Won't You NOT Be My Neighbor?

For 17 years I lived in my apartment in the Bronx. It was my first real place, fresh out of medical school. It was important to me; having my own place gave me a sense of security and safety. I decided who I let in or who could stay. It was my refuge – just me and my Poochie – cozy in our purple place decorated “Friends” style. Eleven years into it, Poochie and I added Tom to the mix and we were a family. I loved my apartment. It was cluttered but with things that were meaningful to me; it was mine filled with pictures of Poochie and Tom, more books than a library and tons of dust. Mine. Leaving there took a huge leap of courage. It meant leaving the place I grew up. Leaving the borough where I was born, the neighborhoods I ran through as a child, the apartment I rented when I was a mere 26 years old. I had lots of good and bad times in that apartment (some not fit for details here): it’s where I brought home my Angel Poochie at 10 weeks old, it’s where I last saw my mother, it’s where I fell in love, it’s where I first let someone become a permanent part of my life, it’s where I laid on the couch for over a year when I herniated a disk in my back, it’s where I learned to cook, and it’s where I took my Angel in my arms when I knew I had to let her go. It wasn’t just an apartment; it was my home.

But over the past couple of years, things had changed in the neighborhood and in the building. More and more, teenagers were taking over the streets, threatening minority store owners, vandalizing buildings, doing lewd things in parking lots and “sexting” about it and the police would do nothing (some were children of the police). The building went from being a quiet place filled with hard working, mature people to one where no one seemed to go to work, too many people blasted TVs and music all hours of the day and night and there was no regard for neighbors. In particular, my neighbor above me would clomp in heeled shoes all the time. She couldn’t have weighed more than 98 lbs. soaking wet but she sounded like a herd of elephants. She scraped chairs over the bare floors and woke me up every single morning. Our new downstairs neighbors were fine at first. A young single mother with a young girl. Then she brought in some guy and the fighting started and never ended. Screaming, yelling, cursing. Blasting music. Non-stop barking dog who (believe it or not) didn’t respond to screams of “Shut up!” We heard arguments about things I wouldn’t repeat here and we could hear them when we used the bathroom. Sadly, even though the rent was stabilized and pretty decent, it was time to go. We swore we would rent a house – no one above or below us again. We set about looking but rents were too high – even with real estate being at an all-time low due to the recession.

Then we met a real estate broker who showed us a beautiful apartment in a beautiful, quiet neighborhood. We told him (again and again) how important quiet was to us. Tom and I, a librarian and professor, just wanted to read in peace. We told him about our upstairs and downstairs neighbors. We told him about the loud neighbors banging doors in the hallway. We told him about the neighborhood teenagers. We told him we needed absolute quiet. I said to him more than once (and in front of witnesses), “All I want is to not hear my neighbor’s go to the bathroom. Is that too much to ask for?” I think he heard us. It’s hard to tell – most of the time his head was bent down into his Blackberry or iPhone or whatever he had. That annoyed me. Common courtesy is a big thing to me and I abhor the rudeness that modern technology has brought with it. He lived in the building and he assured us it was quiet. He said he was probably the noisiest person in the building with his 2 giant flat-screen TVs watching sports all the time but none of the neighbors ever complained to him. Of course not, he’s the broker! We told him of our trepidation of moving into a building again and asked who lived above and below us. He told us a woman lived upstairs and a single woman lived downstairs. We explained that I work from home most of the time so I really needed a place where everyone left in the day and went to work so I could have quiet. He assured us it was quiet. We visited about 4 times, different days and different times, and each time it was tomb-quiet. Still undecided, he told us that if we didn’t give him the $500 non-refundable deposit, he’d have to show the place and we would lose it. We were also hesitant because it was more than twice the rent we were paying. We asked about a smaller apartment. He said there was none available, even though the man in the apartment next door was moving out as this was all happening. That was not the only lie he told us.

Turns out the woman upstairs also has a man who lives with her and guess what? He works from home. He never leaves the apartment except to go out and get lunch. How do I know that? I can hear every move he makes. And she walks with shoes on bare floors! In the bedroom! At 7 am and wakes me up every single morning, even through the ear plugs! I hear every drawer open, every closet door slam shut. He gets up about 2 hours later. He goes to the bathroom (which I can hear), then goes into his office/den and turns on the computer (which I can hear) and stays in there until he puts on his shoes and clomps his way out to get lunch, returns, sits at the table (which I can hear), eats his lunch, and then goes back to the office until about 4 when he clomps around some more in the kitchen. She returns at 7:10, clomps through on the bare floors (the lease says you must cover over 80% of the floors with rugs but the lease says a lot of things that don’t get enforced – had we known that, we could have saved over $500 on rugs too), goes into the bedroom where she kicks off her shoes and then clomps back and forth through the apartment like a herd of buffalo. Kitchen activity is always loud because everyone feels the need to slam the refrigerator, the cabinet doors and run the dishwasher at midnight. They don’t watch a lot of TV but when they do, we can hear it clearly. We have asked them nicely to just please take off their shoes when they walk on their bare floors; they insist they do. Right. We have asked please just in the morning so we don’t get woken up. High-heeled clomp, clomp, clomp – through the earplugs!

Then there is the downstairs tenant. A single woman. Yes, but with a 6 year old child. They have company every weekend with what sounds like multiple children. And they run. Back and forth until 2 in the morning. My husband went to ask them to be quieter to which she replied, “I’m trying to bribe her with a sugar cookie to go to bed.” What???? And the TV blasts and the music blasts and the doors slam. We ask again and she says, “It’s not loud. Maybe you’re just hypersensitive” and slams the door in Tom’s face. We can’t watch TV because we can’t hear it between upstairs and downstairs. We can’t read. We can’t live.

We complain to the super. We complain to the broker. It’s no longer the broker’s problem, we are told, even though he misled us. Had he told us that there was any of these things – someone who worked from home upstairs, someone with a hyper child downstairs, a building where you could hear people in their bathroom from YOUR dining area (ewww!), where you can hear every step, every sigh, every clomp, people who slam doors in the hallway, we would have stayed where we were and paid less than half the rent. The only thing he told us that ended up being true was that the neighborhood is quiet. You walk through the neighborhood and it’s charming and quiet but inside is another story. We follow the rules. The super tries to help but to no avail. We move up to the property manager. They tell us we have to handle it between neighbors. We say we have tried that, it didn’t work, please enforce your lease. They blah blah us until we start talking lawyers. The property manager sends certified letters to both sets of tenants saying there will be “consequences” if they don’t follow the lease. Apparently, this idea took many weeks and meetings with the upper level because they had never done this before. They are all shocked. No one has ever complained before. But we hear the people who used to live in our apartment had many kids and a piano. She annoyed everyone but no one complained. Probably afraid that if they complained about noise, then they could never make any. But Tom and I don’t make any noise. We tip toe through the apartment, even though we have rugs and rug pads underneath, we keep the TV so low, Tom teases me I should put the close-captioning on so he can know what they are saying and we are careful with every door we close. We are considerate. We would like some consideration in return.

The property manager sends out the letters, warning us there might be “retributions” from the neighbors. That’s nice. And there are. Things get noisier and the property manager doesn’t answer the phone anymore. We leave messages. The child downstairs gets Guitar Hero for Christmas and now we have another problem as KISS is blasting (badly, I might add) through our floors. It’s worse on weekends so twice we have escaped – once spending money at a motel and a second time going to Tom’s mother upstate (big mistake) – but we can’t afford to do that all the time. Our dog is nervous. It’s funny because we were worried he wouldn’t be well-behaved enough for this neighborhood but he’s better behaved than anyone. Meanwhile, the stress is causing fights between me and Tom (that’s me, I want him to fix things and he can’t), we have no more money having spent all our savings moving here and even incurring some debt because we bought the rugs and a dining room table. We want to move but even if we found a perfect place, we can’t afford it. We don’t have 1st and last month’s rent put away anymore. We don’t have moving money anymore. With our savings gone and money charged, our credit isn’t as wonderful as it was before and prices for rents are going up now so our options are even more limited. We can’t turn back time; we are not in the same place we were just 3 months ago. I’m having chest pain and dizziness all the time along with headaches. I’m not hungry (that’s very unusual for me) and can’t sleep well. I end up in the hospital after chest pains, labored breathing and throat constriction bring the entire rescue division to the apartment. They think its anxiety. So do I until the ER says my cardiac enzymes are elevated. Uh oh. I’m in the hospital for 3 days, getting poked and prodded, bruised with needles and tested with no results. I miss Benny but I don’t want to go home. The hospital is so quiet. No one above me or below me. They may be starving me because they can’t figure out how to feed a vegan but I can sleep.

The property manager, upon hearing I was in the hospital, no longer returns calls, not to Tom and not to the lawyer, but she tells the super to tell the tenants to please keep it down when I get home. We walk in the door to blasting music from downstairs. Doing what the property manager said to do, Tom goes down, rings her bell and asks her to lower it. She says no. Minutes later, there is a knock on our door. The police. She called the police and told them she feels “unsafe” and they tell Tom not to go near her door again. Yeah, this is not causing me more stress. The officer can hear me crying but he doesn’t come in. This was traumatic for my Tom. He’s the quietest, gentlest, nicest person that exists. That’s part of what attracted me to him (and what drives me insane). I’m used to cops from my abusive family but he isn’t. How is he in trouble for doing what the property manager said to do? And now what can we do? No one answers our phone calls. And the girl downstairs brings home a trumpet or some musical instrument and plays that (also badly) even though the lease clearly specifies “no musical instruments.”

This weekend I was in bed trying to rest. The upstairs people thought it was a good day to redecorate or something and so there was hammering, drilling and vacuuming until I yelled something about compassion loud enough that it moved to another room. I spent $50 I really don’t have on iTunes buying relaxation music. Then the music blasted from downstairs again and the running. I couldn’t take it anymore and walked out of the apartment and walked in the freezing rain for 2 hours until Tom found me. Then I stayed in the car, refusing to go upstairs until everyone went to bed. Tom called everyone and no one replied. Turns out the lawyer, who does tenant stuff pro bono, lost his mother this weekend and he’ll be unavailable all week. Tom moved our TV into the bedroom so we might have a chance to watch something. I told him I felt kind of bad about that because I didn’t want our TV to disturb anyone in their bedrooms and he looked at me like I was an alien. Yes, I am THAT considerate. But as I’m lying in bed, with no TV or music on, just tying to read, the trumpet starts again. And the chest pain gets worse.

Maybe years from now when Tom and I are sitting in our home, I’ll complain that it’s too quiet and we’ll laugh, remembering this time in our lives. If it wasn’t so tragic, the irony might be amusing. We tried to get away from clompers upstairs and loud fighting and music downstairs. We wanted to not hear our neighbors in the bathroom. What did we get? Two clompers upstairs and loud fighting and blasting music and TV downstairs but with an added bonus of a non-musically inclined child running for hours at a time (maybe someone should hide an Adderall in her sugar cookie). Oh, and urinary retention because it seems that every time I need to use the bathroom, I can hear a neighbor in theirs. But then, don’t forget, I can hear that at the dining room table as well. We are the good guys here except we upset the status quo and I guess you don’t do that around here. At least there are no teenagers wreaking havoc outside my bedroom window…yet. Hopefully, we won’t be here come summer vacation to find out.