I was sitting in my apartment one Friday watching a movie, something with Will Smith and Donald Sutherland. Not too engaging, but decent enough to get me through the night. Around 10 p.m., I heard them, so loud they nearly shook the White Russian sitting on the coffee table into my lap.
"Yo, bitch, I gotta tell you something," said a familiar voice. "Julio is fucking my little cousin." It was my upstairs neighbor, a single Latino mom. Her little girl rollerblades in the halls on Sunday mornings, singing hideous songs about boats on the river.
"That guy is a fucking hater," said her friend who runs the video store on the corner -- good prices, poor selection. One evening I asked for recommendations on ‘70s-era Woody Allen. "No," she said. "We don’t carry movies that old."
This wasn’t the first night ruined by my neighbors’ awful stairwell conversations. It was the twelfth disturbance in three months. But instead of sitting on the couch biting off what was left of my nails, I took another sip of my White Russian, mustered up what little courage I could find, and poked my head out the door.
"Uh, excuse me. Would you ladies mind keeping it down? I’m trying to get some work done."
"Watcha want?" asked the one from the video store. "What, we being too loud?"
"I don’t mean to ruin the party," I said, trying to add some pleasantry to our conversation. "But like I said, I’ve got a ton of work to do, and I can barely hear myself think."
It’s funny, I came to New York in search of something different -- a place where I could dance in the streets with all the nationalities of this world, and free myself from the small-minded morons back in my upper-middle-class suburb of Detroit. But after two years here, I often find myself day dreaming about heading back to that fantasy land where people keep to themselves and the only noise you hear from your neighbors is when they close their garage in the morning.
"Who is that?" asked the mom, sitting on the stairwell, out of sight. She poked her braided head through one of the beams and looked me over like I was an alien from the planet Dud. "Yeah, okay. We’ll be quiet."»
They went back to talking louder than before, so loud I felt like a dump truck was screeching to halt inside my head. I stepped back into the apartment and tried to remember how to cry. What could I do? The cops wouldn’t care about my dilemma; the landlord surely didn’t give a fuck. I wasn’t about to challenge them to a fight, or go back out there and ask again. No, I simply needed to accept that these women were going to talk as louldy as they damn well pleased, no matter how nicely I asked.
Then it hit me like a splash of warm, soothing water. I walked slowly over to my cd collection and looked for the loudest, most painful piece of rock music I could find. I was going to give it to them harder and crazier than they had ever heard it.
It didn’t take long to find the necessary artillery. A particular band had been sending deep chills of delight through my dick for the past few weeks, and now was the appropriate time to share it with the world. Raised Fist it would be.
I cranked up the stereo, and let the crushing bass line of "Breaking Me Up" rip through my walls. We’re talking real loud. It sounded hot -- clean, distorted guitars driving together to form a gut-wrenching rhythm. And just before the vocals kicked in I yelled, "Shut the fuck up!" (in unison to the song, of course). It was magical. Pure bliss.
They tried to wait it out, to go on with their conversation as if there weren’t a case of dynamite ripping through their bodies. They couldn’t. This anger-ridden lyrical explosion was simply too much for them to handle. Too much madness.
By the time I played the song five times -- and I could have done it another ten -- they were gone. I turned off the stereo. No more voices. Just the pleasant hiss of the air conditioner spitting its mist into my little room.
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