I have many neighbors. I have only met two of them face-to-face because they have a dog and I have a dog and wow isn’t that ironic. They’re a nice older couple. He is short and bald. She is short and chubby. He is writing a book about the Pacific Coast Highway and she works for a living. He threw her a surprise birthday party last month that featured an ethnic dance troupe and a vegan chocolate cake. My wife and I couldn’t make it because we had other plans, so unfortunately we have never had occasion to socialize with them. I imagine it would be perfectly normal and pleasant, but then when we all went home at the end of the night they would retreat to their bedroom for a long night of unbearably kinky sex. Take my advice, if you’re ever trying to get your spouse in the mood, don’t break the ice with theories about your middle-aged neighbors and their leather collection.
I guess technically I’ve met another neighbor, if telephone calls count. He left a note on my windshield about the insensitivity with which I park my GMC Yukon on our crowded narrow cul de sac. He signed the note with his initials and a phone number with no area code. What do you call that? Aggressively passive aggressive? I tracked him down through Google and Facebook. He didn’t pick up the first time I dialed. I hung up and immediately called again. This time he picked up. I told him who I was and, in typical Hollywood fashion, he started apologizing and equivocating and rationalizing. He explained his reasons for putting the note on my car, none of which considered the possibility that maybe I park my car as tightly and politely as possible and that it is the circumstances that have changed between the time I parked my car and the time he actually laid eyes on it.
It took me awhile to figure out which one of my neighbors he was until one morning I recognized his voice while I was walking my dog and he was walking his kids to school. He was the guy from the second floor apartment in the building on the corner. Through observation and a couple brief conversations with my swinging, middle-aged neighbors, I have come to discover that Damian–that’s what the ‘D’ stood for at the bottom of his note–is a freelance woodworker who lives out of a 1-bedroom apartment with no air conditioning and works out of a 4-door Honda station wagon with no hubcaps. He is a single father with partial custody of two seemingly adorable little kids for whom he makes room in his station wagon by moving turpentine and varnish cans from the front seats to the trunk, because of course those things never explode from prolonged exposure to heat when they are properly stowed. It should be no surprise that he smokes like a chimney whether he’s in the house, on the street, or in his fume-choked automobile.
But perhaps worst of all, he is the guy who likes to sit out on his stoop during primetime and practice his rhythm guitar. Not lead guitar or bass guitar where you might get some melody or some phat, walking bass licks. Nope, he likes to strum out a bunch of chords and repetitive atonal harmonies, right in the middle of House.
Normally I am all for having interesting neighbors with quirky habits. It makes for more entertaining living. But normally I like to watch my shows in peace, and Guitar Zero has made that a daily impossibility. Lucky for him, the primetime television season is over. I was mere days away from marching down the hill, snatching his guitar from him, soaking it in turpentine, and using it as a torch to light his car on fire.
Harsh? Probably. Justified? Definitely.
