The Biggest Bodybuilder on My Sausage Sighting List

When I lived in Upstate, 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.

He 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.

Richard's nether regions were illuminated in orange light.  His beneath-the-belt gifts in full view.

He was enormous.  A Kovbasa++++.  How did he wear a pair of pants?

I was mesmerized.  I stared until eventually it was hidden.

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.