I would like to begin today’s column with a disclaimer and an announcement. First, the disclaimer: I do not have the most horrible neighbors in the world. My neighbors do not deal drugs, or discharge firearms in the direction of passersby, or throw loud parties, or create objectionable smells. (Well, if you define “objectionable” as “the stench of death,” but I’ll get to that later.) My neighbors do, however, perpetrate many many tiny irritations which, taken together, would have driven Fred Rogers to hang himself with the sleeve of one of his myriad cardigans in the space of a fortnight. This leads me to the announcement, namely that I may have to kill one of my neighbors, and I wanted to prepare the readership for a possible interruption in service, because I don’t think the prisoners’ rights lobby has gotten around to providing Web-publishing privileges for inmates of Ossining State Prison, or whichever other facility houses women who, driven to madness by the incessant yapping of a foo-foo dog, stuff innocent victims down the incinerator chute while cackling, “See if you leave Prissy-Wissy-Pudding-Pie off the leash now, you inconsiderate hag!”

All right, all right, so I don’t actually plan to kill anyone, unless we lived in a world where “to kill” meant “to mouth the word ënot’ at the backs of people’s heads in the elevator,” but I’ve gotten fed up recently. I spend most of the day at home, attempting to get work done, and I find it somewhat difficult to concentrate when the odious little mop with teeth down the hall won’t shut up. If you would like to experience Mopsy’s reign of aural terror for yourself, just follow these simple steps: 1) hit “record” on your tape player or Dictaphone; 2) scale your voice up to a falsetto and say the word “ark” as loudly as you possibly can into the microphone; 3) loop the tape so that the word “ark” will repeat for twelve to fifteen hours; 4) press “play”; 5) try to complete a task that requires consistent focus. Mopsy, a rat-like and surprisingly hostile creature, runs free on my floor, because her owner – also rat-like, but clueless rather than hostile – thinks she needs room to run and play. Unfortunately, Mopsy tends to equate “run and play” with “sit in front of Sarah’s apartment and bark at unseen cat,” behavior which Mopsy’s owner finds “precious.” (Also deemed “precious”: the bitty little rat-like incisors Mopsy sank into my pantleg. “Did Mopsy make a friendie-poo? Yes, widdle Mopsy made a friendie-poo!” I’ll give her “poo,” but “friendie”? I think not.) I could live with the din, and the nipping, and the white tumbleweeds of Mopsy hair, but other pet-owners let their companion animals roam around in the halls as well, and few things lay the brick of writer’s block faster than the sound of a snarling fight right outside, usually between Mopsy and her nemesis, Artemis The Cat, who also has a charming habit of dashing into my apartment if I open the door so much as a crack, shooting into my closet, and hiding behind a big table stored in the back while my own love-struck cat goggles at her from the couch, and by the time I wiggle back there and start pulling her out, her owner has materialized at my front door and started wondering aloud if Artemis is inside, and just at that moment, Artemis sets up a loud injured wail, and when I open the door and hand her back to her owner, her owner glares at me like I tried to drown the cat in a Doc Marten ten-hole boot, and I feel all sheepish even though I didn’t do anything wrong, and don’t even get me started on the time Artemis followed me onto the elevator and I panicked and hit the button for the third floor so we wouldn’t wind up in the lobby, and who should Artemis and I find waiting when the door opened on “3” but a German shepherd who promptly tried to attack us both, and Artemis jumped onto my leg and dug in her claws while the shepherd’s owner yelled at me for bringing a cat onto the elevator while I frantically pressed the “door close” button about a thousand times and tried to explain that it wasn’t my cat, and then we wound up in the lobby anyway, and I basically had to lie down on top of the cat as the door opened and explain really rapidly to the people waiting for the elevator that they couldn’t get on the elevator because I had to return the cat, which totally did not belong to me, to the ninth floor, and all the people waiting stared at me, and Artemis said, “Rowr? Rowr? RRROOOWWWR?” and I tried to smile reassuringly while waiting an eternity for the door to close, and meanwhile I felt blood running down my leg, and when I finally got back up to the ninth floor, both Mr. and Mrs. Artemis just stood there with their arms folded and glared at me while Artemis strolled off the elevator and into their apartment as cool as a furry little cucumber, and I suggested that perhaps they should keep a closer eye on the cat, and they both said “hmph” and slammed their door in my face, and I limped my shedded-on, bloody-legged self back to my apartment to change clothes and dress my wounds. Did I miss the newsletter declaring the ninth floor a community pet run? Why can’t these people keep a door between their pets and the rest of the world?

Yappy Scrappy Dog and Over-Friendly Cat give me the most trouble during the day, but I suspect I’d deal with it a lot better if certain neighbors allowed me to get a modicum of sleep during the night. I’ve whinged about the people upstairs before, but I swear to God, they lean out the window and wait for my light to go out, and as soon as it does, they signal the other members of Overweight Tap-Dancing Insomniac Furniture-Movers Anonymous, and five minutes later finds me lying on my back and staring at the ceiling while the light fixtures rattle ominously, and I say to the cat, “I think it’s a sofa this time,” and the sofa overhead says, “Skeeeee-rooooonnnk-wwuuuurrrfff,” and the cat says, “[Sneeze.]” Apparently, the building’s by-laws state that tenants may only employ the principles of feng shui between the hours of one and five in the morning; I must have missed that clause. I must have also missed the clause which recommends pounding nails into the wall at exactly sunrise, because the woman next door to me seems to prefer first light for all her clearly-audible picture-hanging, and I do mean “clearly audible” – BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG! BIFF! “Oh, fudge! Stan? Stan? Staaaaaaaan? Stan, honey, come hold this, I have to start over.” BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG! I don’t know which element of the waves-of-sound-traveling equation my neighbors fail to grasp, but their ignorance extends to their own front doors (CLONK), the hutch of the garbage chute (CLANKETY CLANK), the recycling bin (KEEE-RASH), the newspaper bin (WHOOOOMP), conversations while waiting for the elevator (FLAAAAP FLAP FLAP FLAP FLAAAAAP), and singing directly into a heating vent while showering (“MORE THAN A FEEEEELING, OOOOOH-WHOOOOAAA!”). Thankfully, my call-and-response bellow of “don’t quit your day job, Guy Who Lives Upstairs” prevented that last one from recurring.

I could forgive Guy Who Lives Upstairs, because at least I got a laugh out of it, but his ear-bloodying rendition of portions of Boston’s back catalog is symptomatic of the annoyances my neighbors cause, namely that they don’t seem to remember that other people live in the building. If you remembered that other people lived in your building – people who, for whatever reason, felt like taking the elevator to the ground floor instead of, say, running down umpteen flights of dank stairs, heaving the fire door open, and rounding the corner past the restaurant kitchen on “2,” only to slip on a leaf of lettuce and land like a ton of humiliated mini-skirt-wearing bricks on the ground, just as a random example – maybe you wouldn’t hold the elevator door open for fifteen minutes and detail every step of your recent mole-removal procedure from start to finish, because you’d know that others might want to use the elevator instead of, say, pressing their mouths to the crack in the door and calling out, “Please let go of the door, because I have to get to work, and it would help if I could get there at an hour that has ëa.m.’ after it!” and if you really wanted to continue the discussion, you could get off the elevator and go in for a cup of tea. If you remembered that other people lived in your building, perhaps you’d rinse out the scuzzy jar of seven-month-old salsa before leaving it in the glass-and-metals container, because others might look into the container, and the jar might leer at them, “Hello, Clareeeeece,” and they might run back to their apartments and leap into the laps of their boyfriends all trembling and babbling, “Bad salsa, bad salsa!” If you remembered that other people lived in your building, you might not charge through the revolving door quite so quickly, because others with armloads of groceries might not want to get spun out onto the sidewalk again, and stagger around dizzily with a burst-open plastic bag, and chase a rebellious can of Chicken Of The Sea into traffic, or so slowly, because others might have forgotten to bring a cake and candles into the door with them, since they did not know in advance that they would be celebrating a birthday inside the door. And maybe, just maybe, the presence of other human beings would deter you from frying fish every single night of the year for three solid years, or leaving the door open when your toilet overflows to “let the air circulate,” or turning up the volume on your television so that you can hear it over the vacuum. Which you have chosen to run at six in the morning. On a Sunday. Good thing you didn’t wake the baby in the corner apartment by – oh, never mind. You did. And now the baby is crying. A lot. At six in the morning. Well, at least Mopsy hasn’t started – no, my mistake, she’s barking now. Did I mention the fact that it’s Sunday? Sunday morning? At six? Oh, yes, so I did. I did not, however, mention that the Hoover Corporation would like to congratulate you on the most thorough job of carpet-cleaning in the history of housekeeping, so I guess the solid hour and a half of vacuuming really paid off.

Oh, and, um – NOT! I have a HANGOVER! Don’t MAKE me come OVER there! If you absolutely must rid your home of unsightly lint at this hour, pick it up WITH your HANDS! “Asleep” and “deaf”? NOT SYNONYMOUS! “The crack of dawn” and “an appropriate time to run machinery”? ALSO NOT SYNONYMOUS! If you lived on a one-hundred acre farm in Montana, you could vacuum whenever you wanted, for as long as you wanted, but YOU DO NOT LIVE IN SUCH A PLACE, and if you think I won’t tell that jar of salsa exactly which apartment is yours, THINK AGAIN!

I bet I get on my neighbors’ nerves too from time to time. I try not to smoke too much in the apartment, but I bet some smoke gets into the hall anyway, and I try not to play my music after ten o’clock, but I have people over sometimes, and I bet it gets a little loud when I have people over. I bet I’ve woken the baby myself by accidentally letting my door slam when I have my hands full, and I bet my neighbors have gotten off the elevator and muttered to themselves, “Oy vey, how many casseroles can one woman burn?” while glaring at my front door. And I like my neighbors on the interpersonal, chit-chatty level; we don’t ignore one another when we say “hi” or anything. But the noisy apples always ruin the bushel, and I’d like the noisy apples to pipe down and get off the bloody elevator already and keep their horror salsa to themselves.

Noisy-neighbor role play. No, really.
When salsa goes bad.

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