I'm a quiet guy. I don't throw parties. I don't listen to loud music. I don't have anyone living with me to argue with. When I was in college, I always picked the "quiet" dorms so I could avoid loud parties and inconsiderate frat boys who would be up at all hours making noise. One of the nice things about moving into my own apartment was the power to be the sole regulator of the noise level where I lived.
Otherwise, it's not something I've thought much about. Noise level seemed like a relatively minor concern in the universe of adult responsibilities that go along with your first independent-living situation. Until recently.
Getting a visit from the police is a scary thing: Even if you've done nothing wrong, you immediately start to feel guilty, because why else would these uniformed and very brusque and official personages be at your door? It was a Monday night, and I was lying in bed reading (a more wholesome activity I could not imagine) when there was a loud knock at the door. In my silent and mostly dark apartment, it was quite the scare. I opened the door timidly to discover two police officers, a young man and an older woman, who informed me that someone had complained I was making too much noise.
I had no idea what could have caused so much noise as to inspire a call to the police; my TV had been off for almost an hour and was the only thing remotely noisy in the entire apartment. The police didn't much care; they were polite but dismissive, telling me only to please discontinue any noise I had been making. I went to bed, a little shaken and confused.
The next day, I went to ask my downstairs neighbor if he had been the one who called the police. He had moved in a couple of months before, the third or fourth tenant in that apartment since I had been living there. I don't know his name, but in the interest of anonymity and expediency, let's call him Sarge. He's a disabled veteran—it says so on his license plate—and he uses both crutches and a wheelchair to get around. Right after he moved in, he asked me to help him hook up his TV, which I did, despite my general aversion to any sort of communication with neighbors. A few weeks before my visit from the police, he had complained to me that I was making noise, and though I had no idea what that noise might be, I had promised to be more careful in the future.
"You're damn right I called the police," he said, proceeding into a rant about the amount of noise I made at night, and how it kept him awake. "I was in the war," he told me, like some sort of cartoon version of a veteran. They never say which war; it's always just "the war." He told me about his problem joints that always pained him. I told him I had no idea what noise I could be making.
Finally, he pinpointed the problem: Did I have a desk in my bedroom? Yes, I did. Did I use my computer late at night? Sometimes. Did I drum on my desk while using my computer late at night? Aha. Here it was: Apparently, my absentminded tapping on my desk was keeping him up and driving him to call the police. This seemed absurd to me, but I tried to remain calm. Since his disability prevented him from coming up the stairs, I offered to give him my phone number so he could let me know when I was tapping excessively. He belligerently refused, demanding that I move my desk into another room and cease all noise-making or he'd continue to call the police.
I must not have tapped that night, because there was no police visit.
But the night after that, I was working at my desk at around 10:45 when there was another loud knock at my door. This time I was prepared. The same officers from the previous night told me they had received another noise complaint. I showed them in and demonstrated the desk-tapping habit that seemingly had Sarge so upset. They, too, found it absurd that this could cause so much trouble, and they clearly didn't want to be bothered with it anymore. "Usually by this time we arrest someone," the female officer said. They assured me I was free to tap in my own home, and said they would talk to Sarge and tell him to stop calling them.
For a moment I felt vindicated. The police, the most official of officials, had told me I was doing nothing wrong. Sarge and his bad joints could lie awake all night and there was nothing he could do about it. I resumed working. I even tapped, a little excessively, I admit. After 45 minutes or so, in the still quiet of my bedroom, I heard a bellowing yell from downstairs. "Get off the goddamn computer!"
This was my revelatory moment: I knew I was not tapping because my hands were both engaged in typing. I tested the theory, typing something else; there was a loud pounding on my floor. Type. Yell. Type. Pound. Type. Something definitely hit the window. It was clear that this had nothing to do with tapping; it was the clacking of the keys, like some sort of word-processed telltale heart, that kept Sarge from sleeping.
Eventually, I gave up the typing and went to bed, since it was honestly a little frightening to be yelled at and hear things thrown at my window late at night. My friend's joke from the day before—"I hope he doesn't shoot you"—didn't seem so funny at that point. Since the police no longer wanted to be involved, I planned to go talk to the apartment management the next day.
Sarge beat me to it. When I got home, there was a citation from the management for excessive noise. This was serious business; after three, I could be evicted.
I took the note to the office and explained the whole story to an apartment complex employee. He asked me to point out my apartment so he could figure out who was making the complaints. As soon as I did, recognition dawned on his face. "He's always complaining," he said to me. A female employee using the copier nearby added her opinion: "He's a pain in the ass." She said that he used his disability as an excuse to get what he wanted. "Apparently he was in the war," said the guy taking my complaint, who looked about my age and was covered with tattoos. I wondered if maybe he had received the same sort of insult from Sarge that I had when he told me I'd have to cut my hair and start listening.
I could tell from their reactions that while they felt bad for me, they also feared the wrath of Sarge. The tattooed guy went to talk to his supervisor, but when he came back he had only one solution: Move my desk into my outer room. They weren't going to tell Sarge to stop complaining, and they certainly weren't going to move him to a different apartment. I was, however, free to relocate if moving the desk didn't stop the complaining. They offered me the help of the maintenance crew to move my desk, but I declined.
I thought briefly about refusing to give in, leaving my computer in place and making sure to type furiously every night. If Sarge kept yelling and pounding and throwing things, I could always call the police on him. But the looks in the eyes of the apartment complex employees spoke volumes; there was no way to win against this guy. The police had already washed their hands of the situation, anyway. As much as I would have loved a moral victory, mostly I just wanted to be able to use my computer at night free from harassment.
I spent two hours that evening moving my furniture around, after buying a 50-foot coaxial cable from Radio Shack so I could extend my cable modem from the other room. I've got a wire running across half of my apartment and I can no longer watch TV while I work, but I haven't heard from Sarge in almost a week. This is the nature of adult responsibility: Making ridiculous concessions to irrational people who have nothing better to do than inconvenience you. The other day, I heard sirens coming into my complex, and, somewhere, deep in the part of me that shuns mature adulthood, I hoped Sarge's war wounds had finally gotten the better of him. At least then I could move my desk back into my bedroom.