Oh my god. I just realized that I've never told anyone here the story of my downstairs neighbor in my first apartment. I can't believe that here, where I tell so many stories, that I've somehow managed to not tell it, because I tell it to everyone. It is the best of my stories, but it's usually told orally, so it's sort of interesting to write it down. Here we go.
Okay.
I was 21, and I had had enough of taking care of my mom. For those of you who don't know, my mom has mental health issues. Now my dad, who generally can't take my mom, but for whatever reason stays married to her, regularly took jobs outside the city so that he would leave while my mom would be left with me. I hated living at home and was definitely too young and too emotionally entangled to help the situation in anyway. It really sucked, it made me angry, etc. So I was genearally unhappy with my living situation, when magically, poof, I won a very large award for a play I had written - large enough that I could get my own place and live off of it for a year while attending university. Conveniently my dad's job as a principal at some remote school also ended, so he had come home, and my mom would not be alone. So I found a place. And with my usual style and moxie, I found a wonderful one-bedroom, with a nice eat in kitchen, hardwood floors, and these cool rounded arch doorways. I had the whole parking pad in the back to myself for my lovely refinished 1974 Comet. It was a house on a dead end street, in a questionable neighborhood, but walking distance from the university, so it fit really well. All utilities were included, which really helped with the budgeting. Also, because of the age of the house, it had an old biffy off the living room that had been converted to a curved-roofed walk-in closet thing-y, which was entirely painted a very dark brown and looked exactly like a cave. I called it my "man cave" as I indended on eventually setting up some bars and trapping a sex slave in there. People would just come over to see the cave, and I even had a cave party at one point.
Anyway, I found this lovely apartment, which was actually the second floor of a house. On the main floor lived a single man, who was a very polite, openly gay man, whose son visited him, but rarely stayed long. He was a quiet man, and also so painfully thin that he looked like he was made of sinew. (I mentioned in another thread, how to my amazement when I was moving in, he carried my fold-out sofa bed couch up my curved staircase by himself. I was amazed that a man so thin was so strong.) The house next door was an obvious drug house with dozens of guys coming in and out at all hours of the night, but I just ignored them, and they ignored me, and all was well.
So time went by, and my quiet upstairs neighbor and I lived our separate lives, nodding politely to each other, exchanging occasional pleasantries. I remember one day, that as I was putting my shoes on on my landing area (the only part of my apartment on the first floor), that I heard him softly weeping to himself. I felt sad for him, thought about knocking on his door, and then thought better of it. We only knew each other's first names, and I thought that I wouldn't want him knocking on my door if I was all blubbery.
Skip to a Saturday in summer. I'm getting ready to go over to my too-cool-for-life-friends' apartment. I always feel the pressure to be ultra hip when I hang with the gay boys, and these were my three gay-est friends. I was in my bathroom, which had a window over the back yard (where my lovely Comet was parked), but since it was summer, the tree in the backyard had grown lush green leaves, so all I could see when I looked out was the green canopy of the tree. I had the window opened, and it was a nice day. I was standing over the sink, fixing myself up, when I heard voices in the area below, directly where my car was parked. Young male voices:
"Get more on it."
"Shh! Quiet!"
"Go and watch to see if anyone's coming!"
"Is she home?
"I don't know."
"Hurry up!"
So I instantly think that the drug dealers next door are doing something to my car - stealing it, vandalizing it - something. I have a lot of thoughts all at once: it's my fault for choosing such a bad neighborhood. I wont have time to catch them in the act if I call the cops. I love my very cool car and don't want it vandalized. I have no idea what, but clearly they are doing something! I decide that I will casually go take a look, as though I have no idea that anything's going on. I realize that if they are indeed messing with my car, that I will need to see them doing it, then quickly get away. Conveniently I have my mountain bike on the inner landing. I grab my bike, put on my bike helmet (I remember thinking this will somehow protect me if I'm assaulted), and duck outside and around the corner. What I come face to face with is so outside of anything I could possibly prepair myself for that my brain actually stops working.
I turn the corner into the narrow passage way between my place and the drug house next door, and I come face to face with Diana Ross in full make-up and a sequined gown. Then I realize that, no, it is not Diana Ross, but a man dressed up to look like a glamorous woman. Then I realize that it is my quiet downstairs neighbor, dressed as a glamorous woman. We both stand staring at each other, unsure what to say.
I blurt out "I wish I looked that good in a dress." We continue to stand staring at each other befuddled in the tiny passage way between the two houses. I realize I too must look silly with my bike helmet on, and with my bike with me, there is no way for either of us to pass.
Then his friend, with a camera around his neck, comes tearing around the corner. Followed by a couple tarted-up shirtless man-sluts in short shorts. "We were just taking pictures because he's compeating in Ms. Club 200. We were posing on your car." (Club 200 is a local trashy gay bar)
Me: "Oh..."
My neighbor: "I'm sorry. I know we should have asked..."
Me: "Oh, no, don't worry about it. Take all the pictures you want."
Photographer: "Thanks."
Me: "Good luck. Let me know if you win!" And off I rode on my bike.
I went straight to my friends' apartment, peddling really hard because I couldn't wait to tell them what had just transpired. I get there all out of breath. I tell them the story. "I though my car was getting vandalized, but it was really just Diana Ross in drag!" My friends are totally too cool for this - they can't possibly be enthusiastic. One of them responds, dripping with ennui "You should have asked for a copy of the picture." I'm confused, because I'm so elated, but my friends are so disinterested. "Don't you get it? I thought my car was going to be destroyed, but it was my neighbor dressed as a women doing a photo shoot on my hood!" No one is excited about it but me. I've gone on to tell many other people this story, and unlike these guys, they too are amazed. I still love that this happened to me - it taught me an important lesson about what I expect and what might actually happen. Never be too pessimistic - you think the worst, but it could really just be a sequined drag queen.
From that point on, I never really saw much of my neighbor. I tried really hard to be kind to him when I saw him. He continued to be very quiet, but our paths crossed less and less. I heard him crying once or twice again after that. I heard him puking and coughing, but I didn't really think much of it. He got sick, and then he moved out, and two men who knew him only vaguely moved in. They invited me over for beer, and I got to see the place from the inside for the first time. The two of them were a couple and they had decorated the basement by nailing stuffed animals to every bare inch of the wall even though they had no children. It was creepy and I worried that they wanted to murder me down there, so I got out really quickly. Later one of the men decided to become a woman, and there was a lot of terrible fighting, police coming on domestic abuse charges several times, and some really scary drug-fueled middle-of-the-week all-night parties - all happening just below me. I moved out, and on my second to last day in the apartment, George, who had become Georgina, apologized to me for all the noise - it was too little too late.
Just last year, I read in the paper that my quiet downstairs neighbor died of AIDS after years as an advocate of the cause, and that his son had also died, less than a year before him. I was sad to hear it, and impressed to read about the rich interior life of this quiet neighbor who I knew so little about.
I could tell you lots of stories about other neighbors who were far more annoying, or whose sex-lives I had to experience directly, or about the girl who worked at the equine race track and the smell of manure that invaded everything, but this is really the best story I could tell in regard to apartment living. Because when you live in an apartment, the lives of your neighbors is always mysterious, and yet you get the odd little snapshots of other people's lives. It's very interesting.
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Topic: Things You Shouldn't Do If You Live In An Apartment Building (Read 14402 times)