When I Lived Alone

I used to live in an apartment on the top floor of a smallish apartment building. I had to carry groceries up all the flights of stairs because the building had no elevator, and the walls were so thin I could follow the neighbors television shows from my bedroom, but all of this was made worthwhile by the view and the little buzzer I had on my intercom that would open the door for visitors down below (like in Seinfeld!). Also, the apartments were brand new and had really nice kitchens. The bathrooms, however, had carpet and I never did get over the sensation of stepping out of a shower, soaking wet, onto a plush, synthetic fiber carpet.

In any case, the apartment directly below mine was one of those cursed units that could never hold a tenant for more than a couple of months. I had fighting couples, sad-sack bachelors, elderly divorcees, and, once, even a fashion model. The worst downstairs neighbor I ever had (who was, in fact, one of the precipitating factors for my moving out of the building, finally) was a nameless and shirtless man who resembled nothing so much as a whaler from the nineteenth century.

I don't mean that he had a captain's hat and a pegged leg, or that he smoked a scrimshaw pipe and had a mustache-less beard, but rather that he looked as whalers actually looked in those days.

He was shirtless and grizzled and scarred and absolutely covered in tattoos. He even smelled a bit like whale blubber. And though he didn't ever smoke a scrimshaw pipe in my presence, he most certainly did smoke. He smoked pretty much all day. He smoked early in the morning and in the middle of the night and in seemingly every room in the joint. I could follow him around in his his apartment from my apartment by walking, hunched over, and sniffing incessantly at the vents in my various rooms, chasing the scent trail from the living room into the bathroom and then back into the living room and then the kitchen.

It was maddening. I'd take showers sometimes three times in a day just to get the scent of his cigarette smoke out of my hair. I couldn't prepare a meal without feeling sure that I could taste smoke in it. I'd wake up in the middle of the night, thrashing in anger because my bedroom smelled like an O.T.B. I used to jump up and down on the floor when the smell was especially potent, hoping against hope that the banging noises from upstairs would be interpreted as the histrionics of a much heavier and thoroughly insane upstairs neighbor and that I'd get a respite from ashtray life, if only for long enough to eat a plate of Totino's Pizza Rolls.

Did I call the landlord? Of course I did. I was always assured that it had been taken care of. It never was taken care of..

Did I go downstairs and demand that he stop with the smoking? I did not.

Why didn't I? Because I was afraid of him.

But at some point, my cigarette smoke induced madness overwhelmed even my self preservation and I went downstairs, loudly, stepping heavily on every step and plodding with what I hoped was foreboding down the hallway to his door.

I rang the bell. I tried to stand to the side a bit, hoping to be out of the view of the spyhole. I wanted the element of surprise. (When you are five foot eight and itching for a fight with a six foot harpooner, surprise is often all you have).

When the burly, shirtless, chimney came to his door, I lost all of my nerve. He was taller and broader than me. His face was deeply lined with furrows and cracks. His shoulders had tufts of graying hair sprouting from their tattoos. He had a beer in one hand and a look on his face that suggested he might rather be doing something else at that particular moment - something like, say, tearing a puppy from limb to limb.

"Hey, I'm from upstairs," I said.

" . . . " said he.

"Look," I said, "Is there someone smoking down here?"

And I took the opportunity provided by my sentence to glance around at the apartment. It was terrifying. There was no furniture. I mean, not a stick of it. But all over the floor, sitting alone in the middle of a carpeted expanse or clumped in balls of two or three in the corners as though they'd been blown by the wind, were plastic grocery bags. There must have been hundreds of them. There was even a plastic grocery bag hanging from the faucet in the kitchen, waiting for its starring role as the world's saddest watering can perhaps, or for its nightly duty as world's least effective drinking implement.

What kind of monster lives by himself, surrounded by plastic bags, in an otherwise nicely situated and costly apartment? I shuddered to think. He seemed to read my thoughts and shut the door maybe half a foot so that he occupied the entire space of its openness and all I could look at was his hairy and graffiti covered chest.

"Nobody's smoking in here," was all he said.

"Well, its just that I smell smoke upstairs coming through he vents, so look, if anyone is smoking, please have them do it outside, okay?"

"Yeah, but nobody's smoking in here."

"All right then, thanks." and I made for my apartment, suddenly convinced that I'd be murdered with a gaff-hook in my sleep.

The smell never did go away. I made plans to move out. One night, four days before I actually left the building, the police arrived and, after much commotion, arrested the old whaler and two other guys. I never did find out what for, but I have wracked my brain for years trying to figure what the plastic bags had to do with it.