plaintiff: torrance from indianapolis, indiana. torrance is ruggedly handsome, dressed in a black shawl-collared sweater and black pants with a bald fade and faint mustache. i am ~extremely into~ this new trend of men in very cozy-looking sweaters? i just watched that new movie the gentlemen and charlie hunnam, my forever crush from way back and the inspiration for all of my garish biker tattoos, spends the entire movie cuddled in soft wool knits that made me want to pet him like a cat. torrance has a visible attitude (you can tell!) and an accordion of truth™.
defendant: sonya from indianapolis, indiana. she is wearing a gorgeous rust? auburn? fitted dress that is, like, the color of fall. it’s the color in your mind when you hear the word “autumn.” her long hair is parted down the center and she has accessorized with a couple gold chains. her accordion of truth™ coordinates perfectly with her dress, a first!
the complaint: sonya rents an apartment from torrance and he is suing her for stolen property and damages.
what does he want: $1760 for the property damage. in turn, sonya is countersuing for $1000 for emotional distress, and my heart has instantly grown weary.
how it went down: i just went and got my new glasses adjusted and another tutorial on how to look through these shits, and honestly i would rather just never open my eyes again? first of all, i don’t listen, and these aren’t bifocals they are progressives and somehow there are three different spots on these dumb things i need to train my eyes to look through and that is a nightmare. want to hear something fun? friday i drove to chicago to compete in write club and had to do so in a snowstorm while driving a damn minivan and wearing these dumb glasses and it was fine but also i had to move like a bobblehead to see all the traffic and i don’t have peripheral vision so i stayed in the left lane the entire time. you’re welcome for this old crone update!
torrance met sonya five years ago when she was dating his cousin, and in that five years he’s seen nothing but ruckus and instability in her life. i don’t like when people talk about other people like that. because, you know, what if “instability” in his mind is “paid her phone bill late a couple times” or something? if so, who among us has not been equally unstable???? skip the value judgments and give us the facts or shut up. torrance says sonya is currently dating a man who has a family on the other side of town, and that man’s wife came over and busted out the windows on his property. OKAY FINE I GUESS THAT QUALIFIES AS RUCKUS. torrance doesn’t want to have anything more to do with sonya since she pulled a gun on him when he entered her apartment to do some maintenance work.
excuse me? i know this is asking too fucking much but if these contestants (i mean litigants but fuck it, it stays) could work on their narrative arc i would greatly appreciate that! how did we go from “her boyfriend’s an asshole” to “she pulled a gun on me?” greg says it’s legal for her to pull a gun on him if he entered without permission, and torrance says “is it legal for her to pull a gun on me for calling her out of her name?” and greg laughs and says “yeah, if she’s from detroit!” and boy i could not love him more. sonya is actually from new york, thank you very much, but she moved to indiana after her children were grown to start a new life. she’s in school and has had the same job for years, so “unstable [she] is not.” as a matter of fact, she moved into the house to help torrance out because he needed money.
sonya says she didn’t pull a gun on torrance, she pulled a knife, and i chokelaughed so hard the cat tore out of the room like she was on fire. sonya says it got to that point because torrance is jealous of the young guy she’s dating, and every time they get to arguing about him it devolves into name-calling. apparently torrance has been trying to sleep with sonya ever since she moved into the house! OH OF COURSE. he’s been harassing sonya about her boyfriend since the month after she moved in.
torrance hands the judge a photocopied list of “rules” he wrote up for sonya to follow in order to be able to stay in his house, and there are so many that greg has to take off his glasses and squint at the paper to read them all. greg says the rules are reasonable, but i doubt that because he didn’t read any of them out loud. torrance says she broke every single one of those rules, which is why he wanted her to move out.
the ruling: torrance has before and after pictures of the room sonya was staying in, and it looks like there are tiles that she pulled up or something? also he had a sword on top of a curio cabinet and that is missing. sonya’s defense is that one day it rained and leaked into her room, causing the tile to buckle, and when it did she moved her futon to clean the floor and the tile came up with it. i don’t know man, maybe i have lived in too many shitty apartments but that sounds plausible to me. every landlord i’ve ever had did the bare minimum to maintain their property when i was actively paying for it, but as soon as it came time for me to move conducted their walk-throughs like i had been squatting at the plaza hotel like eloise. “no, donald, that lead-painted window was chipping like that when i moved in here, fuck you where’s my deposit?” sonya says there was also a broken door and she paid for it, so why didn’t torrance make her pay for the floor? he was extorting money from her constantly, and apparently told her that he was going to pay for the floor himself for his new tenant.
the judge reads a bunch of texts torrance sent to sonya and man i would have pulled a gun on this motherfucker, too. a “bum ass bitch?” over a rented room?? nah man, we gotta fight. and by “fight” i mean “i’m gonna peel up all your floor tiles and move out and leave that shit for you to fix, you raggedy piece of shit.” sonya is suing him because he busted out a window in an attempt to evict her (i think?) and the judge cuts her explanation off to say he believes everything she is saying because in all of the printed out texts™ torrance gave him ( ! ) he was so abusive in his language to her that that deserves one thousand dollars.
greg asks for evidence that sonya stole the sword but torrance doesn’t have any so that’s that on that. he keeps flipping through these pages of highlighted texts and getting angrier and angrier because he just can’t believe that torrance spoke to a woman this way, and he says that if you talk to a woman like that you deserve whatever is coming to you. torrance tries to argue back but GREGORY ELLIS MATHIS HAS FUCKING HAD IT and he starts yelling the texts back at torrance, reading “get your bum ass out of my fucking house!” from his printed out text™ sheets with palpable disgust. “that’s how you talk to her? well listen to this: GET YOUR BUM ASS OUTTA MY COURTROOM.” the crowd went wild, i fully screamed at the tv, and jackie, who had tentatively returned to her corner of the sun room, went flying down the basement stairs again. triumphant verdict for the defendant!
did uncle greg say anything fucked up to anyone: “you got drama queens all around you! drama queens make life exciting!”
*bangs gavel*