Tag: absurd

I lived in Post Landing for something like 6 years.  It’s a small, white painted wood and brick apartment building on the edge of downtown Fargo and I guess it used to serve some function of the Post Office, hence the name.  The individual apartments vary wildly in size, seemingly built at random like an eccentric widow’s dilapidated mansion, but mine wasn’t one of the big ones.  It was definitely among the smallest, but the one across the hall was even smaller.  I know because I trudged amongst the wreckage inside of it once.
We’ll get to that in a bit.
My home was a strange one. In the basement, underground, as I am nothing if not an underground person. It’s where I feel most comfortable. The apartment was longish but very narrow – essentially a wide hallway vaguely divided into rooms.  Not a utility, but close.  A living room with a tv about 2 feet from the couch, separated from the kitchen by an arched outcropping of the ceiling, then a door into the bedroom, and then the bathroom.  If you stood against the wall in the living room and walked straight for 30 feet you’d be in the bathroom, which was so small you could wash your hands while sitting on the toilet, which was kind of nice.
You weren’t supposed to smoke in Post Landing, but almost everybody did, and the Landlord was this big dopey guy that told me he wanted to be a writer within 5 minutes of meeting him.  He was pretty lax about the rent, but he was also pretty lax about repairs, which was irritating but understandable.
It was cozy there and I loved it, even though I was miserable most of the time, and it was conveniently located within walking distance of about a dozen bars, two liquor stores, and the library, which pretty much covered all of my needs in those days.
Two liquor stores was perfect, because if you’d already been to one that day, you could go to the worse one about a block down the road and not be judged for buying more booze at 2 PM when you’re already noticeably drunk, which I was about 60-70% of the time.
The residents of Post Landing were – and are, I suspect – your usual combination of hipsters, the mentally ill, mentally ill hipsters, and borderline homeless.  All the way homeless people surrounded the building – I’ll tell you their stories another day – as Post Landing is conveniently located between a homeless shelter, The Rape and Abuse Crisis Center, and Fargo’s only strip club – kind of a Bermuda Triangle of sadness and desperation.
I felt very at home.  These were my people, all of them.
I loved nothing more than to post up on the front stoop with a case of beer, a pack of smokes, and a pizza, and offer any combination of the three to whichever transient was passing by, so long as they would tell me their story.  This was very effective.
Anyway, I tell you all of this to set the scene, as more stories of Post Landing will follow.
But this story is about Sheldon.
I was absent from Post Landing for about a year and some change – maybe more, everything from this time is a bit hazy – basically living with a girl in her much nicer apartment, but continuing to pay the rent in mine, not fully committed.
We broke up and I trudged back to my old squat, possessions in hand, to see how the place was holding up.
It was holding up all right.  A little musty, but not much worse for the wear.
As I was loading in my stuff, a man ambled down the long narrow hall separating my apartment from the one across from it, coming from the laundry room.  He was short, squat, and hairy and he wasn’t wearing anything but Tobasco print pajama pants.  I immediately noticed there was a swastika tattooed on his doughy left breast, which was alarming, but his amble was amiable and my last name is Messerschmidt, so I’m usually given the benefit of the doubt by these people.
 
I was going to ignore – as is my wont – but he was clearly going to engage. He walked up to me, confidently, smiling – terrible teeth, but not without charm.
“You new here?” he asked.
“Actually,” I said, resigned to this interaction, “I’ve been here for a few years but was kind of living with a girl.  She broke up with me so I’m back.”
He tightened his lips within his ragged, brown goatee and nodded his head, understanding exactly what I was going through.
“Man,” he said, “I know how that goes.  I caught my girl getting her ass eaten out by our drug dealer.”
Now, I don’t know why he felt comfortable enough with me to utter these words within seconds of making my acquaintance.  Maybe there’s something about my general demeanor that says “cool with stories about drugs and assplay”.  I kind of hope not.  Maybe he’s just always that guileless.   Maybe he was just taking a shot and got lucky, because I’m totally cool with stories about drugs and assplay.
“Wow,” I said, thinking that this situation was nothing like mine but I sure didn’t want to get into that here in a the hallway with a Nazis and my arms full of a laundry basket holding most of my earthly possessions.
Then he said, “Hey, let me grab that for you, so you can get in your place.”
That was a nice thing to say, swastika or no swastika, I guess.
I handed him the basket and he said his name was Sheldon.  Said he was a bus driver.  Said he lived right across the hall and if I ever needed anything don’t be afraid to knock.
I said thank you and have a good one and went about getting my life back in order.
And then I didn’t see much of Sheldon, which was good.  He’d been nice enough to me, but a Nazis is a Nazis and I hate Nazis.
Every once in a while, though, I’d have an interaction with him which revealed more mysterious details about his life.  The first came about 8 months later.
There was a knock on my door.  This was never welcome, but I must have been feeling relatively stable and sober because I answered it.
It was Sheldon.  He was holding a mason jar filled with a clear liquid.
He said, “Hey man, thanks for watching my place while I was gone, here’s some moonshine.”
And then he handed me the moonshine and went into his apartment.
I had no idea what he was talking about – hadn’t known he was gone. Hadn’t really spoken to him since our first meeting, aside from a few hellos in the hallway.
I uncapped the moonshine and my eyes immediately began to water. It smelled like rubbing alcohol, rot, and fire.
I was a drunk, sure, but I’d stick to killing myself slowly with vodka, not all at once with this stuff.
I poured it down the drain.
The next time I talked to Sheldon, he was with a girl.  Again, there was a knock on my door.
I definitely wasn’t sober this time, but I’d heard his voice and I knew who it was and Sheldon wouldn’t or couldn’t judge me.
I opened the door and this girl was hanging on him, wearing transition lensed glasses that hadn’t quite transitioned from outside.  She was very high.
I said hello.
They told me some disjointed story about her mother who wanted them to store all of her diet pepsi in Sheldon’s apartment and that it was there – he opened his door to show it to me and the place was floor to ceiling cases of diet pepsi. They said she was crazy and that if she knocked on my door or window I should just ignore her.
I said I could do that.
Then the girl said, “You have such a unique voice.”
And I laughed uncomfortably and said thank you and they left. Never saw her again and I don’t know what became of all the diet pepsi.
The next and last encounter with Sheldon was another knock on my door, this time in the middle of the night.  He looked a little panicked and said he was leaving and if Jon asked – Jon was the landlord – where he was, I should tell him he’d joined the army.
I said, all right, take care of yourself.
And he opened his eyes really wide and sighed loudly and said, “It was great being your neighbor, have a good life.”
I closed the door and never saw him again.
Jon never asked me about Sheldon, but months later I unthinkingly checked his doorknob and the apartment was unlocked.
I couldn’t resist. I went in.  It smelled terrible, like mold and BO and old microwave dinners.  It was a mess.  Trash and clothes mingled all over the floor, but also seemingly all of Sheldon’s belongings. A mattress with no frame, a tv and playstation on a tv stand, a full ash tray, food and plates in the cupboards, a sparsely populated refrigerator, the usual shitty movie posters on the walls, a shelf of DVDs – pornos, mostly -and, unexpectedly, a hindu shrine to Ganesh, complete with a fake gold statue of the elephant headed god, some candles, and incense.  Next to it was a travel guide to India and a notebook.
I picked up the notebook and thumbed through its pages. Every one was blank. More mysteries. I pocketed it, the travel guide, and the statue, looked around a bit more, wondering what in the fuck had gone on in here, and then left.
I hoped I’d have a chance to give them back to Sheldon one day. To get some answers, maybe.  But, of course, I never did.