Merry Fucking Christmas. I'm Getting Evicted.

An Appeal from Emil Ottoman

MERRY FUCKING CHRISTMAS. I’M GETTING EVICTED.

Merry Christmas, go fuck yourself. My worst holiday memory is happening right now forever.

First, back up. You know what a Cuccidati is? It’s a Sicilian, because all Italians in St. Louis, Misery, are Sicilian, wedding cookie. A fancy old world fig newton with icing and sprinkled, but so much better. And no, I don’t know why we made them for Xmas.

My best friend Evelyn and her mom made them every year, along with a bunch of other exotic cookies, and we’d go over and have Christmas Eve at her house. My best friend only ever called it Crimbus and it was cute because she was beautiful and brilliant, or Xmas, because fuck Christmas. Then in May 2023, she hanged herself from her bedroom door.

I’m writing this on the day they took her little brother off life support because he overdosed in the bathroom of the same house she took one final severely Catholic drop to her knees from a coat rack hung over her bedroom door, three days shy of his 26^th birthday, nine years ago. We’d been going over to her house for Crimbus eve dinner, which was delicious, horrible, artery clogging lasagna, for a fucking decade.

You know. She was deep in alcohol addiction and had been on a downward spiral for a while, but was trying. And all I can think about is that I know she hadn’t had a solid bowel movement in years from all the White Claw and Vodka. So my mental image of her before her in a box about to get burned, cold as thawing steak, is her in what I know she was wearing, with piss and shit running down her leg.

Note, I’d known her 21 years, this was my sister. I can say these things. She’d have laughed at them. Anyone else says anything close and I will hunt them for sport.

That year when she died? No lasagna at Evelyn’s house. Her mother decided we were persona non grata because, as her closest and oldest friend, I had the receipts on what a narcissistic bitch she was, how she parentified and enslaved her daughter. Raised her to be bold and independent and a raging feminist, until mom needed a ride to the pain clinic.

Don’t worry. Both of her children committed suicide in the house she still lives in, but I assure you, she’s living her best life.

But the point is, Evelyn offed herself and one of our longest running holiday traditions in one voidlong trustfall; Cuccidatis, and Lasagna at her house, with a cheeseball, cookies, board games, video games, Cards Against Humanity, and ketamine. Free to all the wayward souls. With my moms talking to her mother while all us overgrown adult children were belligerent and happy. Until we weren’t and she was ashes.

Hold on, Wait. So in 2024, the next year: My moms is a dog groomer, and she’s getting older, Christmas is always hell. Grandma died on New Years Eve. I’m trying to retire mom but I’m not up to snuff. So to bring up the spirits Operation Holiday Cheer was born. I lit up the house, put tiny Xmas trees with all our favorite ornaments from forever ago everywhere, organized everything, and fuck, it worked. We achieved holiday cheer. Spirits were as high as we could keep them considering Evelyn was dead. Mom goes to see her sister in Arizona for Xmas. Comes back right after New Years. Driving her home it starts to flurry. I’d just put out the first of my Invitations to the Autopsy on Substack, I was playing Nina Simone and feelin’ fuckin’ good. It snowed heavy overnight and all the next day.

January 7^th: wake up to mom yelling the apocalypse is happening in the kitchen. It was. What I estimate at 55 tons or so of snow and ice pack from 30 hours of snow and icefall was coming in through the ceiling in our kitchen like don’t go chasing waterfalls, they’ll come the fuck to you. Ceiling sagging turning to mush. The water left marks on everything looked like dried blood.

This was the first time Substack helped me from being homeless in winter. New guy, been around a bit, leaves long notes, tiny essays all over, editor/refugee from indie publishing, and Substack came out in force. I almost killed myself with discount editing, but we made it. And then Fiction is Culture went on to help other people, all year long. A true fucking success story. Bless you Tom Schecter.

When we got a spot, the move still maxed out every credit card and burned every nerve any of us had so raw they’re still bloody. We got unpacked like, two weeks ago. Getting moved and getting stable are two vastly different things. One of the two got done.

Guess which.

New lease says “report any maintenance, safety, or building issues to management through the tenant portal.”

Now, I’m not saying this was THE ONE time in my life I tried to do the right thing. I’m saying violence gets shit done way, way quicker if you’re good at what you do and you know where to apply the right pressure. I’m saying as soon as water came through a light fixture for 24 hours in October and they tried to cover it up with a cosmetic fuck you, and I said: fix this right or I’m escalating to code enforcement. Oh, they were so quiet. Gave them four notices over what was it, a week maybe? Long enough to be more than legally reasonable. Hold on, I forgot the ceiling collapse in July. Whatever. The point is, IMPCC building codes and NEC codes say water cannot get into your electrical or else you’re about to have a real bad time. And I know this. I quoted the codes. I was so polite. Fuck I was polite.

But I’d crossed the Rubicon. See, any tenant knows, and by now they’re thinking, “this is a problem tenant, they know all two rights they have in this state!” But any tenant knows once you threaten to call down code on your landlord, it’s like saying you’re bringing in GOD. If you let them call your bluff, you get nothing but hard dick and Cheerios the rest of your tenancy. They know you’re a pushover. They know you’re weak, and scared, and in a precarious position, and fuck, you should be thankful to them, never mind the fact that with 6 short tons of books and papers, you should enjoy living in a potential tinderbox of a proven fire hazard. After all, they were gracious enough to give you housing in the first place. You fucking peasant.

This is the part where I tell you I may have non-standard ethics, but they’re mine, and if you ever think I’m bluffing and decide to call it, oh God have mercy on your soul because I don’t bluff. Calling in safety code violations is a protected activity in the State of Misery, and the city of St. Louis.

To a point.

Once you call for a safety inspection on a code violation, you’re protected from landlord retaliation! Except not really. We used to have strong tenant rights, shocking; I know. You wanna know why? Google the Pruitt-Igoe housing projects, then come back and continue. OK. So, they took the strong tenant protections we had out back and shot them behind the shed in 1999.

My landlord commits retaliation on its face in his second email after being notified how we don’t bluff around here, among other things and suggestions he’s not contractually or legally able to offer that fall under intimidation, but not enough for anyone to give a fuck because we’re not getting evicted.

“As far as you and your family moving out, it has come to our attention that you don’t appreciate our team and our property. Therefore we will not be renewing your lease in March.”

If he’d evicted us, among many other infringements, it would be clear retaliation. Unfortunately, they’ve left this loophole in Missouri state law where there are two kinds of landlord retaliation, and this is the soft kind, the kind that’s peachy fuckin’ keen.

Tenant rights are low value cases for attorneys, and we don’t have a warchest. Landlords are good repeat customers. I’ve got too much evidence of malfeasance at too many levels. This is complex. Our case is nuclear waste. The city is acting borderline hostile.

We get our second emergency move in exactly 12 months.

I’m dreading the idea of writing a GoFundMe. I’ve written, campaigned, and filled six. The last one was for the beautiful dead girl to take care of her cunt mother. I don’t want to weigh my small living family against the stunning dead girl with a dual PhD who everyone loved with the picture I picked for maximum impact above the fold on the GoFundMe for a mother who tortured and helped drive her to suicide. If my seventh GFM is the one that doesn’t fill, and it’s to save MY family? Evelyn, may as well see you soon.

I am a writer and editor, yes, but I’m also a community organizer. We’d leaned heavy on Substack already, to the point I was called a beggar by at least one old bastard who I then promptly said if he ever tried to hand me so much as a penny I’d cut his hand off and shove it down his throat wrist first until he fucking choked to death. I never said I was nice, I said I was kind, and compassionate, and I help people how I can.

So having gotten us squarely in this situation I came up with a halfassed idea. Me and some other authors are starting a publishing house. Small press, big guns, good idea.

Know what a holiday letter is? They’re a genre of letter. Started off when the middle class in the US came up and houses fragmented. Tell family neighbors and friends Timmy got good grades, stupid shit. Now they’re a way the wealthy perform social theater by telling you how many trips they went on, the great and amazing and whatever other superlatives they can think of, not many that I’ve read, to tell you how great their year was. And I got one. And it made me so mad I thought, let’s invert this completely. Write one that’s all bad. Or worse, all true. Or better, all lies. So I buy 40 NYE cards and come up with a header for a letter.

Did the math for moving, for potential profit, didn’t hit the floor of the move.

Still announced it the next day.

$15 gets you a Television Sky Press 2025 Holiday letter and New Year’s card, with a page from a novella.

$35 gets you all that and a gift bag in a bubble mailer from my personal archives.

$50 and up gets you a gift box of even more shit from my truly strange and large archive of shit. (Guess I’m downsizing this year.)

Sell through all the cards, which could be 150 or a total of 171, and I’ll print the most bootleg short run “you can only get it if you donated novella” you’ve ever seen. No UPC, No ISBN--bless you Chinese Printers--and you can buy it for one dollar over cost to print+shipping to you if you donated.

That’s it. Hand numbered, signed by the family. Signed by other authors? Who knows what else. This won’t be POD, it will be ONE very small offset printing. Never reprinted.

We sold almost 60 cards the first day. 7 days in on the 17^th, we’ve sold 92.

But yeah, this is THE miserable fucking holiday foreverafter. We’re either going to be homeless or not in March. But at least I guess I’m not just begging this time.

Link to original post:

Television Sky New Year Letters (Emergency Edition)

Link to update:

Television Sky HELP WE'RE GOING TO BE HOMELESS, NO REALLY

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Emil Ottoman is a writer, author, editor, publisher, artist, criminal, & unrepentant.

Photograph by William Eggleston