the paper street neighbors

October 19, 2002 &bull uncategorized

Reflections on the 89er, part three

I wasn’t accustomed to waking up at 4:00am. 1:00am? Understandable. 6:00am? Sure, happens all the time. But 4:00am? As far as I can remember, that was the first thought that popped into my head when I glanced over at my alarm clock. “Why am I awake at 4:00am?” Then I heard a woman scream so loudly I thought she was next to me in my twin. Given the circumstances I wasn’t feeling too sharp, but I was still able to come to the conclusion that a similar wail minutes earlier was responsible for my consciousness. What I had just heard wasn’t the type of scream that you would hear in a horror movie. It was more like one you would hear in a porno. Yeah, that’s right. The eggshell-thin walls of the 89er were doing little to dampen the sound of my neighbors’ early morning romp. “I need a cigarette after that one,” I heard the female participant say. Man, that’s nasty.

And so it went, night after night for almost 30 days straight. Always after midnight; always the same shrieks, fumblings, groans, and nasty post-action commentary. Normally this is where I stop telling the story, which my friends have all heard a zillion times. But, in the words of Paul Harvey, here’s the “rest of the story.”

I’ll have to admit that, being a typical college-aged male, I was at least a little bit curious about my new next door neighbors. They had moved in about three weeks prior and I had never really seen them. Wait a minute! It’s not that I had never really seen them. It’s more like I had never seen them. Now my curiosity was really piqued — I wanted to know what I was dealing with here.

A couple of weeks after my realization I thought I had my chance. I left work for my lunch break and was walking down the hallway, about to enter my apartment to make sandwich or something. Right before I put the key in the deadbolt I noticed that my neighbors’ door was wide open. I’d like to say I had some type of inner struggle, fighting the urge to peer inside. But, it was nothing like that. I automatically kept walking by my door so I could take a look inside. I was expecting to see the walls covered with illustrations from the Kama Sutra or something even freakier than that. All I saw, though, were two members of the maintenance crew taking down the venetian blinds in a vacant apartment.

To this day I’m not sure if my neighbors were star-crossed, lover-fugitives, running from the mob with millions of dollars stuffed in a duffle bag, staying at seedy apartments for a few weeks before they left town. This is the conclusion I tend to favor, probably because I’m a bit scared of the other conclusion that always comes to mind. The one where my neighbors were really no more than a figment of my imagination; a composite of my twisted, sordid dreams. I guess it’s possible that I had a temporary, 30 day foray into insanity and then quickly snapped out of it. I don’t think this is really what happened, though, taking into account the level of instanity that replaced my neighbors once the venitian blinds were up and the carpet was steamed….

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