Love Thy Neighbor

The craziest thing about spring is that it comes every year. Perhaps it won’t always be that way, with climate change and all, but for the last 24 years, spring has come for me. This spring, the sky is beautiful and clear, and the giant tree beside my third-story Bushwick window bursts with new green leaves. When I moved in at the end of August, the leaves were such that they completely enveloped both my tall windows, shielding any perverts from peering into my windows, rendering me neighborless save for the sound of the J-train and my backyard neighbors. Sometime in the fall, these neighbors started throwing parties where they played loud polka music and yelled into microphones. As the weekend wore on, the party started to drive me into a further psychosis than the one I was already experiencing. When would this party end? Could it go on forever? Every time I returned from a shift bussing tables at the restaurant that weekend, the party was still happening.

Jessie once said, “It feels like a party every day,” but I wasn’t invited to this party, just forced to bear witness to it as I unsuccessfully tried to sleep. On the second day I yelled “SHUT THE FUCK UP” out the window, then hid so no one could see me. This provoked my neighbors to turn the music up, to party harder, to dispel the negative vibrational energy I had sent into their space. On the third day, I filed a noise complaint, but when I learned on the website that it can take days to follow through on it, I called the police. I felt intensely guilty about calling the police. Surely this was a cancellable offense. Could I call the police on my own neighbors? Could I keep hearing this booming bass and stay awake for days on end?

a real text I sent to my friend Ana that she says she “quotes all the time”

I’m not a perfect person. I think what drove me to do it was that I had had the police called on me for throwing a house party, and nothing happened. My friend José had brought these extra loud speakers to my previous apartment for a roommate's birthday, and everything sounded great on these speakers. We listened to music and drank long after the majority of the partygoers had left, and sometime late there was a knock on our door. We opened it to find two uniformed officers. They peered over us into the living room, which was also the kitchen. There were only around eight people in the entire apartment, clearly far fewer than they had been expecting. Both parties were embarrassed.

“Can you turn the music down? We received a complaint.” They asked us.

“Oh, for sure! My bad.” I replied as José immediately ran to lower the volume.

“Okay. Have a good night.”

“Yeah, you too.”

We had sort of known the music was too loud, yet we were shocked to see the police at our door. I had actually encouraged José to keep turning the music up to get revenge on our upstairs neighbors, whom my roommate Paul and I despised. They were a couple ten or twenty years our senior, and they were weird and off-putting, and moreover they were always screaming at each other at the top of their lungs all night, and from the sounds of it, rearranging and throwing furniture at the ground above our heads at all hours of the night. The man wore Dahmer glasses and was constantly smoking cigarettes directly in front of my first-floor bedroom window, and they both were always staring at me through the windows in the gym on the roof. I’m sure the feeling of disdain was somewhat mutual as we entertained fairly often and were young and fly while they were old and creepy, and when I learned they had called the police, all I could do was shrug. Touché.

It wasn’t like I didn’t know we were being loud, I just didn’t care. I was having fun, and that was more important to me than my neighbors. I’m sure my polka-playing neighbors felt the same way. But it couldn’t go on forever.

“Did you hear any gunshots?” The policewoman on the phone asked me.

“No!” I said.

“Any screaming?”

“Yes.”

“Do you think someone got hurt?”

“Ummmmmm. Maybe?”

“So it’s just the noise then?”

“Mostly. And it’s been nonstop for four. Days.”

“Okay.” She was unmoved, which I understood.

A couple of hours later, the noise stopped, and I finally slept. Quiet had never sounded so good.

Until the tree fully blooms, I can see into the backyard of these neighbours. A month ago, they got a trampoline for their kids and filled it with colorful balls. I can see the kids jumping and shrieking, but that doesn’t bother me. It makes me smile. Maybe because it’s never at four in the morning. Probably because I remember my parents surprising my brother and me with a trampoline when we were little kids. I thought it was the greatest thing ever. What is it about jumping and screaming that is so fun? Our trampoline was beneath a big tree in our backyard that would drop purple berries onto the trampoline all summer long. We would sweep them off or jump on them, leaving our feet stained purple and juicy purple streaks on the hot black material. My brother would hide in the grass and dirt under the trampoline, trying to slap friends butts and I would try to jump directly onto his head as hard as possible. The trampoline is gone now, destroyed by the winds of time and the winters of Upstate New York. But I still remember it well. I’m happy my neighbors love to have fun and throw parties, and I’m happy that my neighbors love their kids enough to give them a trampoline. Maybe every time you have to stay up all night because your neighbors are having so much fun, Life, that cruel but fair mistress, repays you with a night where you stay up all night because you’re having so much fun.

It seems like everyone is happier in the spring. People smile at me on the street and look for any excuse to stay outside a little longer, because now it’s nicer outside than in our apartments. We’re at the beginning of something, that something being summer, and that something promises greatness or at least goodness, at least something a little better than winter. I went to a Mets game with my friends yesterday and saw God in the giant red apple statue that goes up when they score a home run. I used to think sports were stupid because I was bad at them. Now I realize sports are just about people being together, just like everything else is. Now more than ever, I think people want to be together and smile and laugh and forget the bigger picture in pursuit of the smaller picture, which is, of course, the moment. We have to surrender to it, Addison Rae says, and as a Raecist, I couldn’t agree more.

the apple in question

“Confusion and desire also include the inability to keep quiet. One of the things I remember with embarrassing clarity is all the talking I did, all the statements I made about every possible thing. They were all assertions, bombast, a waste of breath. Could I have shut up? The world was beautiful during those weeks-- chill, sunny, gold-green, severe undecorated shapes of mountains, tree limbs, stones, clouds, floating together in a stream of configurations as the eye rolled past them. If I had it again, I would look at it better.” Jane Smiley, The Age of Grief