Mano Penolo
So what the realtor didn't tell us when we moved in was that someone had been brutally murdered in the apartment downstairs. I found that out from my brain-damaged tattoo artist neighbor, the guy who calls me "the night stalker.""Lady stabbed her husband to death on Halloween night. He was a nice guy, too," he said. Then: "My wife is white, too, so it's OK."
"Halloween, 2004?" I asked, getting him back on the subject.
"Yeah," he said. "And the people who lived in your apartment liked to sleep in coffins."
Awesome.
Anyway, the apartment below us stayed vacant for about a month after we moved in. Then TAARG announced one day that a serial killer had rented it.
"Why is he a serial killer?" I asked.
"Just the way he acts," she said.
It turns out he wasn't a serial killer, but instead grew up in Billerica, MA, about five miles away from where I did. Ian quickly proved that he was anything but a serial killer. In fact, he's the first neighbor since David Grupper I have ever been friends with. Apartment living just doesn't lend itself to that sort of thing, for some reason.
Ian heard about his apartment's grisly history from some local kids who offered to help carry boxes the day he moved in. "Somebody died in here," they said, pointing to a spot in his living room.
"Awesome," he said.
So Ian is moderately worried when the wind blows shut a door or something is in a different place than it was the day before, but he doesn't freak out. And he comes up every now and then to drink Jagermeister and watch movies on the wall.
I have a projector hooked up to my stereo and DVD player. The sound is great. As Joe Piscopo said in Johnny Dangerously, "It shoots through schools."
When I have the sound turned up and Ian is downstairs, sometimes he will knock on our door and ask us to turn it down. This happens rarely, as he is usually upstairs with us.
But the other night we had the sound up and I heard a banging on the wall downstairs. I turned down the sound and the banging stopped. I called Ian the next day to apologize.
"I wasn't home," he said. (He had been in North Hollywood with an ex-girlfriend.)
Well, as Halloween draws nearer, Ian is getting more and more concerned. "Are you sure it was from my apartment?" he asked.
"Yeah," I replied, and was hesitant to add, "and it sounded like it was coming from your bedroom."
"And it wasn't the shades?"
"No." Unless he meant "the shades" in an Edgar Allen Poe sense.
Ian is very kind to the neighborhood kids, Brian and Carlos, whom I've no patience for. They long ago learned to never come up the stairs to my apartment, but they will bang on Ian's door until he gives them cookies. He's a kinder person than I am. Yesterday I was working upstairs and I heard some of the neighbor kids come by.
About twenty minutes later, Ian came to my door and said, "What I'm about to tell you is wicked weird."
Brian and Carlos came by and, in between tracking dirt into Ian's living room and trying to play with his computer, said, "Sometimes when you're gone there's a light on in your bedroom."
(This is one of the reasons I don't let those kids in the house - when Ian doesn't answer his door they knock on his bedroom window.)
I asked Ian at this point if he ever tries to avoid them by not answering the door and retreating to his bedroom. I know people who do that.
"No," he said. "And then they said, 'We saw a woman dancing in your bedroom.'"
As has already been established, Ian goes to North Hollywood for that sort of thing.
"'And then we heard El Mano Penolo.'"
"What's that?" Ian asked.
"'The heavy hand.'"
I am not relating my recent spate of horror movie-worthy nightmares to this. Nor, after a quick Google search on that name revealed there is a popular Mexican (Brian and Carlos' parents are Mexican and don't choose to speak English) radio show called El Mano Penolo dealing with scary topics, am I moved to exorcize the house.
But it is interesting that I, too, heard a heavy hand.
*****
TAARG was the model for the heavy hand in the photo. I give her full credit for her model duties. If investors ever ask for my original artwork, I will make sure she gets a huge chunk of the money.
posted
by Marty Barrett at Monday, September 19, 2005
4 Comments:
crazy shit dude
Is this the apartment you told us we should rent? Mister Marty???? Hmmm???
I figured it would make more piquant our Dia de los Muertos celebrations
That hand kind of reminds me of someone conducting a choir.
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