The Party Patrol (Tom & Dick) and The Sarcastic Colossus (Harold)

Meet the house's official Misfit Troublemakers: Tom and Dick. These two operate as a single, loud, slightly hazardous unit, united by their intense commitment to partying and their general disregard for the concept of "rules."

Tom, a retired 70-year-old steel worker, looks like a guy who should be quietly rocking on a porch, but he prefers anarchy. He had a stroke sometime before I moved in, and while he's physically functional, his speech has been reduced to a dense, indecipherable mumble. Talking to Tom is like trying to decipher an important message that was translated twice through Google Translate before being recorded onto a rusty cassette tape.

Dick, the younger of the pair, is an out-of-work painter/carpenter who owns a van that may or may not be street legal—it’s perpetually under "contention" whether it’s registered, insured, or powered by sheer, stubborn delinquency. What truly sealed this unholy alliance was their connection to Lenny and a shared, profound appreciation for the "partying lifestyle."

The Quiet Hour Fiasco

Almost year-round, these two would stake out a spot on the side of the house, setting up a homemade barbecue that, when the weather dipped, instantly transformed into a roaring, dangerous fire pit. The house rule is quiet after 10 PM. Most of us follow it—if only to avoid a lecture from Big Earl—but Tom and Dick treat the rule like a suggestion written in invisible ink. They’d be roaring outside my window, or carrying the racket into Tom's room right next to mine.

These nights inevitably led to a scuffle with the landlord's enforcer (Big Earl's official title), and naturally, the neighbors on the block regularly called the actual police to complain. The local police know them well, mostly from scooping them up after bar fights or for being loudly, gloriously drunk in public. They are a fixture of municipal mayhem.

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Harold: The Six-Foot-Five Brainiac

Then there is Harold. Harold defies physics by living in the absolute smallest room of the house, yet he pays the same monthly rent as the rest of us. The man is a towering, sarcastic colossus at 6'5" and over 200 pounds, built like a retired refrigerator.

His look is unique: a distinct horseshoe-pattern bald spot surrounded by hair that generally points straight up, and pants that appear to have shrunk four inches in the wash, perpetually preparing him for a flood.

Harold is a retired veteran living on Social Security and a tiny pension. He is one of the few here capable of throwing on a backpack and successfully completing the mile-long Slog of Agony into town on foot. He fancies himself an intellectual—he reads constantly and clearly believes this somehow makes him smarter and better than the rest of the riff-raff he shares walls with.

This intellectual superiority often expresses itself in dark, cutting sarcasm, which doesn't exactly make him popular, though bless his heart, he tries to socialize.

Despite his enormous stature, Harold survives almost entirely on canned goods sourced from local food pantries. His tech situation is a classic "Fiasco" compromise: he has a Smart TV, but only the crappy local HD internet feed he scavenged off the community share table (the one that only gets 4–6 channels). However, he had the foresight to grab a second-hand DVD player. This tiny piece of tech genius allows him to rent videos from the town library and escape the house's perpetual chaos through classic cinema.

WTF: WHAT THE FIASCO!

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Raul: The Less-Than-Super Unhandy Man

Meet Raul, our site "superintendent"—a job title that suggests competence and authority yet applies to him like the word "clean" applies to our Downstairs Kitchen. Raul is, in fact, our Less-Than-Super Unhandy Man. He lives on-site, not in some dignified superintendent's apartment, but in a rather large, permanent camper trailer parked deep in the backyard next to a storage shed.

You'd assume living in the epicenter of the WTF: What The Fiasco grounds means he's constantly identifying and fixing problems. You would be hilariously wrong. Raul is merely the last, most useless link in a Byzantine chain of command. Before he can lay a hand on anything—even to change a lightbulb—we must first navigate a bureaucratic process to get the landlord's attention. The man is not a super; he's a highly paid witness.

Take, for instance, the legendary Sump Pump Incident.

The sump pump, designed to keep the basement from turning into an aquarium, drains directly onto the cracked concrete patio, which had been designated as our communal BBQ area. Predictably, the water pooled in massive, stagnant puddles before slowly—very slowly—seeping into the cracks. During one memorable summer cookout, this setup provided us with entertainment in the form of hordes of biting bugs hatching directly from the patio cracks and immediately joining the party.

The obvious, low-cost solution would be to extend the drainpipe a few feet to the street or the fence line.

The actual solution, delivered one year later, was to REMOVE THE ENTIRE PATIO.

Yes, instead of fixing the drainage, they simply eliminated the problem surface. Now, our once-cracked BBQ area is a field of mud. We are literally grilling in the dirt. One enterprising resident had to make a makeshift trench to guide the water toward the fence. And, naturally, the original pile of cracked concrete slabs—the very slabs that took a year to remove—sat in a growing pile for another six months before they were finally moved to a dumpster, where they have remained as a sort of monument to bureaucratic futility.

WTF: WHAT THE FIASCO!

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