Jimmy McMillan, running for governor as the candidate of the one-man Rent Is Too Damn High Party, stole the show at the debate on Monday night with his repeated and crystal-clear message: The. Rent. Is. Too. Damn. High.

Mr. McMillan said in an interview on Tuesday that for at least the last decade, he had lived rent free.

“We’re like family,” Mr. McMillan said of his landlords. “They don’t want me to pay any money at all. I am basically living there rent free.”

Mr. McMillan said that he moved into his apartment, a one-bedroom on Nostrand Avenue in Flatbush, Brooklyn, in the early 1980s but soon fell behind on rent when he left his job in the Postal Service on disability. The landlady, Mr. McMillan said, admired his Vietnam War service and forgave the back rent and, eventually, the future rent, too. In exchange, he did maintenance work, and after she died in 2003, her heirs continued the tradition.

Mr. McMillan declined to show the apartment, saying he feared for his neighbors’ safety, and fielded questions from the driver’s seat of his parked graphite-colored Honda CR-V, which is also his mobile office. When he travels, he sleeps in it, too; in the back were a sleeping bag, a bottle of Scope Original Mint mouthwash and a pair of nunchucks he keeps in a seat-back pocket. That weapon happens to be banned by the state he wants to run. “My main object is to protect myself,” he said. “I will worry about the consequences later on.”

He said he did pay $900 monthly for a rent-stabilized apartment on St. Marks Place in the East Village where his unemployed 31-year-old son lives.

“Even though my rent is not too damn high,” he said, “if I’m fighting for the children who can’t pay rent, who have no place to live, then my rent is too damn high.”

But Mr. McMillan gave The Wall Street Journal a somewhat different account of his living arrangements in an article published online on Tuesday, saying that he paid $800 a month for his own apartment. His landlord could not be reached. Mr. McMillan, asked about his comments to The Journal, said, “I was probably just trying to brush them off.”

He restated that he personally lived rent free. A few moments later, however, he refused to confirm any of his previous statements.

“Don’t look for anything I say about my living space to be true,” he said.

(NYTimes)