The other evening, I was standing in the front yard of one of my houses, hammering a FOR RENT sign in to the ground.  As I stood up, a twentyish year old man was walking down the street. 

As he walked, he was screaming a conversation in to his cell phone. 

I wasn't trying to eavesdrop on his conversation (unless you owe me money or i owe you money, I don't care what anyone does) but I don't know if this guy was angry, happy, remorseful, sad or fearful.  From what i could understand of his conversation, he could have been arguing about a bad brake job on his car or negotiating a cut rate with a hooker or talking to his priest (maybe about exercising a demon).  At best, I understood one in every ten words.

He strode purposely down the street.  His pants hanging someone near his knees.  Screaming in to his phone with every step forward he took.

I am thinking to myself...please, please, please don't notice my house is for rent, please, please, please.  Pretend to me invisible.  Think...I am invisible.  Poof..you can't see me. 

As he sees me, his stride waivers for a moment and then he changes direction and starts walking directly towards me.

Maybe pretending to be invisible wasn’t the best course of action.

"Yeah man, I needs to talk to you."  he said.

In the last ten years of my life, no good conversation has ever started with that sentence. 

Sometimes in life, you have moments of pure clarity...where you can see the next few minutes of your life as if you were reading a book.  This was one of those moments.   I knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, I was to find myself struggling to make sense out of the nonsense that would be the next few moments of my life.

The young man looked at me, looked at my FOR RENT sign and looked back at me.  He said "Are you the landlord?"

"My God", I thought to myself, "Your powers of deduction and reasoning rival that of a young Sherlock Holmes or perhaps a thin Hercule Poirot.  All it took for you to deduce I was the owner of the house was for me to be at the house and hammering a FOR RENT sign in to the ground.  Your future is bright young man."

What came out of my mouth was "Yes, I am the landlord."  (What the hell?  Where did all those quick witted, snide comments go?  I'll have to save them for later.)

"Yeah, see I needs you to come over to my house and fix the hole in the wall."  he said,  as he pointed to a house three doors down.  A house that had nothing to do with me.

Slightly confused and unsure what to say.  I decided to fill the moment with a standard Landlord question, "What happened to the wall?"

"Well, you know I always had problems wit that wall and, boom, one day that hole was there."  He said.

Boom...the hole was there???  What the hell does that mean?  Does this guy possess dangerous telekinetic powers??  Do I really want to be dealing with a screaming, hole-blowing with his mind superman?   No, I certainly do not.

"But, I don't own that house.  This is my house here." I quickly replied.

"I thought you said you were The Landlord?" He said.

Oh God...this idiot thinks there is only one Landlord in the world.  And I am it. 

Or perhaps I had underestimated this individual.  He had correctly said THE Landlord, I had responded to him in a positive manner.  Maybe he was a traveling wordsmith, preying on naive people, like myself. 

He continued to scream into the phone and stare at me.  I stood in awe at his multi-tasking ability. 

"I'm the Landlord of this house, not your house.  Who is your landlord?"  I stammered.  Hoping...praying...he would not unleash a verbal beating on me for my utter ignorance of the English language

"Howwhat now?  I don't know my landlord."  He said.  Perhaps this was not the Rhodes Scholar I had feared.

At this stage, I realized this conversation was going to go down hill fast.  So how could I extract myself from this conversation as quickly as possible?  I used the mightiest of Landlord weapons against my confused adversary.  Rent money.

"Well, who do you pay the rent to?"  I asked.

"Whoa, whoa, whoa...man, I don’t know anything about the rent.  My girlfriend pays that.  I'll ask her and she can give you a call or something."  With that, he continued on down the street and out of my life.