The Owner of My Building Who Knows My Face

The owner of my apartment building knows my face. He’s a lawyer. He has a small law office adjacent to the building lobby which also doubles as a place to deal with tenant issues. I’ve always thought it to be a strange location for a law office, as if being tucked away in a pocket of innocuous residential zoning is the perfect front for organized crime, where people are happy to ignore any occasional unexplained bloodlike carpet stains in the lobby as long as they get their security deposits back at the end of their leases. Nevertheless, whenever I walk past Jessie the Doorman I have to quip: “That whole Engel, et al. v. Vitale et al., thing is a real ballbuster, isn’t it?” and Jessie nods wearily.

The owner of my apartment building knows my face because one morning when the elevator wasn’t working, I marched down to his office to complain, and he wasn’t there. So I snooped around while waiting, running my fingertips along all of the mahogany and plush leather. And after more than a few minutes passed, I got so bored that I pretended to hold a board meeting, repeatedly slamming shut a thick tome of Illinois statutes to drive my point home. The owner stood right behind me at the end of my speech’s climax, of course, and when I blushed and frantically tried to remember my reason for coming into his office in the first place, he just looked at me coldly, studying my face intently for future reference.

In addition to the weirdly-located law office in my building, there’s a dusty old gym on the Second Floor that creeps me out. There’s a punching bag that swings even when no one is punching it. Even scarier is out in the dimly lit hallway where corroded pipes coil under and above the ceiling. Sometimes this hallway looks like it’s one or two burnt fluorescent light bulbs away from being lit solely by the crimson glow of the EXIT signs. There’s a graveyard for burnt fluorescent bulbs, by the way: stacked up against the darkest part of the hallway wall, around the corner on the short leg of the L, just before the greasy plank doors that lead into nothingness and the complex phone wiring that resemble the innards of some futuristic fish after being cleaned and hung from a rusty steel hook.

A couple nights ago I was down there and my clothes were still wet (laundry being the only sane reason people come to the Second Floor) so to kill time I picked up one of the bulbs and took it into the Scary Gym and swung it around like it was a lightsaber, since, for most of my life, every time I look up and see a long, cylindrical fluorescent light glowing up there, raining down headaches, I think: that looks like a lightsaber. So I’m swinging it around in the Scary Gym, making sound effects, and then, of course, the inevitable happens and I smash it against one of the concrete supports. I’m not entirely convinced it was accidental. What gets me is I really didn’t even swing the bulb all that hard, and yet it pretty much disintegrated. There were shards of glass scattered everywhere, sure, but it still seemed like if you reassembled those shards they’d only add up to maybe a third of the total original length of the fluorescent light. It’s like the thing just popped out of existence.

Then my heart stopped at this sudden thought: What if the Owner Of My Building Who Knows My Face found this broken glass? Of course he’d suspect foul play. He’d do those lawyer things on me, like sue me or hand out a subpoena. So I stomped on the glass until it was complete shining powder there on the floor, and then I dragged a light blue ab workout mat over the crime scene. My fingerprints were all over the goddamn place.

Today when I came home from work, I walked straight past Jessie without saying hello. The Owner Of My Building Who Knows My Face happened to be talking to a maintenance guy near the row of mailboxes, and as soon as I walked by the OOMBWKMF stopped mid-conversation, looked at me, and said, “Hello... Peter.” Not Pete. Peter. The name listed on my lease.

I managed a phony, “innocent” smile that the OOMBWKMF has probably seen countless times in over a thousand courtrooms, then I stepped into my elevator and pressed the CLOSE DOOR button many times, but of course, it wasn't working.