De Ce Monde Secret de l’ Amelie Americaine

The front door of apartment 5A slammed repeatedly, every ten minutes, for the second weekend in a row. How one person, who is now living alone, (since her brother physically threw out the boyfriend who broke her arm), could enter and exit the apartment that many times dumbfounded me. She was of course making excuses to rattle our walls, everytime the heavy metal door hit the doorjam with an unforgiving thud. Once inside, there were more sounds of feet stomping on the floor, breaking bottles, and rants from a voice so irritating that it causes my neck muscles to tense and spasm as it reverberated throughout the building. The building is silent, except for the sounds of one spoiled maniac, hell bent on making the rest of us feel her pain. Another glorious weekend spent with The Drunk Witch…

I was quietly watching an interview of Chris Rock on the Charlie Rose Show, on the local PBS station. He said, (and I’m paraphrasing), that when you are starting out in your career, you get excited about traveling for work, because the hotel you’re staying at is nicer than your apartment in Brooklyn. You work as much as you can, because everything is about “getting out of Brooklyn.” I laughed and looked at my broken tiles, uneven floor, and the slight crack in the wall above my bedroom closet. My apartment is definitely not as nice as the Hilton, it has more of an old world charm of a bygone era. Finally someone who spoke with some honesty about the flip side of living in a dense urban area.

I don’t romanticize the ghetto either, not like I did when I was twelve and dreamed of living in a large loft in SOHO, where I could hang out with my rock star boyfriend. Brooklyn, is what it is…grey, ugly, at times violent, and harsh. There is no pseudo-intellectual, generation-x, downwardly mobile yuppie, left-leaning liberal explanation to justify the behavior of the Drunk Witch, not even gentrification. She has manipulated, threatened and lied to just about everyone who has tried to either help her or confront the situation, all under the guise of being unfairly persecuted by everyone else in the building.

She’s so bad now, that she has started threatening other tenants. Rosa, a sweet, Puerto Rican woman who lives with her family on the first floor, will often stick her head out the front window of her apartment to talk to other neighbors on the street. The Drunk Witch told Rosa that she was going “Set the niggers on her and her family.” Never mind that, as I have written in previous posts that the Drunk Witch is white, and I have doubts that she has any friends, let alone, someone who would hurt or maim her enemies in the building. But I also have an aching suspicion that my landlord has not been motivated to legally act until newer tenants like myself, generally white, more affluent, who also pay a larger portion of the rent roll, started to complain. And in the lull of his inaction, the Drunk Witch has become very confident of that she will never actually be held responsible for her’s.

At this time, I did not know what has set the Drunk Witch off on this latest rampage. These episodes have become more intense, unpredictable and prevalent. I had simply resigned myself to enduring this last leg of the race, as my landlord had given her three months to pack up and leave the building.  But the end of February had come and gone, and she was still there.

There were the usual ploys and last ditch efforts to make herself out to be the victim. She even got her mother into the act, when she had her beg our landlord to not kick her daughter out, because she was just an eighty year old woman, who uses a cane, who can’t handle Drunk Witch’s outbursts, while the Drunk Witch literally laid herself across the hood of his car, refusing to let him leave. Her own mother doesn’t want her.

She carried on for most of the day, and the police had been called to the building three times, before there was a loud, violent banging on my door. Drunk Witch, as usual had assume, I was the one who called. She feel especially persecuted by young, single women in the building and will target them for verbal slaps. I left the door unanswered and turned the TV up, as I heard her daughter in law beg her to come away from the door.

Later, my landlord confessed, he had given her yet another chance, but that starting tomorrow, he was going to his lawyer’s again and “the gloves were coming off.” Yeah, okay, whatever you say. Maybe I’m just more suited for the Upper East Side.

Listen to this podcast

Post a comment

Name: (required)

Email Address: (will not be published) (required)

URL:

Comments: