Day 26 - What you think about your friends
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| Friendship | Rainier Martin Ampongan |
What kind of prompt is that? I mean, they're my friends. They wouldn't be my friends if I didn't think highly of them. They're funny, and smart, and fun to hang out with, and trustworthy, and caring.
But there's this one friend in particular...
I've mentioned before that we always won the asshole neighbor lottery in the city. That's no joke.
In one building, we lived in a downstairs flat, and our first set of upstairs neighbors hated us because we're white and occasionally bought new stuff. I know how that sounds, but we try to keep to ourselves, so they knew nothing about us. They were loud and obnoxious, so we could always hear them talking about us to their friends on the phone and in person. And every time, they referred to me as "that white bitch downstairs" and Big as "whitey."
And they were always saying the most inane things. We got an exercise machine, and it ruined their lives (we only used it in the afternoon). We got a new tv (our old one broke), and it was the reason the guy in the couple was always late to work (we never turned it on before 5pm, intentionally kept it so low that we could barely hear it sitting right in front of it, and always turned it off by 12am at the latest). We "sat on our asses" all day (we both worked from home) and were able to buy new shit and that was why his boss hated him (we didn't even know his boss, had never even been to the restaurant he worked in, and I'm really not sure how he was making that connection at all). Obviously, we thought we were better than them because we're white (Big and I are fairly humble people, and neither of us is a white supremacist). And this is why he hates white people (his girlfriend was white...I can't even imagine being her).
It got to the point that the second we were off work, we'd leave the house, and we wouldn't come back until we were exhausted or out of things to do. Which, of course, just pissed him off more.
And then, one morning, I woke up to him stomping through the house and yelling into his phone about how he was going to "ghost that white bitch downstairs." And we got dressed and drove to the police station to file a report.
Finally, the landlord made them move...into the front upstairs apartment. "They pay their rent on time," he said. "There's nothing I can do."
When they moved to the front apartment, the landlord moved a family in. It's only a two bedroom, and the new family was supposed to be a mom, her son, and her boyfriend, but it ended up being the mom, her two sons, her two daughters, their babies, and her boyfriend.
It wasn't a big deal at first, but then they started jumping from one end of the house to the other every day, and our ceiling started caving in. We tried to talk to them about it, and it just got worse. So finally, we called the landlord...who said, "They pay their rent on time. There's nothing I can do."
Apparently, the ceiling caving in was no biggie. It was so little of a biggie, in fact, that he didn't even look at it until we were moving out. And when we moved out, he didn't repair it. But he did eventually evict the woman because she stopped paying her rent.
After we called the landlord, they started blocking our car in, and we overheard them telling someone they were doing it so Big couldn't go to work. Joke was on them. Big worked from home, and his company's office was on the bus line. But we called the landlord and asked him to let them know that if they did it again, we were having them towed.
And then we started looking for a new place to live.
Low and behold, we found a house on Craigslist in a whole nother part of the city, and thought, "Hallelujah!" No upstairs neighbors. We don't know anyone so there's no reason for anyone to bother us. This is gonna be great.
Except within a few weeks of us moving in, the woman next door got into an argument with her 12-year-old son in her backyard, and when she was reminded about the new neighbors sitting in their backyard, started screaming about how she doesn't give a fuck about us, she never does anything to us, and she hopes we do call CPS.
Great. We haven't even introduced ourselves to anyone, yet, and the neighbors already hate us.
Shortly after that, the kid started playing basketball with his friends in our driveway. A couple times, we caught them bouncing balls off our windows. And then, they started doing skateboard tricks on our front porch.
The more we asked them not to, the more they did it. I talked to the mother and asked her to do something about her kid, and she basically laughed at me. So we finally bought a security cam, and told them that the next time we saw them on our property, we were just going to take the footage to the police station. It helped some, but any time the kids thought we weren't home, I'd catch them on the property. As they got older, and bigger, they started being more aggressive, but our cam didn't have a mic, so we couldn't prove it. And it got to the point that I was afraid to leave the house because I was afraid they'd break in and do something to our stuff, or, god forbid, our cats.
And then, our friend (and one of Big's coworkers) let us rent his house in the country. Since then, he's tried to help us when he can, but Big's pretty proud, and he doesn't like to be a burden, so he doesn't ask for help as often as he probably should. Like when he needed to go to the hospital, but he couldn't drive (I don't drive), so instead, he lay in bed all day suffering.
This friend is an all around great guy. A great dad, a great coworker, a great husband, a great friend, a great landlord. I don't know what we'd do without him. And that's a fact.
This series inspired by a writing challenge from Living Off Love and Coffee. Find the full list here.
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