Vanity. Ares

had no money to even gamble or move around
much. A few club owners paid me over the
counter, sometimes a hundred, sometimes fifty,
but I was simply living hand to mouth. I paid the
Landlord Gordot, but the initial wait offended
him; upon taking my cash he kept saying: “People
like Brandy pay in advance, sometimes two weeks’
young man, and look at who I have living here.”
As he spoke I could see the disdain in his eyes
from the grimace on his old wrinkled face. I told
him that some rent is better than no rent as I had
asked another tenant in the building Beckett, if
there had been anyone living in the room before
me, and he said it had been empty for at least
eight months. So I used this to my advantage and
Gordot seemed to accept that I had a slight point.
I then quickly gauged from Gordot’s words
that he was quite familiar with Brandy, another
neighbour that seemed to harbour the same
feelings; casual hate — as I would say hello when I
saw him walking up to his room and he would
mutter some sort of response and always be too
busy; sometimes scratching his bald head or
sometimes eating. I did not know why Brandy
would take such an instantaneously cold stance,
but after a few weeks I had heard from Beckett
that he was an ex-military soldier that got hooked
on drugs, and apparently one day I had walked in
the house smoking some weed and he had
followed me in just as I had entered and this made
him dislike me; along with me failing to pay
Gordot my initial deposit and rent on time,
allegedly.
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