The Rent Collector

A flophouse alley, choked with soot and the sour perfume of boiled cabbage, becomes the stage for a grotesque ballet of debt and defiance. Larry Semon—gangling, white-faced, a living exclamation mark—skips through this wasteland clutching a rent book like a hymnal of doom. Behind every splintered door lurks a carnival of deadbeats: a tuba-playing giant who pays in sour notes, a widow who faints on cue, a child pickpocket who pickpockets the pickpocket. At the alley’s terminus squats Oliver “Babe” Hardy, upholstered in malice and a waistcoat two sizes too small, ruling his tenement kingdom with a cigar stump scepter and a glutton’s grin. What begins as a simple arrears shakedown mutates into a surreal siege: staircases collapse into slides, windows birth escape ropes of knotted long johns, a horse devours the eviction notice. By the time the moon hangs like a bounced check in the sky, the rent collector has become rent collector-collected, the ledger drenched in ink, sweat, and custard pie, the line between creditor and debtor obliterated in a puff of flour and hubris.