Sausage Sighting of the Crazy Bodybuilder Downstairs

Upstate New York, June  2010

When I was living in Upstate New York, I had a third floor apartment, directly above a crazy bodybuilder named Richard.

He wasn't really a bodybuilder, but he had a respectable physique, big biceps and a thick, hairy chest, and he never wore a shirt.

Sounds nice so far, except he was crazy.  Whenever he saw me get Chinese, Thai, or pizza, whenever he saw me with a Price Chopper shopping bag, he went into a tirade.  That stuff was destroying the world!

Chickens were tortured to death so we could eat them!

Bananas were grown by slave labor and transported through gas-guzzling, ozone-depleted trucks, with the truckers denied access to health care!

I should only eat free-range, free-trade, gluten-free, locally grown, organic, tie-dyed vegan goop.

He had a girlfriend who was even worse.

His apartment was full of free-trade, world-saving, garbage-into-art drek: bowls made of saris by women rescued from human trafficking in Bangladesh, pillows made of discarded brown rice bags by orphans with tuberculosis in Nicaragua; planters made of gun casings by wide-eyed children forced into military service in Zaire.

Plus about a thousand palms, bonsai lemon trees, rubber trees, paduratas, ficus, and ferns.  It was like walking into a rain forest.

With those ghostly, whistling Peruvian panpipes, flutes, tambors, and ocarinas playing constantly.

Richard could be nice -- he looked after my cat when I was out of town, and when I was sick, he brought me a green-tinted mung bean casserole (that looked so gross, I got even sicker).

And he was gay-positive.  Gay rights was one of his pet causes, along with fracking, whaling, animal rights, women's rights, child labor, water conservation, and free trade.

But he was still annoying.  When I ran into him at the mailboxes or in the common area, I gave him a brief "Hi-how-are-you" or flashed a smile and rushed on, to avoid the harangue about the sins of kung pao chicken, Diet Coke, plastic bags, leather jackets, newspapers, Nike shoes, basically everything I used, wore, or enjoyed.

My balcony had a floor of bare wood blanks which looked directly down onto his balcony, where Richard ate all of his meals, from his first sip of free-range, organic, locally grown, free-trade tea in the morning to his final mung-bean-compote nightcap.  In the summer, when the windows were open, I could hear everything he said or did.

But one night I heard something different: Richard and his girlfriend giggling.

They were always deadly serious, moping around over the oppression of animals, the carcinogenic properties of plants, and the forthcoming carbon-emission destruction of all life on earth. Why giggling?

Curious, I walked onto the balcony and peered through the floorboards.

Flickering candles made of locally-grown, free-trade bee's wax.

Richard was lying on a pile of blankets woven from the fibers of free-range linen by children freed from sweat shops in Madagascar.   The girlfriend was kneeling beside him.  They had stopped giggling.  Now they were kissing.

Naked.

Wait -- what was that, illuminated in the dim orange light?  Was it his leg?  Or was he holding a baseball bat?

It took a moment to realize what I was seeing.

Enormous!  Gigantic!  Kovbasa++++!

I was mesmerized.  I stared until eventually he initiated sexual intercourse, and it vanished.

After that I made a point of stopping to chat with Richard, inviting him to church and to the gym, asking to borrow some of his books on why I should feel guilty about eating cows and using kleenix.

If he wondered why I suddenly became so friendly, he didn't let on.

See also: my top 15 Sausage Sightings.