Living in an apartment oftentimes means living around some serious characters. There are a lot of nice families in our complex, and there are some people I give the serious side-eye to. I was thinking this morning about the interesting people we've lived near in our almost 3-years here, and thought I'd share.
At the old building (before we moved due to lack of AC), we had some really fun people. We had the 19 and 23-year-old lesbians from Alabama. They were super sweet, and helped me out a few times with Paisley when she was really little and I couldn't get home at lunch. Neither of them had more than an 8th grade education, and they had some serious attitude and probably some substance addiction issues, but they'd have given you the shirt off their backs. Very sweet girls. They moved back to Alabama for an opportunity at Wal-Mart. I miss them.
Also in the old building was a man we called Billy the Pimp. He was an older black guy who seemed to be living with an older white woman above us. He drove a Cadillac and wore the kind of suits and hats you'd find marked "Pimp" at a costume store. He'd disappear for months at a time and then reappear. Billy bounced around between sales jobs, so he was always trying to sell us whatever he was currently selling, everything from Nissans to life insurance. He once told me that Paisley's tail was curly because she was friendly. This was said as she was barking ferociously at him. Not to mention the fact that she's part pug, which I told him multiple times. Billy the Pimp still lives with the doughy white lady and always gives a smile and a nod when he sees us.
Our new building has some interesting people, too. For example, our neighbors above and on the opposite side of the stair way. They seem nice, but are frequently arguing as they come and go. I know you're not supposed to judge books by covers and all that, but neither seems to take pride in how they dress. The girl appears to work in an office, and her pants are always wrinkled and just a bit too short. I just always want to fix them. I try to at least take pride in how I look when I go to work, and even if I'm not 100% happy with an outfit, it's pressed and clean and I look presentable. Not to mention, they have a pit bull (a disallowed breed for our complex, and most complexes for that matter) that they walk around off-leash. He seems nice enough, but with all the stereotypes about pits, it just seems stupid to me to let an aggressive-breed dog walk around unleashed. It's just asking for trouble.
The guy directly above us is the Vanilla Ice Ice Agent. For real. He's an I.C.E. agent. He drives an unmarked car and every once in a while we see him leaving in full agent gear with rifles and everything. He never says anything to us, just stands on his balcony smoking cigarettes and glaring at everyone. Before the I.C.E. agent, we had a meth head who would threaten to harm herself and lock herself in her apartment, resulting in us calling the police multiple times. it's ironic that a cop now lives in her old place. Needless to say, Vanilla Ice Ice Agent is a much better neighbor.
My current favorite is the Professor. I don't know his actual name, but he's a sweet older guy who calls Clover "Killer" and Paisley "the mean one." He leaves at the same time every day in a slight variation of pretty much the same outfit. I've decided he's a Professor because he looks like one. One day, out of the blue, he came to our apartment with his little TV and asked Dan to help him with his cable set up. When he saw our 47" screen TV, he went and bought one the same day. Before then, I'm not sure he'd really spoken to either of us. Last week, I got the great surprise that he seems to have a mail-order bride. Yes, I know, I'm stereo-typing, but you'd think so, too, so don't judge me. He was beaming as he introduced me to her, and all of a sudden he's all cheery and he even decorated for Christmas, which he definitely didn't do last year. Whoever she is, she turned him into a less Scroogey guy just in time for the holidays.
So, those are the people in our neighborhood. Despite most of them being perfectly nice and harmless, I'm so anxious to begin house-shopping and get the fudge out of there in March. I know that living in a house doesn't guarantee us that our neighbors won't be wackadoos, but I'm ready for new ones.
Do you have any interesting apartment neighbors?
1 comment:
You are right about that last part...because that's what we thought. We figured in a house we'd get rid of the nutty neighbors and live in peace. Except our neighbors now are way worse.
At least yours are entertaining1
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