Saturday morning, and the upstairs neighbors are at it again, though I’m not sure what “it” is. Maybe they’re getting ready for an upcoming audition for “Stomp” and training in heavy combat boots for the added workout. Maybe they’re throwing those huge ten-pound bags of dog food one buys at Costco in order to tease - or flatten - that Twinkie-shaped terrier I’ve see peeing outside. Or maybe this apartment building’s ceilings and walls are as brittle as an octogenarian woman’s bones, but I don’t remember the neighbors being this noisy when I first moved in.
Whatever the reason, I usually don’t mind it. It makes me feel like I have housemates, never mind that I don’t know anyone’s names and no one even grunts hello when we pass in the hall. This is not that kind of building.
Like many apartments in this area, it’s an old building, the kind where elderly couples have been living upstairs for twenty years and pay $200 a month in rent. The kind where twenty and thirty-somethings mostly live downstairs in studios and pay at least $1,000 a month. There’s a very perceptible generation gap. Young people stumble into the building at 3 a.m. screeching about jeans and gay rights. (This morning, actually). And old people shuffle-grumble, if you see them at all. They aren’t milk and cookies grandparent-types. Large Neighbor, the man who sits on the stoop and drinks bodega juice, a $.99 beverage worse than Kool-Aid, flares his nostrils and refuses to narrow his sprawl when other residents need to get in the building. Another cantankerous woman hollers from the stairwell at her visitors.
One time I came back to the apartment after work, and there was a sticker on the front door. It had an unfamiliar name, an apartment number, a date and time. The bottom of the sticker bore the address and contact information of a funeral home.
“Whoa,” I thought. “I live where people die.” I know that any of us can go at any moment, young or old, healthy or sick. But my neighbor expired after living here for years and years. The issues that I’m dealing with are really different from those of my neighbors. The first and second floors are concerned with looking hip. The third and fourth floors are worried about breaking a hip. (This is putting it glibly of course, I won’t get into that whole issue that rhymes with Mocial Mecurity). At this point, it doesn’t make sense that the elders should have to climb stairs to get home. Maybe if they lived in the first floor studios…and more agile youngsters lived in the bigger, upstairs apartments… Well, you can see where I’m going.
I don’t begrudge anyone their bigger, cheaper apartment…this very minute. But I’m not happy that an upstairs neighbor is now vacuuming, and has been vacuuming for a straight half-hour. I think the machine is in a resting position, too, just sucking on the same piece of clean-as-it’s-gonna-get carpet. The highly-decibeled hum will be in my head long after I leave the house today or some cantankerous and possibly deaf neighbor realizes there’s a funny noise coming from the living room, whichever comes first.
