated the tenants and maintenance staff with respect. As a result, the staff kept the property safe and clean, and the building had a modern style to it that left the tenants feeling like they were living in an upscale hotel. Unfortunately, there were no apartments available in that building when he last checked.

On the outskirts of Glebe University, rent prices were skyrocketing as well. One rental property had raised its rent by $800 a month! There was nothing special about it either. The property didn’t have any renovations done to it. It was the same as before—just marked up.

To keep people from renting at his apartment building, Todd wrote a scathing review online (anonymously, of course), but it had little to no effect on the influx of people willing to sacrifice their hard-earned money to live in that building (location, location, location, as the saying goes). Because it was near the city, prospective renters ignored the negative online reviews about the long wait times for maintenance repairs, not to mention Boris’ well-known practice of putting eviction notices on the front doors of tenants if they were one or two days late on rent (he thought that this would scare them into paying on time).

There’ll be a lot of people living on the streets soon, Todd thought.

He knew that there were a lot of tenants that wouldn’t be able to afford the exorbitant rent increase. Wages weren’t increasing at the same rate as the price of rent. They lived on a steady income, and their jobs weren’t paying them $400 extra a month. If they got evicted, they might have to live in motels, in their vehicles, or worse yet, on the streets until they found another place to live.

In Todd’s case, he was well aware that he was only one or two paychecks away from living on the streets. To weather the storm, he took an extra job working at a burger restaurant as a cook. After working from 8 AM to 4:30 PM delivering packages all around Arlington, he only had an hour break before going to work at the restaurant. Once it closed at 9:30 PM, he’d stay there for another hour (sometimes longer) to clean the kitchen before he finally got to go home.

At the end of all those hours and weeks of burn-out, Todd could barely keep his head above water. After paying the rent, the utilities, and the debt he still owed for his unfinished degree, he was basically living on scraps. Work until you drop, he thought. That’s the new American Dream.

With his body shutting down from the long day’s work, he just wanted to go to sleep. In a few hours, he’d have to wake up early and go back to delivering packages. After driving around like mad just to make quota, he’d be back at the line cooking burgers and fries, sweating in the hot kitchen, toiling his precious life away.

Instead of going to sleep tonight, Todd was going to stay up. His one saving grace was a novel he had been working on—a space opera about a man who traveled across the galaxy in search of rare artifacts and treasures. Todd had been working on it for a couple of years, got it up to two-hundred thousand words.

He just needed to edit it. With the night shift at the restaurant, however, it was getting harder to do so. At least he had Saturday off to work on it. He just wished he had Sunday off too, but he was scheduled to work at the restaurant that day.

He wondered if his manuscript would ever see the light of day. Even though his dreams had been crushed by triple-digit rejections of his last three novels, he never gave up. He had high hopes with his last manuscript, which was about UFOs hiding out in the mountains of West Virginia. But after months of rejection letters from agents and publishers, he set it aside in the “unpublished” folder on his computer. It would stay there until the day he had made a name for himself—until a publisher would give him a shot.

***

Todd opened his laptop and began editing his untitled space opera, trying as hard as he could not to fall asleep. The more times he had put off editing it, the more he felt like a failure—like he’d never finish it. He realized that if he didn’t edit it at least once every other day, he’d start forgetting parts of the story. Even if he wrote them down, he couldn’t remember the details and the nuances of the story, nor how the chapters were supposed to be aligned.

Despite drinking his hot green tea, he couldn’t quite focus on the page in front of him. Besides, it was getting close to 11:30 PM, and he had to wake up at 6 AM tomorrow. He hadn’t even had dinner yet. Low on energy, he justified not making it by telling himself to wait until lunchtime tomorrow (he usually skipped breakfast, since he didn’t want to be late to work).

The room was getting colder by the minute. He had emailed Boris about the heater not working, but nothing had been done about it. Boris’ secretary said that it would be fixed in a week, but that was two weeks ago. Every time Todd called about it, she said that the maintenance staff were really busy, and that they’d get to it as soon as they could . . .

Sitting at his small desk with the brightly lit screen of his laptop shining in his eyes, Todd started to doze off. He began to dream that he was in bed, sleeping soundly under the covers, warming his body from the cold.

After a minute, Todd shivered awake, and then checked the thermostat. It was fifty degrees inside his apartment. Outside, it was fifteen degrees. That’s just perfect, he thought.

He turned on the portable heater, waiting for the room to warm up. Even with gloves and a jacket on, Todd’s hands were starting to get numb, and his body was shivering nonstop. He wrapped his hands around the tea cup, which warmed them up briefly. He slowly sipped his tea, and made a slurping sound when he caught an error on the page. “The” should’ve been “they” in reference to the aliens that his hero evaded. He smiled as he corrected this mistake on the computer. Just 500 more pages to go, he thought. Keep trudging. You’ll get there.

***

The bright sun dazzled the pool like a sea of sparkling fireflies. Todd gazed out the window of his apartment in Henrico, Virginia, and thought to himself that he would like to read by the pool later. His space opera novel was finished, which was called A Journey Out of Oblivion. A fitting title for the miserable place that he had left behind.

After the rent increased to $2,200 a month, he stayed at the apartment for eleven months before he finally moved out. The new lease would’ve been an additional $500 a month, putting the total to $2,700 a month just to put a roof over his head in a single bedroom, 700 square foot apartment. That’s robbery, Todd thought. Boris was trying to dig into his savings until he was too poor to live there. Todd decided that enough was enough, and that he would never move back there (and to any place like that) again.

Todd had been living in Henrico for the past six months, and worked at an Italian restaurant for a while until he found an editorial job at the press. It was there that he shared A Journey Out of Oblivion with his chief editor, who was a fan of sci-fi authors like Philip K. Dick, Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov. He told her that it was like Indiana Jones but in space, which piqued her interest. She liked his manuscript so much that she passed it on to a colleague of hers who worked for a major publishing house. Now all Todd had to do was wait. Wait in the comfort of his cozy 800 square foot apartment, which didn’t break the bank like his last apartment did.

Todd regularly checked his email to see if he had gotten the “green light” from the publisher. Whether he did or didn’t, he was grateful to be out of the rathole that he had lived in. After the move to Henrico, he was able to finish editing A Journey Out of Oblivion, since he didn’t have to work in the evenings anymore.

It was bright and sunny when Todd went outside to the pool at the apartment complex. He sat down on the chaise lounge, relaxing under the shade of the umbrella. He was about to read a novel when he heard loud rock music blaring from a car. Todd removed his shades, and he had goosebumps when he saw a Porsche pull up in the parking lot.

Was that Boris—the robber baron? he thought. It sure looked like him. He watched as Boris got out of the Porsche and walked over to the pool sporting a polo shirt and khaki shorts, playing with a toothpick in his mouth. He had a laptop under his arm, and he shook hands with a man in a gray suit (Todd’s current landlord, Horton). They talked loudly as if they wanted to be the center of attention. A few heads turned as if to say, be quiet, but the two men went on talking loudly anyway.

They sat at a table by the pool talking business. Boris had his laptop open, typing in some numbers into a document—a contract perhaps. When Todd heard Boris say to Horton that he was interested in buying the rental property, Todd’s face turned red. He knew what disaster would fall on the tenants if Boris bought the property: rent increases, threats of evictions, downhill maintenance, etc. Todd’s anger finally reached a boiling point, and he clenched his fists, ready to put an end to this deal.

But he told himself to stay calm down. He couldn’t make the same mistake he made at Glebe University—the kind of mistake that got him expelled. He made his way over to the two men, putting his hands in his pockets so that they couldn’t see his clenched fists. Boris saw him out of the corner of his eye, and he seemed to have recognized him, although that would’ve surprised Todd, since Boris didn’t know any of his tenants by name (only by their apartment number, since they were just cash cows to him).

“I know who you are,” Todd said sternly to his former landlord.

The two men stopped talking and looked up at Todd suspiciously.

“Excuse me?” Boris said, removing the toothpick from his mouth.

“You’re a leech—a robber baron,” Todd said.

Boris narrowed his eyes at him, analyzing Todd’s face. “Do I know you from somewhere?”

“$400 a month rent hike. You squeezed every penny out of me. Displaced people out onto the streets. You’ve been doing it for years, and now you’ve come to do it here. I’m not going to let you. Turn around and get out of here you leech.”

A smirk crept onto Boris’ lips. “Oh, nowwww I know who you are. Unit 355. You left about six months ago, leaving wall damage and broken cabinets like you were using the apartment for a punching bag.” To Horton, he said, “It cost him his entire security deposit, and then some.” Back to Todd. “Well, it’s too late, bud. It’s already done. This property is mine.”

“You put up one heck of a good deal,” Horton said with a chortle.

A burst of adrenaline shot through Todd’s nerves. He felt like he was back on Xona again. He grabbed Boris by the collar of his polo shirt, and threw him into the pool like a ragdoll.

Splash!

Water rained down on to the hot concrete, spraying Horton’s suit. Horton jumped up from his chair—taken aback. He was irritated that his $3,000 suit got wet.

“Have you lost your mind?” Horton cried.

Todd gritted his teeth, and threw Horton into the pool as well. He did so effortlessly, and went back to the table and cracked Boris’ laptop in half over his knee. Fragments of glass and plastic sprayed the surface of the concrete.

The tenants at the pool watched in shock. Their thoughts ran wild with speculation: who is this crazy man that threw our landlord into the pool? Doesn’t he know that Horton has been kind to us? But little did they know that Horton had given their lives over to a man who was about to increase their rent by $500 a month.

It started to rain. Perfect timing. The tenants dispersed back into their apartments. The two men in the water hollered at Todd, threatening to call the police and have him arrested as they made their way to the pool’s edge.

Todd held his chin up high, proud of his act of rebellion. Before the men climbed out of the pool, Todd grabbed his book and cellphone from the chaise lounge and ran out of there fast.

Once he made it to his apartment, a strange thought popped into his mind. He thought about his unpublished UFO story, and just like the aliens in it, he considered hiding out in the mountains, taking refuge in the forest, the shadows of the caves. How else could he escape the squeeze on his hard-earned money from the robber baron, Boris? But he realized that there was no escaping it. People like Boris were everywhere in the world. They have always been around, just as they had in the times of serfs and lords. But then again, Todd didn’t have to stay quiet about it. Not in this day and age.

That evening, he opened his laptop, and did what he did best, lambasting the robber baron, Boris (and others like him), in an op-ed article. When he was done, he sipped his cup of hot green tea, then cracked his knuckles with a Zen-like peace about him. The op-ed needed a bit of editing, but that was okay; he had time.

Hours passed. Todd was surprised that the police hadn’t come knocking on his door. Maybe Horton didn’t know who he was. Out of the eighty tenants that lived in the building, maybe Todd was just another number to him as he was to Boris (if Horton could remember it). Or maybe Horton was just so embarrassed about the pool situation that he’d rather forget it had happened.

Lightning flashed in the overcast sky. The downpour drummed against the windows of his apartment like hail. The electricity went out. At least Todd was prepared for it; at least he had candles for the night.

He would go on editing through the evening, editing until he had fallen asleep. Who knows, he might get the “green light” from the publisher tomorrow. His chief editor might publish his op-ed. If not, he’d keep putting his creativity to work, make use of the precious time he had left—bringing his imagination and ideas into this world.

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