Thoughts, Memories & Ravings of Big Daddy Graham: The Rental Zone

It’s August, and if you have rented for the summer, you start thinking about how much of your security deposit you are going to get back.

Rental properties. Sea Isle can’t live with them and can’t live without them. Property owners who depend on rentals would just love to rent out for the entire summer to one group of nuns if they could. But that would come with its own set of problems.

In grade school, I once saw a nun trip down a flight of steps over her cassock and rosary beads. After we were done laughing and we rushed to help pick her up, she whacked us with a ruler that she had conveniently hidden in her pocket. So just imagine the problems these huge, four-floor side-by-sides with no elevator would cause. They would be falling left and right. And an elevator wouldn’t help much anyway since they would only fit one nun at a time.

One more nun story (sorry, I just can’t resist). My brother-in-law once rented his 36th Street side-by-side to a pack of nuns for the week. Sounds like a safe bet, right? Wrong. They kept his family up all night, drinking Christian Brothers Brandy, partying, and singing hymns.

Sometimes you just can’t win, whether you rent for the summer, or rent for the week. Not to mention that sometimes what looks like a safe rental turns out to be a nightmare.

But what are you going to do? Let’s say you have a choice to rent to a nice, All-American family or a pack of bartenders. Again, not a difficult choice. So, what happens? The family ends up being a pack of raving lunatics. And the bartenders? They don’t get home till 4 o’clock in the morning and are too exhausted to raise hell.

The only way you win is if you have a group of renters for the summer turn out to be very quiet and don’t destroy your property. So, what do you do next summer? You rent to them again. My pal Ken and his friends rented the same duplex for years until all the single guys were married off.

My buddies Malnu and Robbie made a bet every summer over who had the most cops show up to tell them, “Just try to keep the noise down.” Let’s face it, you know you have a great party going down if the fuzz show up. (We used to call cops in the neighborhood “fuzz,” as in “Here comes the fuzz,” and I have no idea why.)

Seriously, who reading this article doesn’t spend the rest of their lives telling hundreds of stories that begin with “It was really late and we were really drunk.” As a member of the group-rental alumni, I will say to you that we were once evicted the weekend before August and, quite frankly, we deserved to be evicted. (Let’s just say it was the single greatest version of “Rosalita” that you would ever hear at 4am.)

I was once invited to some sort of council meeting over what to do about the group-rental “problem.” My only contribution to this meeting was that I understood how nobody wanted Sea Isle to turn into “Childwood,” but that you didn’t want to completely stop the college kids from coming down and partying; that someday these kids won’t be kids, they’ll be parents, and you are going to want them to remember our town as a fun place to be.

And that’s exactly what happened to me. I was a group-rental guy for many summers, and I had such great times that when I got up the scratch and could afford to buy a home at the Jersey Shore, I naturally bought in Sea Isle. I have been a homeowner now in this great town for more than 30 years. Lucky for me, I only rented out our property one season. But that didn’t go so well. It started off good, however. I told my neighbor to call me if they caused any problems and he never called once.

So, I dropped by the Sunday afternoon of Labor Day weekend with the renters’ security-deposit check in hand. I kind of casually inspected the house and everything appeared fine. They were a bunch of nice guys who went to my high school, West Catholic, and I gave them that check. But wouldn’t you know it? Later that evening, they’re trying to lug a keg of beer up to my third-floor deck and they drop it. The keg proceeds to hurdle down the steps and puts a giant hole in a wall at the bottom of it. That security-deposit check issue got a little messy after that. Oh, well. You live and learn.

And let’s just say I’ve thrown a few groovy parties in my time as a homeowner where the cops had to come to my home and say, “Can you just keep it down a little bit?” Oh, well, what comes around goes around. And my neighbors can get a little sloppy drunk at times. My neighbor Brenda has now walked through four screen doors, and one night “Season Two” Tuzio got a trumpet out of the trunk of his car and started wailing away like he was a member of the Cardinal Dougherty band. I had a couple in me and mistakenly thought he sounded pretty good. I asked him how long he had been playing. “About two minutes,” he replied.

It’s a fine line and we all need to learn how to walk it. So, here’s the deal. When you are leaving one of the bars, use a Jitney or Uber. When you arrive at your place and you’re outside walking in, keep it quiet so you don’t wake up your neighbors. If it is after midnight, please don’t play any music on the deck, take it inside. And if you are an older hipster like me? Don’t get mad at those 25-year-olds having a party on their deck. Get jealous.

You’ve had your time, and there are plenty of parties to come. It’s Sea Isle.