New Neighbor, New Stereo
November 15, 2008
"Oh no," said Deborah, her eyes rolling out of time with the thump thump thump rat-a-tat-tat-tat of our new neighbor's new stereo, "Our lives are about to change."
Our old neighbor, Adie, lived quietly and alone. Not that she was lonely or didn't act out now and then, she did, just not in her own house. One of the first things she and I bonded over was our shared annoyance at the dusk till mid-morning cocaine parties that used to go on down the hall. My apartment is next door to the stairwell, and I got to enjoy the drunken stumbling and coked-up ramblings of guests as they came and went. Still, Adie really bore the brunt of it, since her apartment was adjacent to the party animal's drug den, their shared wall reverberating for hours with The Smiths’ oeuvre.
Those parties don't seem to go on much anymore, and things were relatively serene for several months leading up to Adie's move.
But now—
Our new neighbors have only been here a couple of weeks, and Deborah and I tried to reassure ourselves that what we were hearing wasn't the start of an entirely new dynamic, but instead just our new neighbor stretching out a little in his new digs. It wasn't a housewarming party, in any event. It was just a loud stereo playing unexpectedly unhip music. It sounded like watered-down calypso hip hop sung by an American Idol runner-up, something you might hear on a cruise ship or a nightclub in the Poconos. The volume went up and down throughout the night, occasionally stopping altogether, just long enough to fool us into thinking he'd resigned himself to the fact that no guests were arriving and he'd tucked himself into bed.
His second wind brought us Drum and Bass, or one of the myriad variations on the genre — Darkstep, Drumfunk, Breakcore, Liquid Funk, or Old School Jungle, who the fuck knows? All I know is that by 3 a.m., the breakbeats had me ready to break necks.
Deborah and I decided he was allowed one housewarming freakout freebee to push his new roots into the hardwood floor and purge whatever ghosts might remain from our old friend Adie.
One.
