My apartment may be slowly crumbling into the ground and is as cozy as a meat locker in the winter, but it has two major redeeming qualities -- its crazy cheap; and in nice weather, I can open my back door onto the courtyard for a refreshing breeze, or slip around the back to lounge in my wee scraggilty garden and enjoy refuge from the urban clamour outside my front door.
Well… in theory, anyway.
I’ve rarely been able to do either of those things since the Noiseys moved in across the courtyard three summers ago…or has this hell been nigh onto eternal? Its hard to tell through the veil of simmering pique that clouds my mind.
When I moved in, I had the best neighbours ever: two young arabic guys who were as quiet, shy and elusive as wild foxes. I only saw them twice; I don’t think they ever opened their back door, let alone ventured outside into our common space. This was around that time of heightened paranoia about what such conspicuously inconspicuous young middle-eastern men might be doing in the shifty, dark hours of the night, but they could have been running a meth lab and smuggling guns and adolescent slave boys to the mountain dens of Bin Laden for all I cared, as long as they stayed mercifully out of my face.
When they left, the building was bought by a flipper who gutted and renovated the place inside and out, which meant an entire summer of scaffolding, copious dust everywhere, wildly sweating, pot-bellied workmen shouting in broad joual outside all my windows, and a cacophony of banging and pounding through the walls, from 7am until just before I lost my mind, 6 days a week. It was heinous, but since I knew that it WOULD end, I was able to just barely hang on to the wobbling, frayed edges of my sanity.
Once the dust had cleared, Didier from France took possesion of the ground floor. He was all that you’d imagine from the phrase “Didier from France”… a smug and snooty, rapidly pudge-ifying yuppie rounding the cusp of 40, who was joined on alternating weekends by his two small sons, Matisse and Remy. Yes… Matisse and Remy, if you please.
They were nothing more than normal, energetic little boys who I might have found cute… if, say, they lived across the street. But having to routinely put up with them running amok in the 20-square metres of din-amplifying courtyard outside the bulk of my living space was not terribly endearing.
There is a safe little park about 30 feet down the block where there are always responsible adults keeping an eye out, but Didier was too tight-arsed to let his kids go blow off their manic little-boy energy down there on their own, and too lazy to take them there.
My guess is that he feared that the golden fruit of his noble loins might come into contact with one of the beastly local stock of provincial children, whose unworthiness is evident in their woeful lack of ridiculously pretentious names, and who run around with ghastly feve-au-lard-stained Caillou t-shirts and tacky dollar store sandbox implements of inferior design.
Instead, in order to give himself a bit of peace while he prepared dinner, or surfed for Plushophilia porn, or perhaps simply took some time to meditate on his own self-importance, he would shoo them out into the courtyard to rampage around the concrete on their plastic-wheeled vehicles that rumbled like jet engines, randomly bang on things (like the iron staircase, or my barbecue) with my gardening tools, engage in the incessant shouting that goes on between boys at play, and occasionally poke their heads through my windows to peek around intrusively and/or do some more shouting in their twee little continental French accents.
But it wasn’t the boys’ fault that their father was an insufferable dink. Speaking of which, Didier did leave me with one irreplaceable memory that I’m sure will remain clear and sharp in my mind forever. Unable to sleep late one night, I padded into my darkened kitchen to get a drink. Catching a glimpse of a ghostly white shape moving across the way in my peripheral vision, I turned just in time to see my neighbour’s naked, meaty backside rising into plain view like a hairy clefted moon as he bent to get something from his own fridge, his junk eerily backlit in dangling horror.
And then there was the time that he invited about 30 people, including a horde of small, shrieking children, to an outside birthday party, complete with blaring, insipid French pop music, that he deigned to commence at 9 A-freakin-M on a Sunday. When I went out later to clean up the party debris that they’d left all over my space, I discovered that they’d let the kids stomp all over the flats of flowers that I’d intended to plant that day; and someone had thoughtfully placed a large crushing rock on the one bush that had miraculously survived the apocalypse of the previous summer’s outdoor renos.
Or the time I woke up around 3 am, panicking because I smelled wood smoke which, on the Plateau, can only mean that your building is on fire and if you’re lucky you may have time to grab your cats before dashing into the street to watch your life go up in flames, only to discover that he’d apparently been entertaining a few friends, perhaps with an Edith Piaf singalong fuelled by discreet smears of fois gras on baguette, around an outdoor fireplace in the wee hours.
But as I expected, Didier only lasted a few months before moving on, probably to some neighbourhood less scruffy and more befitting of his elite stature.
It was a hot spring day and I was enjoying a quiet afternoon chez moi, working my patch of land out back with a team of mules, when two women in their 20s emerged from next door, to scout out the yard. Presuming that they might become the new tenants, I said hi and introduced myself. The olive-skinned one with the rogue eye that insisted on keeping lookout to the right while the other one focussed on me, responded by asking me how the space was shared.
“Well,” I said, my brain busily clicking over as I tried to size her up in spite of the distraction of trying to figure out which eye to follow, my misanthropic spidey senses already tingling in vague alarm at what I thought was a mildy daft question, since the answer seemed hugely self-evident to anyone even remotely familiar with the concept of land ownership, “The property line runs up the middle; so this side is mine, and the other side would be yours.”
I also thought it was a bad omen that when I introduced myself she didn’t respond in kind, because that’s a good-manners basic. But I shrugged it off, thinking, well, they’re just looking anyway…
Next thing I know, googly-eyed Moonya and her boyfriend Antoine moved in, and it was PATIO PARTY HELL TIME!
Apparently on a quest to consume his own considerable weight in nothing but grilled meat within each cycle of the full moon, little round Antoine fired up the BBQ pretty much every evening. They typically had at least two of their equally self-absorbed cohort on hand to eat huge slabs of cow and fill the night air with their painfully naïve and unoriginal 20-something f-bomb-laced banter, delightfully punctuated by the occasional refrain of “You’re SUCH a fag!! … No, YOU’RE a fag, FAG!!!” until well into the night.
On Friday and Saturday nights it would be worse… I’d come home from the movies or whatever, and when I opened my front door, I’d be taken aback thinking that there was a party in my living room, because there’d be as many as a dozen of them out there, happily parked literally right outside my windows in my chairs, slowly getting drunker and louder and flicking beer caps into my garden.
I avoided using my kitchen, because when I did, I felt as exposed and on-view as an animal in a zoo; I could only use the living room if I shut all my windows and curtains and turned the tv or stereo up so loud it was unpleasant; and let’s just say its difficult to feel at ease taking care of business in the bathroom when you’re surrounded by disembodied laughing.
Of course, having been raised to be meek and pathologically non-confrontational, I dealt with this monstrous intrusion by closing my windows and sulking angrily in my bedroom, screwing in ear plugs while wishing that one of my other neighbours would step up and tell them off; or at least drop an unsubtle hint, like dumping a bucket of urine or fire ants down on them from above. Why should it have to fall on little ol' me to confront them? Those on the second and third floors at least had the benefit of semi-anonymity and a bit of distance; and, as couples, at least had one buddy for backup against the ravening mob.
What finally broke me was their habit of playing this insanely irritating game … I think it must have been a drinking game that involved bouncing a die off a table into a beer glass or something... that would sound like this:
TAP TAP TAP!!
[Bounce]
“WWWAAAAAYYYYYY!!!”
TAP TAP TAP!!!
[Bounce]
“WWWAAAHAAAAAAYYYYYY!!!”
(repeat about a 100 times over the course of 1-2 hours).
After about the third tappedy tap session in a week, I was ready to storm out and throttle them all with my bare and trembling hands… but remaining aware that I did have to continue seeing them a.l.l t.h.e t.i.m.e, I decided it would probably be better to take a more diplomatic approach on the morrow when I’d be able to keep my now violently boiling temper in check.
Plus, I really didn’t want to be that curmudgeonly old person who bursts out into the middle of their happy fun night time beer fest, all raving and foaming at the mouth, so that they could then write me off as a miserable hag who oughta take her boring old concepts of reasonable privacy and quiet (like being able to get to sleep before 3am on a Tuesday night) to the suburbs where I belong… and/or take vindictive relish in making my life somehow even more miserable, by, say, having impromptu drumming/dijeridoo jams like my former upstairs neighbour used to do (but that’s a whole other story). 
And things DID get marginally better.
The next spring, I worked on building up a barricade of planters to try to visually underscore the concept of respecting others’ personal space. But still they didn’t get it… if the whole gang came over, they’d just move the planters out of their way, leaving everything askew for me to fix the next morning. It still apparently remained inconceivable that they should have to walk an extra 6 feet from their door and around a corner to use their more private little back patio, which instead had been designated a dumping ground for their discarded crap student furniture, so that on the rare occasions when the view out my windows wasn’t a bunch of drunken kids lolling around butting out smokes in my flowerpots, instead I’d see a mini junk yard.Around mid-June, I noticed that something had changed. Moonya and Antoine had disappeared, and instead of the clatter peaking during the weekends with late-night BBQs, this friend of theirs, who looked like a young, pierced, and punked up version of Mr. Burns from the Simpsons, was holding court outside every night with one or two pals until 2 or 3am. If that sounds way less annoying on the scale of intrusion, it wasn’t, because he’s one of these people whose speaking voice volume is always turned to “Shout”; and about every 30 seconds he breaks out in a jarring, barking laugh, which then typically sets off an equally loud hacking chain-smoker’s cough. So it wasn’t like a low-grade conversation that you could just tune out, because there were these constant little aural jolts of sharp loudoskity… it was like having your brain poked with a sharp stick through your ears every few seconds.
And, like icing on the relentlessly annoying cake, he was simultaneous going through a heated breakup and embarking on a new love affair, so at least once a week I was woken up at dawn by him having a screaming fight out back on the phone, or in person out front next to my bedroom window; or had the fleeting quiet of a weekend morning destroyed by the highly disturbing strains of cauterwauling love-making.
But Moonya ran into immigration problems and never reappeared, leaving the boys free to continue their louche bachelor lifestyle ways.
Over this past winter, I’d spoken to each of my other neighbours and confirmed that they, too, felt mightily put upon by these selfish patio-hoggers. I encouraged them to speak up, because apparently, as long as it was just me squawking at them, the boys didn’t feel any real pressure to change. But somehow, I knew nobody else would step up. People seem more willing to suffer in silence forever, rather than risk having someone get angry at them for standing up for their rights. At this point though, my feeling was: why should I care if my boorish neighbours think I’m a bitch? THEY’RE the ones in the wrong here.
And lo… the magic of those three little digits… 9-1-1!
Its like a new era of reasonable peace and communal contentment has blossomed. Now, entire evenings go by with nobody out there. They actually close their back door sometimes; and on one magical weekend, their outside light, which had been glaring at me all night, every night for the past 3 years like the perpetually burning eye of an all-seeing evil, was either dead or turned off. I have had a few opportunities to sit and read in my garden. I can often leave my windows open, and when I do, I hear that my other neighbours are finally able to do the same, and make use of their balconies again.
It’s like…it’s like… NORMAL.
So what’s the lesson in all this?
Don’t tolerate intolerable behaviour in others. There’s nothing good or noble in keeping your mouth shut for fear of offending somebody whose being offensive. If decent people don’t speak up, the jerks win.
And we can’t have that.
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