TORONTO

HoJin Byun is getting kicked out of his Scarborough home for being noisy.

All-night parties? Heavy metal at midnight? Late movie marathons? He's a chainsaw sculptor?

Nossiree. HoJin, 39, has Tourette Syndrome.

His tics are too loud for the landlady's mom.

And people wonder why Hollywood keeps painting landlords as villains.

HoJin, a renovator, came home from work the other night to be greeted by the landlady's mom, who lives downstairs.

The mom is Chinese and speaks no English, so she put her daughter, Sofia, on the line with HoJin, who's Korean.

"Please find another place to live," Sofia told him. "My mom can't sleep."

"I was dumbfounded," HoJin tells me. "I've been here six months, no problems, paid my rent, don't have people over, don't play music, and she's asking me to leave because I have a disability."

Seems shabby to me, too. You can't evict people for humanly sounds they can't control, any more than you can kick out a mom with a crying baby or a guy who snores.

So I trot up to the two-storey brick house near McCowan and McNicoll. The place is divided into nine units. HoJin says each tenant is allowed two pairs of shoes on the doorway rack, and must wear slippers indoors. His room, for which he pays $450 a month cash, is upstairs from the mom's suite.

The walls are hardly solid rock. Sound travels more or less unfettered. But I did a test and you have to strain to hear HoJin's tics. Nothing a little cotton batten wouldn't block.

"At worst," he says, "I liken them to a sneeze."

Usually, they're more like clicks or light coughs with a grunt or two. After a few minutes, I don't even notice them.

No outbursts or swearing, like in Deuce Bigalow?

HoJin grins. "Only when I'm pissed off."

Then we all must have a touch of Tourette's. But, seriously, stress can make symptoms worse -- such as when your landlady is on your case.

Sofia's mom must be a very light sleeper. No other tenant has complained. For one thing, the tics disappear when HoJin sleeps.

Still, Sofia gave him a month to move out. When he explained Tourette's to her, how he was diagnosed at nine, how he can't help it, she said she'd let her mom think on it a week.

I don't hold out much hope. While HoJin and I chat in the driveway, the mother comes out, gets in his face and makes loud coughing and clicking sounds.

"If they say I can stay, great," HoJin tells me, "but I don't think I want to anymore. I'd feel I was living in a poisonous environment, that they're allowing me to stay because they feel sorry for me.

"I don't want pity. I've been on my own two feet all my life."

That includes a law enforcement diploma from Seneca College and "friends who accept me for who I am and what I have."

On the flipside, it's a life of stares and whispers and pointing fingers and questions, even from cops, such as, "are you stoned?"

"But it's worse when it's where you live," says HoJin.

"Happens all too often," Tourette Syndrome Foundation of Canada spokesman Ken Butland tells me, but few wronged Tourette's tenants actually file complaints. The law is pretty simple -- you can't evict for Tourette's, for crying out loud -- but it gets more complicated when there's no lease, as in this case.

HoJin's last landlord hemmed and hawed, then asked him to move on.

Sofia and mom are not hemmers or hawers. "I ask him to leave," Sofia tells me on the phone her mom thrusts at me.

"My mother always hear noise. She need sleep. We just give him a month and he move."

But it's pretty mild. Hardly a Who concert. And, anyway, he can't help it. Why the heave-ho?

"You crazy!? I keep telling you. My mom can't sleep!

"Okay, sir, now please get out of my house!"

Sure thing, Sofia. But sheesh! Keep it down.