| “ | I could have... | ” |
—When complaining about noise | ||
Mr. Heckles lived in the apartment below Monica and Rachel. In his first appearance, he was credited simply as "The Weird Man". He often complained about the apparent noise that the two made (though seemingly they were not making any noise at all) by rapping on his apartment ceiling with a broom.
Character
When Mr. Heckles complains to Monica and Rachel, he usually starts his lines with "You're disturbing my..." Both of them reply "You don't have a..." but Heckles replies "I could have a..." or even "You owe me a..." Phoebe once responded by saying "In that case, I'm going to have to ask YOU to keep it down!" and slammed the door in his face.
Heckles did a number of strange and unusual things throughout the series. When Rachel and Phoebe asked him if Paolo's cat belonged to him, he lied and claimed that it did. He once stole Marcel and dressed him as a ballerina, though later insisted that he hadn't seen him. He also once lied about being Chandler's new roommate and even wandered into Chandler's room, both shocking and scaring Chandler in the process. It is never revealed why he did those things, though he may have been a lonely old man making up stories to get company, or possibly even mentally ill and delusional.
During "The One Where Heckles Dies", Mr. Heckles dies while banging on the ceiling, and leaves all his worldly possessions to "the two noisy girls upstairs." During this episode, Chandler looks through Mr. Heckles' possessions and draws parallels between his life and Mr. Heckles'. Chandler also becomes irritated when he hears the sound of banging coming from the above room and grabs hold of a broom before banging on the ceiling with it...and then realizes, to his horror, that he's becoming like Heckles. At the end of the episode, the friends seem to have sympathy for their late elderly neighbor in spite of his grumpy nature. The episode ends with a sympathetic Chandler saying to his empty room, after his possessions had been cleared out by the friends "Goodbye Mr Heckles...we'll try to keep it down."
Mr. Heckles appears again in a flashback, where it is revealed that he was the main reason Joey became Chandler's roommate instead of a model photographer with a porn star sister. It turns out that after putting out an ad for a new roommate, Chandler, upon meeting Joey for the first time, took a dislike to him at first due to being irritated by Joey's stupidity, so when he met fashion photographer Eric, who had a porn star sister, he invited Eric to be his new roommate instead of Joey. But just as Eric was about to move in, he encountered Heckles in the hallway, and when he informed Heckles that he was moving in with Chandler, Heckles told Eric that HE was Chandler's new roommate, and he sent Eric away before wandering into Chandler's room, much to Chandler's shock. When Eric didn't turn up, Chandler assumed he simply hadn't bothered to, failing to realize that Heckles had sent Eric away prior to wandering into Chandler's room. As a result, Chandler reluctantly accepted Joey as his new roommate instead...and started to rethink his negative opinion of Joey when the latter introduced him to Baywatch. Although the friends never discovered it, they therefore never would have gotten to know Joey if it hadn't been for Heckles.