My apartment door is an unwitting and unwilling magnet for freaks, junkies, drunks, whores, Bible-thumpers and various evolutionary outcasts.

I’m thinking of replacing my fuzzy welcome mat with one made of human skin that reads “FUCK OFF.” Maybe I’m just too nice of a neighbor that people want to come around and swim like guppies in my milk of human kindness. OK, that’s a total lie, but I have been known to help people out in small ways when they need it, and naturally, scumbags will take advantage of that fact.

One morning, a knock at my door woke me up from dreams of blueberry pancakes and mass orgies with prostitutes dressed in band uniforms. I put on my shorts and went to the door to see a scraggly loser whom I knew as an acquaintance by one of my old high-school friends. I hadn’t seen the guy in almost ten years. He’d apparently seen me at the grocery store buying junk food or toilet paper or something and figured he’d “drop by and say hi.” After a minute of awkward silence, he asked to come in. I told him no. More awkward silence, and at this point, he was licking his lips and looking me up and down. Then he said he wanted to come in and do “something I’d been wanting to do for a long time, if you catch my meaning.”

At this point, my brain snapped into formation and I put two and two together: He was jailhouse-gay and coming out of the closet before my tired and now thoroughly disgusted eyes. I just looked at him flatly and said, “Sorry, not interested.” He shuffled off without a word. I went back to bed with the realization that this guy who had three kids by three different women was trying to get all Tom of Finland with me when he knew damn well I wasn’t about that at all. It took me a few minutes to get the creepiness out of my head and go back to sleep.

Visitors at my door aren’t all about creepy, unrequited and unwanted homosexual acrobatics, though. One notable visitor was a married Goth chick with a milquetoast beta of a husband who couldn’t hold his sugar in bed. She’d been wanting to screw my brains out and said so many times. I kept blowing her off because of the potential drama factor. One day while watching some bad movies, I heard a knock on my door and looked out the peephole. No one there. That’s a huge red flag: Never open the door if they hide from view through the peephole. Like a dumbass, my curiosity got the better of me. I opened the door and she popped into view, scaring the homemade fertilizer out of me. We talked for a few at the door, and while we did, I could notice that she was in extreme pain. I asked her what was wrong, and she replied that it was endometriosis or something like that. She hadn’t been getting it looked at by a doctor because she was hoping it would sterilize her. Then she asked if I wanted to fuck.

Usually in a big city like New York, apartment buildings are set up to where you have to be buzzed in and walk up ten flights of stairs to get to someone’s apartment. I don’t think junkies are willing to expend that much energy. However, seeing as how I live in an apartment complex on the bottom floor, the pillheads can just saunter up the breezeway and make their stupid requests of me.

Take for example last week when a skinny, nervous little pillhead asked me to give her a ride to the next town to a friend’s house. She seemed fragile, desperate, almost ashamed to ask me to help her out. In my infinite kindness, I said those magic words of generosity:

“I’m gonna need gas money.”

She would pony up five bucks and so would her friend who would be coming with us. She would have given more, she said, but she needed the money to score what she wanted, which was Oxycontin. I found this out on the way there after we picked up her friend, a wigger broad with a body like Kim Kardashian and a face like Benny Hill. If you’ve never listened to two female pill-addicts yap incessantly about jail, other bitches and pills in a dialectal mishmash of Ebonics and redneck-speak, then you’re missing out. Inversely, you’re also better off and smarter than I am, but hey, I was bored.

I’ve neglected to mention that I live in an apartment complex which is government subsidized for Section 8 and low-income folks. I get my fair share of Pentecostals and Jehovah’s Witnesses trying to get me to come to service, in which I lie that I’m a Satanist and it would conflict with my attending black masses. One of the cuter examples of pests are the kids who buy candy with food-stamp money and try to sell it door to door under the guise of raising money for their schools.

Speaking of wasting food, there was also the time that one of my upstairs neighbors came down frantic, scared to death of her boyfriend, wanting me to call 911. He had thrown an entire McDonald’s Value Meal in her face. Luckily, the cops showed up before I could do anything and hauled the fast-food transgressor to jail.

My upstairs neighbor gets a shitload of money every month for his numerous and legitimate disabilities, so of course all manner of drunks and losers like to hover around him when the check comes in. They’ve many times knocked at my door. One of them was a white-trashy kind of drunken woman who tried to force her way into my apartment at 5 AM, thinking it was my neighbor’s place. Another one wanted me to let him pass out on my couch, and when I refuse, he opted for the staircase.

Over the years I’ve lived here for the sake of cheap rent, it’s certainly been interesting. Among the other notable people darkening my doorway:

• One deaf girl and her nomad-like and equally deaf friends demanding cigarettes and/or money through handwritten notes which started with telling me how totally deaf they were.
• Mennonites needing a jump for their pickup truck (not really weird, just a little strange).
• One sheriff thinking I was a wanted felon because said felon gave them my address.
• One barely legal wigger girl asking for tampons so she wouldn’t have to use toilet paper like her mom suggested. (Why the hell would a bachelor keep tampons in his house?)
• A furry in stockings wanting to borrow a cup of sugar.
• A woman with no teeth wanting me to drink with her so she wouldn’t have to drink alone.

I’ll end this here, because five cop cars just zoomed up the parking lot, and I want to see if I went to school with the drug dealer they’re busting. I love this place. Can’t you tell? I’d move, but hell, the rent is cheap and where else are you going to find this much entertainment for the money?

Stray kitty that comes pawing at my door for food often. The only little weirdo I don’t mind helping out.

—NATHAN LOWERY

No related posts.