Crazy, crazy man

Our former manager, who was removed from his post, has been doing little acts of vandalism around the building to try to make life harder for the new manager. He is a crazy, crazy man. Last week he broke the doorknob off the elevator door and left it sitting on the bench outside. Was I there to see him do it? Well, no. But I do believe it was him. Why? Well--the backing to the doorknob was missing, so whoever removed it took one of the parts away with him. Also, it had been removed by force, the new manager told me. And the person who removed it did not call to report the damage to the new manager (if anyone else had done it, accidentally, they would have called to tell him, I AM SURE).

Our new manager (who is nice, sane, and reliable) told us that there have been other acts of vandalism around the building, always occurring in the wee hours of the night/early morning. I do believe it is he, the crazy man, who is doing it. He has also been tearing down any notice the new manager posts in the lobby, so that the new manager has taken to printing out individual copies for every unit and slipping them under our doors, instead.

I never see him anymore-- not even standing up in his window, staring at the women in the street with his binoculars, the way I used to. In fact, I have only seen him once since he was deposed, but it was in a sort of creepy way. I saw him come RUNNING out of the front door, in a crazy and agitated sort of way. I don't know if this sort of thing translates verbally; maybe you have to see it to understand why it is creepy. Most people don't come running aggressively out of the front door. It really struck me, in that instantaneous kind of way you can detect sometimes when there's something wrong with someone by their nonverbal cues, something about the way they're moving or carrying themselves that is just... off, or wrong for the context, or something. After I saw him come running out, I hid in my car till I thought he might be gone. Then I went into the lobby. But, I was unlucky; he came back in, with the same air of being in an enormous, aggressive hurry, walked past me and the friend I was talking to, and smacked her four-year-old son in the side of the head as he walked by (the boy was wearing a plastic fireman's helmet, so it probably didn't hurt, but was still totally inappropriate, as this is the woman he was previously harrassing, who has since filed a police report against him). He didn't say one word to us.

Other people have had brief sightings of him. He ran into one of the other tenants and told him he planned to buy the building and evict us all. Fat chance, but still creepy.

Creepier still, our new manager told us of a recent incident in which he and his girlfriend were waiting for the elevator, which is an old-fashioned sort of elevator, a "lift," in which you can see through the chain-link fence around it the outline of the person who is coming down in it, as it comes. So they were standing, waiting, and down it comes, with The Crazy Man in it. When he lands, instead of opening the door normally, he KICKS it open. Violently. With his foot. So it narrowly misses the head of the new manager's girlfriend. If she had been standing a centimeter closer it would have given her a concussion. Or possibly injured a little kid, badly.

In case I haven't mentioned it before, The Crazy Man is tall and big and strong. And angry.

The good news is that everything he's doing is being reported to the owners, and apparently he's got one chance left and then they're going to try eviction; at least, this is what our new manager told me. Eviction is hard, and especially in this case, when, as I've been told, the Crazy Man is a Vietnam vet receiving government money to live in the building, which would make eviction harder.

So, we'll see.