It's summer, and it's around midnight, and I'm sitting on my bed in my boxer shorts, sweating and watching something on non-cable TV, probably COPS.
The air conditioner in my apartment hasn't worked in months. But my landlord is either a nice old man who's about to die or his equally nice son who's grieving and setting his recently deceased father's affairs in order while working and caring for his own family. Either way, it just doesn't seem like an appropriate time to bring up the fact that my place has become a convection oven.
Despite the heat, and the occasional sewage backup that fills my bathtub (and once the entire space) with wastewater, I like my one-room efficiency. I like living on an alley in a neighborhood just west of Old Northeast that's still cheap enough to boast as many dirtbags, college kids and young-adult service-industry types as it does families. The old-school floor-to-ceiling jalousie windows that make up nearly the whole wall fronting on the alley are always open; there might as well be nothing between myself and the neighborhood's backside. I hear the hip-hop and metal in the cars that cruise by. I hear the homeless, scouring the trash bins with wildly varying degrees of discretion. I hear arguments and parties.
Tonight, I hear women's shoes.
They come clicking by from the left, close to the building. They pass by in stereo and fade to the right. Very shortly, they return on a reverse course. This time I can see them in the space between the bottoms of the blinds and the floor — little, deceptively casual, black with low heels (I don't know what kind, this is occurring just before meeting Peaches and the ensuing five-year osmotic education in designer shoes and accessories), attached to some very attractive feet. The shoes and feet and whatever else return from whence they came.
I sit. I sweat. I watch non-cable TV.
Several minutes later, the clicks come again. The shoes don't make it into my line of sight on the right side of the front door this time, and after a brief silence, there comes an extremely light, extremely hesitant knocking. I ooze off my bed and open the door.
There's a beautiful brunette I've never seen before. She's in her mid-20s, dressed for an evening out and smiling perhaps the most embarrassed smile ever forced by unexpected circumstances to cross the features of a human being.
The beautiful woman speaks. I don't get most of it; I'm busy looking over her shoulder for the home invaders or sniggering guys with video cameras and trying to remember if I placed an online order for a beautiful woman at some point during the last six to eight weeks. I'm also acutely aware that I'm wearing only boxer shorts and probably smell like a beer can filled with beef stock and left in the sun. I do, however, get "neighbor," and "left my keys at a friend's house," and "use your phone," so I move aside and gesture vaguely at my desk.
She avails herself of as much privacy as a one-room apartment affords (short of going into the bathroom with the phone, which she probably thinks might seem ungracious), and leaves a message on what I can only assume is her boyfriend's voicemail. I sit. I sweat. I attempt to look like I've nonchalantly gone back to watching non-cable TV. Then she apologizes for the intrusion, thanks me — my reply to this is something along the lines of "uh, no, hey, sorry my, uh, your, anytime" — and is gone.
After she leaves, I put on pants. You know, just in case, when she gets home, she decides to call all her hot stranded friends and tell them about this great place where they can get a sauna and use the phone.
Fifteen or 20 minutes later, the entire process repeats itself: the heel clicks, the light knock, the embarrassed smile, the explanation, the phone call. This time, after hanging up, my mystery guest asks if I might be able to give her a ride to her keys, explaining that her friend's house is just across what, at this point, is still called Ninth Street N.
Apparently, her level of trust increases in direct proportion to how much clothing I'm wearing. I wonder if I could get her to fly to Vegas with me once I don a shirt and some flip-flops.
We get in my car. For someone preoccupied enough to leave her keys somewhere — and impulsive enough to knock on a stranger's door in the middle of the night — her directions are surprisingly precise. In less time than it takes to smoke a cigarette, we pull to the curb in front of her friend's place. She gets out in a hurry, asking me to wait, telling me she'll be right back.
I sit in my battered blue Honda Civic hatchback with the motor running for a while, wondering what the normal people are doing tonight.
The front door of the friend's house opens.
A man comes out.
A big man.
Wearing only a towel.
As he quickly approaches my car, my first instinct is to quickly drive away. But then again, I've never had my ass kicked by someone wearing just a towel, so I stretch over and roll down the passenger side window. The man puts both of his large hands on the door, leans in, thanks me for driving the woman over and (with a grin) informs me that my services are no longer required.
I drive home. I sit. I sweat. I watch non-cable TV.
I never see the beautiful young woman — I'm sure she told me her name, a name, anyway, at some point, but I didn't catch it — again. She never comes in or out of any of the apartments along my stretch of the alley. She doesn't roll by my jalousie windows at the beginning or end of a workday. I don't hear her raised voice at an adjacent party or in a nearby argument.
And pretty quickly, my disappointment gives way to a sort of private bemusement. I realize I don't want to know anything about her; I like her just fine as the central figure in this weird thing that happened to me in the alley late one night.
But weeks later, when I come home to find a thank-you card and a gift certificate from the St. Pete Ale House stuck between the front door and the jamb, I know immediately who it's from. And when I'm finally broke enough to use the damn thing — a decision that feels a little like a betrayal — I hope to God I don't see her there.
And I don't.
This article appears in Jan 11-17, 2006.