Category: Home Improvement

It seems that one of our neighbors has a stalker. Isn’t that fucking wonderful? There is a woman who apparently lives in the house next door to our apartment building, and her ex-boyfriend can be seen at pretty much any hour driving around the block in his van, parking in her driveway, or, if he’s feeling really frisky, sneaking into our back yard to spy on her window. This I love. Our building manager caught him pressed up against the wall the other night and called the cops, who promptly let him go. Thanks, guys! I had a conversation about this with Jason, the guy who called the cops.

“What the fuck? I mean, what the fucking fuck? FUCK!”

“I know,” Jason calmly replied as I fitfully gnawed on my arm.

“Why didn’t you . . . I don’t know . . . hit him with a shovel a bunch of times?”

“See, you can’t. I have to lure him inside.”

“Are you kidding? That’s fucking stupid.”

“I know. But I have taken my guns out of the safe again.”

Well, now I feel better. So we have a crazed stalker diddling around in our back yard and an armed, bloodthirsty building manager. How can we add to this picture? I believe I’ll set up a combo crack lab/abortion clinic! It is imperative that I maximize the horrific danger quotient here. But there are some other anti-stalker methods I can take.

1. I will stop recycling. Not only will this hasten the demise of the earth, and thus stalkers, it may also act as a psychologic depressive on intruders. They’ll sneak into the back yard, and will inevitably see the woefully underused recycling bins. “Jesus, that’s terrible,” they’ll think. “Recycling is important to the global community. I’m too depressed to murder my estranged girlfriend now. I’m going to go read some Carlos Castaneda instead.”
2. I will litter the back yard with my famously inedible pot roasts. This is almost too cruel, but my safety is paramount to people like me. So the stalker will creep into the yard and spy a pot roast sitting there. “Pot roast!” he will think, “What a delicious surprise! I will eat this pot roast before I murder my estranged girlfriend! O happy day!” Then when he discovers that the pot roast is, in fact, horrible, he will become incredibly depressed. “Who can’t cook pot roast? This country is going into the toilet. I’m moving to Indonesia.”
3. I can pay William Bennett to sit around in my back yard and intercept the wicked. Again, the stalker sneaks into my yard, and there’s William Bennett. The stalker panics. “Jesus Christ in New Jersey! A shrill, right-wing moralizer is back here!” And William Bennett will thunder, “This nation’s poor have only themselves to blame!” And the stalker will cringe and think, “What? Is he insane? Why won’t he let me murder my estranged girlfriend in peace?” William Bennett will be unperturbed. “Images on television are destroying our nation’s fiber,” he will dourly intone. The stalker is plunged into a paralyzing morass of confusion and terror. He gibbers fearfully while William Bennett continues his ruthless attack on his psyche. “White people are great! I am frightened by the young! I’m a quacking programmable mouthpiece for the Republican Party!” At which point the stalker, now terrorized beyond reason, chooses to die, and eats an entire pot roast. And William Bennett looks on approvingly; a criminal has died horribly, and recycling is on the wane. It’s morning in America.

I was outside on my little stooplet having a cigarette a moment ago, thinking of a few things. For one, my bathroom, or more specifically, my tub. Even more specifically, my filthy tub. It looks like God’s own biological drop-zone; it is a horror. There are good reasons for this.

1. We’re pretty fucking lazy. Who likes cleaning tubs? It’s a filthy job, particularly if you’re really lazy in the first place. I like to imagine, say, Roy Cohn on some blasted wasteland in hell, dutifully scrubbing an acres-wide tub while winged, incontinent demons flit about overhead. He has a radio, but it only plays songs by the Chipmunks.
2. The tub has a window above it with a sill. Instead of angling the sill downward so the water could sluice away, it is dead level, so water just pools up there and erects signs that say “Bacteria should come fuck their brains out over here!” Also, it’s a wood sill for a little extra rot-oomph.
3. No fan. So all the steam just lurks around after a shower, handing out porn mags to everyone collected on the wood sill.

These three things all add up to: tubfilth. So while we can indeed take showers, we do so knowing that, oops, now we have river blindness. Have you ever tried calling in sick with river blindness? It doesn’t fly. “Put some eyedrops in. We need you here today to cure cancer.”

That’s one thing I was thinking about on the stooplet. Another was I forget because all of a sudden, I heard a sound from downstairs. “EEEeeeeuuggh.” It creeped me out, but then I remembered that the downstairs couple has a baby, and her room was right down there. “EEEeeeeuuugh” again. It was a weirdly non-baby sound; it really sounded like a querulous old man trying to disgustedly ward off some fresh terror, like a chilly sitz bath, or a hippie: “EEEEuuuugh.” I figured the folks had dumped the tot in there in the hopes that she would sleep. I liked to think, too, that she was trying to exact revenge for this indignity by making the most plangent, awful noise that she could conceive of. It sounded like she was trying to talk her body into stigmata. “That’d show the big blurry food machines. A nice Biblicalicious mind-fuck. C’mon palms, c’mon palms, c’mon palms . . . EEEeeeeuuugghh!”

I finished the smoke, and retreated back indoors to escape the ghastly baby-thing honking downstairs. I took a little nap, and when I woke, went to the bathroom. A shower might be nice. I moved the curtain inside. There was Roy Cohn, wearing a tattered, grey suit and listening to the Chipmunks. He leered at me, and held up bleeding palms, and he moaned “EEEeeeeuuugh!”

Boom. River blindness.

So I smoke cigarettes. Hey, where are you going?

Oh, well, for those who didn’t run screaming, I smoke. But not in the apartment, for a few salient reasons. One, it kind of makes everything smell after a while. Two, it tends to cover everything you own in a thin film of ick. And third, my apartment manager would nail my scrotum to a chair and then evict me and then nail some innocent passersby’s scrotum to a chair just to work all the way through her anger.

So I smoke outside, which isn’t too raw. I have a little covered stairway that I can smoke in, with a little window. I can enjoy the view out of my little window, and watch the lawyers working out of their home opposite my place. I will not be hiring these lawyers any time soon, as I cannot help but notice that they leave their computer monitors on all the fucking time. When they split, turn out the lights and slink into their gleaming fuck-you cars, there are their monitors, burning away. Oh, no screen savers either. Just angry, livid monitors, left helplessly on, feeling their pixels burn out one by one, for no reason at all. It seems to me kind of like tying your maid up every night and pointing a halogen lamp into her face. Jesus, you dumb fucks! Turn off your monitors! At least get a screen saver! Is that privileged information you’ve got blasting out photonically into the night? Perhaps I’ll buy some binoculars find out why you’re suing your HMO, gentle reader (they’re not buying the “erotomania” argument, dude).

Another little perk I get from smoking outside–this is a recent development–giant, ghastly houseflies. Our apartment was evidently built on an Ancient Native American Septic Tank or something, because these lovelies really put the “super!” in “supernatural.” For one thing, they are clearly intelligent. They know exactly when I am opening the door. I imagine them huddled outside, chattering: “T minus five seconds until the big pink thing opens the portal. Then we zip inside and look for dead stuff and crap on it. If we don’t find any, just crap anywhere. Christ, I love this job.” The other creepy thing is, they are utterly untroubled by spider webs. I know this because I don’t mind spiders, and I let a few set up camp in my little smoking window area precisely so they could catch flying beasties. Not these putzes. In the Spider World, these guys are France. The flies are so huge that they fly into the webs, kick a bit, and they’re gone. Then the spiders run out, see their ruined, flapping webs, see what amounts to the week’s groceries gracefully flying off, and then run back inside to watch pretentious, porny art flicks and complain about the mushroom harvest.

So smoking clearly has its trade-offs. On the one hand, I have to deal with Brobdingagian super-insects, and even worse, I occasionally have to see lawyers. But on the other hand, I do get to smoke. It all works out.