Dear Girls Above Me: Inspired by a True Story (6 page)

Dear Girls Above Me,

“The cleaning lady canceled! Okay, go to YouTube and look for a video on how to use a washing machine.” Remember
lots
of bleach.

Dear Girls Above Me,

I know you’re going crazy but stop Googling “someone who kills birds, Los Angeles.” Try replacing the battery in your smoke alarm.

Dear Girls Above Me,

“We still have no electricity! Wow, the wind really fucked us last night.” Is “the wind” code for the guy with the French accent?

CHAPTER SIX

Most people talk themselves into doing something gutsy. I much prefer talking myself
out
of doing something gutsy. Who needs gutsy? To me, gutsy is ordering double toasted at Quiznos. Unfortunately, before I was able to talk myself out of it, I found myself standing in front of the girls’ front door. I could hear muffled “Valley girl” conversations on the other side, so they were home. All I had to do was knock on their door and politely ask them to never speak again, and I could finally get enough peace and quiet to get my life back in order. But why was I so afraid? I’m sure a therapist would have told me it comes from an incident in my childhood when my family neglected me. Most likely this fear comes from the time I took part in a local jump-rope competition at my middle school. Neither my parents nor my sisters showed up to watch me take home the gold … jump rope. I remember looking out into the crowd during my awe-inspiring grand finale, and there were the cliché empty seats where my family was supposed to be. To be fair, there were about forty empty seats. In fact, there were only two people sitting
down, and they were both the grandparents of the student in charge of holding the stopwatch. Regardless, I prefer to blame most of my unique and challenging problems on this particular incident.

Intimacy issues … The jump rope competition.

Fear of rabbits … The jump rope competition.

Attention deficit disorder … The jump rope competition.

Annoying way of phrasing words … The jump rope competish.

Motion sickness … The jump rope competition.

Inability to walk in a straight line (even while I’m sober) … The jump rope competition.

“Come on, Charlie. Be strong.” Yes, I whispered those words out loud to myself. I needed some extra motivation to actually go through with knocking, so why not act like a crazy person? As I slowly got closer and closer, roars of laughter from what sounded like three hundred females echoed through their door. I was petrified. I’m not going to lie, I almost turned back. But since I had already accepted that in my lifetime I would never reach the summit (or the base camp, for that matter) of Mount Kilimanjaro, this would be my version of a treacherous trek.

So, I went for it. I raised my fist, which was conveniently still clenched from my previous encounter with the landlord, and I pounded on the door. Well, I pretended to pound. In reality I timidly knocked in the pathetic hope that they wouldn’t hear it and I
could proudly walk back to my apartment, all while telling myself, “At least you tried, killer.” But then suddenly, the door opened before I could walk away. I froze. A young twentysomething girl stood in front of me, but she wasn’t one of the girls above me. She looked me up and down and couldn’t have hidden her disappointment even if she tried. Which she didn’t. “If I’d looked through the peephole before answering, I never would’ve opened the door,” she said. The jump rope competish all over again. “Ugh, we’re totally not interested in changing religions.”

“Okay. Good to know,” I said, having no clue what she was talking about.

“That’s why you’re here, right?” She stared at Mr. Molever’s binder, clearly mistaking it for some kind of religious recruiting book. “You want to convert us to whatevs your religion is.”

“No. I’m just a guy with a beard.” Thankfully I wasn’t wearing a black tie, otherwise things could’ve gotten really awkward. “Actually, I’m the neighbor who lives below.”

“Oh, okay … It’s just … your beard. It really threw me off.” I could hear my mother saying, “See!” From her makeup and platinum-blond hair, I stereotyped her as a friend of Cathy and Claire. She was pretty enough, in an amateur-porn-star sort of way; like “I’ll make a sex tape and just conveniently leave it around and when someone finds it I’ll act like I’m outraged but really I’ll be flattered.” You know the type. This is not a girl you bring home to mom, unless you want to send mom into severe emotional trauma. Either her lips had been recently stung by an entire beehive, or she had made friends with a Beverly Hills doctor who had enormous plans for her, and even bigger plans for her prodigious mouth. Just then, from the other room, I heard a familiar voice call out, “Bridget, is someone at the door?”

A harem suddenly gathered around Bridget to see what the
commotion was all about. They studied me as if I were a chimpanzee who had just awakened from an unsuccessful scientific experiment. Silent farts and dog whistles are heard in this kind of awkward silence. Cathy and Claire were there, but I could tell by their unsettling faces that they didn’t recognize me as someone who lived in the building.

“Umm, hi. I’m your downstairs neighbor,” I said in a voice that a jerk liar might describe as a tremble. All of the girls let out an impressively timed group sigh.

“Oh my God, come in! Come in!” they said at the same high-frequency pitch. I immediately tried to explain my reason for stopping by, but no one was letting me get a word in. Eight girls guided me into the apartment like an octopus’s tentacles luring its prey. There was nowhere for me to go except deeper and deeper into their cave.

Due to the abundance of females, there was a moment where I wondered whether the girls above me were involved in some sort of cult. But from my understanding, cults mostly consisted of people who don’t get around to showering very much and who wear one-piece clothing accompanied by all-black Velcro shoes. The prerequisites for this particular cult would have been: at least a C-cup, modest IQ, Christian Louboutin heels, and memorizing the Bible. And by “Bible” I of course mean
Fifty Shades of Grey
.

As I walked in, I realized that their apartment had the same exact layout as mine. I had just figured that the main difference would be
everything else
. In retrospect I’m not sure what I was expecting. Actually, I’m exactly sure what I was expecting. Given the wide range of conversations I was able to overhear, I thought there’d be an Edward Cullen shrine between the kitchen and living room. Maybe some tiny wall space reserved for Team Jacob. (That Claire is a real bandwagon
jumper and her “team” allegiances tend to shift just as frequently as Bella’s.) But there was no
Twilight
memorabilia. I assumed that no matter where you looked, you’d see pink—pink carpet, pink pillows, pink toaster, pink Brita water filter—and I even assumed they’d be listening to the artist Pink. But again, their color choices were normal, dare I say even pleasant. I assumed that I must have interrupted one of their many FMK (F@#k, Marry, Kill) hypothetical conversations. That imaginary game was always a pleasure to hear at four in the morning, especially when you take into account how each scenario always managed to end with their choosing “f@#k” for
all three people
. I’m not kidding. Even though it’s a theoretical game, impossible to play wrong, they’d manage to play wrong. Every. Time. Always. But alas, no such conversation was taking place. Normal-looking apartment, no
Twilight
shrine, and no FMK game being played incorrectly. That’s when I realized something.…

The girls above me behave differently behind closed doors, in their own personal space, than they do in front of other people in their own personal living room. Just when I thought I had them figured out, a curveball. Their little social inconsistencies were twisting my brain like a pretzel. Who were they? In a matter of moments, I went from annoyed to intrigued.

As I was trying to put this puzzle together, the girls ushered me onto what I’d once overheard them call their “gossip couch.” Then they offered me a fancy kind of wine called “Pinot Grigio,” which I politely declined. “So, what’s your name?” Claire asked.

“My name? Oh, it’s Charlie.”

In unison, all of the girls let out an adoring “aww.” How was their timing so impeccable? They weren’t just finishing each other’s sentences, they
were
each other’s sentences. Maybe my first instinct was right; this
was
a cult.

“Well, I’m Cathy, and this is Claire. We both live here. And these are some of our sorority sisters from our college days.” All I could think about was how far Darwinism would be set back if these girls were all actually blood related. I also found it strange that after being out of college for a couple of years adults would still refer to their friends as “sisters.” I don’t go around telling people that the guy who makes my coffee every morning at Starbucks is my brother. And I guarantee that Alejandro and I have a much tighter bond than these girls could ever have.

Over the course of the next few minutes I was catching glimpses of the girls I’d been overhearing every night. For example, hints of their vocal fry (a way of talking in the lowest vocal register, making the words sound like a creaky vibration; think Kardashian-speak). As well as the unintended “ah” after a word. Such as “Thank you-ah.” Or “Nooo-ah.” This way of talking would sneak its way into the flow of the conversation like Anthony Hopkins’s British accent whenever he plays an American. Also, at one point, Claire wondered if some businesses were closed on 4/20. There were the girls I knew. They popped out from time to time.

I became so enamored that I forgot to even mention what I was doing there in the first place. It was evident that they just assumed I was a new neighbor introducing myself to the tenants. My God, do people actually do that? Sounds exhausting. Anyway, I was debating bringing up the noise complaint when one of their “sisters” looked over at Claire and said, “You think Charlie would wanna play?” I was just hoping it wasn’t another round of FMK, or in their case, FFF.

“Oh my God, do you want to play the texting game with us?” Claire blurted out.

“Umm, I’m not familiar with that game,” I regrettably said out loud.

They began explaining it to me, as if I were five years old. The idea was one of them would come up with a random text message for me to send out. It could really be anything, but their example to me was, “Ugh, I want a baby!” I would then start scrolling through my cell phone contacts, until someone yelled
“stop.”
I would then have to send that text message to whomever I landed on. The girls admitted to me they had been routinely playing this game since college and that “It’s literally the best game since Alex Trebek invented
Wheel of Fortune!
” I could think of at least fifty games off the top of my head that were better than this one. Like
Jeopardy!
, for example. But if there’s anything I learned from growing up with three sisters, it’s that you never argue with a pack of girls. With one girl, you might win an argument every so often, but you shouldn’t expect favorable results. With two girls, chances are very slim. Only a few men have ever pulled that off. With three girls, forget about it. Zero chance. I don’t care how slick or good-looking you are, no man has pulled off a dispute against three or more women. No matter what, the women are right.

Cathy and Claire begged me to play. Perhaps I said yes because I was severely outnumbered, but before I knew it, my cell phone was out. I also realized another problem that might occur: The more I bonded with these two, the harder it would become to discuss the noise issue.

“Okay, here’s your text message. Are you ready?” Claire asked.

I thought about quickly deleting a few numbers from my contacts list, but I didn’t want to get penalized before I even started. So I anxiously nodded.

“You have to text … ‘I’m stuck on the toilet; can you bring me some toilet paper?’ ” All the girls erupted in giddy laughter. If they
thought I was going to send that text message to any of the people in my contact list, they were bat-shit crazy.

“I can’t send that out. I have many colleagues’ numbers in my phone,” I informed them.

“Colleagues? What are you, friends with my dad or something?” I did not believe I was friends with their dad. Also, it’s hard to have colleagues when you’re unemployed, but I was grasping at straws.

“You have to send the text! That’s the game!” The game? That’s not a game. Pictionary, Taboo, Scrabble, Words with Friends—these are games. But I knew I wasn’t going anywhere until I sent out that text message. So, I began scrolling through my contacts. The girls cheered and clapped as if I were doing something of much more importance. Oddly enough, I got a bit of an adrenaline rush from the anticipation of who I was going to land on. Please don’t be my cable guy, please don’t be my cable guy.

“And … 
stop
!” Cathy yelled out. I lifted my thumb off of my BlackBerry and prayed for a landline or any other non-textable number. I looked down.

“Aunt Nancy,” I said out loud. By the reactions I got from the girls, Aunt Nancy seemed to be quite a good pull. I was dreading having to send her a text about needing some toilet paper. I definitely didn’t have a “poo-talking relationship” with my aunt. Plus, she lives almost two thousand miles away in Arkansas, and knowing her, she would probably do everything in her power to get me some toilet paper. But without putting any more thought into it, I typed out the sentence and pressed
SEND
. A couple of the girls gallivanted their way over to me, giving me multiple high fives. Bridget even wrapped her arms around me like a boa constrictor, not giving me the opportunity to breathe. Is this what it’s like to be a girl? I wondered. When
I’m with my guy friends, we pretty much stay in our own quadrants and only communicate with one another through inaudible grunts. I was happy “the guys” couldn’t see me now.