Sunday, February 11, 2007

The Neighbor Upstairs, Continued

Friday night, we put the boy to bed and watched Spike Lee's Summer of Sam. This turned out to be an unfortunate choice when the neighbor upstairs began his characteristic thumping and bumping shortly before midnight. "What the hell is he doing up there?" we asked each other. We ignored it as best we could and continued with our movie about a paranoid New York and serial killer David Berkowitz. Turning off the lights and going to bed hours later, he was still bouncing around.
It was about 9 in the morning when we all awoke to the intensified thumping and bumping combined with slapping sounds and his moaning; "Oh baby... oh Jesus... oh yes... oh yes... oh fuck me... oh Jesus... fuck me... motherfucker, fuck me..." Then came the off-key singing; "Jesus is our sa-vi-our." Then came the screaming; "OW OW OW OW!" All of this punctuated by the mysterious slappings.
This time the apartment complex fellow wasn't smiling or reassuring when he finally knocked on our door. He could hear it from outside.
When the police finally came, the Neighbor Upstairs explained that he had been bitten by a black widow spider and that he had run out of pain killers two days ago. He showed them where a big hunk of flesh was missing from the back of his neck and they noticed no other marks on him, so that was that. An interesting item about his spider bite is that it won't heal - he's had it for at least six months.
The Neighbor Upstairs currently suffers his spider bite and drug withdrawal in silence. But still, just hours after the police left, I found a bloody bandage at the opening of our breezeway that I know came from his wound.

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