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!”