The Weird Fat Kid

I spend a lot of time on my patio, working at my laptop, or sometimes just listening to a podcast on my iPod. As such, I get to observe, sometimes just out of the corner of my eye or in the reflection of my glass door or laptop screen, the goings-on in the apartment complex around me.

Neighbors come and go with the seasons. For the most part, my fellow residents are older. This is a slightly upscale complex (definitely upscale compared to the place across the street), and it costs a little more than your average college student or just-getting-started career person prefers to pay. There are occasional exceptions. I've been fortunate enough to have the occasional attractive college girls move in. Not that I have any intentions for, or illusions about, attractive college girls, but something about having them around just makes a man feel better about the place he's living in. When other guys drop by and spot the nubile things sunning themselves by the pool, a man can bask in the warmth of dude envy, despite the fact that he's only used the pool once since he's lived here and has maybe said hello three times to any such girls in passing. If he, himself, is not a swinging cat, at least he can feel like he lives in a fairly swinging joint.

There's currently a couple of college-aged folks living across the way and upstairs, and the loudness of their social gatherings, with people coming out to smoke on their patio, is a sometimes annoying but mostly welcome change of pace. Being surrounded by nothing but old people all the time can make you start to feel like an old person. Nothing wrong with a little injection of extroverted youth. But they won't be here long. Experience has taught me this. You tend to change apartments a lot when you're young, not hunker down and stay in the same place for five years, like I have. With age comes a need for stability and familiarity.

So in my time here, plenty of neighbors have come and gone, both young and old. The cool hairdresser. The guitar-playing stoner guy. The hot girl next door who left to go join the FBI (that's a whole other story). The Asian family with the hilarious twin boys that tired me out just watching them run around the complex. But through all those cast changes, there's been one constant in my view from the patio.

The weird fat kid.

I never consciously chose to call him that. It's an unkind title to tack on a kid. The designation just sort of formed in my head over time. I started seeing this kid, maybe nine or so years old, off and on. I'd see him walking around the complex, following its sidewalks, very slowly. He never appeared to be walking to get to any destination. He was just walking for to sake of walking. And by "fat" I don't mean he was obese. Just overweight for a kid his age, the kind of state that makes you realize its in his genes, not caused by any overwhelming ice cream ingestion. He always wore baggy clothes, his tee shirts (when the weather was warm) always untucked, but his pre-teen gut still showed through.

It didn't take long for me to notice that his walks were not random. There was a pattern to them. A pattern to the path, and a pattern to the time of day. I'd always see him, first, when he came into view coming ploddingly around the rental office. Often he'd be carrying a stick. He would always stop there in front of the office, and would lean down and look at the same plant - the exact same plant, every time. Sometimes he would whack or poke it with his stick, sometimes he would just stare. Then he'd rotate, and stare out across the small parking lot, just standing there for a few moments. Then he'd start walking again, methodically slow, and stroll past my patio. He'd then disappear beyond my building, following the walkway around another one of the buildings in the back.

Sometimes when I'd get home from work, I'd park my van and get out, and would see him on his rounds. Often he'd just be standing there, swinging at an overhead branch, lazily, with a stick, or looking at the mailboxes. Then he'd move on. During the summer months, when my upstairs neighbor kept his sliding door and living room window open, I'd avoid smoking his place out by having my cigars elsewhere in the complex. I'd wheel to the front or the rear of my building, iPod turned on, listening to music or a podcast or some kind of motivational book-on-tape, maybe just thinking over something I was writing and working out story or character problems. Often, this would happen during the kid's rounds. His turtle-like stroll would bring him around the corner, and he'd pass me. He wouldn't turn the other way, seeing someone in his path (as your average person would be more apt to do when that person in the way is in a wheelchair). He go around me, and would pass too close for social comfort - must people have an innate sense of personal space and give others a wide berth, but not this kid. It was like he felt unable to deviate from his pattern of travel. Like if I was directly in it, he might have just crawled right over me.

Maybe it was these too-close walk-bys or just the repetition of his movements, spied from my patio, but something about this kid started to annoy me. I didn't WANT to be annoyed. It wasn't a conscious thing I thought about. But something in my head, when he'd appear, would make me think - and not necessarily in clear words - "Oh, great - it's the weird fat kid again". His predictability grated on me. His fascination with the same plant, his need to look at the mailboxes as though they were going to do something unexpected like stand up and start singing a show tune, made me want to shake him and tell him to go play a videogame or something like a normal kid, or watch TV. Read a book. Anything! Something normal! Someone needed to tell this kid that he was acting weird, and that "weird" is a one-way street to no friends, Dr. Who and eventually dying alone surrounded by your collection of Pokemon figures. He'd appear and I'd think, "Isn't Wopner on at three? Definitely. Definitely three."

Over time, though, I inevitably started thinking deeper about this kid. One day it finally occurred to me that I'd never once seen him with his parent or parents. He lives on the other side of the complex, but it's not a big place. I'm sure I must have seen whoever his guardian is. And though I probably had, I had no way of knowing if he/she/they was connected to him, because he/she/they was never WITH him. For all observation told me, he might well have been living here alone. I wondered what kind of home life he must have. There were two possibilities - either his parents worked or were gone so much that he was always on his own, or he was so invisible to them that they didn't even notice he was out wandering around by himself. Or a third possibility was that his living situation was such that he needed these regimented, meandering walks just to get away from it a couple of times a day.

I got to thinking of something my ex-girlfriend had told me once. She was in a psychology class at the time, and the professor was asking people about habits that they had. She'd volunteered her own, one that I hadn't even noticed - that she always tended to do things three times. If she were to scrape her shoe on a step to get mud off it, for example, she'd do so three times. Or if she scratched an itch, she'd do so two extra times. Her professor suggested to her that she did that habit from feeling a lack of control in her life - perhaps from growing up a military brat and having to move so much as a kid as she had. That was her way of having some control. This kid made me think of that. Was this routine his way of having some control, some certainty in his life? I grew less annoyed with him, and began feeling sad for him. There were a lot of possibilities to explain his behavior, and none of them sounded good.

Seasons would pass, and I'd continue to see him, and slowly see him grow. He'd put in a little more weight, he'd get taller, his hair would get longer (or later disappear in a buzz cut, only to grow out again later). For a while, I saw him start walking with another kid, a skinny kid who looked a couple of years his younger. This made me feel good. He had a friend, someone else from the complex, obviously. I'd see them hang out, sometimes at the pool in the summer. Some time after, though, I noticed they were hanging out with an older kid. And this kid genuinely bugged me. Loud, obnoxious, had a mouth like Lenny Bruce. Swore constantly, seemed to pride himself on his vulgarity and sexual humor, though he couldn't have been more than thirteen or fourteen. While never having kids, I suddenly felt like a parent, and knew that fear parents have of their kids hanging out with the WRONG kids. This was clearly one that would have been my nightmare as a father. I felt an urge to find WFK's apartment, talk to his folks (if they existed, and he wasn't living alone in some kind of pre-teen witness relocation situation) and ask them why they weren't keeping a closer eye on their son and the company he was keeping.

Eventually, both his associates stopped making appearances, and it was back to business as normal again. Five years I've lived here, and, as recently as this afternoon, the kid - now into his teendom - is still making the rounds. He walks sentry around the complex, a touchstone to my life here, a presence I could set my watch by, if I wore a watch. It's not something he's outgrown. And I've still never seen an adult walking with him, or getting into a family car with him, or out looking for him to call him into dinner. WFK walks alone. I no longer resent his presence, no longer harbor any irrational annoyance when he takes his daily slow march. I hope for him. I hope that something - a good high school experience, a cherished hobby, or, heaven forbid, a girl - comes into his life and replaces his walks. I hope that whatever seems to be missing from his life is finally found, and that he'll grow into a happy, well-adjusted adult, one who goes out and explores the world outside this little complex and makes his mark there.

And not one who, say, buys the same three frozen dinners over and over again, ends up listening to the same selection of familiar songs on his iPod (despite having many more to choose from), tends to watch the same movies time and time again, and ends up on the patio at roughly the same time each day, smoking the same brand of cigars year after year...

Man, I need to lose a few pounds...

NOTE: I meant to point out that the photo used above is NOT the kid in question. That's a random Google image search photo I plucked off the net. No, I am NOT taking photos of my neighbors. And now, my lawyers feel better about this post.