Smokes-A-Lot

There are two types of senior citizens in this world. The first kind make you believe that life truly is a beautiful journey with trials and tribulations that only add grace and understanding to one’s soul. The other kind, however, make you want to revoke driving privileges from everybody over 55 and go Brave New World style creating old folks homes like mad to throw them all in there with nothing to do but watch reruns of Matlock and Murder She Wrote and eat checkers. I distinguish this difference easily: the elderly vs. old people.

The latter lives beneath me in my apartment complex. I call her Smokes-A-Lot, and she’s a nasty, bitter, hateful old woman. Sometimes I feel sorry for her that she just sits in her apartment all day watching TV and getting an occasional visitor (I’m assuming family member), but most of the time I loathe her for the fact that the four packs of hard smokes she wheezes through each day ends up creeping its way up through my floors and vents and fills my entire apartment with her second hand smoke – and she seems incapable of purchasing an Ionic Breeze despite the multiple Sharper Image catalogs I’ve left on her doorstep with the page earmark and item circled in thick, red sharpie. Checkers for her, I tell you. Anyway, she hates me. And I don’t think it’s because of the Sharper Image catalogs – she couldn’t possibly know those are from me.

I decided that she’s an ‘old person’ almost immediately after I moved into my complex. So here’s the back-story: Where I live looks like a row of super big houses, but each building is actually four apartments: two upstairs, two downstairs. I got a great deal on my place because at the time the owners were renovating each apartment and making them SUPER nice, but our building they couldn’t do yet because Smokes-A-Lot and the old dude next to her have lived there for like 10+ years and aren’t going anywhere any time soon. So I asked the landlords if I could move in upstairs at the pre-fixed-up rate, and they and gave me leave to do whatever I wanted to the place since they were just going to gut it after I moved out anyway. One day pretty soon after I had moved in I was hanging pictures at like 3 or 4 in the afternoon. I was on my 4th picture and as I was hammering the nail into the wall I hear banging coming from below. She actually started banging on my ceiling because I was hanging pictures! It’s not like each nail took me 19 tries to get in the wall far enough either, I’m talking two, maybe three taps from the hammer and I was good. This warrants angry banging on the damn ceiling?! Freaking old people.

Anyway, she does little nasty things all the time just to remind me that she sucks. She doesn’t own a car, and yet if I ever happen to park in the space labeled A (which is one space away from my D, mind you) she’ll leave a note on my car telling me that’s her parking space and move my car. If I leave a trash bag on my balcony to take out to the dumpster later she’ll move it right in front of my back door so that I trip on it leaving for work in the morning – sometimes she’ll even leave her trash on the steps up to my apartment in hopes I don’t notice that it’s not mine and take it for her. Sometimes I’m nice and I do, but most of the time I give her a taste of her own medicine and put it right back in front of her door. Now, readers, don’t get all bent out of shape and think that I’m being mean to Smokes-A-Lot. I’ve seen that bitch run after her little yappy ankle-biter of a dog when it gets out, and other than chronic emphysema she’s got nothing wrong with her under that ratty-ass old housecoat.

My friend Blake used to have a Smoke-A-Lot living under him, too, but she wasn’t bitchy. She was just kind of stalker-ish and would somehow know exactly when he got home every day and be waiting for him to walk up the steps so she could talk to him. That’s a way better Smokes-A-Lot than mine. Anyway, the point is that there’s a Smokes-A-Lot in every apartment complex, and I promise, nay, guarantee a good stories if you can find yours. I’ll keep you posted.