Balcony Babes

The summer I turned fourteen, a guy moved into an apartment where the back of his building, and therefore his balcony, faced almost across from mine but one floor down. It was enough of a view to stay obscured from the subject without having to try. Patty and I tested this out at the very end of freshman year when we decided to sunbathe on my balcony and he didn’t look up once from watering his tomato vines. Even though Patty and I didn’t really start connecting until that spring, when we realized we lived in the same complex but on opposite ends opposite floors, she insisted that she come over more often – around her lacrosse schedule - to study this man. Once Patty deemed his more potential status as more bachelor (or “fuckboi” as her more preferred crass synonym). She insisted she not only come over more frequently but that I take her place, as well as meticulous notes, every time he stepped out on his balcony, which was not often when he didn’t have people over. Perhaps it was the limitations within the fenced borders of the buildings’ concrete yards on the ground that made one realize there were no other places to look but up or around, and around could be a nice distraction when it felt like the sky is falling in a way that is only felt as a teenager. The more simple, less abstract reason is that he was an attractive man, they were horny teenagers, and no one else who dwelled in the complex was nice-looking enough for the two girls to want look at regularly. Though as much as we thought we gave our souls to him whole-heartedly back then, practicing our kissing with the Polaroid Patty took of him, we knew, the way all girls knew, that these boy-crazy man-crazy phases was just childhood playing and pretend time packaged in an older, more grounded sense of reality that the mind can run wild with the help of hormones.

The apartment complex was built on property that used to be an auto body shop but the mob burned it down in the ‘80s for the insurance cash. It was left abandoned for almost 30 years before some property bro backed by his dad decided to buy the property from the city and (hastily, poorly) build nice-looking condos for post-recession transplants. Despite warnings from city-developers and locals who knew that the foundation would be as sturdy as the sand that surrounded the island, a five-block stretch of neatly arranged apartments, no more than six stories high to please housing authorities, was erected right off the Neptune Ave F stop in less than a year, when a project that size usually took at least four years. The estate agent flipped the old lot with the approach of a George Carlin fan who was doing this so that tenants can have a place for their stuff, an overpriced shelter close to a train station; for individuals and families made up of individuals that you’ll find only in a city area to live their lives without a pressure – at least a familial or romantic one, finance dread never goes away – to settle down.

The guy could’ve been anybody, though quick and easy for Patty to deduce that he wasn’t a “family man.”

“You told me that you saw him have other people over, and no kids were there?” A gathering forming every couple of weekends – fall to spring, with more meetups in the summer as more as a rest stop to hype up in the sinking sunset and gather physical & mental bearings in the early morning hours when dawn stretched its warm gradual light into a sharp, blinding brightness by the time one got home. Young professionals with their hair down and pulled back up when they need to boot in one of the host’s flower pots from too much sangria, always dressed in whites but lacking the poise to keep them that way; cool girl-women representing the girl-to-woman spectrum of ages twenty to twenty-nine, shining with glitter lightly brushed on the bridge of their noses to complement their perfectly imperfect mix of silver and gold pieces; Timbs worn and stained by the old boys from the neighborhood.

“Maybe your mom knows who he is… you mentioned she grew up in the neighborhood, no?”

“Yeah, she probably like.. babysat him or something.”

“Ask her.”

“No, I don’t wanna have to explain to her why we’re spying on this rando.”

“It’s not spying, it’s studying.”

“The girls he has over dress pretty… you think we could get away with looking like that?”

Hearing “girls” forced Patty’s lower lip to push up along with her upper lip towards the bottom of her babyish button nose, spreading out down the corners of her face into a disgusted frown. “Girls? Girls? No, we are girls, we can look, we can be curious, we can fuck around and find out. But those ladies with him, they wear time on their weary, happily exhausted face. They had their chance to be girls, and hopefully they did. My mom would tell me of girls in the neighborhood who grew up too fast and spent their early adulthood chasing youth that they missed, infantilizing themselves in front of men more age-appropriate for them as they got older.” Patty was crass until the gravity of her passion turned her rhetoric to prose.

“Patty, I don’t get it – then why bother?”

“With what?”

“The “studying” of the man.”

“Ever since he moved here, it’s like he brought culture here by way of his guests. Like the rotation changes with the season, yet he remains the same.”

“How so?”

“You know… same clothes, haircut,

“Like… what is it about him that he attracts all these different people here of all places? That makes people want to stay and linger here?”

“Maybe he’s just a nice guy?”

“Bullshit, I catch the looks he makes to all those tarty girls.”

“I thought they were women, Patty.”

“Whatever.”

“I know it’s stupid Patty, but it’s okay to feel a little jealous of them.”

“I’m not jealous, I feel sorry for them that they’re being played.”

Though they knew the rules of that game better than Patty ever would.