I've had a strange week involving the mentally ill neighbors. The apartment directly above me is a halfway house for schizophrenics who have been hospitalized, but are trying to get back into the world. Most of them are no trouble & some are even friendly.
There are 3 young guys up there now, one is a big guy who recently returned to alcoholism & is causing a lot of problems. He has the bedroom over Rufus's & lately has been blasting heavy metal music at all hours of the day. On Sunday he had it going from after 4:30 pm until 12:30 am, when I called the cops. The cops warned him that yet another complaint & his stereo etc. would be confiscated.
On Tuesday evening , when I turned on the TV, it didn't work. The cable company sent a repairman out. He replaced the converter box & it still wouldn't work. When he traced the wires into the closet, he found they had been cut. It turned out that the same problem had happened upstairs. Neither apartment had a TV signal because of the snipped wires. On Wednesday, 2 cable guys spent more than 2 hours rewiring both apartments from the outside.
Later, the two friendly guys from upstairs came down & explained to me that the big guy had gone through their apartment cutting any wires he could get ahold of: cable, telephone, etc. When they discovered the damage, he threatened them & waved his fists around.
Before the TV repairs in the afternoon, I saw the big guy outside, walking around in his bare feet, muttering, waving & pointing to someone invisible. He tried to pull a metal "No Parking" sign off the chain link fence in the parking lot, then threw a stone at his own bedroom window & walked back through the garages. Somewhere along the way he'd found a can of paint thinner & was carrying it around looking at the foundations of the building(have I mentioned he smokes?). Later, I found it on the front steps when I took the recycling out & quickly placed it in a bag & hid it in the garbage. He had ripped junk mail up & threw it all over the porch and front yard.
That night, about 10 pm, 3 policemen & a caseworker/shrink spent about 45 minutes up there before taking him away between 2 cops in a patrol car. He was clutcing a large envelope, probably containing the medicines he hadn't been taking. I heaved a sigh of relief.Normally I don't mind the fact that there are schizophrenics in the building, but that guy was out of control & scary. Even if he's not gone permanantly, hopefully by the time he returned in a few weeks or months he will be stabilized.
