(Alternate title: Amie, what you wanna do?)

Jen and I looked at some apartments on Saturday. Oh, the tales I could regale you with…but I’m going to stick with this one in particular. As I said before, it’s priceless.

Ad in Artvoice:

ALLENTOWN Cute 2+ bedroom single family house. Fenced in yard, parking for 1 car. $650.

Well, this looks like it could be promising. So I call Ben. Ben sounds frazzled and asks me to hold. He comes back on, and asks which property I was calling about. I read the ad to him.

“Oh, the cute one,” he says.

I don’t know what that means, but he sounds amusing. We make an appointment to come see the place at 4. He tells us to meet him in front of an address, but tells me that this address is not the property we’re seeing. The house is tucked away behind it.

We arrive there a bit early, so Jen and I sit in the car and wait. Directly in front of us is a young child pushing a stroller on the sidewalk in front of a house where a bunch of people are standing on the porch talking. The stroller has a plastic thingy draped over it. It looks like an old lady’s rain bonnet, except bigger.

There are feet sticking out of the bottom of the stroller.

“Is that a real child in there?” Jen asks. “Or is it a doll? It has to be a doll right? I think it’s a doll.”

Nope, pretty sure it’s a real kid. It’s not moving, but the feet look too big to be a doll. Jen is concerned that the child can’t breathe. I tell her not to worry. 🙂

After a brief detour to some guy’s porch, child, stroller, and the rest of the family are on their merry way.

In front of the house where we are to meet Ben, there is a little kid (perhaps 10?) and a guy behind the hood of a car. I can only see the top of his head, but he has dark spiky hair with obnoxiously blond peroxide highlights. Based on this information, I guess him to be, oh, 18 or so. But then I get a look at his face, and no…it would appear that he is much older (I’d guess late 30s, pushing 40) and is the child’s FATHER. Oh, Lord help us. Dude? The hair. Has. Got. To. Go.

It’s now almost 4, and no sign of Ben. We step outside in case he’s waiting inside a car or something, but no. We watch the Puerto Rican Pride brigade (okay, so it was just one guy. But he was bursting with pride, yo.) across the street. Talking to woman in old SUV, very loudly in Spanish. We go back to the car, and decide to give ol’ Ben a call.

Ben, as it turns out, got the time confused and thought he was meeting us at 4:30. He says he’ll be there in 10 minutes.

About 5 minutes later, a jeep pulling a trailer covered with Harley Davidson stickers pulls up.

“I really hope that’s not Ben,” Jen says.

Guy steps out of the jeep and crosses the street. Ball cap, torn carpenter jeans. Looks like a teenager.

“That can’t be Ben,” I say. “He’s, like, twelve.”

Oh, but it is. We know this because he motions for us to follow him.

He leads us through spiky-haired man’s driveway where he unlocks the gate to reveal…

A trailer.

Okay, not so much trailer as “prefabricated home,” but still.

He does mention a boss, which makes us feel a bit better about the whole thing.

“It’s kind of decorated in old lady style,” he warns us. “It’s very…peach.”

And peach it is. Peach kitchen. Peach bathroom, which is being torn apart. It had previously been covered in peach tile. Everywhere. But for the blue fixtures. Blue bathtub. Blue toilet. Blue sink, which is currently lying on the floor in the small bedroom.

The living room has that brown/tan marbley shag carpeting that my parents used to have in their living room. Fifteen years ago.

“We were looking for something…bigger,” Jen says.

Not bigger so much as less peach or less prefab. In reality, we’re looking for something spectacular. “Spectacular, spectacular,” as Jen says. : )

Ben, sensing that we’re really not interested, mentions a couple of other places he might possibly be able to show us. We tell him we’ll get in touch.

Okay, kids…here’s where it gets good.

We head to Allen Street realizing that we need food. We decide to try the new little cafe(Allen Street Grill? The name is escaping me at the moment). The bartender/waitress commiserates with us about apartment hunting. We have some wine and split a sandwich and the most amazing roasted potatoes ever.

As we’re getting ready to leave, the two guys who have been sitting at the bar get our attention and ask us what we’re looking for…because they happen to know that the house next to them is going to be available soon. They introduce themselves as Ben and Chris. They ask for our phone numbers, telling us that they really want “cool neighbors.” They say they’ll pass the info along to Ben.

The other Ben. The one that manages the properties.

Wait, Ben? The same Ben? Our Ben?

We have this very convoluted circular conversation about Ben, and the fact that Ben just showed us the trailer/prefab. They laugh, because they know the place.

And then, they explain that Ben used to be a girl.

“Oh my God,” Jen says. “Did he used to date a girl named Amy?”

Because, you see, we know this person. No, more accurately, we know of this person. He’s in Brenda’s circle of people.

“No,” they say. “He used to be Amy.”

Yes, but…Jen is pretty sure that Amy, now Ben, also used to date a girl named Amy. They broke up after the transformation, because it got too weird.

“So is this the same Ben that we just met?” I ask. Because, after all this, could it possibly not be?

So immediately upon leaving the bar/cafe, Jen calls Brenda to verify. She tells the story, and describes our Ben, whom Brenda verifies to be the very same Ben. Amy. Ben. Whatever.

How weird is that?