Mike is my neighbor. Mike gets drunk. Which are both cool things to be, to me. I like being neighborly. And I like getting drunk. It's great!
One second, I have to help my girlfriend clean out our elderly dog's ears. I always tell her that sticking the q-tip too deep can have devastating consequences. Like the time I was drunk and poked around in my possibly already infected ears with one-- then went deaf until, two months later, an Albanian lady flushed out what appeared to be the head of a q-tip covered in bile. We all do stupid shit when we're drunk. Especially when we're young.
This guy is old- late forties, looks like late fifties. But nothing paints the rotund, bloodshot, loud picture like the Chronicles of Mike-nia. So, here we go, in however many parts it ends up being: I give you, The Chronicles of Mike-nia.
VOLUME I - MY WYFFE AND I R HAVN PROBLMZ AND UR A SLUT (The most recent adventure, which I will steal directly from my very own facebook updates.
1)The upstairs neighbor and his friends, man. . . Some of the most uneducated pieces of shit I've ever been subjected to listening to through NOT-SO-THIN ceilings.
2) "Please leave a message after the beep..." *BEEP* "MIKE, you need to calm the fuck down. Oh, oh, I'm sorry. PLEASE calm the fuck down."
3) Oh man! Turns out his friend was our OTHER neighbor Jeremy. Watched his failed-art-career ass try to vault over our fence THROUGH a tree. Didn't really work out. Fell on his face, got up, couldn't operate his fence door for a minute but succeeded and slammed it, then puked allllll over his deck.
4)"I'M HAVIN' PROBLMZ WIFF MY WIFE AND UR TRYNA FUCK ME 2! MAN WTF. YOU FUCKN SLUT. FUCK J00!" The gist of what I heard when I walked in the door after getting home from work at 11:45. Makes sense now.
Our neighb. Jeremy used to make art. Now he whores himself out to online advertisements for various local companies. Boosts their google rating. Maybe I should talk to him about my blog, as no one reads this POS.
VOLUME II - IT'S A REAL CIGARETTE
It is a real cigarette and he's putting it out in his palm in front of all of my friends in our backyard.
After several- meaning probably twenty, talking over everyone who is already engaged in a real person's conversation- failed attempts at a trick where he licks his thumb-nail and presses a cig to the back of it to give the impression that it's floating behind his hand, he then shows how magical or manly he is by squashing one in his palm.
Everyone is either ignoring him or being really mean to him. Immune to both due to stunted social aptitude, he carries on, swaying and yelling until a friend(Kevin) suggests he turns his music down- we can hear it outdoors and it's getting late.
He leaves, turns the music off and passes out. No one feels oppressed. Everyone is happy again.
VOLUME III -THAT SONG AGAIN?!
THIS, forever.
And ever.
I thought my fifth grade karaoke was bad, but amidst wrestling with other very large older men, he makes me consider suicide by drunkenly wailing Steve Miller, Bad Company's "Feel Like Makin' Love," and Mclean's "American Pie," on a scratchy PA system (that he sometimes uses just to yell "FUUUUCK YOOOOU!"). At one in the morning, I pray to the gods that they end my life. Or his. Please take that infernal sing machine and your TV, that you leave on the LOUDEST POSSIBLE VOLUME ALL NIGHT, and bury yourself with them. Please, please, please. Die.
VOLUME IV-I Wish We Had Let Him
Mike invites us up to his apartment for his birthday. I don't want to go, but my girlfriend, being the sweetheart she is, says we have to. It's neighborly. She gets him a cake and everything.
She coaxes me off the couch, says she's going anyway. I grab my (stabbin')knife which I will fondle the entire night out of distrust for the man.
We reach the door and, already, he is screaming at someone. His door is ajar. We push it open and slowly ascend, each creaky step accenting the coming dread.
"Mike? Mike!" we both call out to him.
"WHAT THE FUCK? WHERE THE FUCK ARE YOU? YOU FUCK'N ASSHOLE! I'M ABOUT TO DO IT. I'M GONNA FUCKING DO IT. NO, YOU CAN'T. IT'S HAPPENING!"
When we get to the top of the steps, he greets us, his phone to his ear, looking all sorts of depressed- his eyes sag and his lungs waft whiskey from his mouth to our nostrils. I can't believe I am up here. I can't believe I am here to celebrate this man's birthday.
"You guys got here just in time. You have no idea. That was," he sniffles, "one of my 'friends.'" He uses air quotes, still grasping his cell. A mostly empty bottle of x-brand whiskey tilts, topless, against the inside of his sink.
Vain attempts to present the cake to this incredulous man end in me eating half of it. I am stuffing cake into my face with my hands while he almost cries in front of us about his sad, sad life. I begin to feel badly about myself as he excuses his dreary-eyed self. He goes into the bathroom, stays there for some time.
When Mike returns, he offers shots. No, there's not a lot of whiskey left, but we drink it all. All in his name. I stomach him, and three straight shots. My girlfriend declines a third.
"Let's take some more."
"Mike, you're out," I say, thinking yes let's not have anymore so I can leave soon.
"I've got this," he says, pawing at an unmarked glass bottle with one of those corks that connects with little metal bars drilled or punched into the side of the bottle.
Yes, I'd love to drink your mystery tonic. Yum.
We take several more shots and adjourn to his living room, where he is going to show us these super awesome previews of movies on Comcast. He keeps telling us what good friends we are for coming over, unlike the others which we assure him come over often enough.
Dave Matthews is playing on repeat in the living room. I don't mean the album or song is on repeat. I mean fourty-something seconds of a single song is on repeat. I don't realize this until there is an odd silence, Mike staring at us while swaying violently and asking us what we're doing.
"What do you mean, Mike?"
"Mike, are we going to watch those previews, that, you know, you want to show us?"
"Huh?!" He growls and leans back, lights a cigarette, and stares at us. His cat is in Kiara's lap, begging for attention. The Dave Matthew's song starts over.
(At this point in writing, I would link you to the song, but I am so unfamiliar with the band and so tired of listening to them, trying to figure out which song it was. I say fuck it.)
I tell Mike that Kiara has to wake up in the morning. Before I'm able to include that this means I am leaving shortly as well, Mike grumbles his way through the words, Good, Us, Bitch, Guys, Hangin', then stops "speaking" and stares at Kiara, his brow furrowed and his eyes deep and red. He sways, startled like a baby by gravity.
Feeling mega-uncomfortable, I grad a cigarette from Mike's soft pack Mavericks. Sorry, Kiara who has a respiratory thing, I need this right now. The room fills with smoke and silence as we sit there, the only noise Dave Matthews Psychotic Nightmare Loop.
Eventually:
"Mike."
"WHAT?! Whatryewdoin'? Huh?"
"Mike do you want to go to sleep?" I ask him this, thinking there's no way this man can hurt us. . . if he's asleep. I am no doubt groping the knife in my back pocket.
"Yeeuh. . . less go. C'mon."
"No. I'm not sleeping with you Mike, but I can help you get to your bed."
"Rrr, nah-man."
We've listened to the fourty-something-second loop about thirty times and it is definitely fucking time to go. I stand up, grab Kiara's hand and tell Mike Happy Birthday Mike, We Gotta Go, and walk out of his well furnished living room, down the stairs passed all the pictures of his previous, presumably happy life, out the door, through ours, and then Why did you make me go up there? kind of spills out of me.
"I'm so sorry. Now I know. I am never going up there ever again."
. . .
And much, much more!
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