CHAPTER 5 – THE CONCLUSION
The neighbor girl vanished in the weeks that followed her
verbal altercation with my roommate Sara.
We hypothesized potential explanations. Perhaps she was so embarrassed about her behavior that she
made herself scarce, unable to find the right words to apologize. The other, and more likely scenario, was
that she had drowned alone in her room face down in a puddle of vomit. Either way, we were thankful for the
reprieve from her special brand of alcohol-induced fury – although in all
fairness, at this point I personally had yet to see anything but the back of
her head.
As weeks turned into months, the neighbor’s absence became
more and more suspect. One
afternoon, I noticed that her door was slightly ajar. I didn’t think much of it until Sara got home and mentioned
it as well. “There seems to be a
funny smell coming from her apartment,” she said. “I think we should go make
sure she’s okay.”
I told her she was insane. There were only three things we knew about this woman; 1)
that she had a substance abuse problem, 2) that she struggled with the opening
and closing of doors, and 3) she didn’t care much for us. I felt the need to check on her well
being as strongly as I did the need to stick my head into a turbine
engine.
“But what if she’s dead?” Sara asked.
“Well then playing Nancy Drew isn’t going to bring her back
to life, is it?” I told her. When
she expressed her displeasure with that comment, I promised her that we would
get involved once the smell of human decay became too much to bare – but not a
moment sooner.
“Well, I’m
going over there to make sure she’s okay,” she said, “So you can either be a
man and come with me, or you can hide in here like a coward.” I compromised by going with her like a
man while hiding in the corner like a coward.
Sara lightly knocked on the opened
door. “Hello?” she projected into open apartment. We both listened carefully to hear if there was any movement
coming from within, but there was none.
She knocked again, this time a little more loudly, and said “Is
everything okay in there? Your door is open.” Again – silence.
Sara looked back at me in my hiding spot and shrugged. “Should we go in there?” She asked.
Suddenly we heard a stomping noise
coming from within their apartment.
Before we knew it, the neighbor’s door was slammed shut in Sara’s face,
her hand still on the knob.
The action was punctuated by the sound of the door being locked, quickly
followed by the dead bolt being pushed into place.
“Well I guess she’s okay then,”
Sara said.
Months passed, and Sara decided to
move back into Manhattan to be closer to her job. One morning while I was at work,
she stopped by to pick up the last of her belongings. While packing, she sent me the following text messages;
“Came home to pick up my stuff. Guess who’s in our apartment…the
neighbor. Also, I want to
take the shower curtain, so let me know when you get a replacement and I’ll come
get it.”
It was classic Sara – known for
burying the lead. I sent her a
flurry of texts demanding she explain how our mortal enemy ended up inside the
apartment. She explained that when
she opened the front door to the building, she found the neighbor woman sitting
on the foyer staircase. “Oh hello,” she said to Sara as she approached. “I live
upstairs, and I seemed to have locked myself out.” Sara was taken aback.
Here she was, face to face with the very same woman who had called her a
cunt in this very same spot several months before, and the woman seemed to have
absolutely no recollection of it.
Furthermore, she was alarmingly sober, which seemed strangely out of
character. Much to even her own
surprise, Sara asked the woman if she’d like to come in while she waited for
our landlord’s office to open. She
accepted.
I made Sara list everything the
harpy had done while in my home.
“Well, she sat on the couch while I packed. I gave her a glass of water, which she drank. And to go ahead and answer your follow
up question, I’ve gone ahead and washed the glass and mixed it in with the
others so that you will never know which one she used.“ As Sara finished packing, the neighbor
thanked her and said goodbye, saying that she was going to see if the office
had opened yet. “The kicker,” Sara
told me, “was that she told me that it was a shame we never got to know each before
I moved out.” Unbeknown to our
Doctor Jekyll, we had come to know her drunken alter ego quite well.
And then several nights ago, I
realized what I had to do. I
worked late one evening, and as I walked home in the dark night, I noticed the
silhouette of familiar figure hunched over the front door of my buidling. My heart started racing, realizing that
I was only moments away from finally meeting the neighbor woman. Confrontation seemed to be inevitable. Panic set in as I got closer, and I
decided to duck into another door well in the hopes that by some miracle she
would just disappear. I checked
after a minute or so, but sadly it had not worked. Weighing my options of hiding there all night, or manning
up, I decided to brace myself for whatever alcohol fueled rage she was about to
unleash on me.
She looked up at me as I
approached the door. Her eyes were
big and filled with sadness. Her
bottom lip was shaking. She had
the air of a frightened little girl.
As I pulled my keys out of my backpack, she put her hand on her heart.
“Are you my savior?” she asked. I
don’t recall what I said, or if I responded at all. All I really remember is struggling to unlock the door, the
way you only do when someone is watching.
Finally it popped open and she scurried inside. “Thank you!” she shouted after
her. “Thank you thank you thank
you” she said the entire way up the stairs. She managed to get into her apartment as I trailed behind
her, and with one last “THANKS!” – that was that.
When I got to my room, I went straight to my computer and pulled up her Facebook page. This woman had called my roommate a cunt, and passed out on my doorstep. She had filled the foyer with garbage, had boyfriends terrorize us in the middle of the night, and left her cat roam hallway. She had not been a great neighbor – that is a fact. But the more I reflected on the situation, I had to wonder – have I always been a good neighbor? I mean, I sometimes let my mail pile up in the hallway and I’ve been known to blast country music when I clean the bathroom. Hell, I just wrote a 7,500+ essay on what a giant bitch the woman across the hall is, and then published it on the internet. So what – she’s not a good neighbor. I can’t say that I’m a terribly great one either. So I opened her Facebook page, and logged out without photoshopping double chins onto her photos or messing with her settings. Being mean to this woman wasn’t going to make me feel any better. We’re suppose to love our neighbors, but it unfortunately we have to love them all – not just the good ones – not just the young college grad and the lesbian bicycle enthusiasts. Sometimes, just sometimes, some drunk bitches are going to move in next door, and dammit, you’re going to have to love them too.
Unfortunately I just came to this realization after publishing chapters I, II, III, and IV of this series, so please disregard everything mean you’ve read up until this point.
Unfortunately I just came to this realization after publishing chapters I, II, III, and IV of this series, so please disregard everything mean you’ve read up until this point.
Yes, I am giving the Patriot Saloon 1 star. Why, you ask? Well, I'll tell you why - without editorializing or exaggeration either. Here is a play by play of the evening:
5:00PM Wednesday Afternoon: Not very crowded. I'm waiting for a beer at the bar downstairs. There are two bartenders - one working up a furry at the opposite end of the bar, and one staring into a mirror, watching herself repeatedly put on and take off a pair of aviator sunglasses. There's a crowd forming around the busy bartender, so I figure I'll have a better chance waiting in one of the many empty stools at the other end. I mean, Sunglasses has got to notice me at some point, right?
5:10PM: Sunglasses has not noticed me.
5:15PM: My friends are texting me from the upstairs bar wondering where I am. I tell them that I'm still working on getting a beer. My first beer. Finally Sunglasses notices me. She walks over, and mutters something. I say "I'm sorry?" She mutters it again and smiles, and then kind of falls over a little bit. I assume she asked me what I was drinking, so I tell her a Bud Light. She frowns. She gets really quiet. And then she lifts her hand above her head and SLAMS it into the bar, screaming in gibberish. She then turns around, and crumples up into a ball. She does not get me a beer.
5:20PM: Sunglasses is still standing motionless in a ball like formation - so I give up and decide to try the upstairs bar. My friends had warned me it was a shit show - but I can't imagine it's worse than what I just witnessed.
5:21PM: It is worse. Much worse. The bar is more crowded upstairs - all older skeez balls watching the scantily clad bartender bounce up and down around the bar. She is most likely old enough to be my mother, assuming she had her first child when she was 13 - which is when I'm assuming she had her first of many children. She is clearly high, and for all of the bouncing she's doing, she's not pouring very many drinks. In fact, I watch her for 10 minutes and she opens not one bottle. Instead, she is draped over the bar, licking her lips at an older gentleman. Everyone seems happy but me. No one is drinking.