I moved from Alabama to Seattle in 2006. My parents helped me move into the new place since my new roommate was off at a meditation retreat and my Seattle friends were busy or out of town. As a lady in my 30s my parents are not exactly young anymore, so it was a struggle for the three of us to move all of the crap into my second floor apartment. The steep and weird staircase did not help. Two of my new neighbors came out to help! They ran up and down the stairs, they moved boxes of various things and even helped with the giant couch which was very hard to maneuver up those darn stairs. My nice neighbors were young and seemed hip and interesting. The guy skateboarded everywhere and the gal was exotically beautiful and sweetly protective of their adorable toddler son. She was a bit alarmed when she saw her son go into my bedroom to say hi to Bob the cat, like I'd do something to him. "Hey, I'm a social worker, " I told her, "I would never harm a child, don't even worry about that." She shrugged and looked down at her young son, calling him over to stand by her.
In retrospect, I was so, so stupidly naive. I walked around the city with a large, excited grin on my face nearly all the time. I even told these strangers that I could babysit if they needed! It seemed normal enough, after all I'd had two regular kid sitting gigs in Alabama for children of two of my friends and it was a great way to spend a Saturday night. My sweetly optimistic and open nature was obvious as I made my way through the city. Jogging around Green Lake, I'd suddenly have a crazy man jogging with me, asking me about my tattoos and about my taste in men (barf). I was polite and talkative, but tried to get away. The schizophrenics often sat next to me on the bus. All sorts of people made eye contact to ask me for money. One time a scared woman jumped in front of my car and asked me for a ride. She was in danger and like she had to get away from someone! Naturally, I gave her a ride and after just a few blocks, I turned my head to look at her just as we drove under a streetlight. Pockmarks on her face! Pressured and rapid speech! Rustling through her backpack that was bizarrely full of empty glass bottles and tin cans! Ah! I just let a meth addict into my car! Lovely. So, I had to learn, and that moment right there was my my first way up call. I began to shift my peepers AWAY from people and take on that urban blank stare. I know it sounds cold, but otherwise it is too much and next thing you know, you've got Jessie from Breaking Bad hanging out in your house (and I don't mean Jessie when he's got it together and reaching out to Walt with his daddy issues, I mean sad and destructive addict Jessie). Anyway, I'm getting off topic but I do have these neighbors to thank for some wake up calls as well.
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| Image from www.icanhazcheeseburger.com |
The months went by. Imagine one of those montages of the seasons changing which in Seattle is like this: the trees stay big and green but everything else becomes very gray and rainy. I was busy, my roommate was busy and it seemed our neighbors were too. Sometimes I saw Dude Neighbor on the 44 bus from Fremont to the U district. Usually I was going to the university to study or take a class and he was going to the Ave to hang out and look at records. Lady Neighbor remained rather quiet, often leaving to do things at night. Sometimes I spotted them them walking their young son to the park.
My roommate and I couldn't help but notice the toddler crying. A lot. The crying was usually at night and went on for a long, long time. It wasn't normal crying, like "oh my toy broke" crying. It sounded like the snot-down-the-face, barely-able-to-breathe, I'm-gonna-die crying. It was very loud, very awful and very distracting. Since we were unable to partake in regular apartment dwelling activities such as sleeping, studying or watching TV while such crying occurred, we instead obsessed. Why is he crying like that? What is wrong? Should we go say something? After several nights of these episodes, some with both of us at home and some with only one of us playing the quiet sleuth, we came up with a hypothesis. Based on the location of the cry, and assuming their apartment had a similar layout to ours, the kid was crying in the bathroom. That also explained why it was so loud, since his wobbly little end of the world cries were echoing. Poor kid. Dude had been looking pretty awful lately, so we assumed he was likely using drugs and locked the kid in the closet while he was doing so.
"I'm a social worker!" I asserted proudly one night. "I am a mandated reporter!" Let me tell you that there is nothing more smug or quick to respond than a social worker in training faced with a situation in which harm may be inflicted upon a child or a vulnerable adult. Let me also tell you that I took my values and ethics very seriously and I was not afraid to call the End Harm line, otherwise known as Child Protective Services. And I didn't have much to tell them. "Um, Dude Neighbor is home but Lady Neighbor isn't. Oh. Their names?" My roommate looked on the mailboxes to find their last names and we tried to piece together who our neighbors actually are. Meanwhile, kiddo kept crying away in the sad little bathroom. I realize we sound like idiots here, but we were pretty tired and a bit overwhelmed by all of this.
The drama increased gradually enough for it to be a bit exciting for us, but nothing to make a movie about. The crying continued; we continued to call CPS. We heard fighting sometimes, complete with door slamming. We very carefully watched their comings and goings. Dude Neighbor no longer seemed like a happy skateboarder and instead looked gaunt and angry most of the time. Lady Neighbor was odd, often leaving at night in a taxi cab when I was finally home from a long day to enjoy my chips and salsa dinner. At this point, most of us in the building were getting annoyed with these two. One neighbor mentioned that Lady Neighbor called herself an 'Exotic Dancer'. So, while she was off stripping at night, her kid was left with Dude and clearly that wasn't going well. So, yeah. Babysitting offer retracted!
Then an informative slip of paper appeared under our door. It told us the Seattle Police were looking for Dude Neighbor because of multiple robberies in various houses around the 'hood. Apparently he walked around with the kiddo in his baby carriage and broke into cars and houses. If we were to see him at any time, we needed to call the police right away! Ahhh! The paper had his full name and a reference number! Ahhh! Now this was exciting and frightening for two overworked graduate students with a cat.
That apartment building had two units per floor. Our front doors faced one another from opposite sides of building. I could look outside our peep hole and see their front door. Anytime I heard a noise from their side of the building, I ran over to the peep hole to check it out. On one occasion, the police were called when there was a Dude sighting, but by the time they arrived he was long gone. Lady Neighbor told them she hadn't seen him for weeks, declaring "We broke up". I realized I was obsessed with this crazy situation one night when I ate my pizza dinner while looking out the peephole for entertainment, you know instead of watching TV or listening to music or something normal like that. Just admit it, you would do the same thing.
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| Prez Obama would look! Image from Wikipedia. |
Now let me stop here for a moment and point out that Dude helped me move ALL of my worldly possessions into my apartment several months before. And he was breaking into people's houses and stealing things all over the place! Yet nothing of mine was ever taken or even harmed. My best conclusion is that he took a turn for the worst that fall and began using his drug of choice again (most likely) and / or he concluded that while I had a lot of stuff, it was mainly weird paintings, books and clothes so it was not even worth it (also quite likely). I will never know if he helped me because he was simply kind or if he was scoping out my stuff.
One night I was chilling at home, most likely playing around online or talking on the phone. I heard a ruckus from next door (which probably meant the sound of a mouse rustling, so hypervigiliant was I at that time). I ran to the peephole and behold, there was Dude going into the apartment! He looked like CRAP, like a quick moving skeleton in skater shoes. (Meth? Yes, most likely). With shaking hands, I called the po-po and within a few minutes they were IN the apartment building. Like, 10 of them. They called my cell and asked me to come down. All of the police (and a detective) stood on the stairs leading up to our floor and quietly waited for Dude to leave. They had the lights turned off. At one point, my upstairs neighbor came downstairs with a bag of garbage to take to the dumpster. He stopped quickly, noticing the line of cops going up the stairs. "Oh," he said. "Shhhh," the cops said. Dude Neighbor now had no escape. He was on the second floor and there were cops all over. I suggested that we pull the fire alarm so everyone would have to leave the apartment building. The detective said "That's a great idea, but I don't think that will work" and smiled in a sweet manner depicting "Beat it honey. We got this." So from what I recall, this standoff took quite a few hours, although I may be recalling it in a strange way because of all the adrenaline I had pumping through my body. I felt a bit like a tattle tale with all of this, and honestly I was terrified that Lady would scratch my eyeballs out, she just had that scrappy look about her. I didn't want to stand around and talk with them and I wanted to pretend I wasn't the person who called. So back to the peephole I went.
The police went to the door of the apartment and Lady threw the door open. They entered inside and she began yelling and howling about her son. They asked her to stay in the hallway while they looked in the apartment. She was hysterical. My SON! my SON! She was yelling. And yep, I'm still looking through the peephole. I sympathized with the Lady a bit but also shook my head, as she had many a night left her dear son in the care of her drug abusing boyfriend. There was then a lot of madness, neighbors outside, fire trucks, police cars, more yelling and screaming.
The detective called me during the first morning light as I sipped on my coffee and asked me to identify Dude Neighbor. I told them I didn't want to come outside because frankly, I was totally shaken up by this whole thing and I was still afraid that Lady would take my eyes. So I looked out my window as they wheeled Dude in a stretcher into the ambulance. "Yep, that's him," I said. Apparently he'd broken both of his legs jumping off the balcony. I realized my car was directly underneath their balcony, as their balcony was right over the parking garage. I sighed and walked downstairs to make sure I didn't have a Dude shaped indent on my old Honda civic and luckily I did not. I realized I was very tired and wanted very badly to live in peace. It was one of my first moments of acute get-me-out-of-the-city syndrome, which still affects me approximately once per month.
Shortly following the harrowing night of many cops and balcony jumping, Lady Exotic Dancer was evicted and a nice military couple moved in. I thought about telling them to cleanse that place with some sage, but they didn't need to know of the craziness. Besides, military folks probably aren't into sage. And even though our place had a great view and was quite cheap for Seattle digs, we moved out once our lease ended. It was just too much after months of that drama.
Months later I was hanging out with a friend and her cousin who worked as a medical assistant at a local hospital. My friend made a joke about what had occurred, something like "And then your crackhead neighbor will jump off the balcony to get away from the police and break his legs!" My pal's cousin perked up and said "Hey, I know that guy!" and recalled the night he entered the ER. "He was laughing and saying 'Dude, I broke my legs!' and there were a lot of cops around". Ahhh, but it is a small world (small city?).
Have you had a crappy neighbor? What do you think makes someone a crappy neighbor?
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