... two months ago. I've been kinda busy, so writing this up took me longer than usual.
An actual conversation my upstairs neighbor and I had one morning as I was leaving the house for work. I knew what had happened, since I was up all damn night listening to the sounds of glass breaking, her screaming half in pain, mostly in rage, him screaming back at her, and the two of them throwing each other into objects of various sizes. Oh, and at the cops for the latter half of the incident.
Me: "Jesus, you look like you got mauled by a bear. What the hell happened to you?"
Her: "...I fell down some stairs."
Me: "...Were the stairs wielding like, a bat with razors in it?"
Her: "Something like that."
Me: "We'll, remind me not to piss of the stairs next time they ask me if I'm sure I don't want to pop upstairs for a quality tattoo job in your bathroom. A tactful decline would be the way to go, yeah?"
This was the point she turned red and walked downstairs to the laundry room. I never spoke to her again after that.
This isn't going to be an easy topic to write about. It probably won't be my usual snarky, smart assed, sorta darkly funny kinda thing. I kinda feel like I need to get it out, but at the same time, it's not really something I can make jokes about.
So a few months ago I moved into a new apartment. It's actually a pretty nice place, and for the most part, it's been pretty quiet. There was really only one kinda speed bump there. We had some upstairs neighbors who liked to fight.
Pretty much nightly, the woman in the upstairs apartment would get the shit kicked out of her. Her boyfriend, a stay at home unemployed guy, would get on her case and eventually start throwing punches, dishes, her, whatever was handy. It got pretty loud and noisy. Couple of times, I called the cops. My roommate called the cops. Neighbors called the cops. They'd come out, he'd be gone or hiding somewhere in the apartment. All the cops saw was just a beat up woman and her kids. After a while, it stopped being domestic violence calls, and just noise complaints, because there wasn't really a second 'domestic partner' that they could catch.
Second month in, it literally became a nightly thing, but a strange thing started happening. The woman started screaming at the cops, threatening to fight with them, calling lawsuits, police harassment, illegal searches, the whole nine. Couple of times she was the one taken away, and the kids were taken wherever kids go in these situations. Within a few days, though, the couple and the kids would always end up back at home, going at it just as viciously at 3 in the morning when the woman came home from work. They kept breaking up, breaking things, and breaking each other (resulting in more than one cast, hospital visit for stitches, splints, and black eyes).
Eventually, I just stopped calling the cops. The system obviously wasn't working for these two. So I just started complaining to the apartment manager about the noise. I wasn't the only one. The woman and her kids ended up getting evicted two weeks after she finally threw him out for good. Like, tossed all his shit onto the side of the street and changed the locks kind of for good. Like, he disappeared and no one who lived in the building here heard or saw him after that night for good. Hell, he didn't even pick up his crap, the groundskeeper just threw it all away.
Flash forward a few weeks, I'm at the office paying my rent, talking to the apartment manager about the whole thing. Turns out, for as much damage as the woman took from her ex, she gave back better than she got. By a very large factor. Part of the reason he couldn't find a job was because he was usually too injured to actually go look for one. Just not too injured to, ya know, smack his girlfriend around. That and he was kind of lazy, and keeping his job search narrowly confined to one tattoo parlor that fired him a few months before (for missing work, for being in lockup, for beating his girlfriend).
So, after about the 8th or 9th call to the cops that resulted in pretty much nothing happening, why continue to bother? These two were obviously made for each other. Sure, sucks for the kids, but how many times should I have kept trying to help people that were clearly beyond saving and willing to take their loved ones down with them?
So, am I an asshole for just being happy that I can finally sleep at night without all that noise? Not that I actually sleep at night, but ya know, someday I might want to. Maybe. Aw, who am I kidding? Everyone knows that sleeping is for when that bright burning eye hurting thing is up in the sky.
I wonder what my new neighbors will be like. Gotta be better than the last ones.
