It isn't official yet, but I think my next door neighbor has moved out. This is cause for celebration around here. I've lived in my current apartment for a little more than 12 years. About half of that time, the same person has lived next door with various configurations of family and friends over the years. I'll be incredibly happy if she and the rest never return.
I know I may be setting myself up to have an even worse person or people move in by saying this, but you have no idea what I've had to endure for the past few years. I like to think that there are three distinct stages to her time here in the apartment complex. All of these phases were bad.
Phase I: She lived her with her family: father, mother, and brother. We could easily call them the Drunk and Fighting Years. The father, a rather smelly alcoholic, was prone to yelling. A lot. Mostly at his daughter. I think it might have had something to do with the choices of men she was dating at the time. I don't know for certain, but I always suspected that the boyfriends were not quite what Dad was expecting. A couple of times, he and the daughter decided to have the arguments in the hallway so that we could all enjoy them. My favorite occured not too long after they moved in. It was about 1 a.m., and the yelling just kept getting louder and louder. Even Mom got involved. The three of them stormed into the hallway, perhaps to have more room, and proceeded to yell and slap and pull and god-knows-what-else until the security patrol officers showed up and asked them to take it inside. Of course, that didn't help me a lot, considering that I shared a wall with them. And this was not a one-time-only event, either. This happened quite frequently.
And just to give you some sense of how drunk the father could get... One night I heard a knock on my door. When I opened it, he was standing there. Well, "standing" would be a generous way to describe it. "Swaying" would be more like it. There was another guy behind him, but I didn't recognize this guy. The Dad asked me if I would loan him 200 dollars; he promised to pay me back the next morning. I told him that I didn't keep that much money on me, and he seemed genuinely upset. I suppose he was accustomed to knocking on strangers' doors and getting large sums of money in the middle of the night. I got the impression that the guy behind him was waiting for payment of some kind, but I couldn't help them out. He took Dad and headed toward the elevator. I never knew what happened after that.
During this first phase, I also came to realize that the family must all be hard of hearing. During the Christmas season one year, I could barely hear my television over the loud din of carols from next door. "Mom" was making dinner and had cranked up the stereo. Just for the record, I hate Christmas music, and loud Christmas music is just going to get on my nerves even quicker. I cranked up the TV so loud that she couldn't hear her music any longer, and I guess she got the idea. Keep this notion of loud noise from next door in your mind. We'll revisit it again later on.
Phase II: She and her brother shared the apartment. Apparently, the parents moved out; there was no moving van or anything like that. I just never saw them any more. The brother decided to take over the responsibility for being the family drunk. Well, someone has to do it. Almost every weekend, he and his buddies would get plastered. They'd come back here, naturally, rather than go to someone else's place to crash. The only problem was Younger Brother didn't have a key, so he had to knock on the door until someone answered. That's fine if someone is home. On several occasions, no one was there. Older Sister had gone out for the evening herself. So Younger Brother just kept knocking and knocking and knocking and knocking. Try sleeping with that constant noise next door. I almost felt sorry for him when one of his friends asked him once, "Dude, you don't have a key to your own apartment? How lame is that?" I got over it, though, when his anger led him to pound on the door even harder.
Younger Brother is now in law school, you'll be happy to know. I found that out when Older Sister was talking very loudly in the bathroom last week. Those tile can really make a phone conversation echo. I could be lying in bed and hear every word of what she said. Apparently, she needed to know if he wanted any of the stuff that he left behind in the apartment when he moved to go to law school. Stuff like his surfboard and snowboard and all of his LSAT prep course stuff. There wasn't room at Dad's place, I gathered. Did I mention how easily I could overhear these conversations? Can you imagine how loud you'd have to be talking for that to happen?
Phase III: She lived with a roommate. This was the shortest of the phases, mercifully. It only lasted about a year. It was characterized by two traits: an incessant slamming of the front door and a predisposition on the part of the roommate to play her music very loudly. The door slamming really got to me. It had happened during the first phase of her living here, but I had yelled at her and her mother one day, and they got better. Yes, I couldn't stand it that bad. I always knew what time they came home because of the door. They weren't really slamming it, of course, not with any sense of anger or other emotion. They were just letting it slam shut behind them. The problem was most pronounced on the weekend. Once I counted 18 door slams in one day before I got up and went for a drive to clear my head. (Okay, I went out looking for a weapon, but the drive did help to clear my head.) I asked as politely as I could, but it never seemed to have that much of an impact. The door slams continued.
Both Older Sister and the Roommate liked loud music. It's just that you could call the security patrol, and the Older Sister would turn it down. Her parties were, apparently, legendary here. Everyone in the building, it seemed, called to complain one night. (This led one of her guests--estimated in the high double digits--to exclaim, "But it's Saturday.") The security patrol must have stopped by five times before the party finally disbanded. (Lest you think it's only next door that's a problem, let me share that the people upstairs--whom I've nicknamed The Clydesdales--are well known for their New Year's party, the one where every hour starting at about 9 p.m. generates a cheer for the New Year. Well, it is midnight somewhere, isn't it?) The Roommate, however, was a classic. She would do laundry every Tuesday night. You ask how I know this? That's when she would turn the stereo up the loudest, and then she would spend the next two hours in the laundry room downstairs. Knocking on the door wouldn't help because she wasn't there. Even the security patrol would get frustrated on those nights. I did "rat" her out one time; I told them where she was, and one of the officers "retrieved" her and made her turn the music down.
The Roommate seems to have moved about a month ago. Suddenly, the music stopped playing so loudly. And then two weeks ago, things got very quiet next door. It took me a couple of days to realize that I wasn't hearing slamming doors any more. I thought that she had moved already. Turns out she was probably just looking for a new place. Unfortunately, she returned. I thought my peace and quiet were over again, but then Dad also returned and started taking things out in bags. Apparently, again, no moving van. Just bags. Bags and bags and bags. However, once I sort of realized that she was moving out, I didn't care how many door slams it took so long as she was gone.
Tuesday night (the last night of September) was the end. All of the stuff was gone; I know this because there's a crack under the door large enough to see what's on the floor inside. (Yes, I got down on the floor in the hallway to look. You would have done the same if you thought you were about to get back some of your own solitude at home. So don't judge me.) It's been like a different place since then. I came home even on the hot days last week, and I managed to relax a little bit. I don't have to keep turning up the volume on the TV in order to hear it above the din next door. And no one slammed a door all day long.
This is all still unofficial, as I stated earlier. Whenever someone moves out, the maintenance crew changes the locks on the front door. While there are people cleaning and painting the apartment, the lock has a white core. That's the "master lock" for the maintenance people. When that arrives, then I'll know she's gone for good. It's still a standard gold core for now, though.
I realize that it's probably more than a little bit mean of me to take such joy in someone leaving, but frankly, neighbors should be more considerate of each other. We share a wall and a common hallway space. We have to live next door to each other, and we're not separated like people in homes are. I don't play my music or TV loud. I don't slam the door when I walk in and out. I don't leave garbage in the hallway overnight because I'm too lazy to walk to the other end of the hallway to drop it down the chute. (Oh, yes, many, many times. How'd you like to meet that first thing in the morning when you're on the way to work?) And most of the other people in this building are the same. It's those few who tend to ruin it for everyone, isn't it?
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