The Complex
Written by me
Photo by me
The Complex
By
James Raisanen
On the face of it, the building looks great; new paint job, new carpentry work, hell, even new gutters. But once you get inside, the smell invades your sinuses like the storming of Normandy Beach. And that's just the beginning. Oh, boy, the cast who lives here at this house is like that episode of Tales From the Crypt, you know, the one where all the lunatics kill the orderlies and doctors and start putting on Shakespeare plays. The noise, it's all day and all night; picture going to a store where they sell clocks and T.V.'s, but all the clocks are set to different times and all the T.V.'s are on different channels, and it's twenty-four hours a day. We've got cockroaches, earwigs, maggots, flies, moths . . . you name the insect, we got it here in this building, but the landlord will never set foot in this place. And that's another thing, the landlord, he's the cheapest son-of-a-bitch on the planet, but I'll get to him later, I think he's just as looney as the rest of these nuts that live here.
Before I get too far ahead of myself, I should probably introduce myself. The name is Alan McCrosky, but my friends all call me Voltaire, on account of I'm so pessimistic and I like to satirize my surroundings, like Voltaire the writer. If you haven't been able to tell, I hate the human race, but I hate the place I live in even more, and if I could I would level it and this entire rat-hole neighborhood with a few pounds of C-4. But I'm sane, probably the sanest person in the entire building. Let me get back to telling you about the building, though.
First of all, I don't think there's one floorboard that isn't warped to shit; you can't walk around without creaking and everybody's always pounding on their ceiling to get you to shut up. One of these days, an entire floor is going to cave in and fall down into the apartment below it; I hope it kills someone when it does happen. Then, pets aren't supposed to be allowed, but nobody pays attention to that rule; which really accounts for a large portion of the smell, because it's a five-story building and nobody wants to walk up and down all those stairs when they need to let their pets in and out. The other major factor in the reek is everybody's weird hours, so you get different types of cooking at all times. But some people use the hallways as toilets, mostly the drunks who think they're in their own bathroom when they're really standing at the door of another apartment.
It's rent-controlled, low-income housing, so it attracts all sorts of nuts who can't work steady because of one psychological ill or another. I think the landlord prefers them because it means a steady paycheck without having to worry about the damn fools getting fired or laid-off. I've seen a few working slobs come and go since I started living here, and they usually get booted the day after they lose their job. See what I mean? Stingy bastard. The heating and cooling units are shot, so in the winter it gets so that you become almost literally attached to your furniture, and in the summer, your face near to melts right off your frigging skull. But let me tell you about the people that live here.
All of my problems start with the man who lives directly above me; God, I want that fucker dead. He only sleeps during the day, and it seems like he waits until I walk out the door of my apartment to go to work. Of course, when I get home, I have the guy downstairs to keep me from sleeping, but I'll get to him. So the guy upstairs wakes up after the sun goes down, and then it sounds like he's dropping bowling balls on the floor, or teaching elephants how to tap dance, or something. The time varies from day to day, but he goes out to get drunk later in the night; I know he gets drunk because then he comes back and he's falling all over the place and screaming at the top of his lungs. He thinks he's singing when he does this, but it's just pathetic. Then he starts moving the furniture around his house and vacuums the place, which, because of the floorboards, is even worse than it should be, I can't get any sleep with that prick living above me!
The guy below me, he's a conspiracy theorist, but it's more complex than that. He spent some time at the local nut-hatch, but it either didn't do him very much good or he's not taking his meds. Either way, he talks about this conspiracy that the Virgin Mary was an alien; that Jesus Christ smoked crack and started the Illuminati; that those little hairs on your corn-on-the-cob are actually micro-filament wires that receive transmissions from the CIA to make you obey everything they tell you. Just some whacked out shit, if you ask me. He also has arguments with his doorknob, usually in the hallway. I've seen it, he gets hilarious sometimes, but it's just sad, really. There's a guy who lives on the same floor as me, I don't know his name so I call him Machu Picchu because he's from somewhere in South America. He sells crack, or tries to, at least, to everybody on the floor, and everybody on every other floor. I don't think he gets too many sales because he hardly speaks or understands English. Then there's the woman at the end of the hall, she has more than a dozen cats, you can smell it every time she opens the damn door. She thinks everybody wants to kill her cats and bake them into pies; as I said, I have some insane neighbors.
That's what I get for wanting to save some cash, I guess.