More Neighbors

My next-door neighbor in my apartement building is a guy named Charlie who looks like a cross between Jackie Gleason, Rodney Dangerfield, and Tony Soprano. He's a jazz piano player who went to Julliard, but now he owns and operates an air-conditioning duct cleaning service. Anyway, Charlie has a habit of starting out most of his conversations by saying, "No! No!" As in, "How you doing, Charlie" "No! No! I'm doing okay." Or, "Here's that Vaseline you wanted to borrow, Charlie." "No! No! I just want to use it to put on some cotton to put in my ear because I have his God-awful ear infection." Or, "Man, this marinara sauce your brother Bernie made is unbelievable." "No! No! There's a bunch of it in the freezer if you want to take some home with you." We love Charlie.

My upstairs neighbor is a hooker. She used to be a grifter and con artist who had a fake athletic shoe company that she and her con artist partner used to scam a bunch of people out of a considerable amount of money. That deal finally fell through, and she still has process servers showing up to serve her papers on a regular basis. Now she's dropped all pretense of being anything but a hooker. She has a series of sleazy-looking guys show up at around 10:00 at night or so, and it's immediately to the bedroom and lights out. About 20 minutes later, it's a couple of trips to the bathroom, and then a break for TV or booze or whatever they do, then it's back to the bedroom and lights out again. The guys always sneak out of the building through the back door when they're finally finished at aroud 1:00 a.m. Then the next morning, she's off to the laundromat with the sheets.

One of the apartments on the first floor near ours was vacated in January. It used to be rented by a singer named Jemma Griffith who went on to bigger and better things. Anyway, the building manager, who's from the Ukraine and wonderfully ignorant of much of our pop culture, told us that the new tenant was a Chinese actress with two kids and two dogs. She couldn't remember this actress's name, but it was something like Xian Xiong. Well, this person moved in a couple of weeks ago, and the first thing we noticed was that she wasn't Chinese. I was watching her through our courtyard window as she talked on her cell phone one afternoon, and as I started to get a good look at her, I asked my wife what Lana (the building manager) said the new tenant's name was again. My wife said it was Xian Xiong or something like that. Hmm.... Xian Xiong... Xian Xiong... Then I suddenly realized who it was. She's a former A-list actress who starred in movies with the likes of Kevin Costner, Bill Murray, and Harrison Ford. Then she started to get a reputation for being kind of wack and pulled some off-the-wall stunts and pissed off the powers that be. Then she married someone outside the movie business and moved to New Mexico for about five years or so. Now she's back in Los Angeles trying to revive her once-promising career, but she's no longer A-list. And she's definitely not Chinese. She's still a beautiful woman, though. Xian Xiong... Xian Xiong... Xian Xiong...