The devil above me

Call me privileged but I’ve never lived in an apartment before, at least not until I moved to Studio City.

I thought that apartments would be fun places to live. I had this perception from Melrose Place. There would be bitchy people, people with secrets, definitely good looking people and everyone would be having sex with each other, bitchy or otherwise.

Instead I live in an apartment with people who are merely indifferent or even worse, anti-social. I have said “hi” to people and they walk past me in silence. A smile doesn’t get returned. The pool area is vacant. When I go to the laundry room, there might be clothes tumbling in the dryer or spinning in the washer but nobody is around. It’s as if ghosts need clean clothes too.

It isn’t all that bad. I don’t live next to sex-starved menopausal women, voyeuristic men who don’t show their mouth, or religious freaks who scream like a girl and have abs of steel. Life is not a tv show, even when you’re living this close to Hollywood.

I do, however, have Satan living above me.

How do I know this? Every so often, I hear a very un-human voice yell “God, I fucking hate you!”. I expect to hear furniture being thrown or maybe a scream but this outburst is usually followed by a very frightening silence. This leads me to believe that a) God has done something very bad to the entity above me b) the entity is pretty darn mad c) there is no one else above me except for the entity and d) the entity is the prince of darkness who arguably has the biggest beef with our sweet Lord.

In fact, one of my friends slept over last night and she was awoken by one of Satan’s outbursts. She asked me who was living above me and I told her. She didn’t question me; this is, after all, California where weird things do happen and no explanation is necessary except for “this is California”.

The voice still scares me when I hear it; it is so guttural, so animalistic but so far, I have yet to witness any other ill effects from living beneath Satan. The walls haven’t started bleeding, I haven’t looked in the mirror and witnessed my own death, I have not heard voices behind me telling me to “get out”. Actually, I wouldn’t mind meeting him some day. I’m sure he is well connected in this town and he could probably hook me up with some pretty important people. He might want my soul but those things are really overrated anyway and I think I gave mine up when I moved here two years ago