As I have mentioned in past diatribes, A and I have some pretty interesting neighbors, ranging from Crazy Cat Guy to Kidney Boy, to Formerly Fat Guy (who did a lot of walking and lost a lot of weight, go him) to Single Old Lady. In case you're not noticing the pattern, we're terribly antisocial and don't actually know any of them, or their names. Sometimes we smile and nod at them, but I won't lie... we keep to ourselves for the most part. If A went crazy and killed me and hid my body in the freezer in the garage, we're the people whose neighbors would all tell the news reporter, "They were just really quiet, really kept to themselves..."
But it could be worse. It could be like my neighbors back in my broke college days at my old apartment, when all I could afford on my poor college student, part-time server wages was an apartment on the more... um... economical side of the spectrum. You get what you pay for, even with neighbors. I've tried to block out most of them, but when I really try, the memories come back. Unfortunately. There's a reason I drank heavily back then...
I was living by myself, and it was my first time really off on my own. On the day I moved into my apartment, I met Kevin, who would become known to me and my friends as Kreepy Kevin. Kevin was weird. When I remember Kevin, I always remember him in the same pit-stained gray t-shirt and gray sweatpants and house slippers. At all times of the day. I can say with a relative amount of certainty that I don't think he worked. Occasionally, I would catch Kevin walking around the apartment building muttering to himself. Sometimes he was angry, sometimes just chatting. But always muttering.
Kevin was a hoarder. Like, you know those documentaries you catch on TLC from time to time about those people who have just one tiny 6"-wide walkway through their apartment that's otherwise filled from floor to ceiling with newspapers, kitty litter, Rubbermaid containers, dreamcatchers and corpses? Yeah, that was Kevin. I only caught a glimpse of it once as I was walking past his apartment door when he'd left the door open, but it was staggering. Combined with the fact that I was pretty sure Kevin was a serial killer, it filled in whatever blanks I may have had regarding my questions of his mental stability.
Kevin was scary. The day I moved in, I smiled and said hello, and was met with an icy stare. That was pretty much the only response I ever got from him.
Then there were the Ethiopians who lived in the apartment above mine. There were like six adults living in a one-bedroom apartment (at least that I could keep count of... there were probably more), along with children whom I could never assign to parents. Living in cramped quarters can cause tension, as was noticed by their CONSTANT fighting. LOUDLY. On the balcony. In the bathroom (theirs was right above mine). In the bedroom (awesome when I had guests of the male persuasion over). In the hallway. In the parking lot. Constantly fighting in a loud, foreign language.
They'd get angry and scream and fight. They'd throw things off the balcony... which is how I attained the delightfully ethnic blanket that serves as Bodhi's bed now... and then they'd fuck on the balcony as loud as they fought. I'm not quite sure how that worked out, with all the little children running around the apartment, and I don't know who was hooking up with who. It was pretty much just all one big love-hate apartment.
My next-door neighbor, I'm fairly certain, was a hooker, and she was usually high on... something. I don't know what, but her apartment always smelled funny when I walked past. I'd often catch her sneaking into her apartment with some random unsavory gentleman, and then would hear them having sex. I think everyone in the immediate surrounding area was having sex except me, really. And then I'd hear the door slam, and hear the man leave.
There was the time the Hooker got really drunk and locked herself out of our building. This is when I was still relatively naive, and believed I could leave my balcony door open at night since, after all, I was on the second floor. Wrong. I woke up to Bodhi barking and I heard someone crashing through my apartment. Details aside, it was Hooker, who had climbed onto my balcony and was drunkenly/stonedly (is that a word?) stumbling through my apartment trying to get through to the hallway to her apartment. Freaked? Yeah, I was a little. I moved not too long after that.
Another really neat feature of my apartment complex that nobody told me about on the tour was the homeless woman who would pick through our trash, then ride away on her motorized wheelchair with a child (or was it a midget? Hard telling...) sitting on her lap. I would have left her groceries or something, but she had a fondness for screaming random strings of obscenities at me, calling my mother a whore, and then stumbling around mumbling incoherently. I really didn't want to fuck with her though, since there was a pretty strong chance that she'd key my car or something.
I mean, all of these experiences make you a better person, yes? It makes me thankful that the worst of my neighborly problems is that sometimes Kidney Boy blasts his music too loud, or Creepy Cat Guy's cats somehow mysteriously get in the house yet again. At least I don't share a building with them.
