Love Thy Neighbor!
But what if thy neighbor is crazy?
Having just finished watching the Netflix documentary ‘Worst Roommate Ever,’ I was overcome with a memory from not too long ago that somewhat tracks what happened in the last episode of this series about a ‘serial squatter’ called Jamison Bachman. In this double length episode, three women, a best friend and a brother are witness to the downward spiral of Jamison’s life that eventually results in Jamison brutally murdering his brother for not allowing Jamison to live with him, even though the brother had bailed Jamison out of jail on two separate occasions. Now, my tale does not end in murder or violence, but there were just a few similarities in the character of Jamison Bachman and our old neighbor, let’s call him Bob.
Bob was a late middle-aged man of unremarkable appearance. Tall, stocky and unkempt, Bob kept mostly to himself in the downstairs condo in West Ventura. He’d occasionally have his girlfriend over for the night, but not too often. He had come to live with his mother some years ago, 5 or 10, I’m not sure. This was at a time when our landlord still lived in the condo above. We now suspect that she had moved out because of Bob the nightmare neighbor. Bob’s introduction to us was calm and strange. On our first ever meeting in the parking lot, he had to let us know that the people that lived in the condo before us bothered him, that they were mean to him, did things in the upstairs condo that would disrupt his peaceful life downstairs like jump up and down on the floors and make lots of racket to cause all kinds of commotion, on purpose. On occasion Bob was yelled at by the man that lived upstairs, apparently for no reason at all, other than to be as mean as possible. Either way, in the back of our minds, we heard and should have listened to the warnings that the previous tenants had imparted to us before moving to Idaho. Don’t trust Bob - there’s something wrong with him, he drinks, gets mad and hits the ceilings with a stick. Oh, and he never leaves his condo. The tenants weren’t scared of Bob, but they did not want their teenaged daughter to talk to him anymore, presumably after a series of weird encounters, which we were soon to find out, would arrive in increasing frequency.
Jamison Bachman was a sociopath. He’d move into a single woman’s apartment in rather a hurry, first gaining their trust with a clean cut appearance, a slick job (he was a lawyer, but didn’t practice because he failed the Bar), and cash in hand ready to pay the first month’s rent. As soon as he was inside, everything changed. He’d stop paying rent immediately, set up residency by establishing a permanent address, thus making his presence legal in the eyes of the law. Eviction would take months, if it would happen at all. Jamison would take possession of the apartment and everything in it almost immediately. Knowing tenant’s laws better than anyone else, he maneuvered in such a way to make it impossible for him to be removed and instead proceeded to try and pry the original tenant out of their own home.
Bob comes into memory when the doc mentions what happened when Jamison was able to remove one of the tenants Arleen and became the sole occupant of the apartment. He had become the neighbor from hell. He’d bother the landlord about everything in the apartment and became very subpoena friendly. When he wasn’t taking the landlord, whom he didn’t pay, to court, he’d be threatening him with court, all the while terrorizing the tenants living below him, dropping heavy objects on the floor, leaving the faucet running twenty four hours a day and running up the water bill for the landlord to pay later. His antisocial behavior continued until the landlord was able to evict Jamison, but Arleen never got her apartment back. Jamison took everything from her, including her two cats.
Bob lived with his aging mother until the day she died, supposedly in his arms, while the Thomas Fire was raging in the back hills, only a few hundred feet away from the condo complex. The stories Bob told were always a little off, which made him seem suspicious. One of the stories he liked to repeat was that unlike the rest of the owners and tenants at the condo complex, he stayed during the fire, the largest in California history at that time, and kept awake for two days straight fighting off the blaze with his garden hose, an unlikely story since his ‘garden’ was situated on the back porch facing the rain wash coming off the hills from the front of the complex. The front of the complex is where the burn marks on the trees ended, hundreds of feet from his magical garden hose. There were no burned trees or vegetation in the back of the building. So what was he spraying? Bob would talk so adamantly about these stories that one would actually believe them.
The trouble started around Christmas only a few weeks after we had moved in. The area of the condo between the kitchen and living room leads through a small hallway into a set of bedrooms along the back of the space. It is in this area of the hallway where the floors creaked as we walked from one room to the next, so, pretty much impossible to avoid. Bob let us know one evening as we watched television by smashing his ceilings with some kind of a stick a few times. We then heard him yelling something that we couldn’t make out. He did this a few times over the next few nights, and then every time we’d come back home from work, he’d start playing loud music, with the sound bar turned on, so the floors would shake from the sound of the bass. That is until I decided to go downstairs to confront him. The conversation was calm, but tense. By the end we had come to some kind of an understanding. We’d be careful walking around upstairs and he’d keep the music and bass to a minimum. Things went well, for a few weeks, maybe months. Bob had a theory that our landlord was renting her condo illegally, because the stipulation is for everyone living at the complex to be the owner of their own place while the HOA forbids the renting out of individual condos. What Bob did not know is that our landlord bought her condo before the stipulations were written and was thus exempt from them, allowing her to rent out her condo to whomever she wanted. Over the years Bob’s anger grew toward the landlord and by extension toward the tenants that lived in her condo, who were coming and going as frequently as the California fire seasons.
The shit hit the fan that summer. Bob had been drinking early one night and with the sundown his rising alcohol level also leveled up his internalized rage. He had turned up the music to 11 and started to continually hit the ceiling in the living room, in the bedroom, in the kitchen and back and forth. We left our condo and went outside to wait out the storm, recording as much as we could with our phones. Outside Bob’s condo sounded like a college party, articulated by outbursts of shouting and slamming noises as Bob moved from room to room. He never came out. It was the middle of the work week and it was on this day we decided that we’d have to do something.
The first time we ever called the cops on anyone was a day I thought would never come. I was never that friendly with the police and view cops with a dose of suspicion, having been close to a few cops in my life. The day came when it became apparent that all the avenues for a decent quiet life at the condo would not come after random confrontations with Bob, who had by then refused to answer the door when I went downstairs to talk to him. On one of the last occasions I ran downstairs fuming, in my mind ready to kick down his door, though obviously realizing that such a confrontation would only help Bob’s cause and not ours. Bob wanted to escalate the situation - that much was clear. Under the façade of strange but friendly banter lay a sociopathic mind that had already been through similar, perhaps worse scenarios before. We learned this sad fact after bringing this up with the Home Owner’s Association, who had many dealings with Bob at the official level in the past. The HOA was set up to resolve situations like this, but as a regulatory body it was completely toothless. There were clauses under which the HOA could penalize Bob for certain infractions, but these were hard to prove. We were told to monitor and record Bob’s misbehavior, which we did until we finally decided to move out and put the entire thing behind us. A couple more nights of drinking insanity, a day when Bob had a fit over water running down from our porch down to his after I watered our plants outside, and some very odd interactions with Bob later in the year, pretty much cemented that we’d be out of that condo by the year’s end. By the fall we had moved our bed from the master bedroom, which was above Bob’s, to the much smaller second bedroom, which now sat above Bob’s new roommate. We no longer had to listen in on Bob’s loud conversations or his music that he’d play deep into the night. The sleepless nights were getting better, but we felt like strangers in our own home, always walking on eggshells lest we wake the monster downstairs. We had gone so far as to offer to fix the floors. The landlord did green light the work, but weeks of living in a construction zone didn’t feel right to us. Plus, we didn’t own the place.
The final straw came when I was out collecting our cat from the outside one night. For a while we’d let him run outside to have some outdoor fun and exercise, but he was to always be home by sundown. The hills in front of the complex are a wild area, host to deer and coyotes who we’d heard many times in the quiet of the night. As I was out looking for our cat I could see Bob lurking through his bedroom window, partially obscured by the window blinds and holding a camera with a telephoto lens. He’s been taking photos of me while I was out collecting our cat. When Bob noticed that I noticed him he quickly scurried away into the darkness of his room. After I got our cat, the way home was around the side of the building, which meant I’d have to walk past Bob’s kitchen window. In recent weeks Bob stuck a small store-bought sign that read ‘Be Kind’ on it, clearly meant to be directed at us, the ‘terrible’ tenants of the ‘evil’ landlord he so hated. As I walked past the kitchen window, Bob stuck his head through the blinds and with a strange smirk on his face said ‘I see you got your cat! Good!’ and again retreated back into the darkness of his apartment. For a few days after this, I noticed what looked like some kind of a viewing tube in the downstairs window of his apartment that faced the staircase that led to our condo. I did not find out what that tube was and I didn’t care. By this time we had already put a deposit on a new place in Ojai and we were ready to move out and leave the nightmare that was Bob behind.
In all our communications with our landlord she was always adamant that she’s going to bring a lawsuit against Bob because he has caused her tenants to leave abruptly and on a continual basis. Well, the joke seems to be on her, because Bob had recently brought a lawsuit against her in the Ventura courts. Apparently the saga continues to this day and we are not surprised, though kind of sad, because other than the nightmare neighbor, this was an amazing place to call home, even if for just a year. And I did not even tell about the time that my family visited. Perhaps another time.
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