Meet Quigley, the most unfazed landlord ever

Bob Dumas

I started thinking about some of the places I’ve lived over the years and decided I want to tell you about Quigley.

Quigley was my first-ever landlord. It was in college, while I was attending SUNY Oswego. I had transferred there as a junior and, of course, was assigned to a dormitory. Now, as dormitories go, this was a pretty nice one. Its backyard was about 100 feet from the rocky shores of Lake Ontario, where students would often gather to watch the sun set on the watery horizon. Oswego was known for its sunsets. They were quite often spectacular. Right up there with Japan’s. It’s in all the brochures.

Nonetheless, it wasn't long before the dorm director (think Himmler) and I came to a mutual understanding that perhaps dorm life and I weren’t necessarily suited for each other. She kept blathering on about some kind of pungent odor she detected seeping out from underneath my door, but I swear, I have no idea what on earth she was talking about.

So, with about two weeks left in the semester, I was given the boot and assigned to another dorm clear across campus. I was about to become someone else’s problem. I knew I was going to be some poor, unsuspecting fool’s new roommate, who had probably been enjoying life in a single room for some time. This was not good.

But then a friend of mine, who lived one floor above me, invited me to stay with him for the final two weeks (his prior roommate had dropped out months ago). I knew I would have to move about furtively and not let Himmler or her minions see me, or I’d be busted. But my mistake was that I never went over and checked into that new dorm on the other side of campus. Eventually, they called over and inquired about my whereabouts. Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong knew who my associates were, and it didn't take her long to figure out the hijinks in which I was engaged. There was a knock at the door about 10 o’clock one night, and I let my guard down for the first time and answered it. There was the dorm director in all her sinister glory, looking like a Yankees fan who just found out they won season tickets to Fenway Park via a radio contest. I swear, if she had a Taser, I would have been flopping around on the floor like a halibut.

Speaking of fish, I wasn’t the only one who despised our authoritarian dorm ruler. I know one guy who nailed a steelhead head (that’s a very large trout) to her office door.

Anyway, I was sent packing, and when I arrived at my new room, the first thing I noticed was that the two single beds had been pushed together. My new roommate had a girlfriend. This was going to be awkward.

I somehow managed to stagger across that semester’s finish line, and that summer my friends and I went searching for off-campus housing.

That soon led us to the blue and beige apartments. On one end of the street was a cluster of blue split-level apartment buildings. On the other end, you found the same thing, except they were beige.

These apartments were owned by an elderly, cotton-topped gentleman named Quigley. I told you this was about Quigley. I have no idea what his first name was, and we never called him Mr. Quigley. He was just... Quigley. Like Cher. Or Bono.

Anyway, to say Quigley was a laissez-faire kind of landlord would be an understatement. He showed up once a month to collect the rent, and that was about it. You never heard from him. And he seemed unfazed by anything that took place in his apartments, or anything untoward that might be done to them. I guess from years of renting to college students, you develop some pretty thick skin.

We lived in the blue apartments, and outrageous behavior and unprovoked vandalism weren’t really a problem there. However, up the street at the beige apartments, it was a whole different vibe. Those people were nuts.

Quigley made the mistake (at least in my mind) of renting a second-floor unit to some hockey players who were there on scholarships. They certainly weren't there for academics. And the icing on the property-damage cake? They were Canadian.

It wasn’t rare to go over to the beige apartments and find a second-story window shattered and a mangled TV on the lawn. Sometimes furniture. And if you dared to look more closely, you’d likely find other gross stuff that I can’t talk about in a family paper. These guys thought they were Led Zeppelin on a world tour. They just lacked the tour bus.

One night, some of my friends who lived in a first-floor unit of the beige apartments (which was adjacent to a garage) decided to throw a party, determined to have it live up to the legendary sordid reputation of that building.

I was sitting on the floor of one of the bedrooms playing an acoustic guitar (yeah, I was like that guy in “Animal House” playing “I Gave My Love a Cherry,” prompting Belushi to smash his guitar) when suddenly the wall next to me exploded, covering me in dust and chunks of drywall. A guy peeked his head in the newly made hole.

“Hey, what’s up?”

He’d grown tired of trying to get into the party via the line at the front door and simply decided to create a shortcut through the adjacent garage. As one does.

Later, out in the living room, someone took an empty Champagne bottle by the neck and threw it across the room like a hatchet. It traveled across the room going end-over-end and actually pierced the wall neck-first, where it stuck like a dart. The crowd went instantly quiet for about five seconds and then erupted into cheers.

Quigley never flinched. At the end of the semester, he would just come in with a few pallets of disinfectant, a stack of drywall and plaster, and about 50 gallons of paint and get the place ready for the next gang of maniacs.

The following semester, we moved to Brokedown Place. For the uninitiated, that is the title of a Grateful Dead song. But it was the perfect name for this place — a giant Victorian home that somehow was both dilapidated and majestic at the same time. I think it might have actually been built during the Victorian era. Sure smelled like it.

I have no idea who that landlord was. Someone in our group must have been responsible for getting him the rent. Two things I remember most about Brokedown Place: the kitchen had an orange shag carpet, and there was literally a mushroom growing in the shower stall. We collectively decided to leave it alone. Ah, youth.

I’ve had all kinds of landlords (and ladies) over the years. Most of them were lovely... some, not so much.

I had one guy who was born with a permanent scowl on his face. He always looked like he was standing next to a leaky septic tank. He had all the charm of a lanced boil.

And yet, looking back, I realize those property bosses — from the storm-trooper dorm director to Quigley, patron saint of benign neglect — played a role in my higher education. Not academically, of course. But in teaching me critical life skills, like how to move quietly, and how to identify which mushrooms should never be sautéed.

Bob Dumas is editor-at-large for Halston Media. He used to live in a 380-square-foot apartment in L.A. He still has claustrophobic-themed nightmares. You can comfort him by writing to dumas@halstonmedia.com.