Creepy neighbors
I haven't really met many of my neighbors, and that is something that worries me just a little bit. I know that my apartment complex attracts many people who wouldn't make it into a lot of other complexes because of the low qualifications to live there and the excessively cheap rent (which I now believe is so low not to attract students but because that is the highest their clientele can afford/are willing to pay for housing). I like to know who my neighbors are, as a general rule, because you never know when you might need to borrow an egg, a cup of sugar, or the like. Also, it makes the community a lot safer when your neighbor cares enough to call 911 when he sees someone strange entering your home in the middle of the daytime or something.
The problem is that my neighbors seem to be a little on the creepy side. I'm sure I'm probably a little creepy myself, but these people push the envelope.
There are two girls that live in the apartment next to mine. Here, I'm making a conscious decision to call them girls - and not women - because (when I think about choosing a word) I tend to reserve the more adult term for people who act semi-adult or better. The wild crazy beating of their music keeps me awake past when I retire a couple of nights a week, usually. And for no particular reason that I can understand, about once every other week, they have a screaming party. I know the walls are thin, and I could forgive one kind of screaming (human they are, still). But this seems to be a shrieking contest with laughter. One of them will let out a loud whoop and then there will be laughter, followed by a responding whoop from the other and more laughter. And this usually seems to happen on nights like tonight where they are having some kind of loud party next door with lots of people shouting and making loud noises.
As much as I might wish for some neighbors who were a bit more open to the possibility that some of us need to sleep by 3:00 am, I would take a hundred of them before another Creepy Guy. Creepy Guy seemed very nice when I first moved in. While I was carrying box after box to the apartment, a 50'ish-looking man stuck his head out of his apartment, introduced himself, and offered to help me carry things. I only had another couple boxes on that trip, so I politely refused and stopped to talk for a moment. He teaches school somewhere in Topeka (I never asked where or what grade/subject), and has a fiance who lives in the apartment right beneath him. He even offered me a cookie.
Now, he seems to be a chain smoker and stands outside his door on the balcony all the time, putting him in a prime place to stop and talk to neighbors as we come and go from our homes. When we talk, however, he brings up weird subjects. When he found out that I was a law student, that opened a Pandora's box it seems. He had lots of legal questions. He has some kind of contract dispute with the school he works for. He thinks his ex-wife might have stolen some of his stuff when she moved out. He has seen a homeless person going through our dumpster and wondered if that was okay or whether he should call the cops. He used to have been a trucker and injured his back while loading some crates and wanted to know if he could get paid for that.
I begged off answering his questions and told him that he should get an attorney to help him with his issues. Never one to miss an opportunity to talk up Washburn, I suggested that he give the Law Clinic a call and see if they might be able to help him with at least a few of his problems. When I offered to get the phone number for him, he said that he knew bunch of attorneys and that he would probably just go talk to one of them about it, since they give him free legal services due to their friendship.
As he talked about his friend attorneys, I slowly realized who he was talking about. The Phelps family. I'm not the sort to shy away from intellectual confrontation, but I'm not so much the type to initiate intellectual confrontation with people who are (for all intents and purposes here) still strangers. So I politely said 'uh-huh' and 'yeah' for a while as he talked, and then when we finished talking and I was starting to walk away, he offered to introduce me around to the Phelps family as a way of making contacts in Topeka (somehow, he thinks I'm from Iowa, and I'm not sure how he got that impression).
Things got a little awkward after that encounter. He keeps stopping me to talk, and it always gets a little weirder. He's stopped to talk to me about how "those damned Mexicans" are stealing jobs away from Americans (when I edged in that some were in fact here legally and others became naturalized citizens, he laughed derisively and said that was left-wing propaganda and that the legal ones were worse than the illegal ones, because then they insinuate their terrible "Mexican values" into our God-given American ones). He's told me about his love for Bill O'Reilly (he thinks the man "should run for President" and prays for him every night).
The weirdest one, though, was a few days back. He stopped me to talk again, while I was on my way to an evening class (so luckily I couldn't stop for long), and started lecturing me about how I should boycott NBC. He seemed pleased when I told him I usually don't watch NBC much anyway, but I asked him why I should boycott. He gripped my arm and stared me in the eyes, demanding how I couldn't have heard the awful and terrible news about "the gay agenda."
Wow. Hearing that shocked me almost as much as when I found out that a Kansas government official, when looking to rent office space in the mall one year, told the Capitol-journal in an interview that she was still in negotiations over the space and that she was trying to "jew down" the price a little. Seriously, who uses the term "gay agenda" anyway? What's next? A deep discussion about how there was no holocaust and how the "coloreds" (he's used that term before) are trying to steal away our pretty white women? Taking bets, people. Can he get creepier?
At that point, I told him I needed to get to class and left. There has got to be a way to go about my occasional coming and going without having this guy stop me to talk, and without turning to him one day and saying, "You know, I wish I could talk, but I'm in a hurry, and you're a jackass."
The problem is that my neighbors seem to be a little on the creepy side. I'm sure I'm probably a little creepy myself, but these people push the envelope.
There are two girls that live in the apartment next to mine. Here, I'm making a conscious decision to call them girls - and not women - because (when I think about choosing a word) I tend to reserve the more adult term for people who act semi-adult or better. The wild crazy beating of their music keeps me awake past when I retire a couple of nights a week, usually. And for no particular reason that I can understand, about once every other week, they have a screaming party. I know the walls are thin, and I could forgive one kind of screaming (human they are, still). But this seems to be a shrieking contest with laughter. One of them will let out a loud whoop and then there will be laughter, followed by a responding whoop from the other and more laughter. And this usually seems to happen on nights like tonight where they are having some kind of loud party next door with lots of people shouting and making loud noises.
As much as I might wish for some neighbors who were a bit more open to the possibility that some of us need to sleep by 3:00 am, I would take a hundred of them before another Creepy Guy. Creepy Guy seemed very nice when I first moved in. While I was carrying box after box to the apartment, a 50'ish-looking man stuck his head out of his apartment, introduced himself, and offered to help me carry things. I only had another couple boxes on that trip, so I politely refused and stopped to talk for a moment. He teaches school somewhere in Topeka (I never asked where or what grade/subject), and has a fiance who lives in the apartment right beneath him. He even offered me a cookie.
Now, he seems to be a chain smoker and stands outside his door on the balcony all the time, putting him in a prime place to stop and talk to neighbors as we come and go from our homes. When we talk, however, he brings up weird subjects. When he found out that I was a law student, that opened a Pandora's box it seems. He had lots of legal questions. He has some kind of contract dispute with the school he works for. He thinks his ex-wife might have stolen some of his stuff when she moved out. He has seen a homeless person going through our dumpster and wondered if that was okay or whether he should call the cops. He used to have been a trucker and injured his back while loading some crates and wanted to know if he could get paid for that.
I begged off answering his questions and told him that he should get an attorney to help him with his issues. Never one to miss an opportunity to talk up Washburn, I suggested that he give the Law Clinic a call and see if they might be able to help him with at least a few of his problems. When I offered to get the phone number for him, he said that he knew bunch of attorneys and that he would probably just go talk to one of them about it, since they give him free legal services due to their friendship.
As he talked about his friend attorneys, I slowly realized who he was talking about. The Phelps family. I'm not the sort to shy away from intellectual confrontation, but I'm not so much the type to initiate intellectual confrontation with people who are (for all intents and purposes here) still strangers. So I politely said 'uh-huh' and 'yeah' for a while as he talked, and then when we finished talking and I was starting to walk away, he offered to introduce me around to the Phelps family as a way of making contacts in Topeka (somehow, he thinks I'm from Iowa, and I'm not sure how he got that impression).
Things got a little awkward after that encounter. He keeps stopping me to talk, and it always gets a little weirder. He's stopped to talk to me about how "those damned Mexicans" are stealing jobs away from Americans (when I edged in that some were in fact here legally and others became naturalized citizens, he laughed derisively and said that was left-wing propaganda and that the legal ones were worse than the illegal ones, because then they insinuate their terrible "Mexican values" into our God-given American ones). He's told me about his love for Bill O'Reilly (he thinks the man "should run for President" and prays for him every night).
The weirdest one, though, was a few days back. He stopped me to talk again, while I was on my way to an evening class (so luckily I couldn't stop for long), and started lecturing me about how I should boycott NBC. He seemed pleased when I told him I usually don't watch NBC much anyway, but I asked him why I should boycott. He gripped my arm and stared me in the eyes, demanding how I couldn't have heard the awful and terrible news about "the gay agenda."
Wow. Hearing that shocked me almost as much as when I found out that a Kansas government official, when looking to rent office space in the mall one year, told the Capitol-journal in an interview that she was still in negotiations over the space and that she was trying to "jew down" the price a little. Seriously, who uses the term "gay agenda" anyway? What's next? A deep discussion about how there was no holocaust and how the "coloreds" (he's used that term before) are trying to steal away our pretty white women? Taking bets, people. Can he get creepier?
At that point, I told him I needed to get to class and left. There has got to be a way to go about my occasional coming and going without having this guy stop me to talk, and without turning to him one day and saying, "You know, I wish I could talk, but I'm in a hurry, and you're a jackass."
posted by The Academian | 8:59 PM
3 Comments:
That's why my motto has always been "Never trust a single adult male chain-smoker living alone in an apartment in Kansas."
You mean you're not from Iowa?
I'm not sure I could pass as an Iowan (Iowaian? Iowa-ite?). There's too much of the central plains states in my blood. I'd be too tempted to call Des Moines by it's real name, "Dez Moyneez."
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