2002-10-20 8:06 p.m.
It's A Neighborly Day In This Beauty Wood
There are some very strange people living in my building.
My homely, late 60s building is in a pleasant, nondescript and convenient urban neighborhood in the foothills. Bay Area socioeconomic status roughly correlates with how far up the hill you live, so this place should be middle of the road in every way. Somehow, though, we've ended up with a disproportionate number of very odd people. Generally harmless, mind, but odd nonetheless.
On one side of my apartment, there's a guy I'll call Bud. Bud is a short, blond guy in his 20s with a voice like gravel, a twenty-pound orange cat and, until fairly recently, a perpetual smoke/incense cloud wafting out of his apartment. (The cat got asthma, so on vet's orders the smoking had to go outside.) And he's a hardcore Lord of the Rings geek. He even has a framed sign in Elvish hanging on his front door. One day when I was working at home, he was heading to work and asked me if I could sign for the Ring of Sauron being shipped to him for his birthday. He's a sweetheart, and his enthusiasm for LotR swag is endearing, but he needs to get over his habit of standing on the balcony at night, smoking or yapping on the phone. In his underwear.
On the other side, we have a married couple with a toddler. The husband may be the last person in the Bay Area who still wears a suit on a daily basis. One day someone came by asking for the building manager, and when I looked confused, they asked for Suit Guy by name. We don't have a building manager on-site; it's all handled by a property management company up the hill. The wife is constantly doing laundry, to the point where I can't imagine where they get it all, even with a small child. Every time I've worked at home, she's spent all day carrying laundry up and down the stairs, unless her mother was there, in which case her mother was doing all the laundry.
Somewhere downstairs are two owners of cherry-red Mustangs. The car of choice in the Bay Area is either something small and Japanese or an SUV, so this represents probably half of the red Mustangs in the county. Also living downstairs (I think) are the noisy drunks who helped keep me awake a few weeks ago.
The odd neighbors are not limited to the human. There's a boxer next door who squares herself up and glares up at me defiantly every time I leave my apartment. And then there's the gray cat who followed me up three flights of stairs and waltzed into my apartment. My own cat was less than thrilled about the uninvited visitor.
And then there's the recycling guy, who is probably more of a sad story than an odd one. The trash and recycling cans are in the alley between our building and the next. You can hear what's going on down there, but unless you're on the first floor you can't actually see it. Soon after I moved in I started noticing that once I got back up to my apartment after taking out the recycling, I'd hear cans and bottles clinking in the alley. I assumed it was some hidden but incredibly vigilant homeless guy for nearly two years, until the day I showed up in the alley and found one of my neighbors with his hand in the recycling can. He's welcome to it, but I hope he's rooting around in there to build the world's best beer can pyramid or something instead of out of economic need.
A point in favor of the odd rather than sad version is that my broken fan disappeared from the alley this afternoon, well past the point when it might be useful for a Burning Man project. But I'll bet Mister Rogers never had a broken fan swiped from his trash.