A few years back I lived in a house out in north Minneapolis with a group of friends. For those of you who are not familiar with the area, Lowry was the kind of neighbor hood where you didn’t go to sleep at night until you heard the gunshots. A few bangs echo through the house and you know that the streets had cleared and it was finally safe to shut your eyes. The kind of neighborhood where when you walked out your front door there was always someone right there offering to sell you some crack. I loved it. For the first time in my life I had neighbors that I actually liked and could get along with.
This is the story of the one particular neighbor who was the exception to the rule. A neighbor we affectionately dubbed, the cable guy. To understand the story I have to give you a short layout of the house. The main door and entry way jutted out from the side of the house. If someone knocked on our door we would look through our kitchen window and have a side view of them, or we could go through the entry way and look through the peephole if we wanted to see them head on.
One Saturday night a group of us were sitting around the table drinking and throwing spades when someone banged on the door. It was like one in the morning, no one comes into our neighborhood at one in the morning, not even the cops. Mike yelled “ who the hell is it?” The reply that came damn near knocked me off my seat. A loud burly voice yelled back “I’m your cable guy. I came to give your free HBO!”
We all just sat there staring at each other for a moment and then burst into laughter. I leaned back in my chair and pulled back the curtain. There was surprise number two. An older scraggly looking black guy stood there facing the door. Definitely not anyone I knew. In one hand he held a tool box and the other which was stretched behind his back gripped a little .22. I motioned for everyone to take a look. We all gathered around the window. Finally Mike spoke. He explained to the man that we had no need for free HBO. The man, continuing to speak towards the door, not recognizing that the voice was coming from the open window six inches to his right, was not going to accept that. “This is the last time I am gonna be able to do it, you’ve got to get it tonight!”
The initial fear of the situation was fleeting and I was once again finding the humor in the situation. Mike tried telling the guy that we didn’t even have a tv, but this guy was just not going to take no for an answer. “I’ll hook it up now and when you get a tv you’ll already have it ready.” We argued back and forth for a while and eventually decided that the best course of action was to just ignore him completely. He stood out there for about an hour and eventually at some point wandered off.
But that’s not the end to the story. About a week later he came back. Same act. In fact it was the same every time he came back. He always faced the door, never realizing that we were speaking through the window, he always carried the toolbox in one hand, and the .22 in the other, and he never acknowledged in any way that he had ever been there before. He would use the same lame arguments, and even if directly confronted he would deny ever having even been in our neighborhood. The guy was persistent, I’ll give him that. We even started calling Mike the embassador to the cable guy because we always let him do the talking.
As time went on he started coming more and more often. Towards the end he was stopping by three to four times a week. Looking back on those days, things just didn’t seem right if our nightly visitor wasn’t standing at the door. There is one night that stands out in my mind though. It started normally enough. About six of us were throwing spades (or watching) and chatting. There is still some argument as to who was the last person home but someone had left the door open. I never even heard him come in. I looked up and there he was. The cable guy, standing in my kitchen. He kept the .22 behind his back and without even breaking out an expression he said “ I’m here to give you guys your free HBO.” Everyone panicked. We all jumped up and grabbed everything from beer bottles to kitchen chairs to use as a weapon.
As usual the embassador stepped up. “All right man, how may of us do you think you can get, before one of us gets you.” The cable guy stood his ground for nearly a full minute. The room was completely silent. He looked at us with this confused look on his face. Then, just as suddenly as he came in, he turned and left. He walked straight out the door with the gun still behind his back. As he rounded the corner I heard him mumble “fine, than you aint gettin’ your free HBO.”
That was the last we ever saw of the cable guy. I hardly think of him anymore. Yet, somehow, he’s connected to my memories of those days. When I look back on those happy days of life on Lowry I think of the cable guy as an oddly happy memory and I like to imagine him still working the neighborhood today.