Everett

My neighbor upstairs has been railing for about ten minutes. He can go for hours. There is nothing you can do about it no matter how threatening it feels. He called the fire department once for no reason, and then when the firemen came he called one of them a bitch. The fireman was, like "Excuse me? You just called me a bitch?" And the other one told him to ignore it and go.

Even when he crashes things down out his window onto my across-the-hall-neighbor's fire escape, the police say you can't do anything unless he is threatening someone directly. He crashes things on his floor so hard it has knocked something off the shelf in my kitchen once, and his apartment is not even directly over mine, but that doesn't count as threatening. Once he yelled out his window that he hoped I electrocuted myself, but he didn't say he wanted, directly, to hurt me. I try to not hear what he's saying anymore--just think of it as bad weather. It doesn't happen as frequently as it used to.

But just a minute ago, he came down the stairs yelling and said, "I'm going to kill you, you fucking bitch. Are you sleeping? I'm going to fucking murder you." I tip-toed to the door to look through my peephole to see if it was my door he was talking to, because I do sleep during the day, and he knows that my neighbor is gone to work 8Am to 6PM every day, but I could see him with his shirt off in his hand, pressed up against her door with his ear to it. Then he said, "Every last one of you's--you're all leaving before I do." And then he went back to his apartment upstairs and opened his screechy fire escape window and slammed it shut.

Everett is his real name. I felt guilty for refusing to testify in the landlord's eviction case against a woman on the first floor who was jailed for "making terrorist death threats", (jailed for six days which she bragged about afterwards). She told me she was going to kill the landlord's whole family and I was too afraid of her to tell anyone. I didn't want to exacerbate it all if she didn't mean it really. But how can you tell? I knew she liked to scare people. I hoped she would just go away, and she did. Everett calmed down after she left. She had told him that the woman accross the hall from me was homophobic, which is absolutely untrue, and that I was mentally unstable and paraniod. She knew what medications I take from going through the trash.

I am definitely feeling the adrenaline jolt now, but I'm not reporting anything about Everett's new death threats, because I'm just tired. I'm too tired of this to feel scared anymore. Just numbed tired. I don't know if that's wrong though since technically he did just threaten my neighbor's life. I would think of an excuse to leave, to go outside for a little while--he can't tell when I come and go like the woman on the first floor watched--but I don't want to leave my cat alone here while I'd be gone.

It doesn't feel real. It feels like he's play-acting in a movie, for his own entertainment, thinking of scaring me since he knows I'm probably here. It feels like he likes to feel, or just needs to show that he feels that no one is going to do anything about anything he does. Regardless of the first floor woman's eviction.

This is a very nice bulding on the edge of a rich neighborhood. The family who owns the building offer a lot of their units to people with Section 8 vouchers and other subsidies. Some of the tennants are awarded the help with rent because they are very old. Some of us are problems in other ways. The reasons are technically not the landlords' business.

Everett is completely cordial in an actor-ly way when I've seen him on the street or when we've passed each other in the hall. Like neither one of us knows anything about it.

He's smashing heavy things on his floor, then being quiet long enough for you to think it's over. Now doing it again. He's in the hall again. Kind of chanting something. Now he's singing. This is my report.