Dancing With The Macabre

Since All Hallows Eve is fast approaching, what occurred last night only seems fitting.  Hubby and I were leaving our favorite restaurant when a pale, thirty something year old man dressed all in black jogged by and looked directly at us before quickly averting his eyes and jogging away.

Instantly hubby and I turned to each other and silently mouthed a name we both knew all too well.

Yes, there had been a sighting. 

Is it peculiar that our former upstairs neighbor of nearly five years refuses to acknowledge us while jogging, shopping at the grocery store, buying toiletries at CVS?  Yes.  Yes it is.  But then again, what isn't strange about this man?

For starters, as I've previously mentioned, he strictly wears black, and there are no deviations upon this rule.  His funereal uniform is as follows: black shirt, black suspenders, black trench coat, black beret.  It could be 95 degrees outside with humidity at 100% percent and he'd still be sporting black combat boots.  While jogging.  A sandal, sneaker, T-shirt wearing kind of guy he is not, no siree.

Not that I've ever been one to form judgments based upon dress or appearance.  You see, it goes much, much deeper than this...

It was September of 2000 when we first met him on the staircase a day or so after moving into our first NY apartment.  Our building had a business below and two apartments above, ours being on the second floor.  "Hi there!"  I'd said in a friendly, obviously not from The Big Apple kind of tone. 

"Oh, hi."  His demeanor was guarded and awkward.  It seemed our very existence was causing him discomfort.  OK, so it was evident we wouldn't be partaking in any neighborly Beer Pong tournaments with our somber new acquaintance.  Who really gave a good crap, though?

Oh, if it had only ended there, Dear Reader...

Shortly thereafter, we met up in the hallway again.  "I'm not being too loud, am I?"  he nervously inquired in his muted, polite tone. 

"What?"  Hubby and I laughed.  Was this guy for real?  "Of course not!  Not at all!  You're perfect!"

"Good"  he sighed, looking relieved, before racing back upstairs to his lair.

I'm not really sure when we started hearing the banging.  Or the dance macabre, as I lovingly came to call it.  I only remember the rhythmic, aggressive pounding that would emanate daily from above, making it impossible to do anything but sit there and wonder what in the hell was going on up there?

Was he dancing?  Truly, this seemed unlikely, but...

Exercising?  Perhaps he was exercising.  But in a trench coat? 

Was he passionately walking in rhythm?  Or could it be he was performing some kind of Gothic, woebegone aerobics routine? 

I prayed he wasn't sacrificing small animals. 

The nightly banging was nothing like the Dance Macabre of my youth, that annual October ritual where my elementary school music teacher would turn on psychedelic lights and have us dance to a moody, melancholy orchestration, our colorful scarves billowing behind us.  Some of us were skeletons, some were ghosts, some were possessed Jack-o-lanterns on broomsticks.  I can still close my eyes and hear the music.  This was certainly my first and very best experience with interpretive dance.

But I have digressed.  Back to the story at hand.  Much of my time and energy was spent trying to decipher our mousy neighbor's secret identity.  His maniacal midnight banging was driving me absolutely bonkers, and some nights he even sang, though the lyrics were always indecipherable.  I think it was the singing that scared me the most. 

It became increasingly necessary for me to justify this curious behavior, almost as if knowing what was going on up there was somehow going to make the situation more tolerable.

Hubby, being hubby, let it roll off his shoulders.  "Why do you let it bother you so much?"  he'd ask me.

I wasn't sure why.  As the months wore on, my imagination ran wild, leaping to absurd, paranoid conclusions.  My inner Catholic feared the worst and decided he was probably a devil worshiper.  (Hence the suspenders.  And the beret.)

Thankfully, there were brief respites in between all the noise.  It turned out our upstairs friend would leave for weeks at a time, sometimes months even.  But he'd always return.  As would the rhythmic banging. 

It all came to a boiling point one eventful night around 3am, when I was jostled from sleep by a loud thumping.  Ah.  So the dance had begun.  But this time he was experimenting with some new vocalization, to keep things fresh perhaps:

"Do you want me to fucking kill you?  Do you want me to fucking kill you?" 

What the?  I shook hubby and he woke up just in time to hear our neighbor yell:

"Pain, Fire, Pain, Fire..."

Or could he have said "Rain, Fire, Rain, Fire?"  I really couldn't tell.  Whatever he was chanting, it was fa fa fa freaky. 

What in the name of all that is Holy????!!!! 

The banging was one thing, but this?  I desperately tried to rationalize what I'd just heard.  Did he have headphones on, and was he singing his favorite angry, freaky weirdo song?  And if not, what poor creature was he talking to?  A mouse?  A cockroach?  A Goth hooker? 

Was he flogging himself, penitent style?  I lay awake pondering the possibilities.  Perhaps he'd met someone nice and the evening had turned sour?  I decided the lesser of several evils would be if he simply turned out to be a crackhead, though I knew this was only wishful thinking.

That. Was. IT.  We had a potentially murderous, macabre hermit loner living above us, and I was through being polite.   

The next day we went to our landlords, who listened intently, though didn't really hide their amusement.

"Well, ya, he's always been a weird guy, but..."

My excitement could barely be contained.  I blurted out that which desperately needed blurting:  "He dances."

"What?"  My landlady looked skeptical.

"He dances, in rhythm, and last night he was chanting while dancing in rhythm."  In great detail, I elaborated on last night's performance.

She looked confused:  "Rain, fire?"

"That's not all..." I went on.  "There are always stinky smells coming from his place, terrible, sickening odors..." (I suppressed the urge to describe these as dead body smells, since I didn't want her to think I myself was crazy, too.  After all, these were our starving artist days and we'd been almost 12 days late paying the rent that month...)

My landlady shook her head.  "He doesn't cook..."  I always thought this was a strange statement for her to make, since how could she know if he was cooking meals or not?  (Let alone squirrels and other small mammals?)

They would talk to him, they assured us.  He had been their tenant for years.  It was nothing.  He was just odd.

Naturally, my family two states over was most concerned.  All but my sister, who found the entire situation to be very entertaining.  I suppose everybody wanted to sneak a peek at him, but macabre sightings were few and far between.  A rare, mystifying experience.  A total eclipse of the goth.

One day Hubby got a call on his cell phone from a friend of ours whom I'd told about our living situation.  "I think I saw him!"  Christos excitedly told hubby.  "In the store, just now, he was wearing a black trench coat...it had to have been him!"      

It seemed this macabre man was becoming a legend of sorts.

Eventually, mercifully, and not nearly soon enough, we moved from our cozy little apartment.  (We went from living below one nut job to living above two new ones.  But that's another story.)

These days when we see him, there is always the same inevitable (macabre) dance: the eye contact and the split second of recognition followed by immediate speedwalking in the opposite direction.  This is far less painful than the awkwardness that has ensued when we've actually said hello to this man. 

I'll tell you one thing.  I will go to my grave wondering what or who the hell was up there during the night of the rain, pain and fire fiasco.  Poor little squirrel. 

Comments

[Sissy]

I loved when Mrs. Ceislak let us do Danse Macarbe in music class! That was my favorite!

I forgot all about that strange, lonely man. Very motivated with the health and fitness, he was.

[The Odd Broad]

Do you really think he was just exercising? I'm still not sure.

I loved Mrs. Ceislak, too. At the time I thought she smelled like "Halloween", though now I recognize her scent as patchouli.

[Sissy]

Well, I have never met a Goth who was particularly into health and fitness, but I don't want to generalize an entire group. He was probably playing Dungeons and Dragons.

[The Odd Broad]

Yes, that's more like it.

[bill]

My niece, who is eight years old, was talking about the crazy dance she does for halloween at the greenmont school. Right away I knew that mrs. cieslik was still up to her old tricks. she also still does hot cross buns on the recorder and love is like a magic penny. ahh memories.... the tradition continues...

[The Odd Broad]

I found my recorder the other day when I was home. I didn't play it, but I thought about it.

:)