THEN THERE WAS THE TIME #2

Altered Note to Future Self #8 / 2018 / Russell C. Smith

Then there was the time, when some of my worst neighbors ever moved in. Into the apartment building built in 1910, on Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood. I’d lived in the same apartment  since 1988, my second year in Seattle, after living for eight years in New York City’s Hell’s Kitchen. There was something about the location and the vibe of the place, during the first few years I resided there. It was a building of baby grands being miraculously moved upstairs  through skinny hallways and doors. Impromptu dance parties and nudist neighbors. A place for pet psychics and novelists-in-progress. Exhibitionists doing inner work, and grassroots community builders planting seeds. A welcoming place. It was a a magnet for attracting the bohemian element – artists, writers, musicians, dancers, creative sorts of every type. The ongoing problem was some tenants aren’t meant to live in an apartment building with paper-thin walls. And others really aren’t meant to. For at least half a decade, it was a breeze to knock on a neighbor’s door, and ask if they could turn their music down just a little bit. It was in the early 2000s when we had the longest-term onsite building manager. She came into the position after replacing a building manager who never shaved, combed his hair, or got out of his bathrobe. Which was how he usually answered his door. After maybe a month on the job, she had the unfortune duty of dealing with the aforementioned worst tenants to ever land there. They were a skinny couple, both with dirty blonde hair, both of them addicted to smoking meth. How they managed to get away with being meth heads in a non-smoking building for as long as they did showed their ingenuity. From the moment they moved in, this rail-thin couple stayed high, were a living breathing health hazard to themselves and others, and blasted heavy metal music day and night. She was gone for about five hours most evenings, and was rumored to be an exotic dancer. Which meant, the boyfriend part of the couple was alone to blast music even louder. They both lived in the land of We Don’t Give a Shit, and that’s how it went on for several months. While it continued, the new building manager issued the meth heads down below three written warnings. Things just got worse. The manager suggested I write a note to them. Of course, it made them surlier and even louder, for more hours in a row. Until one Saturday morning, when the heavy metal thunder from downstairs punched through my floor loud enough to shake the walls. I made a cup of tea, picked up a Paul Auster novel, and sat in the hallway outside my door. Living just down the hall, the building manager walked out and asked me why I was in the hallway. I looked up from my book, and pointed at my apartment door. Stood up and opened it. The painful to hear solid wall of sound blasted out. She shook her head at the shaking walls. All she said was, “That’s it.” I stayed there, reading my book. She went into her apartment and called the local precinct. Half an hour later two cops arrived. I heard her meeting them, loudly talking in the echoey downstairs hall. They understood the situation and went to the apartment below me, the volume still blaring. One of the cops shouted loud enough over the music, to say more than once, “Sir, you’ve got to turn down your music. So you can hear us.” Finally, the music was lowered to a dull roar. The other cop said, “We need you to step back and open the door, so we can enter your unit.” In response, my downstairs neighbor, high out of his mind yelled through the door, “I’ve got a gun.” Certainly not one of the wisest things you can tell a pair of cops at your front door. I heard the squawk of a walkie-talkie as they called for backup. In less than ten minutes backup arrived, carrying one of those handheld battering rams. The first two cops on the scene stood on each side of downstairs neighbors door. They yelled out, “Stand back from the door, and if you do possess a weapon, do not have it in your hands.” Seconds later, the backup team battered the door down, and loud, high-all-the-time downstairs neighbor came face to face with four pissed off cops. One of them repeatedly shouting, “Where is your weapon,?” “What weapon?” he yelled back. They immediately ascertained there was no gun. Never had been. But there was a seriously agitated, still way too high dude, way out of control and unable to calm himself down. He screamed at the cops, telling them they had no right to knock his door down. Someone turned off the music. One of the cops yelled, “Turn around and place your hands behind your back!” There was shouting and screaming, and a lot of frantic movement downstairs. He resisted having handcuffs placed on his wrists. In the struggle, his left arm was broken. He was taken outside and placed in the back of a waiting cop car next to Cal Anderson Park. I went to the top of the stairs in the hall and looked at the wide-open glass front door, where I saw the building manager talking in the doorway with the last cop left in the building. I took a deep breath, sensing it all ending. I turned and went inside my apartment and made a fresh cup of tea.