Wednesday, July 12, 2017

GREEK FORTRESS

I have a lot going on right now.  I live with awful roommates.  I’m always trying to not be home so I don’t have to see one of the pterodactyls.  That’s what it’s come to.  I’ve assigned a nickname of an ugly prehistoric bird to the people that I share an apartment with.  I live in an abundantly-tiled Greek house that resembles a fortress that begins with a nose-bleed angled, city code-defying cement staircase that leads up to the main floor.  The first floor is half in the ground.  They call that “garden level” in New York, which was probably invented by real estate agents, because all feasible square footage is rented out in this city.  In other states, what towns call a cellar, in New York is a shitty basement apartment.  

The landlord of said dwelling lives upstairs.  He is a plump, talkative Greek man who speaks as if he has a swollen tongue that’s gotten pinned while wrestling with the rest of his mouth to spit out the English language.   After he has spoken in his long-winded, overly self-indulgent manner in extreme broken English for what seems like an eternity, I often say, “what?!” 

I cannot begin to express the violence I feel for all of these people.  Because of this, I realize I do need to work on myself some, while simultaneously feel completely validated in imagining their untimely, somewhat horrific demise.

Yesterday I heard a knock at the door roughly around 5:30PM.   I had a sneaking suspicion Aristotle Onasis was on the other side of the door waiting to proclaim his case for bothering me in grunts that resemble communication.  Avoidance doesn’t really work with this fisherman.  After several tries at knocking with no answer, he walked back down the hallway towards the foyer, opened the front door to the house – a grown man mind you – reached his arm outside and rang the buzzer to my apartment.  The shrill, earsplitting decibels of the buzzer could wake up an entire submarine regimen.  He leaned on the buzzer too, to be extra annoying.  How quaint.  I still ignore it.  After the fourth or fifth time, I begin to reach exasperation, I virulently open the door to ask him what he wants.  I yell at him stating that I’m not really dressed and what the hell is so important (clearly he doesn’t get the hint that nobody wants to talk to him).  Even his wife sleeps in Flushing.  

First he asks if we have a washing machine in the house, which is just “THIS IS WHAT YOU WERE RINGING THE DOORBELL LIKE A FUCKING PSYCHO FOR ???????  REALLY!!??!!”  First of all, the pterodactyls can’t afford soap or paper towels, so it’s funny to me that he would even think that they bought an appliance.  Then he says he’s bringing the ladder for one of the roommates (the one I choose to call the Macedonian whore – she’s in a different blog).  I proceed to just yell at him, telling him to leave it in the hallway because I’m in my pajamas and then shut the door.

Lack of understanding American social moors or boundaries might be what he hides behind as a disguise to get people to interact with him.  That aside, describing him as wildly inappropriate doesn’t seem to stress enough what he is.  He tells the neighbors I’m his girlfriend.   He makes offers of taking me to Greece.  One time he and his family had come back from a wedding (this was before his wife retired to another part of the borough).  It was late.  The weather was nice, so I was sitting outside, smoking.  Most likely he spotted me from his balcony about, then rushed downstairs to bother me.  He was in a robe and his rotund, watermelon-like stomach was sticking out.  He made small talk and then quickly proceeded to show off his construction chops by showing me pictures on his phone of the Athens condo that he built out.  I may have been indulging him because the rent was late, I can’t remember looking back.  I am a comedian after all, I can’t really just walk away when people are being ludicrous).  But also I had had some wine and it was kind of entertaining.  In hindsight, I’m questioning why I was so polite toward Baklava.  Sometimes you have to be gracious in the face of others’ rudeness.  He has invited me to go live with him in Greece on more than one occasion.  He’s so lucky I don’t have a gun.  It’s just so wrong that I can’t even make it clever. 

I did get him back though.  He asked me how old I thought he was once, and I said seventy.  It’s not clear exactly how old he is, but he’s arrogant, so in his mind he’s still in his fifties, and by his reaction it’s clear I was way off (but not by much I suspect).  A hundred bucks says he’s sixty-nine.