On Neighbors and 3:30am Wakeup Calls — M.M.
July 24th, 2022:
Well, today was a fucking write-off.
You know, when I was living with Master Barfbreath, I had a front row seat to the evolution of his ridiculously intricate alarm system. Every few months he would add a layer of protection, and by the time I left him we were routinely getting important video footage of our various neighbourhood wasps and spiders. It was kind of like living in Fort Knox, and I attributed his over-zealousness in the face of no real threat to being part of his neuroses.
I still think it was mostly his neuroses, but last night as the banging on our front door began to shake my building enough that I could feel it three stories up, I started to wish my fortress was just slightly more impenetrable.
Let me back up. The doorbell started ringing at 3:30am, just in time to startle me awake from the deepest of slumbers. My heart sank as soon as consciousness was achieved. I hoped that Hazel was better than I was at sleeping through the noise, since she had a 7-hour drive to embark upon in the morning.
This wasn’t the first time I’d awoken to my doorbell; it had happened a couple of times earlier in the week. I’d woken up, aggravated, but had assumed it was a drunken partier with the wrong apartment or something. The ringing had stopped both times, and I’d gone back to sleep.
This time, however, the ringing persisted for about five minutes, pausing long enough to give me hope that it was done, but then beginning again. We don’t have any kind of video surveillance or buzzer system, because until last night I wasn’t a neurotic paranoiac like my former master.
No way was I gonna go downstairs as a petite solo woman to find out who was trying to get into the building. (I did check my cell phone, juuuuuust in case someone was actually trying to reach me. Nobody was.) I began to wish that my martial arts instructor had taught me karate when I was a teenager, instead of being a child molester. Then I might have learned how to defend myself, feeling at least feel a bit more confident to confront whoever the fuck was ruining my good nights’ sleep.
Finally the ringing seemed to have paused for good, and I tried to to calm my heart, which was beating a bit more frantically than normal. I hoped that whoever it was ringing the bell had realized that nobody was home and had given up.
I couldn’t fall back asleep, though. I started to hear noises in the backyard, and it occurred to me that while the front door is very secured, my back entrance is definitely not. In fact, somebody could probably climb up my terrace and break in through my bedroom window if they felt like it.
You know. Smash through the bedroom window which was located mere inches from my head.
That thought did the job. Once we had thought it, we couldn’t un-think it, and my chances of falling back asleep started to recede into the distance.
Baby Girl insisted that we look out the window, where we observed a woman stumbling around, likely on drugs. She appeared to be battling with a paper bag, batting it wildly with her arms, letting it fall, grabbing it, batting at it again, letting it fall…etc. Could the culprit have been her?
Probably not, because at 4am, with her still in view, the doorbell started back up again. That’s when I gave up and made my way into the living room where Hazel was also not asleep. I looked out the window and saw the shadow of a man on my front stoop. After a few more minutes, a nicely dressed couple emerged on the steps. They got into a car and drove away before I could even try to squint out a license plate number.
Drunken partiers? Mother fuckers.
Hazel and I said goodnight once more, and I crawled back into bed, but Baby Girl couldn’t sleep. She didn’t think the night was over.
In an effort to determine exactly how much danger we might be in, we decided to look out the back window again. The sky was beginning to lighten by now (not that it ever really gets dark in downtown Montreal), and we could clearly observe a woman (not the same woman? We didn’t think so) banging on my downstairs neighbours’ gate.
Basically, my neighbourhood seemed to be alive with people at this ungodly hour, except for whomever the doorbell ringers had been trying to reach.
The woman by the gate didn’t look like a serial killer though. She actually seemed a bit distraught, speaking anxiously into her cell phone. Baby Girl wanted to go down and see if she needed help, but I preferred not to call attention to our ill-defended hideout.
We continued to peek out the window off and on for the next hour. The woman stayed by the gate, but there was no more doorbell ringing, and we took slight comfort in the fact that nobody seemed interested in climbing upstairs to my defenseless terrace.
Finally, one more peek out the window revealed a quiet backyard. The woman seemed to be gone, and I tried to convince Baby Girl to calm down so we could fall asleep.
And we almost did.
Until 5am, at which point the doorbell started going off violently.
That’s when Hazel came into my bedroom and suggested that I call the police. Brilliant idea.
“Umm…somebody is ringing my doorbell,” I said a bit lamely to the 911 respondent. I thought about how pathetic that sounded as an emergency, but felt better when he didn’t immediately hang up on me. “It’s been an hour and a half,” I continued quickly. “I don’t know who it is, and I’m scared.”
That’s when I looked out the window and saw that the police were already here. In fact, they were the ones RINGING the goddamn doorbell this time.
I suppose it would make sense at this point to explain to you that the first floor of my apartment building is a daycare. There are three doorbells, one of which belongs to the daycare and two of which do not, a fact which the daycare obviously didn’t find important enough to tell people. All this became relevant quite suddenly, because…Remember that elegantly dressed couple from earlier? Well, they had apparently been trying to pick up their child from the daycare for the last hour and a half.
“It should be fine,” my future landlord had explained to me when I came to see the apartment earlier this year. “You may hear them a bit during the day, but on nights and weekends they won’t be around.”
Ummm…bullshit.
Also, who the fuck leaves their child at daycare until 3:30 in the morning?!
And who DOESN’T make a plan about how to REACH each other?!
Oh no, we’ll just wake up the entire neighbourhood instead.
With Baby Girl satisfied that nobody was actually trying to break in, for real, Hazel and I managed to squeeze in a couple of more hours of sleep before bidding one another an extremely groggy goodbye at 8:30 this morning. She seemed to be in remarkably good spirits despite her sleepless night and long journey ahead.
I, on the other hand, was pissed.
Fort Knox alarm systems, here we fucking come.
Love,
M.M.
