I awoke last night frightened that my toothless landlady, Mei, was lurking hunched and troll-like in my closet waiting to spring on me if I dare leave the bed. Perhaps this was because I spent that evening - a Sunday I could have spent watching Masterpiece Theater - scrubbing yellowish mold blobs from my bathroom ceiling to please her. I quickly became dizzy, stretching on top of a wobbly chair I had planted in the tub, scrubbing voraciously for about an hour. I prayed yellow ooze would not drop into my panting mouth.

I did this revolting chore for a simple reason: Money - exactly $1,050 in a rental security deposit. I am breaking my lease. I have quit my job and am heading back east from San Francisco. Mei holds this money, probably under a dirty mattress, and I need it. So I not only have to pretend to like her. I also have to scrub accumulated scum from the bathroom ceiling and when I am done with that, my 1930s refrigerator will require defrosting as well. It is packed with ice deeper than the Everest summit.

"From the day I moved into my $700-a-month shoebox, she has managed to stir my beastly, intolerant side. The part of me that makes me want to push someone in front of a Muni bus, spit in someone's Coke or tell them their new haircut makes them look like Elton John."

Landlady Mei, like Mao, is not an easy person to like, at least from where I stand. From the day I moved into my $700-a-month shoebox, she has managed to stir my beastly, intolerant side. The part of me that makes me want to push someone in front of a Muni bus, spit in someone's Coke or tell them their new haircut makes them look like Elton John. It's not that she calls me a Caucasian and refers to my neighbor as "the Japanese man" (this, I guess, is just the reversal of the crap we've given Asian people for years -- see: the Überasian column). And it's not that she keeps sharing her sundry health problems, including her weak bladder (she typically flees a phone call she initiates to take a pee) and some persistent lung condition that requires her to get lots of fresh air.

With Mei, who will likely outlive us all, it's a whole host of other things that annoy me, many of them quirks I guess any old woman who is losing her mind would possess. A kinder person would probably try to ignore her.

Her unpleasantness began last October, the week I moved in and arrived home one night to find a pile of crap in front of my apartment door, including a dirty lawn chair and a dusty brown sleeping bag that stank. The chair was covered in orange soda that was leaking all over the floor, leaving a small puddle.

I stared at the vile present, wondering what the hell it was doing there, and unlocked my apartment. Inside I found a scrap of paper on the floor with a message written in wobbly long-hand. It said "Do not go on the roof. Do not leave things on the roof."

The note was signed by Mei. I was furious and immediately knocked on my neighbor's door to seek an explanation for the note and the strange behavior. My neighbor emerged, sympathized with me and told me that Mei, though basically an OK person, was a bit wacky. Her mother was a doctor under Mao's regime in China, allegedly, and she is a single woman who lives downtown and travels a lot.

"She is leaving all of her money to some weird church," the neighbor told me.

"Figures," I said.

Inside my apartment, I hunted for my lease and called Mei.

"Mei, this is Kim from 4th Avenue," I said. "I got your note and I was wondering why you left this stuff in front of my door. I have never seen it before."

"I am so sorry," she blustered. "You are new tenant. I thought it belonged to you. Have the Japanese man next door move it."

"Mei I just don't understand why it was left there in the first place," I said.

"You are new tenant and I thought you did not know to not go up on the roof," she said.

"I don't even know how to get on the roof," I said. "Is someone living up there. Is this something I should be concerned about?"

"I think the building has not been cleaned since the Nixon administration. You could probably grow a palm tree in the heavy dirt on the back stairs."

After apologizing again, Mei asked me to go upstairs, where a slight though heavy footed pony-tailed man lives with his mother in some Divine-esque arrangement, to inquire whether the sleeping bag and chair belonged to them. And after I did that I was supposed to ask the "Japanese man" next door to clean up the mess. The Japanese man apparently gets free garage space because he is our unofficial building manager, though I think the building has not been cleaned since the Nixon administration. You could probably grow a palm tree in the heavy dirt on the back stairs.

But I digress. After I hung up with Mei I was, of course, fuming and called friends to share the tale. I did not bother to talk to the upstairs neighbors until a month later when my key got stuck in the ancient front lock and I nearly missed a flight. Thankfully, the Japanese man moved the chair and sleeping bag and cleaned up the orange soda.

Mei followed up her initial strangeness with a string of phone calls at rent time. She usually called at least twice to remind me to leave my rent check taped to my door. Mei hand collects all money as she does not trust the postal service. Typically she asks for rent a day or two before the first of the month, and lets us know the exact time of her morning arrival via Muni bus.

If she cannot reach a tenant before her scheduled arrival, she sometimes asks me to kindly knock on their door and remind them to leave their check out, a request that boggles my mind.

There have been other niggling offenses as well. When my kitchen was invaded twice by an army of carpenter ants that somehow managed to bust into my refrigerator, infiltrate my cereal boxes and invade my salt shakers, I called Mei to inquire about spraying. After all, I had spotted the nasty creatures stampeding up the base of our stucco building.

She told me to go out and buy a can of Raid, which temporarily helped, though a second, stronger invasion left me fuming for days and humiliated when a visiting friend watched me cleaning ant guts off my smeared kitchen walls. A third invasion hit the bathroom, leaving my floor and toilet covered with the creatures until a Raid blast forced them out. At that point I decided asking Mei to fix my locks, kill ants or clean the building was beyond her scope as landlady. She relied on the "I am old and alone" excuse far too heavily.

One time, when she was visiting to pick up her loot she asked me why I had left a big piece of wood in our driveway.

"Never seen it before Mei," I said. I smiled brightly at her and went inside.

This was before I told her I had to move out; that I was breaking my lease. I dreaded talking to her.

"She has never called me by name, but starts every phone message with a now notorious catch-phrase that rings in my head 'This is MEI.'"

"You are breaking the law," she sputters, sitting at my table. She has come to inspect the apartment. I stare back at her. She rummages through a canvas sack that holds empty, crumpled plastic bags, random keys, pens and pieces of paper I assume she uses to write notes. She is small and slow-moving and speaks with a thick Chinese accent, halting between words. She has never called me by name, but starts every phone message with a now notorious catch-phrase that rings in my head "This is MEI."

"Can I use your bathroom?" she asks.

She is in there for a bit. I wonder what she is looking at -- the soap, my box of tampons, the ocean still life?

When she returns she complains about the bathroom ceiling, tells me what a good and honorable person she is, how much her previous tenants love her and how one man even wants her to move to Colorado so he can keep an eye on her. She says she donates all the rent money to a scholarship fund and, apparently sensing I do not believe her, leaves a letter of thanks from a student on my table the next day. "I buy my clothes in second hand shop," she said, as she pulls the fabric on a striped T-shirt. "This shirt was one dollar."

Good Mei, I think. I want to punch her.

"Mei what do you think about the security deposit?" I ask, staring at her again.

She asks me for a key to my apartment. I hand her one. She tries putting it in the door and cannot make it work. I try showing her how to work the key - my special twist and pull method to free the old, wretched lock. She cannot get the key to work and says she wants to go and make another key. Something is wrong with my key, she says, propping her foot against the door and yanking at the knob. I tell her I need to go; that I have things to do.

The tenant who lived here before, he was district manager, she tells me. He was Caucasian. He moved to Colorado. He kept the place nice. Nice furniture. He was only here a week out of the month. I want someone stable here, she tells me.

"He wanted to look after me," she continued. "My health is not good. My lungs. I have emphysema or asthma. I need to get lots of air."

I know from her answers that I will possibly wait forever for my security deposit. I hand her a self-addressed stamped envelope anyway.

As Mei leaves my room that day, she lurks in the hallway, pretending to wash a window that leads to the stairs. I know she is waiting for me to leave so she can play with her key to my apartment again and maybe go back inside to pee or to sit. I leave and lock the door behind me.