Did you hear that, or is it just me?
3/15/2020 — West Village, New York
Last night at 8pm a thumping, bass-heavy noise rocked my apartment, which occupies a little carve out of a pre-war brownstone on Grove Street. Pre Civil War actually, when soundproofing technologies hadn’t anticipated Sonos and EDM. (That’s electronic dance music for all your boomers.)
I’m a gentle, easy-going person who’s not that sensitive. Just go with the flow kind of guy. I told myself, it’s fine. Keep watching the episode from Season 2 of the Star Trek: Discovery DVD (another throwback technology). My neighbor will stop. Eventually. She has to. Right? It can’t go on forever? Can it?
Moments later I drafted a text to my upstairs neighbor, whose schedule I’ve memorized over the years. Refuse to put down carpeting and live in an 1850s building that magnifies footfalls = a recipe for heightened awareness. My theory is that in the 19th Century people didn’t have Netflix or you know, electricity, so listening to involuntarily noise from neighbors was their primary source of entertainment. Is Jehoshaphat walking, again? So amusing!
My upstairs neighbor (vertical roommate?) goes to bed at 11pm, wakes up around 3am for the bathroom, step, step — pause— then the shooming flush. She finally rises at 6:30am-7am each morning to rearrange her furniture and perform dramatic renditions of elephant mating rituals. Stomp stomp stomp. Quiet. Stomp stomp stomp.I really shouldn’t know this much about her.
“You live in an apartment building with other people. Please turn down your music,” I typed into my phone. I looked at the draft message.
“Please turn down your music,” I finally texted.
Two seconds later. “I’m not playing music. Other people live here.”
Touché!
After a text downstairs — hey, it’s binary — and then some quick sneaker donning and timid, then slightly less timid, door knocking that went unanswered, the ecstatic sounds of robot sex wound down on their own. Back to spore drive malfunctions on the USS Discovery! OK they actually resolved the spore drive in Season 1 and now it’s a mysterious Spock on the run that’s somewhat animating the otherwise architecturally crumbling story arc. But still. It’s not about viruses!
Finally, in pajamas, I read a few pages of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ slow but skillful first novel, The Water Dancer, and was off to bed.
At 7:43am — a solid hour before my ever shifting wake time — a loud mechanical hum jolted me. Was it a sump pump? What is a sump pump? What is “sump?”
Maybe it was a rogue vacuum cleaner? It was mechanical. And loud. Bzzzzz. I tried going back to bed. I read the New York Times app which explained that countries I’ve never visited will no longer have us. I noticed the Times was now using the journalistically brave language that Trump is “speaking falsely” instead of the truth, which is that HE EFFING LIES! But hey, lawyers gotta eat too. I tired myself with news worry, put in ear plugs which are my favorite possessions, and tried to fall back to sleep.
BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ.
I texted my hyperlocal saint, the Landlord of Infinite Patience and Ever Optimistic Rent Valuations. He lives on the bottom two floors of the house; I’m on the fourth floor. The BZZZZ is in between us.
“Sorry to bother you, but do you have a sump pump going? That can’t be right on a Sunday morning, but the noise is mechanical and loud, and started an hour ago.”
He texts back an hour later. “She has a treadmill. That’s probably what it is.”
Dear Lord, bless this Landlord for confirming that I’m not crazy. At least, not in this context.
A few hours later, on my way out the door to meet another friend on another uptown park bench, I slid a note under the apartment door below me. “Something something we’re all in this together something something shut the hell up.” But worded like how a lawyer would write it.
My downstairs neighbor texted me a few hours later while I ate snacks on a bench on the banks of the Hudson River, this time by West 92nd Street.
“It wasn’t me.”
In this era of no one taking accountability for everything, I could do nothing else but agree.
