Big City Neighbors and Small Town Weirdos: Part 1

Ryan and I live in a small town just north of Buffalo. We’re close enough that we can throw “Buffalo” or “Tonawanda” on an address line and the letter or package will find our front door. As close as we are to the city, there are distinct differences between there and here.

First, our little town has fewer people than downtown Buffalo, where I lived when Ryan and I first met. It’s not that Buffalo is overcrowded or teeming with miscreants and hustle-and-bustlers. There’s just always someone within a few feet of you. And for a guy who grew up on a 32-acre (former) farm, in a town of 2,000 people, and often had miles to himself, this was, at times, an uncomfortable adjustment.

The second difference I noticed between the city and our town is the noise. Downtown Buffalo is not loud or overwhelming like Chicago or New York City can be; it’s more like the background noise in a social media video that is too loud to hear what the person is saying. There’s just enough noise to lose focus.

The noise that comes out of downtown Buffalo is often unidentifiable to me. Traffic noises, the metro pulling in and out of the underground tunnel, industrial sounds from factories that still exist within earshot of Main Street—those I all know. But there’s a hum, a soundtrack I can’t quite grab onto or discern. Maybe every city has that. Sometimes I think it’s the breath sounds of Buffalo’s ghosts pushing every last bit of air into the city to inflate what exists and reinflate what has disappeared in the last few decades. It’s a nice thought, but the sound is probably just echoes bouncing off the buildings and the underside of the Skyway.

Though a quieter existence out here in the burbs, one thing I was afraid I’d miss from downtown were the people.

The people in the city are neat. They’re not like me—you know, normal. They’re different and weird. Some of them have jobs without “analyst” or “manager” or “paper pusher” in the title. They don’t look like me, they don’t sound like me, and they don’t care about the things I care about. Some of them, though, care about the things I care about way more than I ever thought possible. More on that in a different post.

Downtown, the neighbor to my left was Dexter. He worked as a curator for a museum and he looked the part. He was a thin, mustachioed man a few years my senior who walked with a slight hunch as he carried mountains of books and tote bags to-and-fro every morning and evening, his newsboy cap hiding a handful of hopeful wisps of hair. Dexter was the first person I met who wore a shirt and tie to work but carried his dress shoes in a bag. In Buffalo it’s commonplace to see folks wear snow boots to work and back home, only changing into their wingtips, monks, or flats when they clock in. In Indiana, we just kick off the snow at the door or wear the boots all day. In Buffalo, they strip off a floor-length parka, toss their earmuffs and mittens aside, and kick off shin-high snow boots, spending the first 15 minutes of the day in a full wardrobe change on the company dime.

To be honest, I moved here in December and didn’t see the sense in such behavior. It was cold and snowy, but boots? A parka that could double as a tent?

Then I experienced my first Buffalo January and February. I get it now.

 I had other neighbors downtown who were characters, even more so than Dexter. There was the drug-addicted couple across the hall who, upon being evicted from their apartment, broke into it no fewer than five times in the succeeding weeks. When the super put plywood over the door, the couple came back with a power drill and took it down. When the super put up a steel-reinforced door, the couple built a mini-mountain of tossed out furniture and broke in the living room window. I never learned their names, but they kept their door open all day and when I walked by it had a distinct smell. So, I’ve always referred to them as Cool Ranch and Armpit.

Perhaps the most memorable neighbor was the one I never laid eyes on—Ray. The night I moved in, already at my wit’s end and in the middle of an internal debate over returning to Indiana in the morning and ending my Buffalo saga before it began, I was carrying boxes into my apartment when a fellow resident said hello. He asked if I was moving in—quite the assumption when I had not three seconds earlier jumped out of the back of a U-Haul van and was carrying boxes marked “kitchen.” When I nodded yes, he gave me the following welcome:

Cool, man. Well, welcome to the building.

It’s pretty lowkey here. A few folks get rowdy, but they’re so stoned it only lasts a minute.

Everyone’s pretty chill. Just one piece of advice:

Don’t mess with Ray, the homeless guy who sleeps in the laundry room.

In 18 months, I never had a run-in with Ray; never even saw his face. Though, there was one night I went halfway down the steps, saw his denim-draped legs sprawled out on the hard, cool floor, and ran back to my apartment. I wasn’t going to break the one rule I’d been given.

When we moved to the ‘burbs, I was nervous we wouldn’t have any characters around us. I grew up around town and ‘burb people. Their stories were my stories; their experiences were my own. So, I knew what those characters were like. And I love characters. I need them in my life (at least long enough to scare the life out of me when I’m halfway down to the laundry room). But new ones—I need new characters; people who are unlike anyone I’d ever met.

The day we moved in, everything looked so normal, I was afraid we’d have to go downtown to get our fill of characters.

Then we met Pete and Disturbia.

More about them tomorrow.

Adam Tidrow is a serial entrepreneur, expert in American business and economic history, and scholar whose work focuses primarily on local economic development in the American Rust Belt.