One Friday night, we
went to our friend Art’s apartment to help him bid farewell to the place he has
called home for 26 years. The thing is,
we once lived in the same building for eleven years. We had actually moved in first and when
another apartment became vacant, we gave Art and our friend Sharon a shout and
they wound up taking it as roommates, so we all lived on the same top floor of
a building filled with middle-aged or elderly people. We were the youngest tenants. Together, we had weathered a major Los
Angeles earthquake that left several of our neighboring buildings
red-tagged. Ours still stood proud the
day after.
This year when Art
decided to move out, we were already on our second apartment since that
building and Sharon had relocated up north out of Los Angeles. Art was the only one left from the original
tenants who occupied the place when we first moved in. In effect, we were now the middle-aged
people. Everyone else was dead or
gone. The management was different, the
building was more run down, but the owner was the same. He was the one who took offense to one
sentence in an essay I wrote about apartment living in the Los Angeles Times in 2003 where I labeled him “an absentee landlord.” I actually wrote I liked living in the
apartment, but I guess he didn’t read that part.
And so it was that we
came to our old stomping grounds to help Art give it a fond farewell. We planned to take him to dinner to celebrate
both his birthday and his exit from the old place, and when we arrived, we
noticed that the entire building was surrounded with scaffolding. It was a mess with debris and tools and dust
everywhere. They were repainting the
building and putting in new windows, something that “absentee” owner promised a
long time ago and never got around to doing.
Someone else was moving in or out—it was difficult to tell—and the
workers had propped open the security door.
We rode the elevator to the third floor and walked into Art’s
apartment. He was standing in the living
room looking perplexed.
“This is weird,” he
said. “I took the last few boxes to my
new place and when I returned, someone had been in the apartment. They smoked a cigarette, opened all the
cupboards, and they left a pill bottle in the bathroom. I left the door unlocked because there’s
nothing left, but I wonder if they were already showing the place.”
“Well, don’t worry
about it,” my wife said. “You don’t live
here anymore.”
“Yeah,” he said a bit
wistful. We walked through the empty
rooms looking out the windows at the scaffolding with bits of plastic blowing
in the breeze. From his second bedroom I
could see the pool, which was dirty probably from the sandblasting and
painting.
“Twenty-six years,” we
all took turns saying. “Twenty-six
years.”
“Do you think one of
the painters climbed through a window to use the bathroom?” he asked.
“Don’t worry about it,”
we responded. “You don’t live here
anymore!”
We walked down the
hallway to the elevator. On the way, we
passed our old apartment. “I can’t
believe we used to live here,” my wife said.
After we had moved out
well over a decade ago, Art kept us up on building gossip. We also could read all about it in the
newspaper. Two or three guys moved in to
our old place, young twenty-somethings who did not seem to have steady, regular
employment or steady, regular hours. Art
started noticing strangers riding up the elevator. Sullen.
Not friendly. Rough around the
edges. They would go to our old door,
knock and mumble something and then be quickly admitted. One day, I was surfing the L.A. Times website and their crime
statistics and saw our old address listed as the site of an assault with a
deadly weapon, possession with intent to sell, burglary, and kidnapping. “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” I literally shouted to my
wife in the other room.
It seems those gents
who occupied the place after us were dealing out of the apartment. One evening, some gun-toting ruffians knocked
on the door and shoved their way in. Everyone
got proned out on the floor while the dudes ransacked the place threatening to
blast anyone who moved. The occupants
got tied up and left on the bathroom floor while the thieves fled with cash and
drugs. We wondered if the tight-ass owner
even painted the place or changed the locks before he rented it out again. (If he didn’t like the Times essay, he won’t like this one either.)
Once we were in the
elevator, Art told us he would meet us in the lobby as he wanted to drop off
his keys and garage door remote with the manager. Once out on the street, my wife and I looked
up at the building with all the scaffolding and construction mess, both of us
lost in memory. Since we had been gone,
there had been two major fires in different units, more drug dealers, and
rumors of ghosts in one particular apartment.
It was at that point that something distracted me. It was a guy with red shoes. Red tennis shoes, to be exact. It was weird because he looked to be middle
aged but he was wearing a high school student’s shoes, dark pants and a red
shirt. He looked like a punk but greying
at the temples. He definitely did not
seem to belong, yet he was walking all over the place outside the building,
first on one side of the street and then the other, crossing over to the grass
median and back. He did plant himself on
the next building’s front stoop, but he was there only momentarily before he
was on the move again.
Two guys came out of
our old building and went to the moving truck.
One looked us up and down and made me a little uncomfortable, so we
decided to wait for Art in the car. I
forgot about the red shoe guy. Later, at
the restaurant, Art told us he asked the manager if he had shown the apartment
already, but the manager said no, so Art told him that someone had been in the
apartment and that he should tell the painters not to go into the building to
use the facilities even if the apartment is vacant.
“YOU DON’T LIVE THERE
ANYMORE!” we pretty much shouted at him.
A few days later, my
wife talked to Art on the phone. He said
the manager called him to tell him there had
been someone in the apartment. He
did a check on the third floor and as he was walking down the long hallway to Art’s
former place, he saw a guy come out and duck into the stairwell. He followed him all the way down to the lobby
and out of the building. It was clear
the guy was not part of the work crew and also that he was not staying with
anyone in the building. The manager
followed him down the street snapping pictures and calling 911. The cops got him a block away.
Once he was handcuffed
and in the back seat of the patrol car, the cops told the manager that the guy
was on parole for robbery. He had
climbed the scaffolding and kicked in a screen on one of Art’s open windows
since the door was now locked. He had
been squatting in the apartment until he saw the manager and ran. In the pictures, which the manager sent to
Art, and Art forwarded to us, I immediately identified the guy in cuffs as the
red shoe intruder. Only, now he was
wearing the same style of tennis shoe but in black. Somewhere, maybe in the apartment, there were
hidden red shoes. Evidence, to be sure.
“Can you believe that?”
Art asked. “I wasn’t even out of the
building yet and someone was trying to squat in my apartment.”
“That’s so dangerous,”
my wife told him. “What if you had
walked in and he was there?”
“Good thing HE DOESN’T
LIVE THERE ANYMORE!” I shouted from my reading chair across the room.
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