Early crazy neighbor stories from another life

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.