I met a neighbor!

I have a neighbor!

I don't want to downplay the significance of this event. Until today, I had no evidence that anyone else lived in this building. I'll have been here a month next Tuesday, and I have never seen anyone. Except, of course, the elderly apartment manager who showed me the place and gave me my keys. I see him about once a week. He's always coming around, asking how things are, helpfully testing my locks by trying to enter a couple of times before knocking. Saving me a few minutes each day by steaming open my mail. Friendly, friendly man.

He never answers his phone, though. I've had to call him a few times, and his wife always picks up and answers my question thoroughly. I've never seen his wife….

For a while, I was fiddling with a short story about a man who moves into what he believes to be a full apartment building, only to discover that it is simply full of dead people and that he is the creepy old apartment manager's new pet. I was working on the part where the manager masquerades as his wife when it came to my attention that I was, in fact, writing Psycho, and the whole enterprise went into the recycling bin. Until that point, though, I was pretty pleased with it.

Anyway, I met the woman who lives next door. She claims she has a blaring bacchanalian hootenanny about once a week with her friends, which makes me wonder what the hell I've been doing over here to prevent myself from hearing half a dozen excessively happy women on a weekly basis. It also makes me wonder what a fellow has to do to get invited to a bacchanalian hootenanny, although the more I think about it the less interested I am. She was a very normal woman, but normal in a way that only serves to remind me how very abnormal I am. I would say I'd be a "colorful character" in her world, but from the sound of it her world doesn't have any of my colors. You are a truly plastic person if someone as unremarkable as I am seems mind-blowing.

My mind was a little blown too upon the discovery that my neighbor has a two-story apartment. Very out-of-nowhere; her place was just like mine, but where there should have been a stove there was a flight of stairs. I found myself thinking of Snoopy's doghouse, or those times when Oscar the Grouch would go into his trash can and you'd hear him playing piano or bowling or something. No wonder I never hear anything when she has company; they're in the Jacuzzi Room over in the East Wing.

It's probably best that I don't run into anyone around here. I'd have too much explaining to do. My friends, after being robbed of any real source of stimulation over an apparently long period of time, broke the boredom barrier and made time go backwards until they were all back in junior high. This, combined with generally poor security at my building's front door, adds up to a recipe for fun, fun, fun that would have gotten us all shot to death at my old place.

Last week, a few nights after seeing Blair Witch, I got home and found a note on my door reading

POTATOE (sic) GUN
+
BEER
=
EVENING OF FUN

"Oh, dear God. Am I going to have produce launched through my window by the end of the evening? I need to have something to throw back. Job applications, maybe, since there are obviously some people in desperate need of something to do."

So I was putting away my laundry when I began to hear a strange but persistent tapping, a gentle rapping on my chamber door. When I went out and looked through the ever-handy peephole, no one was there. To be certain, I opened the door, only to be greeted by a pile of smooth stones arranged at my feet. Now, that might have been scary in the theater, where your imagination conjures images of indescribable evil, but it was a different story outside my apartment, where it conjured up images of three grown men breathlessly hiding in the shrubbery, alternating between girlish giggles and that snort-snort-I'm-choking-on-my-own-stifled-laughter noise. And possibly touching themselves. I arranged the stones to spell "HI" (lacking the stones to say "YOU ALL NEED SERIOUS HELP") and went back inside.

It should go without saying that stick figure men were only a few moments away. But that time, I waited for someone to show themselves, and a hearty laugh was had by all.

I'm starting to remember what it was like to have male friends. When I was a kid, my guy friends were doing stuff like that all the time. Leaving things on my car, lighting off fireworks outside my window, painting hate symbols on my house.… Good times. Anyway, when my friends were mostly women, the worst I had to worry about was a faux obscene phone call on my answering machine, which only served to make my roommate and I feel impotent with the knowledge that no woman would seriously say those things about either of us. Kids can be so cruel.

Come to think of it, I can remember two occasions when female friends messed with me. My freshman year, Brian and I never locked our door. Our room was kind of community space in which people would congregate at all hours, and we felt very comfortable with our newfound sense of community, and we kept the door open as a way of expressing our faith in the new neighborhood while also expressing our extreme laziness about getting out our keys three whole times a day. My friend Joan decided that this was unacceptable to her and, since Joan is Lord God Almighty, she punished us by getting some people to come in and screw with all our stuff. Kleenex box in the fridge, Brian's sheets on my bed, remote control in the microwave, you know, hilarious stuff like that.

"I hope you learned your lesson," she said.

"If by 'your lesson' you mean 'that I, Joan, am a total ass,' yes. I get an A+ in that lesson. Gold star. Right here."

Later that same year, Joan, Brian and my then-girlfriend decided to completely mummify my car with toilet paper while I was at work. This would have been, you know, absolutely hysterical (see? it's toilet paper! but it's not in the toilet! it's, like, on your car! get it? a-hyuk! a-hyuk!), except that I was working at a movie theater that was showing The Rocky Horror Picture Show and it was Halloween. Twice as many people as usual showed up, all of them laden with toast and playing cards and water guns and hot dogs and t.p., t.p., t.p. By the time the movie was over (2 a.m.), the floor… well, we had what were known as "blow evenings," so named because the theater had to be cleaned with a leafblower. That night was a blower blowout. I spent that whole night fending off the advances of a 6'2" man in pigtails, lipstick and a teddy (sorely testing my creed, "even if you don't want to go to the party, it's always nice to be invited") and spent two hours blasting the last remnants of what looked like Mr. Whipple's Charmin orgy into a dozen trash bags, only to emerge from the movie house at 4 a.m. to find… a ton of toilet paper that needed cleaning up! (My friends had wanted to help, but, you know, it got late and I never came out so they just went home to bed.) I found my limit that evening. I actually dropped to my knees in the parking lot, scaring my coworker into finding another ride home. Then I got up, took a deep breath, and drove home with the t.p. all over the car, my enshrouded windshield wipers flapping the rest out of my line of sight. As I drove, I prayed that a cop would pull me over so I could steal his gun. I did not speak a word for the entirety of the next day. Given my mouth, I can only assume that was the plan all along.

Compared to that, I'll take a bundle of stones any day.

***

Nicole, my much-loved, much-missed companion from days long gone, came into town last weekend to witness someone's wedding. She was always my culinary tutor, and to keep the dynamic of our relationship humming we did nothing but chow down the whole time she was here. And she got to ogle my new place. She seemed almost impressed.

"As you can see," I said, "I need a little help decorating. The walls are rather bare, and I know something needs to go up, but I'm terrible at this stuff. How much is too much? How far apart should the pictures be? If I do it by myself, the place will end up looking like TGI Friday's. Walls with street signs and old blenders and **** staple-gunned to them."

"Yeah," she said. "Well, you do have that Star Wars poster there and… that other Star Wars poster over there… hey, slugger, you ever plannin' on havin' any girls over?"

"Not really, actually. Ha ha. I guess I wouldn't want to look too fixated or anything, huh? Ha ha ha."

"Ha ha ha ha ha. Yeah. Seriously, this has to come down."

"You think?"

"Yeah. Yes I do. Yes. I mean, maybe some movie posters would be… but I mean… all this stuff from, you know, just the one movie…I'd run. I won't lie. I'd look around, say 'cultist,' and go for my coat."

I thought about it for a while and, yes, I have allowed myself to take the easy way out. I've gotten so used to people saying, "Hey! That's got Boba Fett on it! Jim loves that crap! Get that for him, that Boba Fett decorative spittoon!" that I do it myself now. "I need a wall hanging; guess it's back to the comic book store!" So poorly thought out. I can't even remember the last time I watched a Star Wars movie. In the future, I shall have to give more thought to how I'm coming across.

Coming across to whom, I don't know. It's not as though there's a big date around the corner.