Dear Girls Above Me: Inspired by a True Story (5 page)

So, as you can see, Pat was a super-fabulous guy. But was he gay? I still wasn’t sure.

“Eighty-one thousand points, baby! Suck it, dead Michael Jackson!” Pat finally got off of our violated coffee table.

“Maybe next time you could play the game when it’s not in the early hours of the morning?” Why did I even have to ask this?

“Shit, I’m so sorry! I’ll make it up to you by squeezing you some extra orange juice. But I need to buy some more umbrellas.”

“Don’t worry about it. I just barely got any sleep; those girls who live above us kept me up most of the night—”

“Oh my God, me too. How good was that conversation about baby Cruise’s little shirt? I found the picture online, they were so right. She looked adorable.”

I made a mental note to add this to the “Could Pat Be Gay?” list.

“I’m sure Suri looked great, but I can’t keep living my life listening to these idiotic girls yap to each other.”

“Tell me about it. Hey, maybe we should just go knock on their door and see if they’d be down for a foursome. You know, just ’cause it would be an awesome story to tell,” Pat blurted out with what I believed to be sincerity.

“Umm, I was thinking more along the lines of filing a noise complaint,” I said.

“Totally. That’s a great way to handle it too.”

Before Pat left for work, he hand-squeezed me another glass of orange juice with a makeshift umbrella, even though I begged him not to. He said, “It’s no problem at all. Who wouldn’t want to squeeze something that feels just like titties?” This statement made me consider a new list. Could Pat be an alien?

THE GIRLS’ KNOWLEDGE

Dear Girls Above Me,

“How do I spell … this word?” Unfortunately, I don’t have a visual, but aren’t you pointing to it?

Dear Girls Above Me,

“How does Google work? Is someone hired to look up your search and send it back to you?” Yes, and they search for it on Google.

Dear Girls Above Me,

“School was forever ago! I don’t remember what a stupid adjective means!” Ironic that the adjective you just used was “stupid.”

Dear Girls Above Me,

“I’m blanking, who discovered the world was round again? I mean flat—wait, did he think—yeah, flat—wait—” Christopher Columbus.

Dear Girls Above Me,

“She’s kinda pathetic, spending years studying just to work at a bar.” Does this “bar” happen to be called “the Bar”?

Dear Girls Above Me,

“He kept saying his name instead of using ‘I.’ What’s that called again? Same person? Talking person?” 3rd person (Charlie sighs).

Dear Girls Above Me,

“All I want in life is a strand of Justin Timberlake’s hair so I can make his babies.” DNA doesn’t produce children.

Dear Girls Above Me,

“Okay, I honestly just noticed that keyboards aren’t in alphabetical order.” This is a quote from you and my two year old cousin.

CHAPTER FIVE

I mapped out my course of action. The strategy was to deliver my rent check and then casually, while I happened to be there, file a noise complaint against the girls above me. I’m the king of the “Oh, by the way.” As I walked down the long dark hallway to Mr. Molever’s apartment, I heard a familiar clanking sound. My immediate reaction to this particular noise was to gag, find the nearest hiding spot, and wait for as long as it took till this noise went away. The source of said racket came from Penny’s collar; she’s a toy poodle who lives in my building and is my least-favorite dog on the planet. Her owner, Tania, isn’t much better. Tania thinks that Penny and my dog Marvin are “lovers.” Therefore, she believes they must see each other at least once a day to keep their spirits and sexual drive fulfilled. “A relationship is a partnership, which is why they both end in ‘-ship.’ ” I don’t know what that even means. “So my Penny can’t keep giving and giving emotionally while your Marvin is taking and taking.” What a lunatic. By the way, Marvin
hates
Penny. Interacting
with Penny is Marvin’s “surgical neuter” … and he’d been surgically neutered.

They live on the other side of the building, 4F, but will often make trips by my apartment for reasons beyond comprehension. I know this because sometimes I spy on them through the peephole. Tania will pretend she’s on the phone, just casually hanging out directly in front of my door. One time she was having a “hilarious” conversation with a friend on the phone, when all of a sudden I watched as her cell phone rang. She was so surprised and stunned by the loud ring in her ear that she let go of her phone and accidentally kicked Penny a good few feet down the hallway. She quickly turned and looked directly into my peephole, as if she sensed I was staring at her. She then sniffed around a little bit, which I found remarkably unsettling. The point is, I’m a grown man and I won’t allow myself to be reduced to a childish fear all because of a scary lady named Tania.

So as I was frantically trying to find a hiding place to avoid Tania, Penny’s collar was becoming more and more audible. Where should I go? I wasn’t able to pinpoint the direction they were coming from, so turning back was just as risky as trekking forward. I was screwed. So, for whatever freakish reason, I got down on the floor and curled up into a lopsided ball. I guess I figured the hallway was dark enough that Tania might not even realize there was a person there. Or maybe I was unconsciously re-creating some traumatic experience I had suffered in the womb? Either way, even if she did spot me, maybe she’d think I was a pile of clothes or a sleeping zombie who should undoubtedly be left alone.

What I didn’t take into account was Penny’s bionic nose. Out of nowhere she trotted up to me, took one sniff, and began barking
directly into my ear. It was truly the most annoying sound I had ever heard. I had a violent vision of swiftly grabbing Penny by the collar and, with the ease of Chuck Norris (but without the homophobia), snapping her bony poodle neck. But I had committed myself to this position and believed I still had a chance to stay invisible to Tania.

“Charlie? Is that you down there?”

“Huh? What?” I didn’t quite know how else to respond.

“What are you doing? Are you hiding from me?” Tania asked.

“What? No. I was just—ducking and covering—from the earthquake.”

“Umm, what earthquake?” She was onto me.

“You didn’t just feel that tremor?”

“No.”

“I can’t believe you didn’t feel it! You should probably go back inside your apartment and check the news for updates. Inside your apartment. The news. Inside.”

“I didn’t feel anything. Neither did Penny. So, where’s our little Romeo?” Tania asked in a cutesy way that made me want to vomit.

“Oh, Marvin? The poor little guy is feeling under the weather. He’s been resting.”

“Aww, sweet sweet Marv. Well, I know what he needs.”

“Yeah, rest,” I reiterated.

“Nope. He needs the warmth of his lover.”

“I’m pretty sure he just needs to rest.”

But I was too late. Tania headed toward my door with Penny trotting at her feet. I thought about turning myself into a hallway barricade, making it more difficult for her to barge into my apartment, but I couldn’t muster up the energy. Without any warning, my poor little Marvin was about to get pounced on by a freakishly
energetic poodle. In a last attempt to save Marvin’s life, I yelled, “My door’s locked!” But Tania paid less attention to me than she did to the earthquake I had invented. She easily opened my unlocked door and called, “Romeo? Where art thou, Romeo?”

I left a good pug behind that day.

Mr. Molever came to his doorway dressed in striped baby-blue silk pajamas. Not that it would look normal on anyone, but he looked especially ridiculous. He gave me an “it’s about time” glance, which then morphed into an “I’m disappointed in you” downward head nod, which finally transformed into an “I’m reminding you of your mother” glare because of his slightly squinting stare of indignation and subsequent silent judgment. But that might have been me bringing some of my own baggage to this exchange. After what felt like three hours of awkward silence and repressed childhood memories, I handed him my rent check.

“Thank you. I don’t normally bend the rules for tardy tenants, but since I can see by your appearance that you’ve had a rough morning, I won’t charge you the late penalty,” Mr. Molever said to me. I felt like punching him in the testicles, or at least ripping off his terrible pajamas, but that would ultimately have punished me. I had to just grin and bear it, because I needed his authority in order to shut up the girls above me and bring some much-needed peace and quiet into my life.

“Oh, by the way …” I explained to Mr. Molever my unbearable living situation.

Who: The girls above me.

What: I can hear everything they say.

Where: In my apartment.

When: All hours of the day and night.

I went on to list specific examples of my noisy situation. I could tell Mr. Molever was intrigued by these girls more than anything and showed no signs of sympathy. He walked away for a moment and returned holding a large binder with a sticker on the side that read
OFFICIAL COMPLAINT DOCUMENTS
.

“Here, fill these out. Assuming there are no spelling mishaps or grammatical errors, I will give you the next set of documents you’ll need to complete.” He handed me the binder, which weighed about as much as a grown-up bowling ball.

“Can’t you just go tell them to keep it down?” I pleaded.

“Theoretically, yes. Legally, no. Not until the proper paperwork has been filed.”

My fists clenched. Although I’m not sure why, since I’ve never physically fought anyone before. If I ever do, Mr. Molever will definitely be the first person on my list, especially if he’s wearing silk that day. I took a deep breath.

“I don’t understand what you’re complaining about,” Mr. Molever blurted.

“Excuse me?” I asked, stunned by his boldness. I was quickly running out of fists to clench.

“A couple of attractive young gals talking locker room? Isn’t that every guy’s dream?”

Every guy’s dream? What guy wants to hear about the latest dieting craze, called “the Tic Tac and edamame diet”? What guy do you know who wants to hear in great detail the cause of “toxic shock syndrome”? Can you find me one, just one, guy who wants this
version of “Little Bunny Foo Foo” stuck in his head: “Little Bunny Foo Foo, hopping through the forest, jerking off the field mice and giving lots of head”? You should’ve seen the looks I got at the DMV when I accidentally sang that song out loud.

Mr. Molever, not surprisingly, was of no help. I was a thousand dollars poorer and my maddening situation was still very much in existence. I reluctantly took his “I’m never getting laid” binder of building incident reports and complaint forms, then headed down the hallway with my tail between my legs. Speaking of tails, I hoped Marvin was protecting his. If Tania was still playing Cupid at my apartment, forcing our dogs to make love to each other, I might possibly have been having the worst day of anyone’s life. Except for maybe poor Marvin’s. “You can always just go knock on their door yourself,” Mr. Molever yelled out after me. What an idiot. The whole point of filing a noise complaint against your neighbor is so that they don’t know which person ratted them out. If I showed my identity to these girls, I’d practically be handing myself over on a silver platter. Up until this point they had been noisy without even trying. Could you imagine the racket these girls would cause if they found out the snitch lived directly below them?

APARTMENT LIFE

Dear Girls Above Me,

I apologize for the Chewbacca greeting in the parking lot, I was eating a banana.

Dear Girls Above Me,

Our building doesn’t have a ghost “trapped in the walls on Thursday and Friday.” It’s just street cleaning.

Dear Girls Above Me,

Sometimes when you’re having sex, I play you in Jenga. Right now I’m winning 3 games to 2.

Dear Girls Above Me,

“I wish my bad date could’ve been in dog years so it ended faster.” I’m so thankful your lease is in human years.

Dear Girls Above Me,

“So, I gave him two options, breakfast in bed or a blow job. Guess what he picked?” Well I didn’t smell burnt toast, so …

Dear Girls Above Me,

I changed my wireless Internet name to “JohnStamosCondo” in hopes that it might confuse and excite you. It did.