Nutty Neighbors: Pride Goeth Before a Fall

My Sunday morning ritual is simple. I get up at around 8 a.m. and pick up the Sunday edition of the Los Angeles Times outside my apartment door. I sit down on the couch for an hour and watch the Sunday morning news shows (This Week with George Stephanopoulos, for example) while reading as much of the paper as I find interesting.

This morning, however, there was a new wrinkle. I opened the door to the apartment and discovered a young woman sleeping in the hallway. She was wearing what would likely pass for a party dress and she had on a pair of heels. She’d obviously been out having some fun on Saturday night and had managed to make it back to her apartment. That was as far as she got, though. Lying on the floor, phone in hand, she periodically would pound—loudly, I might add—on the (metal) door to the apartment next door. She did have a slight scent of alcohol about her, but I don’t know how long she’d been drinking or how long it had been since she had stopped. She looked asleep, not dead, when I looked at her, so I didn’t immediately call the security patrol for our apartment complex. I didn’t recognize her as the current female resident of the apartment since there have been so many over the years. It’s hard to keep track. And, unless she was walking, I couldn’t determine if she was the person I’ve dubbed Bigfoot thanks to her heavy stomping on the wooden floors next door.

Thankfully, someone else in the building called our security officers, no doubt because the loud banging on the door was quite disruptive, and three of them showed up. I found out then that she didn’t have a key because she wasn’t actually a resident. She was just a friend who was staying with them. When questioned by the officers as to why she hadn’t called someone to open the door for her, she said that her phone had died. When they asked her if she had any identification on her, she replied that she didn't. She also told them that she hadn’t gone to the security office downstairs because she figured if she kept knocking on the door, someone would eventually answer it or perhaps someone would eventually come home. I should mention here that I had been awakened at about 6 a.m. by the knocking but hadn’t immediately recognized it as such.

So a drunken woman with no identification or working phone is sleeping in the hallway and banging repeatedly on an apartment door. And what did our crack security patrol officers decide to do? Unlock the door for her, of course. They asked her first what was inside just to be sure that she was familiar with the place, but they did unlock the door. By the way, she told them that the first thing they would see is a balloon that says, “Proud of You.” I knew there was a party last night—everyone in the building knew there was a party last night—but I didn’t know that someone next door had accomplished something deserving of a balloon and loud drunkenness. They seem like classic Millennial Underachievers to me, the kinds who wind up in uninspiring jobs that necessitate them having to drink themselves into oblivion each weekend just to forget how dull and unimportant they are. It’s been such a joy living next to them for the past half-dozen years or so.

I don’t know if anyone else was home next door or not. After the security officers opened the door to let her in, they walked away and she stomped her way down the hallway, presumably to pass out in a bed to finish sleeping off her stupor. She wasn’t loud enough to be Bigfoot, which was good to know, I guess, but I hope she at least tapped the Proud of You balloon as she passed it.