I've always known that there were some crazy people in my apartment complex, but the majority of my days pass incident-free. Sometimes I think God likes to store things up and then spring them on me collectively at opportune times to make unrelated events seem correlated and therefore more significant.
Like seventeen years and four days ago, when I was on a middle school field trip to Boston and in order to bypass the huge line to get into the famous "Cheers" bar I sidled up to the doorman and asked in a faux-Texas accent whether he could let me and my friends cut the queue, seeing as how we had escaped from those horrible Waco Branch Davidians they been showin' on the news. And he let us. And the next day the compound burned to the ground. And I realized that even at age twelve I was a total dick and God already hated me.
Anyway, so today, I was thwarted in my simple attempt to do a small load of laundry by the collective crazy of my fellow apartment dwellers. Three of them, in fact.
1) The Gnome
The gnome is back. I may have mentioned before that there is a gnome who lives in, or under a bridge near, my building. I've only seen her once, and only in the building's basement laundry room, where I presume she can tunnel out from her underground lair in order to launder her soiled and frayed robes, harem pants, and pointy-toed cloth shoes.
Accordingly, I don't even remember so much what she looks like. But I'm guessing a standard file photo of Hayden Panettiere can serve as sufficient visual demonstration of her gnome-ish qualities.
So if the last several months have been totally devoid of gnome sightings, how do I know she is back?
Because when I walked into the laundry room today, there was a small, rusty-looking stepstool leaning against the machine. Who else but a gnome would be using a stepstool to assist in dropping clothes into a washing machine?
I was too terrified to stay in the room, even though there was still a free machine available. Besides, I hate the recently installed "upgraded" machines anyway, because they don't have a cold/normal option, forcing me to choose between inferior cycles.
Better to save up all my laundry and quarters and hit that coin-op laundry near my parents' house that is really just a front for a Salvadoran smuggling ring of some kind, where at least I get to listen to the fellow patrons talk melodiously about me behind my back because they think I don't understand.
2) The Teen Music Fan
On the elevator ride up from the laundry room, a pale skinny hand clutched at the doors as they were closing. I would have thought it was the gnome chasing after me were it not regular-sized.
It turned out to belong to a college-age kid, maybe 18 or 19 years old. He had an iPod strapped around his neck, the earbuds buried in some floppy, appropriately unwashed looking hair. He wore scuffed gray New Balances, a cool looking retro shirt, and shredded jeans.
So why was this relatively normal kid blaring from his iPod a song I recognized as by Miley Cyrus? I could hear a wasted hooker-with-emphysema voice screeching about the next STD she is planning to contract even with the headphones on!
Am I really getting that old, or are "the kids these days" totally beyond insane? Who is this Justin Bieber character, and who is the record executive responsible for slipping him prolific doses of Human Growth-stunting Hormone? Why is he singing a song about "Eenie meenie miney mo" on broadcast radio? Why is Justin Timberlake, never a scholar of lyrical sense to begin with, now singing about “Carryout”? Is Rihanna an epileptic?
Why has the FCC not stepped in to ban this garbage from the nation's airwaves? I'd rather hear the continuous, logical beeping of the Emergency Broadcast System than try to decipher these lyrics.
3) The Wicked Witch of Northwest DC
So because I couldn't stop staring in disbelief at the kid in the elevator, or perhaps because I was beginning to move ever so slightly along to the audible beat (that Miley be a dirty festering skank but her Swedish pop impresario producers sure write a catchy tune), I decided to get off the elevator a floor early with my laundry bag.
Big mistake.
There is an widely-known crazy lady in my apartment, and she was there. For the sake of maintaining her privacy and dignity I'll just call her "Batshit Brenda the Septuagenarian Cackling Cat Lady who still wears miniskirts in A Concerted Effort to Kill Us All with her Rand McNally Atlas-worthy collection of spider veins." Brenda for short.
Doesn't every urban apartment complex have a Brenda? You know, a holdover from the 'Nam years who still dwells in her rent-controlled little hovel and emerges every once in a while to terrorize the other tenants with awkwardness?
I made the rookie mistake of talking to her once, and now she knows me. She never remembers my name, but she knows me. In fact, Brenda's probably given me an equally insightful nickname like "the Crazy Oriental Tall Girl who dresses like her welfare check got lost in the mail.”
Anyway, every time I see her in the halls or elevators, Brenda likes to complain about how expensive things are these days and what my rent is. She’s very consistent and persistent, like a one-woman Gallup Poll. Every time she asks, I give the same pat answer, that “I’m not in charge of finances in my household.” That seems to satisfy her.
But today, I was already in a little shock from my run-in with the music fan and the evidence of gnome activity. So today she started whining again about money. Went on and on and on. When she finally got to her customary question, I decided on a whim to break the cycle. I decided to answer her in Chinese. Just plain pretend I no longer speak the Engrish.
So I told her my rent in Chinese, then asked what hers was, and then looked at her politely as though nothing out of the ordinary had occurred.
What happened next was straight out of a Coen Brothers movie. Brenda didn’t skip a beat or change her expression at all. She started speaking German! Or at least what was definitely a Germanic sounding language. Too bad I don’t understand German, because I never did get the answer to what her rent is.
She hacked and hawed for about two more minutes, and then.
Literally.
Said, “Auf Wiedersehen.”
Like she was Heidi Klum and I was a Project Runway hopeful. Or she was Arnold Schwarzenegger and well, just had never learned to speak English in the first place.
WHAT?
So there are two potential explanations for this social interaction. First, that she really is that crazy and didn’t notice that we had gone all “It’s a Small World” and had a multi-lingual conversation. Which would mean that I’m just as big a dick now as I was seventeen years ago.
Second, and more troubling? That I was just one-upped, and rather admirably so, by the apartment crazy lady.
Either way, I ran back up the stairwell, locked and bolted my door, and turned up my TV really really loud. Help! I'm afraid!
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