In 1994, it was as if the stars and planets had aligned to drop beside my great home and great life the people and issues that would acquaint me with the suffering of others I'd never known. Perhaps some natural balance was needed. I was too good a neighbor, too satisfied with my life. Or, maybe I'd been a wretched neighbor in a previous life and now it was payback time.
Naïve at the time that there was any such thing as a Neighbor From Hell, I was caught off guard, and didn't actually see what kind of trouble I was in during the first year of the conflict. I'd later learn how ill-prepared and ill-equipped we better neighbors are to resolve problems with people hell-bent on causing them, how challenging it is to restore peace in and around our homes once it's compromised. I'd also learn that noise is just one attribute of an overall Neighbor From Hell.
A good neighbor beside me was leaving, just about one year after I'd moved in. Good neighbors come and go, it seems, while bad ones never seem to move away or die. The couple who moved in to her nicely kept, quiet home didn't strike me at first as bad people - they wore tie-dyes and army fatigues and looked counter-culture, and being a young liberal myself at the time, I didn't worry. A neighbor's politics never interested me before.
But I came to describe them as hippie-wannabes - consumers of commodified dissent who embrace the look and attitude, if not the spirit of peace-loving counter-culture practitioners. Upon moving in, Jeb and Delta, as I'll call them, brought no furniture - they just carried giant stereo speakers and stolen milk crates full of CDs in from a an old, beaten car that made the trip from whence they came and then it died. Their expressionless faces moved back and forth without a word, even when some of us tried to welcome them. We all chalked it up to shyness. I was too young and inexperienced to sense the doom in store.
They quickly flushed their mint-condition home down into dilapidation - paint peeled off the façade as though trying to escape the grime, or maybe it'd been shaken off by their concert-worthy bass; wood shutters rotted and dangled, ready to fall like swords of Damocles onto pedestrians below; a colonial basement box window they'd broken sat covered with bare plywood for years. The inside smelled of pot and hash, which wafted through the wall separating our existences, along with the sound waves of the unrecognizable, angry music they considered eclectic.
They played their loud music and blared their bedroom television at all hours - and in the city noise is just not something you keep to yourself easily. Being a good, quiet neighbor does require care. In many older buildings where people live clustered together, a sneeze in one's living room can be acknowledged by a next-door neighbor in his bedroom. God bless you. To hear the sounds of others living their lives isn't uncommon in tight quarters.
But noise takes many forms. As discussed earlier, some comes late in the day, some early, some overnight. Some is electronic like a loud stereo, some is vocal like an argument. Some is necessary and ordinary, some is not. Children at play make it, so do dogs, lawnmowers, motorcycles, air-conditioning compressors, honking horns, on and on. There may be millions of forms noise can take.
Yet, noise takes only two levels of offensive distress: The stuff we hear and don't raise cane about, and the stuff we do complain about. The stuff we do complain to neighbors about is the stuff we want corrected, and usually for good reason. That which isn't corrected after our pleasant request, or numerous requests, can safely be called without a doubt the absolute loudest and most irritating noise there is.
I made such a request. I was pleasant, but even a pleasant request can spark a long-lived and treacherous war. Why? Noise is only part of what noisy Neighbors From Hell bring to the table. They have what I referred to in the Introduction as a "Type-NFH personality."
My hippie-wannabes had that personality. I have many liberal friends and am not liberal-bashing; I've had extreme leftists as neighbors with whom I got along fine. Politics aside, anyone who, like this pair, is habitually unemployed, lazy and antisocial will make for a bad neighbor nine times out of ten. The one commitment they can make is to rage against the machine of good neighbors - the establishment power structure in their smoke-clouded minds. Unemployment equals spare time, and bad neighbors find nothing constructive to do with theirs.
I triggered their wrath by merely asking them to mind their noise. My balding head, healthy interactions with other neighbors, habit of keeping my home well maintained and attractive, and wearing of suits to work made them see red - to the pair that moved in beside me, I was a cross between Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich. By objecting to their un-neighborly ways, I was in their minds trying to keep them down and control their thoughts - violating the mores they'd established for the commune they saw in my community, and this got them sufficiently fired up to abandon giving peace a chance.
Adults who choose to live in a neighborhood among others establish what we know as a community. It's a haphazard creation - people join it only by virtue of moving into it. A commune - a private compound of extremely modest dwellings for dysfunctional, unemployable people to live among themselves and share with each other their wisdom, wit, food, music and weed - is not a community. My hippie-wannabes endeavored to establish a makeshift commune within my community, teaching me that communes need to be cut off from the rest of society for them to malfunction as planned against the establishment tide, with loud music, squalor and an aversion to boundary separation. Unfortunately, the financial limitations of typical hippie-wannabes, and others unable to find or hold jobs, disable them from buying large chunks of remote land where they won't offend others, so the so-called wisdom that is theirs gets shared with us. Their chosen lifestyle then wreaks havoc on the lives and lifestyles of neighboring productive adults and their families.
Their noise was disruptive enough to wake me, loud enough to disable me from talking on the phone, and wall-shaking enough to obliterate the sound of my own choices in music and other media. It took place on no schedule, with no warning. The sudden jolt of amplified music could come at any time, eventually leaving me in a constant state of vigilance and agitation. My life for a period is defined by anticipation of the next noisy outburst.
Though not the only one being disturbed, I was the only aggrieved neighbor who'd address the problem with them. They reacted at first feigning unawareness they were offending anyone, and disbelief others beyond myself were complaining. They explained they play their music "a little loud" because they're half-deaf from years of auditory abuse. Big surprise. Nonetheless, they seemed to understand there was a problem, and seemed willing to comply with my wishes and the wishes of other neighbors I allegedly represented.
But I'd soon learn they were fully aware of the bother they were creating, that they'd heard neighbors' complaints many times over the past years, long before making me their neighbor, and had learned how to deflect the complaints without addressing them - by pretending to be willing to comply. Relaxed and groovy as they purported to be, this thirty-something couple, with their soft-spoken style, monotone speech, laid-back affectations, scraggly hair, tie-dyes and military fatigue shorts looked the part of liberal lovers of peace. But they proved to be a very short ride from going on a warpath against anyone taking exception to their behavior and questioning their authority as gurus of their commune.
My Hippie-Wannabes
