Neighbors

Let me tell you a little bit about my neighborhood. I live in a decent-sized suburb in the Silicon Valley. It's upscale, for the most part, but I live in what you could call the "lower income" area. It's a roughly one-square-mile area comprised of small apartment complexes, duplexes, and a few larger complexes. I live in a 12 unit complex on a street full of 6 to 12 unit places. They rent for between $1,000 and $1,500 a month, which, for the Bay Area, is fairly low. Our apartment is a two bedroom townhouse that we pay a reasonable $1,010 a month for. It's actually absurdly low for what it is, which is why we've been here for going on six years.

A few months after we moved here, a family moved in next door. They were colorful to say the least. They quickly became known as "Timmy's Family" since Timmy was the only name we knew. How did we know? Because they screamed it nightly. One morning, for example, we were awakened at six in the morning to the slamming of the front door and the following exchange:

Matriarch: Timmy! Get the fuck back in here and take your fuckin' pills!
Timmy: Fuck you!
Matriarch: TIMMY! I said get the FUCK back in here and take your fuckin' PILLS!
Timmy: FUCK YOU!
(indistinct negations and obscenities followed by the slap of a skateboard on the concrete and the slamming of the door)

Welcome to my neighborhood.

Five years later Timmy is a post-teen who has a job but still lives at home. His sister Mary has spawned two children, Andrew and Adriana, and I think she just popped a third, but I haven't seen it yet. The two parents are as horrible as ever; their style of parenting seems to be of the "drunken shouting and verbal abuse" school. Their house is spotlessly clean but reeks of cigarette smoke which drifts into our place when the wind is right.

A few weeks ago they were having a knock-down-drag-out at about 11 PM. There was screaming and throwing and what sounded like a body tumbling down the stairs. I couldn't hear if Andrew and Adriana were involved, but Mary and Timmy and the parents were having some sort of grudge match battle royale with cheese and Ryan and I felt a bit disturbed by the whole mess. That and the cat was freaking out. I called the cops.

Me: Hi, I think my neighbors are not quite literally trying to kill each other.
The Cops: Oh? Are you at 1260 Cortez Drive?
Me: Jeepers, yeah. Are you tracing this?
The Cops: Naw, some of your neighbors already called. We've got a car on the way out there. If it starts up again after they leave, feel free to give us another call.
Me: Thanks.

The cops turned up shortly thereafter and a blessed silence fell, marred only by a door slam about an hour later. They've been pretty bad the last few days though. On Monday Ryan was home and heard the Matriarch smacking the hell out of the little girl. Mary came home from her new job and reportedly gave her hell about it. Ryan said the two of them were playing screechytime out on the front stoop for a good 20 minutes, "How dare you smack my daughter, blah blah hatefest."

We have loud, stair-thumpin' neighbors on the other side too, a near-hopeless parking situation, and a capricious laundry room that functions only when the wind is northerly or Venus is rising in Sagittarius. According to the California sex offender registry we also live in the dead center of an unusually dense cluster of pedophiles and rapists.

And today, I just got notice that they're raising our rent.