My downstairs neighbor Conrad was almost comically bad. Like hack, over-the-top, sitcom character bad. Like I only tell people the small stuff, because the rest is insane, bad.
I wasn't sure how to handle living upstairs from Conrad. I'm still wondering.
Let me tell you the full story:
I moved into my place following a breakup. The first few months were rough, sleeping on an air mattress, surrounded by boxes and my two cats. Cats are air mattresses' natural enemies, by the way, so I’m sure I didn’t bring my sunniest self to our first meet. But Conrad eclipsed that.
The welcome wagon was secondhand smoke, top-of-the-lungs, outdoor voice on phone conversations and action movies at top volume. And yes, I rap-tap-tapped aplenty to little avail. When he finally did answer one night out of dozens, I was rather taken aback.
The overture to enthusiastic overnight guests notwithstanding, I hadn’t encountered someone mid-blackout since I looked in the mirror one gin-soaked night a good 15 years before. Conrad was at least a decade older than me and in his mid 40s at the time.
Weeks later, the same max-volume action adventures were on the TV. I hated to do it, but since he was (presumably) passed out, I left a note. I came home to find he left a note of his own and somewhat of a peace offering. His note read something along the lines of: “Sorry about the noise. Sunday and Monday are my weekend and I spend them getting fucked up.” He left me a pack of earplugs.
Not surprisingly, the apartment that shared a wall with him was the most frequently vacant. He and I were divided by his ceiling and my hardwood floor. I could only imagine how disrupting he would’ve been through walls. I commiserated with one longtime neighbor who managed to stick it out a bit longer before he too moved.
Conrad and I never got friendly, but would chat in passing. We were both rockers, we were both originally from Southern California, and we were both, to varying degrees, estranged from our families. We were both bachelors, but Conrad‘s bachelorhood was more steadfast. He never dated or had friends over. He, apart from loud phone conversations, was solitary.
I’m a loner by nature, but would and will still go out regularly. I have a small but tight group of friends. I dated rather promiscuously between LTRs.
Seasons passed. So did years and neighbors. But there was a sad constancy to my neighbor. He wore the years physically, but you couldn’t tell from the rest of his life. He kept the same routines, and was never gone overnight, to say nothing of traveling. There were little things that I learned from him that were troubling. An online school scam had wiped out much of his savings. A “girlfriend” offshore lost interest after his job evaporated.
The slide continued. Never exactly a shift. He went from bachelor to a full-blown shut-in. He no longer used the building's laundry. He cleaned his increasingly battered and eccentric clothes in his bathtub and dried them on an ancient clothesline. Even that became rare.
An odor became began to seep from his apartment when he would open his door and linger long after. He had a startled quality, and shaved his head instead of combing his hair. And the noise resumed with a vengeance. He took to slamming doors, as if he’d just been served divorce papers every time he went in or out. The movies played fast, furious and loud.
Desperate, I ordered a “white noise” machine. Initially it seemed to work, but then he took to watching what sounded like movies with long, mumbling and rambling dialogue. Kind of my jam, but not in the wee hours. I knocked, then notes, then I finally ran into him.
“My TV is broke! I don’t know what you’re hearing!” That night I wondered who in the building had taken up such odd viewing, and so loud! I turned my white noise machine up to no avail. Whoever it was had started watching Poltergeist over and over again.
Apparently, my white noise machine was haunted.
Unemployed, and having no resources, he was eventually forced to move. Moving is always stressful. Not surprisingly, Conrad managed to share the wealth. His move was smeared across an entire entire month, disgorging the contents of his apartment into the shared space.
Our apartments are a mirror of each other; small, perhaps 600 ft.². I needed to stretch out and had gotten a separate art studio years before. How had he managed to fit so much stuff in a small place?
The spillover ran onto the curb. Broken consoles, '80s particleboard furniture, badly soiled and food-stained chairs, two litter boxes, and a very old bag of Johnny Cat. I hadn’t known Conrad to have a cat in all that time.
There were moving boxes of cassette tapes, several unopened, laser discs players, more chairs. (You’d think he was hosting AA meetings!) His kitchen table was abandoned by one would-be taker after it lost structural integrity upon contact.
For the first time he had visitors. Middle-aged, stoical, resigned and masked. Perhaps family? I never found out. They worked from afternoon to evening excavating under Conrad‘s watchful eye.
One morning a knock came at my door.
There was Conrad, completely winded and sweating from a flight of stairs. He had in one hand a pair of tan jeans, slim cut, with an odd sizing like 33/37 or something. In his other hand he had a massive pair of primary red Dickies. Now I’m no Beau Brummel, But these were very not me.
“Yeah…” I was delicate. “ Thanks, but they’re a little small/long for me.”
“What about your son?” he asked optimistically.
“He’s 11, and barely 5 feet tall."
“ Oh yeah, what about these?” motioning to the Dickies.
Rerun from What’s Happenin’ would’ve been insulted by the prodigious sizing.
“Nice, thanks, but red isn’t my color.”
The final day of his month-long move, I encountered him on the stairs.
“If I was a little loud sometimes…” he began “…but I heard you up there getting busy!”
And there it was again, bookending our time together. I wished him well and headed out for a ride. I returned to find him and his companions loading the possessions he intended to keep on a truck. There was a mattress whose description I won’t undertake.
Conrad wasn’t my friend. He was my neighbor and was the worst I’ve ever had. Beyond his indoor hibachi, I worried he would pass out while smoking and burn us out of our homes.
I never took steps against him. Maybe that was irresponsible of me. But despite how near-unlivable-with he was, I couldn’t bring myself to cause someone to lose their housing.
But I wonder if I failed him in some way too. Sure, I was a “good neighbor“ as far as that goes. But seeing the conditions in which he came to live, witnessing the hoarding and the filth, I wondered if he was safe or capable of living alone. At what point do you call adult protective services? Having witnessed how society fails its most vulnerable I can’t imagine any department or division being of actual help.
The day after he left, the landlord hauled Conrad's curb offerings off to the dump. They spent the next month, stripping his apartment to the studs. Their hammers, crowbars and power tools had a rhythm and method to their madness, and they promptly wrapped every day at five. It was serene by comparison.
Fred Noland is an illustrator, artist, and author living in Oakland.
