This is one of those stories I can’t believe I haven’t
written down yet, but I’ve told several times to friends, always to some good
laughs. I have a long history of
interesting neighbors, tracing back to my first Vermont apartment in Fair
Haven.
(To sum up Fair Haven - I visited Middlebury, and ran into my old advisor, the legendary environmental writer John Elder. On learning I was working at Castleton, he waxed on about the beauty of the area, and asked where I was living. On hearing the response of "Downtown Fair Haven", he paused, bit his lower lip, and said, "Ummm...interesting choice...")
The apartment was the back “L” of an old house on Main
Street – a two bedroom I’d rented in anticipation of my girlfriend moving out
to Vermont when I got settled. She,
however, elected to stay in San Francisco for another year, so I had a big
drafty apartment with cranky heaters (the one in the second bedroom I never
turned on – had a nasty habit of going BANGBANGBANG rather than lighting, and I
didn’t trust gas that much), and not much to decorate the place with.
I had two sets of neighbors.
The downstairs neighbors, Jim and Lucy(I think – don’t really remember),
were a lovely couple I knew from the college where I worked. He worked in IT, and she was a student. Both of them were about 6’2”, and both of
them probably weighed about 300 pounds each.
Very warm-hearted, good friends with a lot of the music and theatre
people I worked with, and a joy.
The upstairs neighbor was the landlord’s kid. He was in his early 20’s like the rest of us,
but hadn’t been quite right since he fell off a ladder and hit his head a few
years prior. He’d been a decent sort
prior, I’d been told, but became a raging asshole as a result of the brain
rattle. He still worked occasionally as
a house painter, but mostly did nothing besides drink and throw loud parties at
odd weekdays.
Parties included loud country music and line-dancing. Billy Ray Cyrus’s “Achy Breaky Heart” was a
wild favorite at the time, and they would blast it at 2 am while doing the “Achy
Breaky” dance. In boots. Over and over and over, as I stared at the
ceiling, willing them to stop in my mind.
Complaining to the landlord did no good. He shook his head, lamented the issue of his
poor injured son, and reminded both myself and the other neighbors we had
signed year-long leases. (I have never
signed a long-term lease since.)
Occasionally the front neighbors would go up and bang on the
door if it got really loud (the one time I complained it only resulted in the
dancing getting louder), but mostly it was counting the months left on the
lease.
One May night, he threw an especially loud party, with the
sounds of probably 30 people dancing and singing the “Achy Breaky” at the top
of their lungs, or at least as best they could drunk out of their minds. I’d drifted off briefly, the party noise
being mostly background at this point I’d gotten used to, but this woke me
up. “Goddammit,” I muttered, looking at
the clock. Just after 2am. Dammit.
Then suddenly – complete silence upstairs. Total.
No music, no dancing, no voices.
Nothing.
Now I snapped awake, and sat up. I could hear the refrigerator in the
kitchen. The hiss of the pilot light in
the gas heater in the living room. I had
never heard this quiet before.
A slow, thumping walk down the outside stairs. Then a pounding knock at my front door.
I stayed in my bed, and pulled the sheets up. Nothing good can come of this, I thought.
The knock pounded again.
I got up slowly, walked to the door, and opened it.
Standing there backlit in the moonlight, was Lucy – all 6’2”,
300 pounds of her – dressed in an open flannel bathrobe with nothing on
underneath, flapping in the light breeze, holding a shotgun across her chest.
“Ummmm…..”
She smiled. “Just
wanted to let you know we won’t be hearing that crap for a while.”
My mind raced.
Shots? No, I hadn’t heard…at
least I don’t think… “Oh?”
She nodded, and showed me the shotgun, split and now clearly
unloaded. “Told them I was only bringing
this up unloaded once. And maybe they
should just pipe the fuck down during Finals Week.”
She smiled, and kissed my cheek. “You have a good night.” And with that, she walked down the path and
back to her own apartment.
I sat at the kitchen table, trying a couple of shots of
vodka first, then finally making coffee and staring at the clock until I knew
the convenience store on the way to work opened. I drove there, picked up the paper, continued
on to work, and went over the classifieds for Apartments as soon as I walked
into my office.
By the end of the day I’d called three apartments that
seemed promising, and by the end of the week I’d signed on to an apartment on
Lake St. Catherine (another two bedroom). Oddly enough, my landlord had no issues with my breaking the lease at
this point, and overpaid my security deposit by $100 without even an inspection
of the place before I left.
“Thank you for all your…patience,” he said. And with a handshake, that was it.
Posts
