by Cathy
I live in a six-unit condo building. Each side of the building has three units - the top and the bottom of which are duplexes, the middle ones are simplex units. We're in one of those. We have the most number of people in the entire building (4), yet we are the ones living on a single floor while one- and two-people families are living in the spacious two-floor units.
So until we make the move to a single-family home, we are sandwiched - and not in a good way. As irony would have it, the unit below us has only one woman living there. She's an attorney who works from home, and aside from the occasional late-night phone conversation or clarinet practice for her Klezmer band (which she does in her basement), I can barely even tell she lives there. Now why couldn't SHE live upstairs from us? Instead?
Instead, a loud Italian family and their 90-lb. German Shepherd live above us. Granted, here I am, the pot calling the kettle black. We are a Greek/Latino family and we are loud as heck. But at least my upstairs and downstairs neighbors have the option of fleeing one floor above or below us when the going gets loud. We have nowhere to go and as such, are subjected to every fight, toddler tantrum, dog-barking episode that occurs. And when does most of this occur, you may ask? But of course, waaaaaay before we wake up in the morning. It's bad enough I have outside noise to deal with when asleep but noise emanating from within your "house" that's not your doing - that's a whole other component to city living.
We never had much luck when it came to upstairs neighbors since we moved into this multi-unit building 15 years ago. The first couple was the building developer and his wife. How bad could that be, right? No kids. No pets. Well, they were both over six-feet tall and heavy-footed as hell. The scenario that stands out the most with them, happened one night when the guy walked back from a local bar, drunk as a skunk in a funk. It must have been around 2 a.m. and Joe and I were fast asleep when I heard a key searching our back door for a keyhole. Then the knob was turning incessantly and the screen door slid along the tracks in one fell swoop. My eyes flew open and I froze, with the exception of moving my elbow hard enough to nudge Joe in the ribs. "Someone's at the back door!" I whispered and shrieked simultaneously.
In seconds, he was on his feet and stepping cautiously down the hallway, wide awake now. After a few tense minutes, he returned.
"I didn't see anyone," he said shuffling back under the covers. "What did you hear?"
As if on cue, we heard the supposed intruder stumbling into the room above us. He obviously found the back door keyhole that fit his key. After a series of boom-boom-booms heard criss-crossing the floor above us, we felt the ceiling, walls and floors shudder and all the furniture and pictures on our wall shook with electricity as we heard the loudest THUD! ever. We simultaneously shot up in bed, our hearts racing and our breaths still, waiting for more. But there was only silence. Apparently, he shuffled his drunk weight around the room in an attempt to remove his pants and naturally, got tangled in them to the point where he lost his balance and tipped over like a tree falling in the forest. There he lay flat on his face and slept for the rest of the night while we hardly clocked a wink.
The people who moved in after them were a single mom and her teenage son, another lead-footed, shuffler who listened to loud rock music at all times and had friends over almost always.
And now, we have the loud Euro family. We've had them as upstairs neighbors for nine years now so you would think we'd be used to this but we never do because every day brings with it a unique, loud-ass scenario that could be as simple as their four-year old using the bathroom and screaming out to her mother. "Mommy! I miss you! Mommy! Can you wipe me?!?" As luck would have it yet again, they are also a Shrek-sized family. Both parents are over six-feet tall (noticing a pattern here?) and their "toddler" wears a shoe size that looks dangerously close to the size I wear, as Bella delicately pointed out to me today. "That's just wrong," we said, almost in unison.
That big-footed toddler doesn't run as delicately as a girl her age should. She flops her feet in a dead-weight fashion with every leap forward. More than once, my heat has kicked in simply by having one of the parents stomp-walk above my thermostat. Meanwhile the dog jumps off the couch and my light fixtures shake, rattle and roll. We all know that Greeks and Italians talk so loud it sounds like they're always fighting, but when in fact they are fighting? Fuggedaboudit.
Now this family is finally moving into the single-family home they need to be in but the question looms large: Which big-footed, loud-mouthed, zoo-toting family will move in?
