42
by DNA Concept_Archive
In Brooklyn about eight years ago, my upstairs neighbors were some guy I didn't know named Sal, his roommate Otis, and eventually Sal's ex -- don't remember his name, so let's call him Mike. Mike had only been at the apartment for a few weeks when I heard him in a verbal argument upstairs, followed by him stomping down the stairs and slamming the door one night. Didn't think much of it.
Sometime after midnight he returns but doesn't have his keys and is buzzing repeatedly at the front door. It's summer, my bedroom is at the front of the house on the first floor, and so my windows are open and right next to the stoop. I can hear Mike's heavy breathing and cursing under his breath as he jabs at the buzzer, again and again. Sal comes down and tells him he can't stay here, "no way, you've been using again", keeps telling him to go away, etc.
Mike spends the entire night out in front of the house, yelling at Sal and kicking things. Everyone, up and down the block, calls the cops for hours and hours but nobody wants to confront him: the first time two cop cars and a passel of cops show up, they determine that he's let a crank-driven explosion of diarrhea fill his pants and cover the stoop, and the fact that he's demanding to be let back into the apartment to retrieve $5,000 worth of HIV medication doesn't make them want to get any closer. Mike figures out that the cops aren't going to do anything -- they repeatedly make him walk off and drive away, only to have him return in ten minutes and start throwing bricks and bottles at the house -- and eventually he starts taunting them. Not one of Brooklyn's finer precincts, and they keep telling him "dude, you are this close to getting arrested. This close."
This was right around the time of Patrick Dorismond; late-Giuliani-era cops would show up en masse and brimming with swagger at the smallest block party, and shot an unarmed black man seemingly every two weeks. Mike, a white HIV+ man covered in his own shit, is permitted to keep dozens of people awake for several hours because a phalanx of "brave heroes" look at him and think "eew". Even with an irate block full of Italians on the line with 911 all night. This is the only guy in New York who can't get arrested.
Mike agrees to climb into the back of an ambulance at around 7am. I go out to sweep the broken glass off the sidewalk and placate my bigoted busybody neighbors, and run into Otis. He's thrown his belongings into a suitcase and is moving out, which is a wise decision. I leave a detailed note for my roommates not to admit Mike to the building, which they somehow overlook: Mike comes back in the afternoon, they unwittingly let him in the front door, and he goes to find a locksmith to get him into the upstairs apartment. With no ID and no cash he persuades the locksmith's shop around the corner to drill out both of the locks on the front door and the lock on the upstairs apartment door -- only quick thinking by a neighbor lets us get a copy of the front door key -- and pays the locksmith with a check.
Mike has retreated into the building and the locktard is standing there next to my roommate, who is explaining the events of the previous night. The locksmith dolefully looks down at the check in his hand and says "this isn't going to clear, is it?"