I’ve had some interesting folks live in the apartment across the breezeway. When I first moved in, it was a group of young, black guys and I’m 90% sure they were drug dealers. I came to this conclusion not based on racial stereotype, but based on the fact that late at night, nearly every night, a car would pull up to the edge of the court and idle in the parking lot until somebody would hop out, run up to the door, and knock for at least five minutes until one of my neighbors would let them in. Sometimes I’d come home to find people hanging out on the steps in front of their door, waiting for them to get home. (I don’t know what kind of drug dealer doesn’t have a cell phone, by the way, but that’s just not good business, to make your customers wait.) The visits were usually pretty short, and the passenger would return to the idling car within five minutes, then they’d drive away, bass thumping, into the night. Maybe my neighbors were running a speed-dating operation from within their 2 bedroom. Probably not.
I always made a point to be super polite to them. A small part of that was because of the sociopath coworker factor. The sociopath coworker factor goes like this: That one guy? In your office? Who has long fingernails and smells like gasoline? Share your brownies with that dude. Because when he pulls out the semi-automatic and starts laying waste to your cube-mates, you’ve got a much better chance of survival if he remembers your generosity and culinary skills. The thugs next door were pretty low-key though, and didn’t strike me as the long-fingernail type. I was nice to them more in the hopes that if shit went down, they might have the courtesy to knock on my door and let me know the Badd Newz were on the way; or if things got desperate, leave my shit alone and instead rob the family with that yappy dog upstairs.
Eventually, they moved out and the late-night visits came to an end. They were replaced by a giant Indian family. Large in numbers, not size. They only stayed a few months, and were quiet and made for pretty uninspiring story material. There’s a new family living there now that so far, seems to consist of an old guy and two kids—a boy and a girl. The girl looks about high school age and the boy slightly older. The boy sits out on the patio, plays lots of g-chords on his guitar, and smokes and hits on me constantly . He’s got long blond hair with Zac Efron bangs and looks sort of like a much-less-hot, cracked out version of Silas Botwin. I don’t know if they’re Cali-transplants or if he just wishes he was. He always makes a point of greeting me when I pass his patio, and goes above and beyond the requisite “hey” that most of our community finds adequate. “Excuse me, miss. Do you have any c-clamps?” he once asked me. Nope, ugly-SilasZac, I do not. He also said “nice snake” when I was moving Beatrix and Kyle during the ‘09 Mold Outbreak and asked to bum a smoke once as I was leaving for work. We live less than a block away from a gas station, so either he’s underage or lazy. Or maybe both.
I’ve probably been a little cold to the poor, landlocked surfer dude, and I feel kind of bad. It’s just that his neighborly friendship is a bit off-putting. Maybe it’s because it skeeves me out that I’m already old enough to be the object of his cougar nextdoor lady fantasy. More likely, it’s just because I get the sense that he’s trying hard to strike up a real conversation with me, and it’s just not done in our apartment complex. I’d gotten pretty used to the apartment-neighbor chilly attitude in Madison, so it didn’t surprise me much when everyone here kept to themselves. Granted, we all still say hello to each other, which would have sent one of the Wisconsinites into agoraphobic shock, but nobody really cares about anybody else. During the ice storm, there was a bit more “is everything okay in your unit?” chatter and talk about the power outages, but other than that, it’s just pleasantries.
I don’t quite have the neighbor thing figured out yet, I have to admit. As social creatures, we crave interaction, but if everyone had their druthers, we’d all live miles away from the nearest neighbor. I would, at least. I’m only 25 and I already have it out for the neighbor kids on my mom’s street and when my through-the-bedroom-wall neighbor started playing Mariah Carey at 7am on my day off, I didn’t hesitate for a second before banging my fist a couple times on the wall to express my irritation.
Probably for the best that I don’t have a lawn.