Pedro Garcia, Hunchbacks, and Vampires
By Radrook
By Radrook
The new tenant, Pedro Garcia, was banging on the apartment door of the landlord, Mr. Gordon, a man who suffered from a spinal deformity commonly referred to as hunchbacked. After a very prolonged silence, the door finally flew open.
“What do you want?” Mr. Gordon barked hoarsely, followed by three bursts of a hacking cough, which he muffled against his hairy forearm. He was dressed in a soiled white tee shirt and purple Bermuda Shorts, from which his rather short, stubby, hairy pale legs protruded towards the floor.
He was massively built in the torso, very muscular. He was also bald, and the dim hallway light reflected off a skull that had obviously been meticulously shaved, and generously greased. The immense hunchback was, of course, the finishing touch. Momentarily, Garcia, a young short, skinny man of Mexican-American descent, with strong Mestizo facial features, drew back from the unusual visual impact.
"You should know what I want Mr. Gordon!" he finally forced himself to say.
“But I don't!" the landlord bellowed revealing yellow tobacco-tainted teeth.
“Mr. Gordon, what did I ask you when I was applying for an apartment?” Garcia continued, after having partially regained his composure.
“Be specific and cut to the chase! Darn it!” Mr. Gordon shot back.
“OK, I will. Why did you rent me the apartment when I very clearly said that I was looking for a quiet place to live? A place where I could feel safe and get some sound sleep?”
“Why did I say that to you, you ask? Simple! Because this is a place where you can feel safe and get sound sleep. Has anyone here stopped you from getting sound sleep?” he asked, suspiciously jutting his Kirk-Douglas chin, and squinting one green, bloodshot eye.
“Don’t play the innocent with me, Mr. Gordon," Garcia immediately responded, as he gradually recovered from the shock of the initial encounter.
“You know exactly what I am talking about. If you had told me who lives here, I would never have agreed to sign that lease and given you a deposit."
“I cerrrrtainly did not mislead you! Have any of my tenants messed with you-eh?”
“Well, directly? No, I can’t say that they have,” Garcia responded sheepishly.
“Then case closed, and up your nose with a rubber hose! Bye!”
“No! The case is not closed, Mr. Gordon!” Garcia kept the hunchbacked landlord from shutting the door in his face by pressing on it with his hand.
“Get your fat, brown hand off my door!” Mr. Gordon said menacingly, while squinting his left green eye at Garcia.
“I’ll take it off your door as soon as you tell me why you lied, Mr. Gordon. I had a right to know.” Garcia, who strongly resembled the actor Erick Estrada, said in a trembling voice, while trying to squint a brown eye right back, and for a long moment, they both stood there in the semi-dark hallway squinting at each other.
“You had a right to know what? Dammit! Spit it out already and be done with it. I have other things to do than stand here listening to you griping and whining and bellyaching all morning!” Gordon finally blurted out breaking the impasse. He had noticed how physically frail Garcia was, and if things got out of hand, he had absolutely no qualms in tossing him head-first down the steps. But he had other ways to deal with such tenants which were just as effective.
“Alright Mr. Gordon, I'll tell you why," Garcia continued, "it’s very simple! You rented me an apartment next to someone who behaves and looks like some damned vampire.”
“Vampire? Vampire? What vampire? Ohhhhhh! Wait a minute!" Mr. Gordon scratched his bald head with what to Garcia looked more like claws than regular nails. Then after smiling broadly and revealing his yellowed tobacco stained teeth again:
“Yeah! Yeah! I know who you might mean. You probably mean Vladimir Petrovich, the recent immigrant from Romania. Heh! Heh! Heh!”
“Transylvania?” Garcia was about to ask, but refrained for the sake of keeping the conversation on an even, less adversarial keel.
“He is more or less a recluse and keeps pretty much to himself.”
“Really? Why is he so damn pale?”
“Why? Does everyone in your immediate vicinity have to have a suntan? This isn’t San Antonio California, Guadalajara or Chihuahua Mexico, Mr. Garcia, you know?”
“No, I’m not talking about just a mild pale. I’m talking about an extremely, abnormal deathly pale similar to a Caucasian cadaver drained of blood. A humanly impossible kind of pale.”
“Gee! I don’t know, Mr. Garcia. Maybe he has pernicious anemia? Vitiligo? Why? What exactly is it that you are imagining that Vladimir has? As if his paleness were any of your business anyway.”
“Well, how pale a person is becomes my business if whenever we bump into each other in the hallway, the pale person stops and stares at my neck as if he wants to bite and slurp!”
“Vladimir? Bite and slurp?" Mr. Gordon scratched his temple as if to indicate total disbelief.
"Vladimir hasn’t bitten anyone in this building, and he has been living here for a full three months. No one else has ever complained about him staring at them in the way you say he did you either. Not only that, but he always pays his rent on time, and goes to work every single day at his job as a mortician. He also never--”
“He’s a mortician?” Garcia interrupted in a quivering voice.
“Why? You Mexicans have some personal gripe against morticians?”
“Of course I don’t have anything against morticians, as long as they aren’t as pale as death itself, and don’t stare longingly at my neck as if they want to bite and slurp.”
“So why bring this to me?” Mr. Gordon said, pounding his chest with his massive fist at the word ME!
“Why not take it to Vladimir himself? Eh? You are both adults. I’m sure you can both work this out.”
“Because you rented me the apartment, and you are to blame for my difficult situation.”
For a few moments, the landlord stood there as if pondering what Garcia had said, silently shaking his head slowly in the negative, and then nodding vigorously in the positive, as if weighing the prose and the cons. Then finally, after heave/grunting a deep, tired sigh of resignation, and displaying an unnaturally broad, practiced smile:
“Alright Mr. Garcia. Alright! Let’s go upstairs to Vladimir’s apartment and clear up this mess. How does that sound?”
Seeing that Garcia was nervously hesitating he added:
“It’s better than having to vacate the apartment before the lease is up and losing your thousand-dollar deposit, Right?”
“I just don’t like getting involved in messed-up situations,” Garcia responded nervously feeling as if he were a sheep being led to the slaughter.
“But there really isn’t any situation, Mr. Garcia,” the landlord said after slamming the apartment door shut and revealing the full measure of his hunch.
”But since you insist that there is a situation, then let’s take the matter up with Vladimir personally. What do you say?” he asked in what sounded to Garcia like an unnaturally deep voice. .
Pedro Garcia hadn't noticed just how hunchbacked Mr. Gordon was when he had applied for an apartment. Mr. Gordon had been seated behind a huge, oaken office-desk, and the hunch had been more or-less hidden. Neither had Gordon shown him the apartment. That task had been assigned to Willie the handyman, who ambled with a pronounced limp. So it was with a severe shock that Pedro had just observed Gordon emerge so grotesquely hunched. All this simply coordinated too much with the macabre appearance of his deathly pale neighbor, Vladimir and made him feel as if he had just entered a castle dungeon of sorts and paid money for renting a dungeon cell.
"Thank you, Mr. Gordon. But maybe this isn't such a good idea after all?" Garcia responded, eyes swiveling nervously from side to side in their sockets .
"Why not? Is it cause you got a good look at my hunchback?" Mr. Gordon asked solemnly.
"No, that has nothing--"
"Let me assure you, Mr. Garcia, being hunchbacked has nothing to do with being good or evil. Was Hitler hunched? Eh? Most evil people aren't hunchbacked, are they now? "
"No that isn't--"
"What do you think? That I'm going to slap you on a torture wrack once we get to Vlad's apartment and provide him with a feast?” Mr. Gordon grinned, once again exposing yellow and green-tinged teeth..
"No I Would--"
"Or that I'm gonna stab you in the back as you walk up the stairs with this?” Mr. Gordon seemed to whip out a Machete from seemingly nowhere.
"That never--"
“Or maybe set you on fire after dowsing you with this?" Mr. Gordon produced a jug of what Garcia perceived as being gasoline.
"Madre de Dios! Keep the rent money!" Garcia screamed and bolted as Mr. Gordon stood with a broad smile on his pale face and took a few swigs from the jug full of filtered water.
"Wow! Why do people have to be so skittish?" he mumbled as he ambled back into his apartment where Vladimir, who had been visiting, greeted him with a brotherly embrace.
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