The 21st Street Duplex

So as I mentioned a few days ago, I lived next to a psycho in that little brick duplex. I can't even really tell you how I discovered that he was a psycho. Maybe I just knew it all along. Sometimes you can just sense these things. I could probably count the number of times that I actually saw his face on one hand, but I immediately remember beady little eyes in a balding head--a sure sign of psychosis, right?

There were the long, long, long nights of extraordinarily loud music until about 4am (at a time when I had to be at work by 6am), and conversations that I listened to through the apparently thin wall separating us. I don't think he ever had anyone over to the apartment, so I *assume* he was on the phone, but you just never know. I couldn't hear everything, but I'm pretty sure I heard the words "score" and "rocks" on more than one occasion. I'm also pretty sure he wasn't talking about sports or music.

And then there was the night that he pounded on my door at around 3:00am demanding that I fix him something to eat. It had been a night of loud loud music, and he was obviously drunk/in an altered state. And he was pounding on my door. My door that shook visibly when pounded. My door that, I'm fairly certain, was less sturdy than even foam-core--"air core" if you will. And it wasn't a friendly "Hey, got any food in there?" Oh, no. It was a mean, drunken "HEY! Get up and make me some FOOD! Come on, damnit, I'm HUNGRY!" I happened to have locked my pitiful front door that night, which is a good thing, because he actually rattled the handle a few times.

Needless to say, I did *not* make him any food. I'm not even sure I responded to him at the time, at least not directly. I may have told him to go to bed. The action I did take consisted of protecting myself. I pulled my phone into my bedroom (this was back in the dark ages of land lines) and shut and locked the door. I think I stated before that from that point on, I slept with a steak knife under my pillow, but that was a lie. I was living alone, and I don't eat beef. I owned no steak knives! Besides, I'm far too much of a klutz to sleep with something so easily dangerous so close to my head. No, I slept with a cloak pin. Because that's safer than a steak knife, right? Thanks to an exboyfriend who happened also to have been a blacksmith, I had this little dandy in my Renaissance Faire repertoire. I'll pause for a moment to let all that sink in.

Renfaire geek with blacksmith boyfriend ---------> Recovering WoW addict with interactive web designer boyfriend. My how the times change.

Anyway. I called the property management place the next day and told them what had transpired. He remained there until long after I moved out (he was, in fact, still living there when I returned to Lawrence 3 years later--my old apartment was up for rent again and I would have moved back into it in a heartbeat had it not been for his presence), but the loud music ceased to be a problem and the drunken hunger rages were never directed at me again.

Didn't stop me from sleeping with my cloak pin for a long time afterward, and I *always* remembered to lock my door from then on.

There are more, slightly less life threatening stories from that apartment. Like the time I chiseled ice from my freezer and put it in a big metal bowl between my bed and a big fan because it was 115 degrees outside and I had no A/C. For three weeks it was over 100 degrees. I used to go hang out in the library for relief. So all winter long I saved and saved and saved and bought myself a really nice programmable window A/C unit for the following summer. And it never got above 90 degrees.

Good times. Good times.