THE LOVE THY NEIGHBOR CHRONICLES - PART III

 CHAPTER 3 – WAKE-UP CALL

I looked down at the gristly man hovering over my left arm, a large apparatus humming away in his hand.  I was finally getting the tattoo I had been talking about forever – the tattoo of da Vinci’s Last Supper as an armband.  My brother had cautioned me against getting it.  He told me that with my little string bean arms, I couldn’t fit more than two or three of them apostles on there.  When Beardy turned around to refill his ink cartridge, I lifted my arm to see the progress.  No, Jesus! – I screamed inside my head.  There was no Jesus!  There was no Last Supper.  In its place was a massive tribal armband encompassing my entire forearm.   I started to tell the artist that he must have made a mistake.  That he must stop.  That he must fix this.  But nothing came when I opened my mouth.  I was paralyzed – unable to speak.  Beardy turned back around.  “Now I’m going to start doing the kanji you wanted.”   No! – I tried to scream.  “Stop fidgeting” he told me as he pinned down my arm, “or else I won’t be able to get more than two or three of them kanji on this little string bean arm.” 

“Chris” I heard whispered from behind me.  My roommate Sara was standing over my shoulder.

“Oh my god Sara, help me!  This man is doing terrible things to me!”

“Chris.” she repeated.   

“Sara!” I said.  “Why are you letting this happen? Stop him!”

“Chris!” she shouted. 

I gasped as I was suddenly thrust into the darkness of my bedroom.  Sara’s silhouette was hovering in my door well.  Sitting up in my bed, my hand clasping my chest, I realized that it had all been a dream.  I was awake now, confused as to why I was awake. 

“Chris” Sara said as she approached my bed, “There’s a man outside.  He’s been ringing our doorbell for the last 20 minutes.”  I grabbed my clock from the nightstand.  It was 3:00AM Tuesday morning.  “What do we do?” she asked, unable to mask the worry in her voice.

“Well, don’t let him,” I said, still half asleep and not fully understanding the urgency that would require waking me.  “Of course I’m not letting him in!” she shouted, “But aren’t you concerned that there’s a stranger trying to get into our apartment?”

“Oh yes,” I said as the fog of sleep started to dissipate. “I guess that is concerning.”  I got out of bed, and together Sara and I went to the intercom to see what was going on downstairs.  I pressed the camera button, forgetting that the quality of the front door camera was basically useless.  We could make out the shape of a man – or at least a human – or at least an object shaped like a human.  Sara asked if I thought we should call the cops.  I told her I didn’t think it was necessary – that it was probably just some confused drunk trying to get into the wrong building.  That’s when we heard the door downstairs open.

“Maybe you should call the cops,” I told her.

Sara told the 9-1-1 operator that a strange man had just entered our building and she was worried he was going to try to break into our apartment.  After hanging up, she told me that the cops would be here any minute.  Downstairs we heard someone knocking over the recycling bins.  “He better not be making a mess down there,” I told Sara.  “I just cleaned that hallway up.”

When the cops arrived, they told us that the downstairs door had been wide open.  That someone had been in the hallway, but that it was empty now.  They said they would stick around for a few minutes to make sure everything was safe, but that we should be fine.  Sara and I looked at each other dumbstruck, wondering where this man could have possibly escaped.  “I wonder…” Sara said, “I wonder if the girls next door let him in?”

Two weeks later, a similar incident shed some light onto the situation.  It was early on a bright Wednesday morning, and I was just coming out of the shower when I heard a right kerfuffle coming from downstairs.  Dripping wet and wrapped in a towel, I pressed myself against the front door to hear what was going on.  The foyer door had slammed, and now there was a man pounding on it from outside.  “Let me in” he shouted repeatedly.  As this was happening, a series of slow and unrhythmic thuds ascended the staircase.  I looked through the peephole just in time to see a shadowy figure emerge from the steps.  It was Short Ponytail from next door.  She was moving extremely slow – carefully trying to steady herself as she trembled up the stairs.  Her entire body was convulsing unlike anything I had ever seen before.  Her hands were shaking violently, her legs wobbling clumsily like that of a newborn fawn.  I have seen a lot of fucked up people in my day – but this one took the cake. 

When she got to her door, she reached into her purse to find her keys.  Every movement she made was in slow motion.  She fumbled around in her bag for an extremely long period of time, only then to drop the keys on the floor the moment she found them.  As she blindly jabbed them into the air, I noticed that from behind she resembled a squattier Lena Dunham.  A squattier Lena Dunham with a ponytail.  At least the back of her anyway - I had yet to see her face. 

Without any warning, the ponytail started rapidly approaching my peephole.  Her entire body had gone limp, and she just tipped over right there, slamming the back of her head into the very peephole I was spying through.  Her skull rang my doorbell as the peephole ricocheted into my face from the other side of the door.  The impact knocked me flat on my ass.  

I was feeling guilty for not offering my assistance, but then again, I was only wearing a towel, and she had a screaming boyfriend pounding on the door downstairs. The scenario did not pan out well in my head.  By the time I got back up on my feet, she was thankfully back on hers and shaking herself off.  The fall had apparently sobered her up enough to get her door unlocked, and right there - door wide open, she started to strip down to her underwear. The entire experience was incredibly awful, and I shut the peephole quickly, deciding that I had truly seen enough.  
Suddenly everything started to make sense. “I get it now” I told myself.  “She’s a drunk!”  

THE LOVE THY NEIGHBOR CHRONICLES - PART II

 CHAPTER 2 – THE BATTLE OVER THE HALLWAY

The first incident with the neighbor girls started with a territory dispute over the foyer.  Now, when I say foyer, I am in no way trying to elicit a feeling of grandeur.  I do so only because it’s easier to say than “dilapidated hallway attached to the front door.”  Long and impossibly narrow, its walls have been painted two shades of dingy yellow and overlaid with a brown hatch mark effect that looks like it was created by a mental patient with a handful of feces.   The floor is covered with a blue and black carpet that is so matted that if they were ever to be clean (emphasis on the if) it would be easier to use a broom than a vacuum.  By the front door, there’s a large pile of mail where two mailboxes should be, and in the very back three large recycle bins to tie in the motif of garbage dump.  Incase I have not brought my point home yet, it’s that the foyer is disgusting.  It needs no help on being disgusting.

The girls across the hall moved in only a week or so after first viewing the apartment.  I was out of town when it happened, but when I returned, there were two large plastic containers lying out in the middle of the hallway, tipping me off as to their arrival.  I’m just going to pause for one moment and explain to you a little something about myself.  I’m a neat person.   Like, very neat.  Like, “borders on obsession” neat.  It’s something I’ve always dealt with.  I remember being a child and alphabetizing my parents pantry.  When I went to college, I became a tyrant –so much so that my roommates took away my dry erase privileges after I left one too many passive aggressive notes.  Since then, I’ve come to realize that it’s unfair of me to demand the same level of cleanliness from other people.  However, seeing those two bins where they shouldn’t be immediately set my brain off into Terminator mode, identifying both as two Sarah Connors that must be destroyed. I took a deep breath though, and reminded myself that they literally just moved in.  They probably just left them down there while they unpacked, and would most likely take them to the curb on the next trash day. 

Three weeks later, and the bins were still there.  They had been rearranged several times, but never thrown away.  My landlord called me one afternoon to discuss something unrelated, and in a very forced attempt to sound breezy, I brought them up.  “They’re totally not a big deal,” I kept saying “but they just take up a lot of room down there so if they don’t need them, maybe they could get rid of them?”  He assured me that he would talk to them. 

Two months went by, and not only did they remain – but now they were joined by several other items as well.  A large cardboard box filled with metal beams sat perched against the wall, reaching from the floor to the ceiling, as well as several deconstructed boxes, which laid behind the recycling bins.  Every day when I’d enter the hallway, my blood pressure would start to rise.  But I decided that perhaps this was a test by our good Lord, who was trying to teach me a little patience.  I would take a deep breath and remind myself that in the grand scheme of things, this was not a big deal.  “They just moved in, Christopher,” I would tell myself.  “Cut them a little slack.” 

Another month went by, and now empty boxes and bins stretched from one end of the hallway to the other, and showed no sign of moving.  All three of the recycling bins were completely filled with torn up boxes and packing peanut – which overflowed onto the floor. I brought the matter up with my landlord again.  He sounded confused.  “But I talked to them about it.  They said they had cleaned everything out.”

Every day, my frustration about the situation would rise.  The hallway, which was ugly before, now resembled the murder scene in a Law & Order intro.  It was common for the narrow pathway they had left to navigate through their junk to be obstructed by falling objects.  I found myself lying in bed at night, unable to sleep knowing that such a mess existed just a floor below me. I imagined what their apartment looked like  - something out of one of those specials on hoarders no doubt. 

And then one day, after a particularly long day of work, I decided the amount of energy I spent fixating on this mess was not equal to the amount of energy it would take to clean it.  And so I did.  I tied up all of the cardboard boxes and took them out to the curb to be recycled.  It took three large trash bags to remove all of the packing peanuts, plastic drop cloths, balls of painters tape, and the other garbage they had left behind.  I didn’t know what the box of metal beams was for, but it was clear they had no use for them – so I carried them out as well.  I saved the two bins for last.  As I looked down on them, I muttered under my breath “Hasta la vista, baby.”  After I swept the carpet, I took a long moment to admire my work.  It was beautiful.  Well – not beautiful, it was still a shit hole – but a clean shit hole with everything right where it should be.

My roommate was appreciative of my hard work, but was concerned as to the aftermath.  “They’ll probably assume now that they can leave anything down there and someone will clean it up for them.”  I reassured her that she was wrong – that they would be so embarrassed when they saw that someone else had cleaned their mess up for them, that they would never do it again.  She stared at me blankly for a moment and then said, “I just don’t understand how your brain works sometimes.”

Of course, she was right.  Two weeks later, a bunch of boxes filled with trash appeared in the hallway again.  The most frustrating part was the girls next door had placed them there on trash day – instead of two yards further on the other side of the door where they would have been picked up by trash men.  “Oh HELL no!” I said, and went back to the apartment to find the dry erase markers that I had sheathed so many years before. 

My note exemplified my best attempt to resist every passive aggressive inclination in my body.  It simply said; “Be aware – tenants are responsible for their own trash. Please refrain from leaving refuse here.” 

And sure enough, the next day the trash was gone, as was my note – which was torn up and left in the recycling bin labeled “paper.”  I thought it was a weird move, ripping the sign down, but I was just glad it was over.  At least, I thought it was over.  What I didn’t know then was that things with our neighbors were about to get worse.  Much worse.