When I rented my very first apartment, back in 1979, I had an upstairs neighbor who drove a tow truck.

He was in his mid forties and had no other expenses, probably got ten tow calls a week from which he pulled down a damned good income. I saw his apartment once, and it was more spare than mine- at 20, I was living with a rollaway bed, a beanbag chair, a cable spool, and a 12″ black and white TV. He had a chair and a desk. I never saw his bedroom, maybe it was lavishly appointed, I don’t know.

Anyway, you never heard a damned thing from him, at all. Except after i’d lived there two weeks, I was startled to hear what sounded like roller skates in the room upstairs. He stood in the living room, rocking back and forth on the skates(maybe it was a skateboard) crooning. It was “Indian Love Call” (the Jeanette Maconald and Nelson Eddie version) from the movie Rose-Marie. Here’s a version by Slim Whitman that will give you the flavor of it.

Anyway, after he sang this yodely annoying song (the Slim Whitman version of which is used in “Mars Attacks” to cause the aliens’ heads to splode) my upstairs neighbor would rollerskate off to his bedroom, at which time the noise of squeaky bedsprings could be heard for maybe ninety seconds, and then silence.

In the year I lived in that apartment this scenario repeated itself at least once a month, and pretty much every two weeks in summer. I never understood any of it. He never had a woman in the apartment. When i moved out, I never saw or heard from him again. He’s probably somewhere now hiding bodies for the mob.

Freaky.