They Call Me The Zookeeper

By Michael Schempp

The Blue Diamond Inn located in Culver City Nebraska was once one of the cities finest hotels. But as the city expanded the neighborhood deteriorated, along with the inn. It was then converted into an apartment house. Most of the residents were ex-convicts and mental patients. These are the stories of the people that lived there and the security guards that watched over them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Michael Schempp
• Release date: Jul 6, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465893703

Michael Schempp

Michael Schempp lives in Kansas City,Kansas. He works in private asset protection. He is originally from Sioux Falls,South Dakota.

Book preview

They Call Me The Zoo Keeper

By Michael Schempp

Smashwords Edition Copyright © 2011 Michael Schempp

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CHAPTER ONE

THE BLUE DIAMOND INN

Get the hell out of my office and go suck your own dick said the female voice. I heard the words and couldn’t stop laughing. Bobby! the Manager yelled. I jumped up and ran into his office. Get this bitch out of here and tell Kelly that I want her evicted now! So goes a normal-abnormal day at the Blue Diamond Inn where something usually happened about every other day. Today’s event was Lilly Baldwin-one of our resident mental patients.

The Blue Diamond Inn is an apartment building in the heart of Culver City, Nebraska. In the first ninety years of its existence it was a four star hotel. When the VIP’s came to town they all stayed here. It was the in place. People in the lower incomes fantasized about staying here and many spent their 25th and 50th wedding anniversaries here. But as Culver City grew into a major city, the neighborhood was left behind. Crime and social problems moved in and soon it became a neighborhood that people stayed away from at night.

Then in the 1980’s developers came in and decided that they were going to turn the neighborhood around. They bought a group of buildings, one of which included Blue Diamond Inn. They were going to turn the inn into a lower income apartment house with three hundred apartments ranging from studios to two bedroom units with retail and offices on the first level. Unfortunately they ran into financial problems and the buildings ended up being sold at a bankruptcy auction.

That is where Larry Riley came into the history of the inn. He bought the building thinking this was going to be the start of his financial empire. Eventually he would own the whole neighborhood. Larry had worked for his uncle in upscale hotels all over the country. This was Larry’s chance at building the kind of world wide conglomerate his uncle built. It couldn’t be to difficult—just rent out the apartments and collect the rent. Plus this part of town had an added benefit-25% of these units were government subsidized. The government would send you tenants and then send you checks each month for their rent! For repairs you hire maintenance men, housekeepers to keep it clean and office personnel to rent out the apartments collect the rent and pay the bills. He would pay off this building and then use its equity to buy other buildings and then each of those would become equity for more buildings. He would retire by the time he was fifty, then he could return to traveling—his first love. He had spent a couple of years traveling around the world after his uncle past away and living the good life with a family discount at his families’ hotels, but then two million dollars just doesn’t buy you that much anymore.

What Larry didn’t think about was the fact that the inn was an old building. The developers did a lot of cosmetics but very little actual repair. Its roof was old and dilapidated, the plumbing was full of patches, and the elevators-one manual and one automatic were shaky from age. The manual elevator was the original elevator in the building. These days it was used for freight and service. Every now and then it would get stubborn and we would have to take a stretched out hanger up to a steel wire that went to the motor and pull on it. When the elevator would start running you would drop the wire right away so that you didn’t get an electric shock.

I loved working there. The building was full of social misfits. I worked for a security company. I was successful at this post because unlike a lot of people who work security, I cared. I could work at other clients and make a lot more money, but I enjoyed watching people live their lives-especially in this part of town. I cared for the outcast-keeping the buildings children away from the drug dealers that would give them candy-preparing them for drug addiction, the single mothers that were trying to raise a family by themselves-a lot of time with runaway fathers or fathers that were in prison for long stretches, the mental patients who had the world telling them one thing and the voices in their heads telling them something else. We have a lot of convicts here (on probation)and ex-cons that like to victimize these people. The security company I work for—Knight-Walker Security Inc. has a seventy hour a week contract here. They send a lot of guards that would best be described as receptionists. The company, which is as franchise out of New York is owned locally by five men, each with stock in it. They are bottom line oriented. They bid the contract thinking it would be a simple checking people in assignment and checking floors and then outside rounds every couple of hours. To bad they didn’t talk to residents. They would tell them that security companies never renew their contracts here. Now my supervisors hate this place because it is a staffing nightmare— most employees refuse to work it, so I smile when I get my paycheck—it usually has sixty hours a week on it.

CHAPTER TWO

STEVE WILSON

The guard that was here before the company took over—Steve Wilson—was hired by Knight-Walker and they made him a supervisor. We work along side Kelly Moore-the leasing manager. He has a huge crush on her as do I but we never approach her for a date because it is against company rules. When the company promoted Steve to road supervisor they gave me the title of main guard with the responsibilities of supervisor but not an increase in pay. The inn employees had hoped that Larry would straighten this place out but the first thing he did was lower wages for incoming help while cancelling the raise policy and the health insurance policy on the rest. Sick leave was now unpaid. Holidays for Blue Diamond Inn employees were paid days off if you worked the day before and the day after. All of the employees quit except for Kelly. With her criminal history she wouldn’t be able to get a job that easy.

When she was fifteen years old she ran away from home with a man. He forced her into a life of prostitution by getting her addicted to cocaine. She worked in a ring with a bunch of other girls traveling the truck stops. Unfortunately one of the truckers turned out to be an under cover cop. He arrested her and she served time in prison after taking plea for helping run the prostitution ring which also was selling stolen goods. Unfortunately she was caught when she was 25 years old so she had to serve in an adult prison. She got a job after she got out at the Blue Diamond Inn. She started taking management courses at a community college and so Larry promoted her from housekeeper to Leasing manager. Now she had a low paying job with a discounted apartment to be on call to a bunch of irritated tenants-a dream job! He gave her the job of finding new tenants and employees to fill a building that has a lot of problems and no employees, along with tenants moving out every day.

Those former employees went to work for other buildings in the neighborhood and describe Larry as a jackass, a jerk and a slumlord. One told his new boss of Kelly’s criminal history. They had very little response to their advertising. so Larry and Kelly started discussing it and Kelly convinced him to start renting to people on probation, parole and all sorts of ex-convicts. Larry decided to go one step further and he started hiring them for housekeeping and maintenance and so the bad reputation of the Blue Diamond Inn went from bad to worse.

The next night I walked into the office to relieve Kelly. The office was high class in its day ., but it had been allowed to show its wear. The wood was expensive oak but the carpets were worn out shag. The wall paper in the lobby’s(we had two ) was out of date. The furniture is about fifty years old. My shift is 6pm to5 am. Being in security here, I do almost everything Kelly does except for the bookkeeping. I work out of the leasing office where I screen in visitors. I do this by answering the phone when they use the entry way phone. The visitor tells me who he wants to see and what apartment that person is in. I then look at the tenant list and if the information is correct I let that person enter the building. He then proceeds to the office where he presents a photo identification that I check against the banned list.

The list has 375 names of people that management has deemed harmful to the building or its tenants, therefore forbidden to enter the building. The person may have been an evictee; he may have assaulted a tenant, done harm to the building, found on property with illegal substances, or a variety of crimes against the building or business. He could have been placed there by a tenant because he didn’t want to see him, say if a tenant felt unsafe when that person was around. A name going on the list had to have a written statement listing reasons and be approved by Larry. If a security officer does it there had to also be an incident report going to the Knight-Walker office for legal reasons.

It is hard to get off the list. We had an 83 year old man that was evicted. He had caused a lot of legal problems for the Blue Diamond Inn. Larry wouldn’t let us take his name off the list for six months after the old mans death. We had been told by a friend of his that old Hank had passed away, but Larry wanted to make sure. We also had other problems with it. When drag queens came in, they would give you a picture of a guy but you would see a person in front of you with a wig on, makeup, eye shadow and a dress with stockings. Seeing a drag queen around here wasn’t that unusual but sometimes they could fool you. One time on rounds I saw this really good looking girl. Thoughts of an impure nature went threw my mind. She came up to me and said Hi Bobby! Upon recognizing the voice I came back to reality and blurted out Juan? It was Juan Garcia—Ted Buller’s boyfriend. Ted was one of the housekeepers here. Another time I was out in front of the building and saw models walking up and down the street. This time I knew the score. They were coming out of Billy’s Bistro across the street. Billy’s was a gay club known for its transvestite shows. One of the foreign citizens that were living at the Blue Diamond was out front cleaning out his car. His name was Hector Morales. I looked at him. He was smiling ear to ear. I got a kick out of this. Hey Hector I asked do you like what you see? With glazed over eyes he purred yeah! I asked him, Are they males or females? He looked at me and said females—definitely females! I came back and said, nope all males! He looked at me confused and I said, drag queens for the show over there tonight" he looked at me while I smiled and then quickly returned to cleaning his car!

Ted the housekeeper was my first exposure to the gay lifestyle. I came from a small town in North Dakota. Back there we either didn’t have gay people or they weren’t claiming it out of fear of retribution. Ted had been dating Juan about six months when I got to know him. While Ted was built like a football player, Juan was smaller and effeminate. One day they were having a dispute and Ted kicked Juan out of the apartment. Juan came down and asked that I do something-he was on the lease just like Ted and had just as much right to be there. I checked the lease and found that he was correct—that both of their signatures were on the contract.

I got the key to their apartment and we proceeded up to the apartment. I knocked first but there was no answer. I unlocked the door but found that it was blocked. We both tried to get past the block but couldn’t do it. I thought about it and then we went back down to the office. I called Kelly-after all she was the leasing manager. She and Kim Miles came down to the office where Kelly talked to Juan. She sent Kim up to talk to Ted. Her mother