Alphabet People - Letter H

“H” was my creepy landlord for many years. He was an older man in his late forties who struck me as the kind of guy who was gay but never came to terms with it and never came “out,” as if revealing so would have diminished his supervisory status somehow. Or maybe he had come to terms with it and it manifested itself in ways I’d prefer not to know about involving leather-clad role-playing with ball gags and blindfolds, or paraphilic infantilism and diapers. Of course, it may have just been my overactive imagination, since the guy was just a nice, doughy man with a goatee. But, it was my perception about his sense of purpose that had me on guard. He was serious most of the time, but other times he chuckled at the wrong things. H thought he was funny, but he really wasn’t. Fortunately though, H lived two blocks away and was not in the same building as me. However, I was not spared from other, more colorful characters in my building. One asshole that lived above me came down one night and accused me of raising the volume of my stereo in response to the volume of his television, as if I would rather engage him in some kind of perverse “my stereo vs. your TV” volume war than come knocking on his door and ask him to turn down his TV. I never even heard his TV, he was just a paranoid prick. And, as a result of his paranoia, I became paranoid myself in that “I’d-better-watch-my-back-or-my-neighbor’s-going-to-knife-me” kind of way. There must be a correlation between loneliness and paranoia. It seems that the deeper a person’s loneliness, the more elevated their levels of paranoia. That the ever-present “man” is always out to fuck them.