dale bridges writing

As I’ve mentioned before, there is a man who lives in my apartment building who calls himself the Buffalo. He is a big man, a talkative man, and a man who would prefer not to wear shirts. He is not ashamed of his body, thank you very much. Although he probably should be.

Fortunately, the Buffalo is also a computer-less man, and since he only leaves his apartment to do laundry and purchase Hungry-Man Dinners, I can safely assume that he will never ever read this blawg.

I am simultaneously awed by and frightened of the Buffalo. I constantly want to have conversations with him, and yet whenever he does start to converse with me, I have an overwhelming impulse to scream and run out of the room. This is also kind of how I feel about Lady Gaga.

If the Buffalo was either evil or good, it would be a lot easier to make up my mind about him. I could simply classify him in a category and then treat him accordingly. For instance, if he were evil, I would say that he’s got a real Jeffrey Dahmer-type vibe and all those hours in the bathroom are probably spent carefully peeling off the tips of his fingers so that he won’t leave any prints on his  victims, a la Kevin Spacey in “Se7en” (and, yes, that is technically how the name of that movie is supposed to be spelled–I looked it up on IMDB.com).  Or if he was good, I would say that he is more of the Quazimoto type, a deformed creature that has been rejected by society because of his outward appearance, but inside that extremely hairy, man-boob chest there beats a heart of gold.

But the Buffalo is a complicated guy and he cannot be so easily defined. There is goodness in him and there is evilness (if that is actually a word).

PEOPLE’S EXHIBIT A: There used to be a young Mexican man named Juan who cleaned our kitchen and bathroom. Since there is one kitchen and one bathroom for the entire floor, those facilities have to be used by seven people, and since those seven people are lazy slobs, management has to pay a man to clean up after them once a week, and since management is cheap and doesn’t want to pay minimum wage, that man needs to be willing to work for very little cash paid under the table. Juan was such a man. He wasn’t exactly great with a mop and dustpan but then again he never complained about the insane people who made his job miserable, so everyone decided to ignore his janitorial shortcomings.

Everyone except the Buffalo.

The Buffalo told management that Juan was lazy and then Juan was fired. Let me repeat that: The guy who doesn’t have a job and has never had a job complained that the guy who cleans up after him was lazy.

Okay, so that’s the Evil Buffalo. However, hold on to your knickers, there’s also the Good Buffalo.

DEFENSE EXHIBIT B: I have another neighbor who steals my mail. Well, to be fair, she steals everyone’s mail, not just mine. I guess it’s like her thing or something. Some crazy ladies have cats, some crazy ladies collect campaign buttons; this crazy lady steals mail.

You see, there’s only one mailbox for the entire apartment building. What! you say. Only one mailbox! Why, that’s absurd! Yes, dear reader, it is absurd and I appreciate the exclamation points in your hypothetical reaction. The mailman simply drops all the mail on our front porch like a zookeeper throwing a pound of chum into a shark tank. For the first two months that I lived here, I couldn’t figure out why my Netflix movies never arrived. I found out later that Crazy Lady was stealing them. She waits for the mail and then she takes all of it to her room, where it disappears into a dark vortex of stuffed animals and ceramic figurines. Since I actually have a job, I can’t wait around all day to prevent this woman from taking my “Diff’rent Strokes: Episodes 1-5” DVDs. That would be insane.

I told the Buffalo about this problem and he immediately sprang (well, oozed) into action. Every day, he sits on the front stoop of the building until the mailman comes and he carefully looks at every letter three times to make certain that he has all my mail. Afterward, he either shoves my mail under my door immediately or, in the case of packages, squirrels them away in secret hiding places in his room until I come home, and then he promptly delivers them to me. It’s like having a butler. A butler who lives down the hall, and talks too much about “Unsolved Mysteries,” and doesn’t wear a shirt, and refuses to do any actual work aside from delivering postal products. So not really like a butler at all, actually.

ANYHOW, that’s the situation. Evil Buffalo vs. Good Buffalo. Who shall win the day? If Good Buffalo prevails, I will continue watching crappy sitcoms from the 1980s while writing this blawg. If Bad Buffalo is victorious, you will probably find me in a duffel bag along with numerous cans of well organized food products.