I am a college student that has had their share of struggles like any other coed that goes for a degree.
Though enrolled full time, I also had a job at the time that wasn't exactly exciting and barely met the bills. If my father hadn't been sending a weekly check on top of that, I doubt I had made it at all.
Meanwhile, I was rooming with two of my closest girlfriends in an apartment in the college district we managed to find cheap.
This was an area where rents were totally outrageous, so finding the place, Phyllis, Kellie and I considered ourselves lucky--at least at the time.
The landlord was a Greek guy, age thirty, that everyone called Tino; it turned out his dad had died and left him the property.
Those who had lived there when the old man had the place talked about how generous and kind Leo had been, but with Tino, they didn't have the same liberties.
First, he was too cheap to fix anything in the building to make it remotely decent.
If we didn't have two guys, Jason (who I suspected had a crush on Kellie) and Tommy, living down the hall picking up the slack from time to time, we would all be living in a dump.
Of course, Tino neither reimbursed them nor knocked off anything on the rent for improvements, which pissed us off even more.
Second, most of us found Tino to be an asshole. He was always nasty to the older couple that managed the building next door that Tino now also owned.
He also bitched at anyone who showed up at his door when HE thought was too early in the day, getting pissed off when people had parties and being too loud (never mind he had a few beer and weed parties of his own with his creepy friends while they took in a porno movie or two), and was always dissing the older, less attractive women in the building.
If that wasn't bad enough, Tino would eye up women in both buildings and check out the girlfriends and/or female relatives that would visit, trying to flirt with them, before commenting to his drinking/weed buddies later about how hot or not they were.
Being we girls that lived there were all anywhere between eighteen and twenty one, most found Tino, despite being hot in his own way, to be pervy and weird, and avoided him as much as possible.
It wasn't easy, being he lived downstairs and we had to pay rent to him every month; Kellie managed to still avoid him when she would write a check every month (after Phyllis and I pitched in our share to her), and slide it in Tino's mail slot.
Tommy and Jason, as well as some of the other girls that lived there and a few guys in the building next door had a name for him behind his back: The Greasy Greek.
Even being the tightwad that he was when it came to maintaining the buildings, Tino was, for some odd reason, generous when it came to the pool area of the place.
Both the decks and the large, in ground pool were always immaculate, with him always upgrading things and the water was always clear.
Tommy would laugh and say that Tino kept up the pool so he could watch the young chicks from his picture window (that faced the pool area) while he was jacking off.
And of course, he also liked harassing Phyllis for some reason.
But unlike some that would retreat in tears to their units, Phyllis, a fiery redhead, took was Tino dished out and gave it back to him in triples.
The funniest moment had to be when he had asked her one day if her boobs were real.
She had glared at him. "Of course they're real. Is your cock real? Or is it as much as a prick as the rest of you?"
For once, The Greasy Greek was speechless. We all had a good laugh over it for a long time.
But one summer, I had just turned 19 and had enrolled for classes for that semester. I hadn't made enough money during spring term to cover all my books, even with the money Dad sent, because The Greasy Greek had raised the rent again.
Worse, Phyllis had moved out, and Kellie and I ended up having to go halves instead of thirds on the rent.
We were still buds with Phyllis, but her boyfriend had asked her to move in with him, and besides, she'd finally gotten tired of Tino's bullshit.
Kellie and I were really in a jam; I was about to drop some classes, and we were already behind a month in rent when Kellie had lost her job.
It looked as if we were going to have to beg our folks for more money to ward off both Tino's bitching and the process of him putting us out.
As the saying goes, desperate people do desperate things.
I had gotten an idea one afternoon after I had gotten in from school and changed my clothes.I thought that if perhaps I could reason with The Greasy Greek to hold off until my dad sent another check, Kellie and I wouldn't be thrown out.
At least I hoped so, but with the asshole Tino was, even that option looked dim. But it was worth a try.
I had figured since unlike most of the girls in the place, I had at least made the attempt to be nice to him previously, so I crossed my fingers and prayed that would at least work to my advantage.
And it would, but in a way that had been the furthest thought from my mind at the time.
"He's just going to bitch us out more," Kellie said when I told her what I was going to do.
"Maybe not. I never really had a problem with the guy, even if he is weird," I replied.
"Okay, knock yourself out. But I still say you're wasting your breath."
It had taken me awhile to get up the nerve, but then I went downstairs and knocked on his door, expecting to be cussed out.
He didn't disappoint, at least at first.
"Who the fuck is it?" Tino yelled on the other side.
"Um....it's Tara."
His tone changed a little. "Hey, Tara! Just a second; I'll be right there."
