Passing Papers

     They say when celebrity deaths come, they come in bunches, typically threes. The same could come with life-altering changes.
     Those few who have stuck with my and Mrs. JP's travails since the spring of 2009 have known that we've been living in the same apartment for six and a half years. While our current landlord leaves much to be desired, one of the good things about him was he'd kept our rent the same since August of '09. Even so, being out of a job all these years while still trying to make our bills always means living in a state of excitement the Chinese call in their infamous imprecation, "interesting times."
     An hour ago, we just got a text from said landlord that he's about to pass papers with a highly motivated buyer. It's a crappy way to find out since as of the first of October we'll have by far more seniority than any of his tenants. But that aside, even to old liberals such as Mrs. JP and me, change isn't always welcome, even though last April we'd briefly flirted with the idea of actually moving out.
     But we're not nearly as flush now as we were last April. That was when I had my last fundraising drive (you may recall that was during the same time Mrs. JP was in Florida during her mother's final decline and I had to make a significant outlay of cash in a very short amount of time.). No one is more sick and tired of these constant fundraisers than yours truly, which is why, even though we by necessity have to spend more money on bills than we have coming in, I'd decided to give you guys a break from my passing my constant, neverending problems onto you.
     And one of the reasons for our white-faced trepidation is our being unsure what the new presumptive owner's plans are regarding this property. It could very well be, pending approval by the bank appraiser's inspection this coming Wednesday, when he takes over he could invalidate all the existing leases and jack up our rent. If it comes down to us being made tenants at will, we'd be forced to either cough up the extra money or get out in 30 days as per the commonwealth's tenant at will laws.
     Remember, we've been paying the same $650 a month for rent since Mrs. JP moved in with Popeye and me in late July of 2009 and it could very well be that the new owner will decide he can get a hell of a lot more for our four bedroom apartment than that (and, with some modest modifications, he could with the Massachusetts housing market. I got a firsthand look at that while pricing apartments here last April.).
     Since our cash outlay is already several hundreds of dollars a month more than we're currently taking in (and, don't forget, as well as not having a sofa, we don't have a TV or cable so it's not as if we're living the life of Riley), and with our annual food stamp certification still up in the air, our already precarious finances could take a nosedive in no time flat.
     And, to add drama to our lives, even if the new owner doesn't go all gentrification and jack up the rent to get in a higher class of tenants (what will I tell him when he meets us on Wednesday and asks, "So, Robert, what do you two do for a living?") our finances, already shaky, will be nonexistent when our sole benefactor has to cut us off at the end of April when he retires. So I'll have to ask you all for help again.
     For my part, I'm busting a nut trying to get someone in the film or book business interested in buying the film or First North American rights for Tatterdemalion. I've got a major editor of a major publishing house looking at it now and I've sent out my latest novel to a dozen film production companies in a desperate, last-ditch effort to get something going and some actual earned money into our humble household.
     I'm also literally in the middle of a new novel entitled Gods of Our Fathers, which is about the earliest hours in the history of the Boston City Police Department in 1854 and how it was all hands on deck for them during the riots after the capture and trial of escaped slave Anthony Burns. No one's ever written about this incredible story in a novel before and I know I'm onto something. And, even in first draft, it's turning out wonderfully.
     So anything you guys could do to help would be enormously appreciated, moreso than even my literary abilities could ever articulate.