Mystery Unsolved

The rumbling continues as always, or what seems like always; it woke me up at 5:30 this morning. Alas, when I put my ear to the wall, I heard nothing coming from below in the way of music, so it must have been that my downstairs neighbor happened to be listening to music in the middle of the night that I was doing my rumbling research, which consisted of putting my ear to various surfaces within and without my apartment, but she evidently is not the cause of the part that’s always there. I heard the words “underground bunker” pass through my mind about 5:31 this morning and thought, “Uh oh.” I suppose it’s just some piece of residence-related equipment, and it’s probably been happening all of the seven years I’ve lived here, and I’m just tuned in to it now, and I can’t untune. At least now I can go back to trying to feel friendly toward it, whereas it’s hard for me to feel friendly toward something I think I might be able to control. (Lately I’m starting to think my list of what I may be able to control is optimistically long.)

I suppose now, when I’m complaining about noise, is as good a time as any to confess that I play the trumpet. But not after 10 p.m.! And not before noon on weekends. And, actually, I haven’t been playing it lately. Unfortunately, the older I get, the less comfortable I feel about inflicting this on my neighbors, plus I’m not in a band now. Many years ago I had a neighbor who came not to enjoy the sound of the trumpet and one night simply turned the power in my apartment off. I could hear his music playing, but I was in the dark. Turning off my electricity didn’t turn off the trumpet, but it did have a disorienting effect on the trumpet player. The same neighbor had covered all of his windows with Mylar, to stop people on ladder trucks from looking in at him, and he was often awake around the clock doing speed. Another time, he piled a bunch of wet garbage outside my apartment door. The landlord had tried without success to evict him, so after the garbage incident, I decided it was time for me to move.

I went then to live in another apartment in the Mission where I played the trumpet happily for 10 years—some neighbors kindly swore they enjoyed it—until a lesbian couple moved in above. It’s always nerve-wracking for a trumpeter to acquire a new neighbor: Will this be the one who can’t stand the trumpet? I didn’t worry when these two moved in, however, because the previous occupant had been a friend of theirs, who had surely alerted them to the occupancy of a musician below. I was therefore rather surprised when the blond-haired one came down about two weeks after moving in to ask me to stop playing. Soon they began jumping up and down every time I played; they could keep it up for an hour. It made my lights flicker, and also terrified me. (It sounds odd in retrospect, but it really did scare me to have this violent reaction going on every time I did the thing I loved most, which I had to do pretty much every day to be able to perform well.) The landlord went up and asked them to stop jumping up and down. “We’re dancing!” they said.

The neighbors and I talked several times and I compromised until my performances began to suffer ill effects; at one club I had such an off night that the bandleader decided we’d better skip my big solo that evening. I agreed to virtually everything the neighbors asked (why?), and still they jumped up and down. It was absolutely ghastly. After some months, the jumping began to wear them out—I hope it destroyed all four of their knees, and gave them unsightly tough skin on the bottoms of their feet—and they switched to bouncing a ball on their floor instead, every minute I was playing. The landlord went up and asked them to stop bouncing their ball. “We’re practicing our juggling!” they said.

Obviously they felt no compunction about lying, as on the day I played for a few minutes early in the day and for half an hour later in the day; they announced to the landlord that I had played “for seven hours straight!” Basically, they were enormous jerks and I hope they’re extremely unhappy, wherever they are now.

A shocking piece of information emerged just before I gave up and moved to a musician-friendly building: One of my favorite people on earth, Mr. Marilyn Bull, turned out to be acquainted with one member of this couple and told me that she came from Ann Arbor, Michigan—my very place of birth! I was horrified to hear that someone so awful could go around claiming my hometown as her own. And get this: She actually went to the same junior high school I went to, Tappan. I dug out my yearbook and, yep, there she was, one year behind me.

The moral of these stories is, I think, rather clear: people should not make noise that I find annoying, and they should not object when I make noise they find annoying.

(All right, I suppose the real moral is that the less you object to, the happier you’ll be, and also that I should have yelled “Fuck you morons!” at the ceiling and then played twice as long as I’d planned to.)