My roommate Brian has a friend named Mike. He is the most terrifying man I know.

The dude is like 6’7”. He has a beard, which makes even the most baby-faced man creepy (trust me, I know from experience). Every time I’ve seen him, he’s wearing leather gloves and a jeffcap. When he’s not, he’s rocking a wife-beater, displaying some very serious tattoos. I’m not talking about dragons and naked ladies and shit, but prison-looking tattoos, endless unintelligible patches of ink from his wrists all the way up his arms.

His looks befit his lifestyle. I think he was in a low-budget porn. I’m pretty sure he now runs a horror film production company. He loves Nascar, not for the races, but for the tailgating, where he sets up a make-shift boxing ring and challenges all “rednecks” to fight. A national magazine recently profiled him for this, noting how he’ll box up to a dozen rednecks a day.

He is, by any reasonable standard, a lunatic. But also a pretty nice guy.

Saturday night he came into town. I don’t know him very well or know much about him (aside from those things I just mentioned), so I don’t know where he was coming from, where he lives, or what brought him to the city. All Brian said to me was “Mike is coming tonight.” And I knew it would be interesting.

After during our usual routine (six hours of drinking, smoking pot, and watching VH1 Classic), we went to a bar in the Lower East Side called Motor City. I HATE this bar. With a passion. But for some reason, my friends insist on going there. When I lived in the LES, my apartment was five doors away from this bar, and I think I went there once in two years. That was in my first week in the neighborhood and I never went back after that. This is because it sucks. But now it’s probably the bar I go to most in NYC. This infuriates me to no end.

When word came down that we were going there on Saturday, my mood soured. I normally would put up a stink, but the fact is that I really don’t have many friends in NYC anymore. So I can either go where they are or stay in. So I went.

And – shockingly – it stunk. I was drunk, stoned, and bored, and so shut down. Also, though I know Mike, he and Brian were talking most of the time, so I did my whole “brooding” thing. The best part of the night was the enjoyment I got out of watching the hipsters tremble in fear around Mike. Mike could be mistaken for a hipster, but he’s closer to monster than to hipster. And one of the main hipster pastimes, aside from not washing his hair and trying really hard to be indifferent, is being total pussy. So as someone who is not a pussy, I took great joy in watching Mike be a dick to the hipsters. God I fucking hate hipsters.

Before close, I left – probably around 3am. I wasn’t feeling it and hated the place, so I headed home. And missed out on the best stuff of the night.

Brian and Mike stayed at the bar until close getting messed up. When I left, both were very drunk. Not unserveable drunk, but pretty banged up nonetheless. They continued drinking and when the lights came on went to LoSide, a pseudo-hipster diner nearby. I’m glad that I wasn’t there for this portion of the night. Since I’ve become a vegetarian, or more specifically a pseudo-pescatarian, there is no more joy in eating. I now know why I didn’t eat a lot of fish or vegetables – because they taste fucking horrible. Horrible, horrible, horrible. I have to stop now before I crush my laptop in my hands, but I’ll get into this at a later date.

After the diner, Brian and Mike made it back to our apartment. I was fast asleep – I hadn’t slept well during the week and so came home and passed out before my head hit the pillow – and so didn’t hear them come in.

Brian is a notorious “tired” drunk. I can’t blame him for this, but I have to point this out to serve the story. Brian wakes up at 4:45 in the morning for work, so when the weekend comes, he sleeps. A lot. Last weekend, on Saturday I think, Brian “woke up” (read: came out of his bedroom) at 6:36pm. Very impressive.

For some reason, Mike decided that he wanted to go get cigarettes. It was now about 5:30 in the morning. Mike contends that he told Brian about his plan. Brian says he did not. Either way, Mike left. Brian fell asleep/passed out.

Our doors, both to our apartment and our building, lock when they close behind you. This is almost universally true for all building doors, but not always true of apartment doors.

This is the assumption that Mike was operating under. When he left, he closed the apartment door behind him but propped open the door to the apartment building.

He went to get his cigarettes, came back, and was able to get into our building because he propped the door. But when he came to the apartment, it was locked. He knocked. No answer. He knocked again. No answer. He banged, screamed, and yelled. No answer.

Brian and I were asleep in the apartment (not together – sadly), dreaming away. As I said, he’s a pretty heavy sleeper. Normally, I am not. But for some reason, I wasn’t waking up.

Faced with a dilemma, Mike decided to sleep in the hallway. Now you must keep in mind that we do have neighbors. My building, which you may remember is located in Little Italy/Chinatown, has three types of residents: 1) Young people like Brian and I; 2) Old Italian people; 3) Chinese people who leave their apartment doors open all day long and yell and stink up the whole building.

And here was Mike: giant of a man, simply horrifying in appearance, now laying down in the area just outside our apartment door. Enter Amadeo.

Amadeo is the “super” of my building. I use the quotation marks because he’s not a superintendent in the traditional sense (i.e. he lives in the building, you call him when something’s broken, and he fixes it). Instead, I don’t have Amadeo’s number. I don’t know where Amadeo lives. From what I can tell, he might just live in the Italian restaurant I live above. His job at the restaurant, from what I can tell, is to sit there getting drunk on white wine. This may or may not involve stumbling around the restaurant and/or yelling in Italian at tourists and sexually harassing women. Basically, he’s got the life.

Amadeo is an ever-drunk, 50-something Italian guy. Naturally, he is quite the character. On a weekday morning last week, I was awoken by his screams outside on the street near my window (every night I wake up at about 4am to open my window, since when I go to bed after midnight it’s 40° in my room, but then the heat kicks on and by the time I have to wake up, we’re pushing 80°, but I’ll leave that for another time). At 7am, I opened my curtain to see what the fuck was going outside and found Amadeo yelling into the driver’s side window of a parked car, screaming in heavily-accented English, “You son of a bitch! You animale! You don’t-a talk-a to me like that! You son of a bitch, you! You mother fucker!” The passengers in the car were screaming back at him, though I couldn’t tell what they were yelling about. I watched this scene for a few minutes from my bed, wondering what the hell my life has become if I’m totally unfazed by this, before closing the curtain, shutting the window, and going back to bed.

Two days later, I was opening the door to my apartment coming home from work when Amadeo came up to me:

Amadeo: “Hey, you!”
Me: [removing headphones] “Hey Amadeo.”
Amadeo: [eyes closed, stinking of wine] “Listen, eh, rhgaoainvoia hoih aoihfascanl.”
Me: “Um, what?”
Amadeo: “No, no, listen, listen, iahoaidn iosvsod vosidvn viohdoiho.”

This went on for a good four minutes as I stood in the doorway, trying to decipher what the hell he was trying to tell me. I assumed this was building- or apartment-related. Perhaps he had a package for me, since he kept two Christmas packages for me for two months before giving them to me in February. But no, it was neither. He was trying to tell me that if I was planning on throwing out any clothes, I should give them to him. Then he pointed at the shoes I was wearing and said, “Like the shoes.” For the record, I have never thrown out clothes. I’m guessing that he either confused me for another resident, since he has no idea of my name, or this plan was hatched out of alcohol-induced dementia. At any rate, I told him that yes, I would give him any clothes that I was planning on throwing out, shook my head, and walked inside.

But now back to the scene. Mike was asleep in outside the apartment door. It was around 7am now. This disturbed some residents, who called Amadeo. Amadeo entered the building, then saw Mike.

Missing what transpired between the two of them has become one of the biggest regrets of my life. To see Mike, all 6’7” of scary, and Amadeo, a drunk Italian, screaming at each other in my hallway, would have made my month, if not my year.

Brian caught the end of the action, as he was finally awoken by Amadeo pounding on the apartment door. He opened the door to see the two yelling at each other, Amadeo gesturing wildly, spewing invectives in Italian, English, and a hybrid of both. Mike was also swearing bloody murder, but he also turned his attention to Brian, asking him why he didn’t open the fucking door.

I heard this from my bedroom, but didn’t get up. I was too groggy. I’m not a sleep doctor, but I’m guessing that you’d be groggy too after getting four hours of sleep per night, eating nothing but carbs, carbs, and more carbs, drinking fifteen beers, and then popping a Xanax just to make sure you’re nice and out of it.

I suppose the story is anti-climactic, because Mike was then let into the apartment. Amadeo was pissed off, but we’re guessing he was bombed anyway and might not even remember the incident. But what I would have given to see that scary giant and that Italian drunk yelling at each other at 7am in the hallway.

This is what passes for entertainment in my life. I think I need some new friends. Or at least a hobby. Too bad both those seem like a lot of work.