Condominium (30 page)

“So move,” said Forrester.

“Second,” said Garver.

“In favor? Opposed? Carried. And now we will proceed—”

Frank Branhammer sprang to his feet, red fists clenched, big red face scowling and bulging. “Just one goddam minute here!”

Pete McGinnity banged his gavel. “Please sit down, Mr. Branhammer. You’re out of order.”

“I want to know what the hell is going on!” he yelled, ignoring his wife, who was tugging at his arm and whispering at him.

“We are dispensing with the reading of the minutes,” McGinnity said. “That means we are not spending time having Stanley here read three pages of minutes. That’s why we had copies sent to everybody. You got a copy. Now sit down!”

“Does that mean nobody gets any chance to talk about any of the shit you people put in those minutes?”

McGinnity roared at him. “When we get to that part of the agenda, to that part of the list of things we are going to talk about here today, we are going to talk about what’s in those minutes, under old business. But maybe you won’t be here because if you keep up that garbage mouth of yours, I’ll have you put out of the meeting.”

After five seconds of fixed glare, Branhammer, mumbling almost inaudibly, sat down.

“What did you call me?” McGinnity demanded.

Branhammer studied him and said distinctly, “I called you an ass hole, you ass hole! I don’t trust a one of you overeducated ass holes sitting there in a goddam row.”

McGinnity stood up and dropped the gavel on the table, making
a thunderous sound over the amplifier. He shook his big head. “I don’t have to take this, do I? I don’t have to take this at any time from anybody. Have yourselves a nice meeting.”

There had been gasps of astonishment and outrage at Branhammer’s language. There was a shocked silence as Pete McGinnity strode toward the door. Wasniak and Garver went after him. Gus turned in the doorway and said with the clear and unmistakable ring of authority, “All of you sit quietly until we get back.”

Brooks Ames came forward from the back of the room and edged along a row until he was behind Branhammer, who sat with chin on his big chest, fists on his knees, huge belly in his lap. Brooks Ames wore the symbols of his authority, his armband, ID tag, whistle and handgun. He wore his khaki shirt and shorts. He tapped Branhammer on the shoulder and said, “As Sergeant at Arms of this meeting of the Golden Sands Condominium Association, I must request that you leave the meeting.”

Branhammer turned slowly and looked up at him. “Eh?”

“You have to leave now, Branhammer.”

“Or what?”

“Or … I will escort you out.”

“Escort me?” Branhammer looked startled and then he smiled, and with reptilian quickness hooked a big finger in the red woven cord around Ames’s neck and yanked his head down to within a few inches of Branhammer’s red face. “Escort me?”

“Let go! Let go!”

Branhammer released him so suddenly Brooks Ames tilted back and sat on the lap of Mrs. Winney, and jumped back to his feet immediately.

“Go blow your little whistle, captain,” Branhammer said. “You wanna get my attention, you better shoot me in the head with that little gun you got there. Go away, huh?”

Branhammer turned back, completely dismissing Ames. Brooks said, in a voice a half octave higher than usual, “You will be permitted to stay in this meeting. Mr. Branhammer, if you will watch your language. There are ladies present. Is that understood?”

Branhammer yawned and sighed.

“You have been warned,” said Captain Ames, and sidled back along the row, as twenty different conversations all started up at once. The babble faded away as the three officers came back into the room and took their places at the card tables.

McGinnity said, “I want to apologize to all of you for my display of temper. This is a miserable thankless job, and I would drop it in a minute if anyone else would take it. But I want to make it clear that I will not stand for any vilification. I will not be called names. I will not be treated with suspicion and distrust, as there is no way in the world any of us officers can make one lousy dime out of the hours and hours and hours we put in on this job. Now we will get back to the meeting. I want no interruptions. When I want to open things up to comments from the floor, I will let you know. We will take the committee reports in order as usual, and then we will proceed to old business and then to new business. Now we will hear the treasurer’s report.”

David Dow reached and pulled the microphone close. In a breathy raspy whisper he said, “As you can plainly hear, I have laryngitis. I have had enough copies of my report made for all. I will wait until Mrs. Gregg has distributed them to all of you.”

After the distribution he said, “Total budget is $91,000 per year. You can see the simplified breakdown. We had to make a total assessment of $15,412.50 on June first in order to catch up on back underassessments. The first of this month we dropped back to the regular amount of $7,583.45. Of this total of $22,995.95, we have not yet received approximately $4,000. We will need it
in order to make all budgeted payments. Excuse me for whispering.”

McGinnity said, “We will skip any report from your president at this time and go directly to old business, which means picking up where we left off at the last meeting: namely, this business of the management contracts and the maintenance service contracts we were stuck with on account of the arrangements were made by the previous officers of the Association, namely, Mr. Liss and his people. Now I am not going to open this up for discussion until your officers have made their comments, so stop waving your arms at me back there and sit quiet and listen. You might learn something. Hadley?”

Forrester pulled the microphone over. “As was recommended, Mr. Dow, Mr. Wasniak and I consulted an attorney about this whole matter, a Mr. Searle Wadkin of Hooper, Wadkin and Lannigan, in the Athens Bank and Trust Company building. We had two sessions with him. I took copious notes, but I see no point in going into detail at this time. He states that constant changes are being made in the law, to protect the condominium dweller, and that though many of these may not stand up in court if tested, most of them will. He said that it would not be possible to do exactly what was done to us, if this project was just starting at this time. But at the time it was done, it was perfectly legal, and it is his opinion we are stuck with it.”

He grimaced when he heard the groans from the audience and pushed the mike back to McGinnity.

McGinnity said, “I had some long talks with David Dow, here, before he lost his voice. So I’ll report what he was going to report to you. You will remember we noted in passing how nice Mr. Martin Liss was to the four of us when we called on him. (That was one you couldn’t make, Gus.) We got class-A treatment in Liss’s
office, and it puzzled us. In the car on the way back we talked about it, saying he didn’t really have to talk to us at all, but he knew we were upset and for some reason he wanted to calm us down.

“Now I have to get into some of the new business in order to say what I have to say, so I guess it will have to be okay with you people. We now know why Martin Liss didn’t want any big fuss going on here. He has showed his hand. He is starting one hell of a big project right behind us, a very rich project. And he is taking a big risk starting something in times like these, with empty condominium apartments all over the state, tens of thousands of them. Maybe hundreds of thousands. And so many up for sale by individuals. You can look at the Sunday paper and find page after page. Okay, now let me look at this piece of paper here that David prepared for me. You people look at that ninety-one thousand budget. I asked David to peel it down to what we would actually have to have here in the way of expenses: insurance, maintenance, cleaning and so forth. He came up with a horseback guess of forty thousand dollars. Now we divide that by forty-five apartments, not forty-seven, and we come up with eight eighty-eight a year, or seventy-four a month. No, don’t applaud. It isn’t a fact, certainly not yet. Of course, using the same pro rata basis, the monthly cost would go from probably fifty a month on the first floor to a hundred on the top floor.

“Well, we sought some more legal advice, and this time I won’t tell you the name because he would rather not be quoted. He said the first thing we have to do is catch everybody up to date on the assessment schedule. Then we have to be able to advise Investment Equities and Gulfway Management that we have decided, every single one of us resident here, to stop all payments on the recreation lease and on the management contract—”

“Now just a minute, Mr. McGinnity. You can’t—”

“Shut up, Julian. You are here at this table as a guest.”

“I just …”

Gus Garver reached over and put a powerful hand on Julian’s forearm and silenced him with a warning pressure.

McGinnity continued. “The lawyer agreed that it is a ripoff situation, even though it was done legally. We have to stand together, every single resident. We have to try to get every kind of publicity we can. If we can make enough stink we can make this new thing behind us look like a bad bet. And maybe we can give some other condominiums the guts to quit making payments on their lousy contracts too. The lawyer said he thought if we went at it right, that they’d come back to us with some kind of compromise deal. When that happens, provided we all vote to go ahead with it, we can negotiate. The way we are right now, there are people here who just can’t keep on paying so much every month. They just can’t do it, and it isn’t right they should have to. Now I’ll open it up for question from the floor. Please, everybody, no speeches.”

A hunched little woman in a floral dress stood up. She was wearing a pink hat with a wide brim, and carrying a shiny red purse. Others stood up too, but the pink hat caught McGinnity’s eye.

“Yes, Mrs.…”

“Taller. Mrs. Boford Taller. What I want to ask is, who was it had the pool party last Tuesday night? I swim early every single morning because I’m allergic to the sun, and I’m telling you, that whole pool area was one nasty mess when I—”

“Mrs. Taller!”

“What I’m wondering, did they even register at the office to have a pool party? People eat like pigs and drop ugly hunks of food in the pool and it lays there and it turns my stomach.”

“Mrs. Taller!”

“I want somebody to find out who it was. Maybe it wasn’t even people from here. I’ve said before, we all ought to have special badges and have to wear them, so outsiders won’t use our facilities the way they do. I want it investigated. That’s all.” She sat down, chin high, lips sucked in.

“Anybody else out there who has any comments on anything besides the monthly assessment costs, please save it until later, okay?”

“I want to say something,” Julian said.

“Residents first, Higbee.”

“I forgot to mention,” Mrs. Taller said, hopping up again, “that the pool furniture was moved around every which way, and one of the umbrellas was broken. Just who pays for it, I wouldn’t know.”

McGinnity sighed into the mike. “Jack Cleveland?”

“Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Grace and me have talked this over. It just isn’t fair in a person’s retirement to get cheated out of the little extras that make life worth living. Now I would guess that because I had a pretty good success in the building supply business, we’ve got a little more cushion than most. But I can tell you we have felt it, having the assessment on the first of the month go up by a hundred dollars. That’s twenty-five dollars a week that we would be using to eat out more. And I just can’t see what we’re getting for that extra hundred. Take for example the recreation lease. Neither of us care a darn thing about the pool, not with that wonderful Gulf of Mexico right out there. And tennis is too active, and about all anybody does in this room is have meetings or play cards. I can tell you, I had enough of meetings in my lifetime. I don’t need any more, not at this stage in my life. And cards … I was going to tell you a joke about that, but the funny part of it has slipped my mind at the moment. I guess what I want to say is that
Grace and me, we will go along with whatever the majority says. That’s the democratic way of life, as I see it. But if they take legal action against all of us, and it looks as if we could lose the apartment or anything like that—well, I am going to put the difference into a separate savings account, and if it turns out we all have to pay up, I’m not going to fight city hall. I mean, there has to be a stopping place. I’m not going to turn myself into some kind of a martyr just to prove a point. I can tell you this, though. Most of us went along with the developer’s suggestion and we set up the mortgage paper on the condominiums with the Athens Bank and Trust Company, and speaking as a director of a bank in Warren, Ohio, I can say that no bank would be very happy about any kind of action that would toss thirty-five mortgages back in its lap all in the same building. God only knows how long the bank would have to pay for all the maintenance and so on before, in these times, they could unload the property. It would seem to me that—”

“Thanks for your valuable advice, Jack. We should probably all put the difference aside in case things go against us, so it won’t be too much of a shock to come up with the money. But if we stick together, we’ll have a better bargaining position.”

Arms were waving. People were calling for recognition. He recognized Phil DeLand from 1-B, a lean, bearded, retired major addicted to wearing tank tops, jeans and beads.

“Pete, will this Wadkin fellow continue to represent us if we go through with this plan?”

“To whatever extent we ask him to.”

“Right on,” said the major and sat down next to Roxanne, his Indian-looking wife.

He recognized Sally Kelsey from 2-G, a broad tanned woman noted for swimming straight out into the Gulf, out of sight. “Mr. Chairman, if we have a
legal
obligation to pay this additional
money, then my husband and I think we have a
moral
obligation to pay it. All over this country we have seen people marching around, burning and destroying, because they didn’t like this law or that law. We guessed what might happen at this meeting and we talked it over. We think that the right thing to do is to pay under protest, and at the same time sue the developer for misrepresentation.”