I’ve always been fascinated by the concept of neighbors. Maybe it’s because when I was growing up we didn’t really have them. We essentially lived in the woods and none of our neighbors were visible. Sure, you could hear them if they fired a shotgun or started up their chainsaw or four-wheeler or something, but I didn’t have that quintessential cul-de-sac experience where I could get to know my neighbors, watch them coming and going, and pretty much keep track of what was happening in their lives.
My first real experience with having neighbors was my freshman year of college in the dorm. It was novel and delightful to live in such close proximity to my peers. Being able to walk out my front door and end up in a friend’s room seconds later was a big shift from always having to make arrangements to drive or be driven anywhere from 10 minutes to a half hour get to my friends’ houses.
About halfway through my freshman year, the girl who lived directly across the hall dropped out of school, leaving the room vacant. I had not gotten to know her and I still had other neighbors, but her absence felt like a small step back to a more isolated living situation and it bothered me. The room sat empty for what felt like quite a while, until I came home from class one afternoon to find the door of the room open and boxes stacked inside – finally, we were getting a new neighbor. It would have been easy, not to mention rational and mature, to knock on the door and introduce ourselves, but for whatever reason, my roommate and I took turns monitoring the peep hole and making what we thought were nonchalant trips to the bathroom to see if we could get a glimpse of our new neighbor. When we finally saw her, we were intrigued and pleased. She was equal parts Goth and Rave with ripped up black clothes, vivid dyed-red hair and piles of jewelry – bright plastic mixed with heavy silver. She was clearly not one of the all-too-common sorority girl types and we considered that to be a very good thing. Unfortunately our new neighbor was completely uninterested in meeting any of us. I think the best I ever got was a muttered “hey” as she slipped into her room before shutting the door. She wasn’t mean or rude, we just rarely saw her, which made her that much more intriguing. In fact, the only thing more intriguing than her was her boyfriend, Captain America. That wasn’t his real name, or at least I don’t think it was, but that’s what we called him because of the red and white striped Lycra pants he wore with black combat boots and an overly-studded leather jacket.
The Captain Americas were good, if somewhat strange neighbors (and I say “they” because we were quite certain Captain America was living in the dorm even though he didn’t seem to attend the university.) They were mellow and minded their own business. Shortly after they moved in, they embarked on a mysterious and epic project. We caught glimpses of lumber and paint being hauled into the room and occasionally heard hammering sounds. One evening their door was halfway open and I subtly peeked inside as I walked by. What I saw was beyond perplexing – a bright green picket fence standing in the middle of the room. Art installation? Indoor garden? Class project? We never did find out. After the construction stopped, the Captain Americas threw a party; presumably to celebrate the fence’s completion. One of their guests threw up at the end of the hallway, just past our rooms. The puddle of puke sat through the next day and eventually dried, at which point Captain America vacuumed it up. My roommate and I had given up trying to figure out the green picket fence and didn’t think much about the party or the puke until the next time we used the shared vacuum. Then it all came rushing back – literally. We plugged the machine in and started it up. A few moments passed before it hit us both at the same time – the rancid odor of vomit being blown, in the form of hot air, throughout our room. Gagging, we struggled to turn the vacuum off as it continued to blow puke-air. We finally gave up and left it running in the middle of the room as we ran to the hallway window, gasping for fresh air. I don’t remember how long it took us or how we determined who got the job of going back in to unplug the thing; I’ve probably blocked it from my mind. I do remember that the vacuum was sent away for deep cleaning and our windows were left open for many days. I lived in the dorm all four years of college. I had neighbors that were as uptight as elderly librarians and neighbors who seemed to be practicing for careers in the porn industry and neighbors who became wonderful friends, but no one ever topped the Captain Americas in terms of interesting neighbors.
The first apartment I had on my own after college was on Belmont and Howell in the heart of Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood. My building was called The Emerald Arms and it was colorful neighbor headquarters. My first look at the building was on a sunny spring afternoon. I called on a studio that was advertised in the paper and was told that while the unit was likely taken, I could come and take a look. My friend Marla came along to keep me company and provide a second opinion. The Emerald Arms is a lovely, old, six-story, brick building, covered on two sides with ivy. Directly behind it, canceling out the idyllic ivy vibe is a bright orange garage with no roof. Or maybe it’s a parking lot surrounded with bright orange walls. Either way, Marla thought it was weird. As it turned out, the weird was just beginning. Julia, the building owner, answered the door with her long hair braided and wrapped into buns atop each ear à la Princess Leia, except Julia was 60-some years old, five feet tall and chubby. She was wearing enormous round glasses and an alarming number of silver and turquoise necklaces. Her flowing white blouse was cinched with a belt that had more heft and bling than a heavy-weight boxing champion could handle. Julia showed us around the building and I was immediately smitten. While the outside of the building was classic and dignified, the inside was anything but. The hallways on each of the six floors were sponge-painted various electric shades of orange, pink, blue and purple. The studio that had been advertised was a corner unit on the first floor. Julia pointed to a tree outside the window. “Isn’t it pretty?” she asked, “When you look out the window it’s almost like you’re living in the country!” Marla and I traded glances; clearly Julia didn’t know she was talking to two girls who grew up in the forests of rural southern Oregon. The tree outside the window on Howell Street was about as far from the country as either of us could imagine and that was fine by me because being in the country wasn’t a selling point anyway. It wasn’t the tree that did it, but I was, in fact, sold.
Marla thought I was more than a little crazy, but the Emerald Arms spoke to me. It was home to an autistic musician, who marched through the sixth floor hallways practicing his trombone at all hours, a kilt-wearing handyman who could fix anything and a number of other oddballs and eccentrics. Julia left Christmas trees in the stairwells through August (a fire code violation of horrific proportions my architect husband would later point out) and rotting pumpkins in the laundry-room until April. She left a basement window open a crack and put out bowls of cat food, making the building home to who knows how many stray felines. I came to refer to The Emerald Arms as “The Island of Misfit Toys” and, at that time in my life, I felt like a bit of a misfit. So, despite Marla’s are-you-sure eye rolls, I gave Julia my number and told her to please call me if an apartment was available. The unit with the “country view” ended up being taken, but a couple of weeks later, I got a call about a studio on the bright blue second floor. I took it immediately, thus beginning six wonderful and interesting years at the Emerald Arms.
In addition to the colorful residents of my building, the transitional, low-income building next door was jam-packed with fascinating neighbors. One evening, after just moving in, I was folding laundry near the window in my apartment and someone started yelling. “Hey! You! Knock it off! Goddamn it, you better stop that shit right now!” I carefully peeked out my window and saw a man from the building next door yelling up at what seemed to be my window. “I see you, you asshole!” he shouted. I panicked and ducked. His yelling stopped but I crawled around on my hands and knees for a good 15 minutes, heart-pounding, wondering if he was really talking to me. Nobody ever accused me of being a domestic goddess, but I didn’t think my laundry-folding methods were THAT offensive. Several months later, I came home one night to find the street in front of my apartment closed and filled with police cars and ambulances. A small crowd of people had gathered and I joined them, hoping to figure out what was going on. A nice man with three little boys filled me in – a resident of the neighboring building had been shot in an altercation inside the building. We continued chatting as we watched the police work and it didn’t take long to figure out that my new acquaintance was the man who had been shouting up at my window that day. “Oh no!” he said, “Did you think I was yelling at you?” It turned out he wasn’t yelling at me. He was yelling at the man who lived in the unit below mine who had a habit of coming home every evening, settling down on his bed and masturbating with the curtains wide open, right when the three little boys were trying to do their homework. I didn’t know whether to be relieved that he hadn’t been yelling at me or horrified about the pervert living directly below me.
After a couple of years in the studio, I moved to a one bedroom on the neon orange and pink third floor, where my neighbor was a 40-something, chain-smoking, heroin addict who made her living as a maid and played bass in a rock band at night. She was always coming and going with her bass in one hand, a cigarette dangling out of her mouth and her ancient vacuum cleaner dragging along behind her. She was a quiet neighbor, but I lived in constant fear that she would pass out and burn the building down with one of her cigarettes. During my last year at the Emerald Arms, my now-husband and I got engaged and he moved in, leaving his larger and much nicer apartment because his landlord did not allow cats and I had two. Had there been any question about how deeply Matt loved me, his willingness to move into The Emerald Arms would have put those doubts to rest. In the year and a half we lived crammed in the small space together, Julia inexplicably had his truck towed from the parking spot we paid for, causing us to spend a very long, rainy night waiting outside a sketchy tow-lot to pay hundreds of dollars to get the truck back. She also lost the kilt-wearing handyman and replaced him with a well-intentioned alcoholic that we routinely found passed out in hallways, with the ring of master building keys in plain view. Some thoughtful neighbor started letting bums and addicts into the building to sleep in the basement and to top it all off, a couple of prostitutes began turning tricks inside the bright orange garage walls. So, as much as I loved the Emerald Arms, the time came to move on.
We bought our house in December of 2001. Moving into a house in a neighborhood was strange. Even though I never got to know my apartment neighbors – we always allowed each other the psychological distance that living in such close physical proximity requires – it felt odd to be in a building, however small, all by myself. And it was so quiet! There were no hookers screaming in the street at 3 a.m. that they wanted the money they just earned and they wanted it “now, goddamn it!” There were no people hanging out windows telling the skater boys who were practicing their ollies and kickflips at midnight to “Shut the fuck up!” It was eerily quiet. That is, until we met Carol. Carol is our next-door neighbor to the north. One evening, the doorbell rang and there she was, dressed in head-to-toe red and green, wearing a headband with reindeer antlers, holding a plate of Christmas cookies and exclaiming, “Welcome, neighbors!”
Carol-watching quickly became an entertaining pastime. She wears floral print moo-moo dresses and giant fake flowers in her hair. She plays banjo in an old-time band and is always going to and from gigs in some kind of crazy costume. On the first Easter we spent in our house, I glanced out the window to see her dressed as a giant Easter Bunny, serving lemonade to her guests. Carol leaves her Christmas lights up year-round and her backyard is perpetually decorated in a summery Hawaiian luau theme. She is a widow, but is constantly surrounded by her children, her children’s spouses and ex-spouses, her grandchildren and lots of extended family. Before he died, Carol’s husband was a member of the SEAFAIR pirates – the band of men who spend every summer dressing up like pirates and storming Seattle area beaches, festivals and parades. Carol still has pirate gatherings at her house and proudly flies the Jolly Roger from her porch.
Carol is wacky, but she’s a great neighbor. She has lived in her house forever and knows everyone. She has parties with people doing karaoke in the driveway and drum circles in the backyard, but she always shuts things down at a reasonable hour. Her seemingly endless family goes crazy on the 4th of July, setting off more fireworks than the rest of the city combined, but she shoos them into the street if they get too close to houses and she insisted they take the whole operation to the far end of the block the year that Chester was only a few days old.
My all-time favorite Carol story took place one December night. Matt was away on a work trip and I was going about my routine of getting Chester ready for bed when a phone started ringing. It rang and rang and rang and then stopped. A few minutes passed and it started again . . . it rang and rang and rang and then stopped. The pattern continued and it started getting a little creepy. We couldn’t figure out exactly where the sound was coming from. I kept looking over to Carol’s house because she and her sons have a habit of talking on the phone on the porch, but nobody was there. It was freezing cold and snowing – not even Carol’s clan would choose to take the cordless outside in that weather. The more I listened, the more it sounded like the eerie unanswered ring was coming from our basement. I imagined horror movies and CSI episodes; surely The Cell Phone Killer was hiding in my basement, waiting for me and my sweet baby to go to sleep. Once I got Chester to bed, I decided to investigate. There was no way I was heading down to the basement without checking all other alternatives first. I could hear the audience yelling at me, “Don’t go down there you idiot! The killer is down there!” The ringing continued at odd intervals and I kept looking. Finally I went out onto the porch and noticed the dome light on in Carol’s car. It was snowing and I was dressed in just slippers, sweat pants and a short sleeved t-shirt, but I cautiously inched into Carol’s driveway, where I saw her – facedown across the front seat of her car, her legs sticking out the driver’s side door. I was sure she had fallen victim to The Cell Phone Killer or perhaps keeled over from a heart-attack. I called out her name, which caused her to pop up and smack her head on the door.
The good news was that Carol was not dead and The Cell Phone Killer was not in my basement. The bad news was that Carol had lost her cell phone and once I was standing in the driveway with her, I felt compelled to help her look for it. Again and again Carol went into the house to use the landline to call her cell phone. It rang repeatedly, as it had been doing for an hour, but it was maddeningly difficult to pinpoint the exact location. We searched her car top to bottom. We looked under the car. We tore apart the trash and recycle bins. We groped through dried leaves and debris in basement window wells. Finally ready to give up, I looked under the car one more time and saw a flash of bright pink. I got down in the snow, reached as far as I could and managed to get my hand on the object, but it wouldn’t budge. That seemed weird until I realized it was UNDER the tire of Carol’s car. “Hey Carol,” I called out, “I think I found it . . . you need to back your car up.” Sure enough, there it was and besides the battery cover having popped off, it was totally fine. I was freezing, my slippers were soaked through and it was only then that I realized the full ridiculousness of the situation. Not only was I out in the snow, rescuing a run-over cell phone that I thought was a violent serial killer, I was doing it for my crazy neighbor who was dressed as one of Santa’s elves, complete with Santa hat, green felt skirt with jagged edges, red and white striped tights and little green boots with curly toes. I believe some jingle-bells were also involved.
We have lots of nice neighbors now in addition to Carol – the family to the south with three teenagers, the friendly empty-nesters who drink wine and listen to classic rock on their front porch and the elderly woman who was born in the house behind ours. There is the family across the street – likable, despite their very loud diesel truck and the fact that they put the Baby Jesus out in their manger scene before Christmas day every year. (I have no idea why this is a problem because I’m a raised-without-religion-heathen, but it drives Matt crazy. Apparently every self-respecting Catholic on the south side of Chicago knows that you do NOT put the Baby Jesus out until Christmas day.) There are several other families with young children, including Chester’s little friend Kyrah who lives on the other side of Carol. Listening to Chester and Kyrah talk to each other across Carol’s backyard is adorable. “Hey Kyrah, I’m playing cars!” “Hi Chester, I’m swinging.” “My cars go really fast!” “You should come over and see how high I can swing!” Their conversations go on and on that way and it makes me so happy that he has a little neighborhood friend. Growing up in the woods was an amazing experience and I wouldn’t trade my über-urban twenties for anything, but now I finally have the neighborhood experience I dreamed about as a kid. It’s pretty nice.
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