Noisy Balloonist Blog is the apprentice

The car is gone. The fire engine-red BMW 5-series, abandoned by the man upstairs because he could no longer press the clutch with his mashed leg, is gone. Sometime in the last 15 hours it was sold or stolen or towed (all Sly Cooper-like; I heard nothing), after sitting derelict in the carport for nine years. The wheels actually tore up a bit of asphalt patch in the alley. There was a white envelope on the ground where the car had been. I opened it, half expecting to see a we offered to buy, but no note. It was empty.

For many years my next door neighbor was a twig-like old woman who collected garbage and never spoke. She lived on investment income and the landlord hinted she was fabulously wealthy. Occasionally her mail found its way to my box my mistake—there were thick packets of financial documents. We shared a kitchen wall and patio fence. Her side was a snarl of potted plants and trees with barely room to step. She crept out at night to water them. As best I could determine, her companions were cockroaches and a radio she never switched off. The roaches raided my kitchen through gaps in the plaster, where their corpses piled up in the silverware drawer. Sometimes I put a glass to the wall and pressed my ear against it to decipher the buzz from the radio.

The woman (I forget her name; let’s call her Ruth) had lived next door for decades. She didn’t sleep. Her metabolic baseline was so low she required only brief periods of hibernation; sometimes, through the porch glass, I glimpsed her in stasis by the radio, shrunken and still. Ruth operated a one-woman salvage operation, pushing a grocery cart from alley to alley, sifting through rubbish bins and claiming things she liked. She would return in the afternoon, park the cart at the curb and transfer the day’s take, piece by piece, into her apartment. Sometimes there was a night run. She wore the same clothes every day: drab skirt, stockings the color of dishwater, shabby navy down jacket and a shapeless hat that hid her face. The only person I ever saw her speak to was a wizened security guard at the Barrington Vons. He was reedy and tall and looked like the faintest puff of wind would blow him to powder—I don’t know what he was securing in his condition. I wondered what history he shared with the old woman. Under the circumstances it was easy to dismiss Ruth as senile, and that’s what I did. She was a shade. I was afraid to speak to her.

I was on my porch one evening when she spoke to me. She passed by and remarked, without acknowledging our years of mutual silence, “That’s a very special cat.” She motioned to Caliban, who was perched on the cat tower just inside the apartment. I saw her face clearly for the first time. It was sodden and blotchy, like wet cardboard. She looked desperately old, but her eyes were shining.

“I know,” I replied, trying to appear nonplussed. “Thank you.”

“I’ve known a lot of cats. I know cats,” she continued, “and that’s a very special cat; I can tell. What’s his name?”

“Caliban,” I said, in a mild fugue. “It’s from a Shakespeare play.” Despite her shriveled appearance and central-casting bag lady persona, Ruth was perfectly lucid. Ruth was staring through me like a benevolent wizard. Ruth was oracular. Inside her shrouds hid a clairvoyant soul. I was instantly ashamed of the assumptions I’d made.

“Oh, Caliban, is that right?” She nodded. “Well he’s a smart cat. I bet he takes good care of you. Do you take good care of him?”

Caliban listened. “Well I love him,” I said. “I’ve had him since he was a tiny kitten.”

“That’s good.” She smiled. “Take care of him. You have a very special cat. I can tell by his eyes.” She repeated: “I can tell by his eyes,” and walked away.

I spoke to her only once more after this encounter, about a discarded TV in the alley behind the building. Years past, interest compounded, roaches expired in the salad spinner and Ruth accumulated more stuff. I speculated about the condition of her apartment. One morning in 2007 there was a rap on her door and a sheriff’s deputy announced himself. Ruth was being evicted. She wasn’t home; I’d seen her plod by my window around dawn. She knew it was eviction day, and after painstakingly archiving the detritus of the city for more than 20 years, she walked away from her work with nothing but the clothes on her back. That is a literal statement. She betrayed no sentiment, and she never returned.

It took men two weeks to empty her unit. The landlord was a little cagey about why Ruth was kicked out, but he explained he had offered to help her clean. He had offered to help her find a new apartment. She refused all assistance. My landlord is a Los Angeles impossibility—honest and responsible—so I believe him. He seemed as bewildered as me. I googled her name and found nothing. I sifted through some of the garbage that had been removed from her place in an attempt to decode its value. It felt strangely voyeuristic. How had she managed to fill two bedrooms with stuff, like someone bricking in a tomb, and then casually abandon it? How did precious things become meaningless overnight? I was interpreting Ruth’s collection as a personal monument, but maybe she knew it was crap all along, and that someday it would wind up back in the dumpsters from whence it came. I haven’t seen Ruth since.

One morning in pre-PATRIOT act America, I was playing The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask when I heard a wet thud outside. Thirty seconds later there was a knock at my door. It was my upstairs neighbor, prone on the cement step, his breath catching in his throat. “Could you call 9-1-1?” he asked. “I fell and broke my ankle. I can’t walk.”

His position, lying on his stomach with his elbows propped against the threshold, reminded me of a teenage girl chatting on her bedroom laptop. He was dazed by the pain but quiet. Quiet was all he was since I moved in, until the moment he landed in the bushes in front of my house. I called emergency services and blabbed nervously into the phone. “They’re coming,” I said, and looked at him. I was unsure what to do. He asked for water and I brought him some in a UCLA Restaurant-issue plastic mug. EMTs arrived and packaged the upstairs neighbor (I’ll call him Chet) into an ambulance and drove away.

A week later, with skewers of metal protruding from his leg, Chet explained his fall. He had locked himself out of his apartment while doing laundry and attempted to climb onto his balcony by using the wooden trellis surrounding my patio as a ladder. This was ridiculous. One glance at my 1961 stucco Lego-block apartment building and you’ll recognize that scrambling from ground-floor fence to second-floor balcony is equivalent to a rock climber leaping free of a face and clutching an overhang with nothing but fingertips. Chet never managed a shot at this class-five maneuver anyway; one of the rotted trellis timbers gave way and he dropped, perhaps four-and-half feet, into the soil beneath. Both bones in his left calf plunged downward and destroyed his ankle, like punching a nail through tile. Chet was an older man somewhere on either side of 50 and not especially fit; still, I was shocked a short fall onto soft ground could do so much damage. He no longer drives his stick-shift BMW 5-series; it’s been sitting under the carport for nine years and there are cobwebs inside the cabin. Passerby routinely scrawl offers to buy in the grime on the windows. A scaffold of implants substitutes for his ankle. He wore a brace, then walked with a cane and limps to this day. This is a particularly severe penalty for forgetting your keys.

These two conversations—the accident and the explanation of the accident—are the only significant contact I’ve had with Chet. He’s an inoffensive sort who lives alone and works from home. He minds himself and no one else. We have neither grievance nor friendship. He does his laundry in the wee hours of the morning when he is least likely to encounter other tenants, which strikes me as sadly penitent. I’m fairly certain he takes intermittent visits with a prostitute. He’s a nice guy, but I don’t know him. He broke my fence and I called him an ambulance.

Lately, he has violent coughing fits that escalate into spastic wretching. This occurs multiple times throughout the day and night. I wonder if he’s ill. He likes cigars, but that’s my only lead. It’s difficult to listen to Chet’s dry heaves, which last for minutes at a time. My physiology is empathetic; the sound makes my stomach itch and I have to quell the urge to vomit. I wish he was stricken with compulsive yawns. Invariably I wonder what sounds emanating from my apartment are so publically available. I recall two occasions when I bellowed into the phone so ferociously that everyone on the block knew my mother was welcome to look elsewhere for a son. The birds are loud; also the persistent thwack of the Rock Band drums.  This is where I’m expected to mention enthusiastic masturbation, but that doesn’t really happen. At least not audibly.