2006-12-27 - 1:23 p.m.
My friend Flloyd reports that his next door neighbor nearly burnt down their building, while everyone else in the complex ran around screaming and shrieking. This actually articulates one of the great fears that all of us have when we live in an apartment.
It’s the idea that you can be minding your own business, making sure that the stoves are off every night, or that you don’t have a fork stuck in an electric prong, or that the hair dryer is an appropriate distance from the full bathtub – but you ultimately have no say in what your revolting neighbors do.
I mean, if one of them gets drunk and accidentally leaves the stove on, or plops a lit cigarette too near a pile of old newspapers, or a perhaps the bulb on their Christmas tree sparks while they’re in bed – why, when that blaze catches fire, and the walls melt, and the black smoke fills all the other rooms in the building, their problem suddenly becomes your problem. You might have done everything right, except for the fact that you moved right next door to someone else who didn’t do it right at all.
In our building, I am afraid the actual candidate for The Resident Most Likely To Burn Our Building Down is none other than my own dear stepfather, who is remarkably forgetful. Back in the day, when he was smoking, my stepdad would often forget about cigarettes that he might leave burning in the ashtray. One night, we even smelt smoke coming from his study, which unexpectedly filled with smoke from a garbage back full of paper, into which he had tipped a-still smoldering cigarette butt.
When we saw the paper bag bursting into flames, I instantly grabbed it and tossed it with one gesture into the bathtub. I shoved on the water tap and dowsed the fire out, filling the tub with half-scorched garbage and soot. Cleaning the tub was a small price to pay. On another occasion, my stepdad left the oven on all night – and when my mother woke up the next morning, the living room was something like 8000 degrees. Nothing caught fire because there was nothing in the oven, but you never know.
Mind you, in my apartment, the true menace is the lady next door to me who INSISTS on making homemade cabbage soup, what, two or three times a week? Oh my lord: The stench! Margarita, the lady in question, is a total nutcase. Seriously: I am not joking. She has an apartment in our building because it’s near the mansion her super-wealthy mother lives in. Margarita’s mother, quite understandably, refuses to have her in the family mansion because her behavior is so erratic and her emotional needs are so demanding.
Instead, she lives in this tiny apartment next to mine, where she cooks up her one dish – cabbage soup – which seems to require something like 12 hours of simmering. She makes it almost nightly. You’d think she would get tired of cabbage soup, wouldn’t you? Maybe it isn’t cabbage soup at all – it might be something else.
For instance, in Ancient Rome, they used to boil up gigantic vats of urine. You see, back in the day, boiled urine was regarded as a fine disinfectant. Any time a guest would come to a Roman house to visit, he or she would be expected to urinate into the gigantic urine vat, and then the contents of the vat would be boiled and the laundry would be done in it.
And that I must declare is precisely the aroma that Margarita’s cabbage soup wafts throughout the corridor of my building. The stink is almost unimaginable! It literally makes you gag – and Margarita, poor soul, has no idea that it is a foul odor.
A few weeks ago, my stepdad was ill, and I happened to mention the fact to Margarita, who was busily trying to carry in piles of rags and garbage into her apartment. She opened her madwoman’s eyes very wide, so that the whites almost bugged outwards like mountains of tapioca, and cooed, “Oooh, I am sorry he is sick! Do you think that he would like a nice piping bowl of my cabbage soup?”
Well, I could not help but think, a bowl of that soup would all but finish him off.
Alas, you see Margarita is ultimately a total fruitcake. She wanders about all day in her baggy pajama bottoms and a pink tulle sweater, with her short graying hair framing a moist, wet mouth from which drool and spittle can be seen caked on the side. She is someone who is prone to anxiety attacks, I seem to recall – and she is known far and wide throughout the building for her vendettas against other neighbors on the most capricious of contexts.
I always imagine that I must be a perfectly horrible neighbor, given that I am up all night and playing the radio – and some of the men I have over on occasion are LOUD, let me tell you. And yet, I have never had a complaint from Margarita – though she has complained to the management about everyone else around her.
Oh my goodness: I remember working at my desk one evening, when some people in the building across the way were throwing a party at around nine in the evening, and Margarita simply went berserk! She shrieked, like a harpy, from the window opposite, “Excuse me! Can you please pipe down! Don’t you know that I work! I have to be up at 7 in the morning and I work all day for 10 hours a day! You are keeping me from sleeping! So please, can you pipe down?”
The neighbors kindly replied, “You are a crazy bitch and you should shut the fuck up! Jeezus, you’re a stupid fucking nutcase!”
Well, first of all, it was only 9 in the evening, and the people were not having that loud of a party. And, second, the thing is, crazy Margarita has never worked a day in her life! She is, rather, an emotionally fragile lady who has had more nervous breakdowns than you’ve had chicken dinners and is incapable of any bona fide constructive activity whatsoever. She wakes up at two in the afternoon for her dose of lithium, then putters about the apartment in her pajama bottoms and tulle sweater. Poor old thing.
One must be charitable, because it is Christmas. Or rather, it WAS Christmas. Christmas has come and gone, you see. And a good thing, too! For Christmas, my parents and I went out to Canters Deli with some family friends for pastrami – and a holly jolly Jewish Christmas party it was, I tell you. After the dinner, I peeled off from family and friends and walked all the way to Mickys, passing many closed stores and shuttered restaurants. Mickeys, thankfully, was open, and full of boys – albeit none of them were dancing and in their briefs. Drinks were half price, though, and that was pleasant. Except, the thing is, when you think about it, the cute, shirtless bartender TELLS you that the drinks are half price, but they aren’t really. In fact, you are actually buying two drinks at once, and paying the double price for them.
I was particularly besotted, old man style, by the newest shirtless bartender, an extremely young kid with perfect skin who has lovely curves that are the product of natural living, not of endless exercise and steroids. He is someone who is going to get as fat as a hippo in a few years – but right now, he has the soft, elegant curves, particularly in the bubble butted rear department, that scream out “little brother.” And he is always winking at one! What could be more charming. I ended up having my nice drinks, while a rather depressed Latin young man of about 32 flirted with me with increasing blatancy and vulgarity.
In the end, though, I came home alone and went to bed, having lived through another odious holiday. Hope you had a more interesting one!
