CRAZY OLD MAN
Being a semi-autobiographical tale set in Montreal
I originally wrote this story in October 1992 in a notebook, because the building I lived in had paper-thin walls, floors and ceilings, and if I tapped my manual typewriter late in the evening my upstairs neighbour would jump up and down on his floor until I stopped. This third draft version I'm publishing here isn't all that different from the first draft in the notebook. I sent the typewritten third draft off to a Toronto-based literary magazine called Blood & Aphorisms the same month, and the editor wrote back some time later to say she liked the story but found the last section confusing. I'd basically written a story-within-a-story which I thought was very clever and innovative, but I gamely rewrote that part as a dream, sent it back, and that version was published in 1993.
When the crazy old man slams the tip of his cane against the ceiling, it leaves dents in the plaster. "Can I have no peace?" He shouts. "Silence!" He has a German accent. Upstairs, the tenant is used to this periodic abuse. It's like the weather; sometimes it rains, sometimes the old man bangs on his ceiling. It takes no more provocation than a creaking floorboard, and there are many creaking floorboards in this old building.
The view from the upstairs apartment is more-or-less the same as the view from the crazy old man's apartment. One might see passing traffic on a quiet sidestreet, pedestrians, children playing hide-and-seek among parked cars. Who could say what the crazy old man saw? He seemed animated by rage. Rage got him up in the morning, rage moved him around restlessly among his stacked boxes and rows of canned food, and he went to bed at night wrapped in a blanket of rage.
When the crazy old man's refrigerator stopped working, it quickly became part of the world's overall plan to destroy him. He complained; the landlord sent a repairman, who told him he needed to defrost the fridge. The impatient old man used a knife to chip away at the four-inch-thick walls of ice in his freezer, and managed to puncture the freon coil. Now, the fridge didn't work at all. The landlord characteristically gave him the runaround, so when the crazy old man spied the janitor outside his window, working on his bike, he hobbled out with his cane and demanded justice. The janitor agreed to take a look at the fridge. He opened it, and a stench of rotting food rolled over him like a wave. "Yeah, it's broken all right," the janitor said, quickly closing the door. "I'll talk to the landlord about it."
"What about these boxes?" the crazy old man demanded, gesturing at a stack of cartons that took up a quarter of the space in his small apartment.
"What about them?"
"They aren't mine!" the old man said. "They belong to someone else! I was away for two years, I paid my rent, and these rotters rented my apartment to someone else who left those things!"
"Then throw them out." The janitor wanted to get out of that room, which stank like a morgue, but the furious old man in his filthy undershirt and baggy old trousers wouldn't let his audience with the authorities be cut short.
"I will not throw them out! I want them to find the owner of these things." His gaze was absolutely fixed, rigid behind his horn-rimmed glasses.
"Well, maybe they can't," the janitor reasoned. "People just disappear sometimes you know."
"And this," the old man continued, gesturing toward his kitchen counter. "The bastard next door has put a hole through the wall."
"Really?"
"Yes, he tries to poison me. Look, look!" The janitor stuck his head under the counter, where there was indeed a hole that had been cut by a plumber while installing some pipes. The hole didn't extend into the next apartment, and the janitor told the old man this. "He can't poison you through that," he said. Then he made his exit.
The janitor talked to the landlord on the phone. Naturally the landlord didn't want to pay for a new fridge, so he told the janitor to inspect the freezer for any signs of damage. If it had been damaged the old man would be obligated to replace it. So the janitor told the old man to empty his freezer, and when he returned he found the marks of a knife in the coil. He wrinkled his nose and said, "Look, throw out all that food, it's rotten, you can't eat it."
The crazy old man slammed his cane against the floor. "Listen," he said, "I will be paid for this food!"
"Fight with the landlord about that if you want, but throw it out. It's going to make you sick. You've got to look after yourself you know, nobody else is going to. That's just the way it is, you can't be expecting other people to care for you."
The old man's response to the landlord's inaction was to leave his door open, an electric fan blowing the reek of putrefaction into the corridor. The janitor talked to the old Greek woman who collected the rent. He asked her about the crazy old man's boxes. "Those are his," she whispered, embarassed. "He go away, when he come back he say they're not his!"
The janitor said, "He's nuts, eh?" When she showed incomprehension he tapped his head with his finger. "Nuts. He says the guy next door is trying to poison him."
"Oh, he crazy," she agreed. "But he pay his rent always."
"But shouldn't he be in a home or something? He's always burning candles in there, I see them at night through his window. With all those boxes in there he could burn the place down you know."
The Greek woman looked very serious. "Yes. I see him sometimes, he drink, he drink so much he fall down can't get up. And one time he try to choke little old man next door!"
After he paid his month's rent the woman told the old man the landlord wouldn't replace his fridge. She also told him to stop bothering the janitor because the janitor was just a cleaner and could fix nothing. Incensed, the old man lay in wait until the janitor came along the corridor. "You!" he said. "The lady told me you are not a janitor! You are just a cleaner!"
"What's the difference?" the janitor asked, bemused.
"You cannot repair anything!"
"Why? What's broken?"
The old man showed him the sliding doors that had slipped out of their runners in his closet. "This!" he said. "I cannot get into my closet!"
"I can fix that," the janitor said.
"You will not! You are just a cleaner!"
"What else is broken?"
The old man showed the janitor his window. The screen had come out of its aluminum frame. "I can fix that," the janitor said.
"You'll fix nothing!" the old man said.
"Then why are you bothering me?"
The old man fished his rent receipt from his wallet and shook it in the janitor's face. "I paid my rent," he said, "now the landlord says he won't repair the refrigerator!"
"Of course not, you broke it."
The old man clenched his fist. "I will call the police!" he said.
"You do that," the janitor said. "They'll take one look at this place and throw you out on the street."
Despite the prospect of losing a steady supply of rent, reports on the deteriorating condition of the old man prompted the landlord to take action. The old man was an outpatient from a mental hospital, so the landlord contacted the proper authorities and told them he obviously couldn't take care of himself any more and should be removed. The proper authorities sent someone around to help the old man move into an institution, and rather than submitting, the old man ran away. He just disappeared. One day the janitor was shopping for groceries on Saint-Laurent when he noticed the old man's face plastered to telephone poles and light standards. 'Missing'. The janitor was relieved. The hallways would stop stinking.
As he threw out the old man's mountain of cardboard boxes, as he soaked down the apartment with insecticide and watched the roaches boiling out of their nests to die, as he swept together the roach corpses and years and years of dust into a mound, as he mopped and scrubbed layers of insect shit, filth and dirt from the floors, the walls, the cupboards, the janitor thought about the crazy old man. He remembered a story the old man had inspired in him.
In the janitor's story, the old man sat in his darkened room, a single candle burning, his cane between his legs, his hands clutched together around the top of the cane, remembering the war, remembering Poland. Yes sir no sir. Marching in formation, following orders. The stiff-armed salute. Riding in the back of an open truck across frozen steppes, huddled in a grey greatcoat. Rifles, machine guns, gun grease, bullets. Riding in a truck behind the advancing front, burning villages and rounding up suspected partisans. Partisans lined up in rows, their back to open pits, shot, falling backwards. His hands on the rifle. His hands shovelling lime over twisted corpses. Mopping up. They were vermin. "Vermin," the old man said to himself. "Vermin." Yes sir no sir. When they said jump he asked, "How high?" Something clattered behind him. His Polish neighbour trying to poison him again. The crazy old man gripped his luger, fired into darkness. A cockroach the size of a dinnerplate writhed on its back, oozing a clear fluid, its antennae undulating. He shot at it again. "Filthy vermin." Or was it another memory? The hospital? Leather restraints and a rubber gag in his mouth, a sticky substance daubed on his temples, a lightning bolt through his brain. His wife, children, grandchildren all spun away from him by the force of his burning hate, his unfocused hate, his all-consuming hate. Alone in his apartment full of things he no longer recognized as his, holes burned through his past. These strangers all around with their sounds, their schemes to destroy him, their feet in the corridor. Through the thin walls he heard a woman cry. Still clutching his luger he pressed his ear up against the wall opposite his kitchen and listened to the sound of a man's heavy breathing, a woman screaming, "No! No! Let me go!" She screamed and she screamed, then the screams were muffled and the old man heard blows falling until she was silent. The next day the old man heard the familiar sound of the janitor's tin pail, and complained. "There was a woman making a terrible noise," he said. "I couldn't sleep!"
The janitor was mopping up a pool of congealing blood in the apartment next door. He squeezed the mop in his bucket and said, staring at the old man, "Yeah, she was raped and murdered. Why didn't you do something about it?"
"That is not my responsibility!" the old man said. "That is a matter for the police! The landlord! You!" He pulled his rent receipt out of his pocket. "I pay my rent here, and I should have peace!"
The janitor looked down into the pool of blood at his feet. "We didn't find the last one for a few days. The smell got into everything."
The old man said, "There are cockroaches in my apartment."
"I can do something about that," the janitor said. He went away and soon returned wearing a steel helmet and military fatigues, a huge steel tank strapped to his back. A hose projected from the tank, attached to a machine-gun-shaped nozzle. "Stand back," the janitor said, and he began spraying everything in the room with Zyklon-B. Jews, partisans, gypsies, homosexuals, socialists, all those of impure thought and impure blood came boiling out of their nests to die. "Filthy vermin," the janitor said, looking the old man in the eye.
"What am I to do with all these corpses?" the old man said. The janitor shrugged.
"That's your business. It's your apartment, not mine. Like you said, you pay your rent."
The old man set about digging a pit in his living room floor, and began pushing the corpses into the pit one by one, shovelling lime on the layer and layers of bodies. This task kept him fully occupied until the first of the month came around and his cheque didn't arrive. Again he accosted the janitor. "My cheque has been stolen!"
"No it hasn't. The government's run out of money."
"Liar! You stole it!" The old man couldn't imagine life without his monthly cheque.
"Come with me." The janitor led the crazy old man into the street. The old man saw posters displaying his face on each street lamp and telephone pole. There were people meticulously covering these posters with pictures of a smiling young woman. The old man remembered the smiling young woman in the apartment next to his. 'Raped and Murdered', the poster read. 'Twenty Thousand Dollar Reward'. Perhaps the reward was meant to compensate for the fact that the people who heard her scream in the night never got around to calling the police.
The janitor ambled along, occasionally pausing so the old man, limping with his cane, could catch up. He led the old man to a government office building surrounded with a sea of protesters demanding cheques. High atop the building, government officials gathered. One by one, like lemmings, they began to jump. Soon the sidewalk was littered with crumpled bodies. The old man pushed his way through the crowd of chanting demonstrators and limped along the sidwalk. He spat at the corpses. "Vermin!" he said. The janitor followed not far behind. Eventually they came upon an official who wasn't quite dead, although broken bones protruded from his flesh.
"Where is my cheque! My cheque!" The crazy old man waved his cane threateningly.
"No money," the official said. As he spoke blood bubbled and frothed from his mouth. "Economy collapsed. There's nothing."
"My cheque!" How could the old man continue to enjoy the privacy and security of his apartment, month after month, year after year, without his government cheque?
"I'm sorry," the dying official said. "I'm very very sorry." He wept, tears coursed down his cheeks. "We want so much to keep giving you your cheques. We love you. You're all we have to live for, you and all the millions of people who depend on us to survive. We love to manage you, we love to administrate you, we love to police you, so you can all live alone and never ever speak to each other. Without the cheques, we have no reason to go on."
"Is that why you jumped?" the janitor asked.
"We can't face a future where neighbour looks after neighbour. We want to die as we lived, alone."
The crazy old man cursed. "Vermin!" He kicked the official, nearly fell over, then limped away and disappeared into the crowd. The janitor said, "But you're never alone. That's a lie. We tell lies to each other, we tell lies to ourselves, and the lies turn into walls, the lies turn into rules and regulations, they turn into laws and prisons and institutions, they turn into television shows, they turn into stories. But it's all lies. We're never really alone."
By the time the janitor finished speaking the government official was dead.
While fictional, this story's quite grounded in actual settings, events and characters, including the encounters and conversations with the old man himself and the Greek concierge. My janitor 'job' was actually an illegal, undeclared 'under the table' gig, allowing me to continue collecting my unemployment insurance payments and affording plentiful free time for my writing practice. This arrangement should be very familiar to anyone on the lower rungs of the Montreal economy to this day – there's an enormous pool of black market workers, in the restaurant business, in construction, you name it. My job was particularly lousy in that I received no money at all, just reduced rent. I was only paid extra in exceptional cases – such as the task described below, in an excerpt from a letter home written shortly before I composed 'Crazy Old Man'.
I'm sitting in my little apartment. [...] I'm pretty intimate with it since I spent a couple of weeks cleaning it up and painting it before I moved in. Much of my time since AUG 1st has been taken up finding furnishings [...] So far it hasn't been too difficult actually. I've got a futon (used), a desk somebody left out on the street – people do that here, knowing someone else will find a use for it – (it's a big desk too), dishes, a dish rack, a telephone (982-0217). I've put up some shelves. All I need, other than minor details [...] is an easy chair. [...] Did I mention I have a desk lamp? You find the damnedest stuff just chucked out on the street.
The deal here is that I pay only $90 to live here, in exchange for doing stuff like taking out the trash, cleaning floors in the hallway, clipping the front lawn, and so on. I landed this with the connivance of the 'building manager', an old crazy Greek woman who always wears white. [In another letter I mentioned that she was also virulently racist.]
The building has 36 apartments. It's a 3-storey brick building with a basement (and scarey basement apartments) in a U-shape. Basically a rat's-nest, cramming as many people into as small a space as possible. It's in crummy shape, although the owner / slum lord Mr. ––––––– says they're going to do extensive renovations somet time this winter. I got a handle on the roachs in my apartment, though I still have to seal the cracks they come through.
As soon as I moved in they had a job for me, painting one of the apartments. It was rough. An old man had lived there for the last 19 years, the walls were a weird greyish-beige colour. He'd washed the floors with Javex so often, they looked like they'd been sanded. (Hardwood floors.) I spent a lot of time painting, repainting, fixing holes and cracks in the walls, fixing broken tiles and such in the bathroom; the kitchen was the worst, the old guy must have cooked exclusively with a frying pan. There was grease all over the walls and cupboards. When all the painting was done I had to wash the floors and verathane them. It seemed to take forever to do. I thought doing my apartment was hard! I made $170, which isn't much but I was also learning a lot in the process. ...
Instead of renovating that winter, the slum lord was suddenly out of the picture when the bank seized the building early in 1993. In short order, the chronic roach presence had been professionally exterminated, but the janitor job continued as before – under the table.