The West Village is a ridiculous place to call home. People with unseemly bank accounts spend thousands of dollars freshening the flowerpots on their stoops. Rosebushes, hydrangeas, pansies, and zinnias—all casually exposed to marauding vagrants. Except there are no vagrants, not even marauding ones. It’s a generationally diverse area, but otherwise it’s as removed from reality as a movie set. Celebrities’ kids skip along the pavement, backpacks twice their size bobbing up and down. One of the houses visible from my apartment is owned by an elderly couple. The woman likes to tell guests how Hilary Swank used to climb a fence and exit through their house in order to avoid the paparazzi.
Down the block and around the clock, people take photos of the façade of Carrie Bradshaw’s apartment in “Sex and the City.” Submitting to their fate, the real owners have installed a donation box on behalf of a local animal shelter, to collect a contribution for every photo taken. These tourists’ heads would explode like a bomb full of nicotine patches if they knew that Sarah Jessica Parker herself lives around the corner. I can’t help but wonder what she feels when she walks past Carrie’s building. It must be like driving past your high school—at once everything and nothing.
I only cared about the celebrities the way all New Yorkers care about celebrities: I ignored them or, if they were especially famous, congratulated myself for ignoring them. The real draw of the neighborhood was the quiet. And not just any kind of quiet. Here, in the heart of Manhattan, was a pod of that suburban silence that had eluded me as a child. You could hear a pin drop in my bedroom—on the bed. Early mornings, I listened to the heckling of seagulls that had strayed inland from the Hudson River. On warm evenings, a cellist sat on the street corner with his case open. When it rained, water pelted the leaves outside my enchanted tree house.And then one day the leaves dropped and Jared came out. Jared lived in the town house directly behind my apartment. He must have been on summer vacation or touring Europe by colonial rickshaw when I moved in. Jared was between fifteen and eighteen years old. It was impossible to tell. I could never get a good read on his height, as his resting state was slouched in a lawn chair, watching viral videos on his phone at full volume. And I never heard him say stuff like “Looks like I can be legally tried as an adult now” despite being someone for whom the distinction was clearly relevant.
How do I begin to explain my relationship with this creature? Is it a relationship if you’ve never met? Certainly this is an acceptable dynamic online, but played out in real life it’s called stalking. All five of the windows in my apartment faced Jared’s house. And, for as many years, I heard every word this kid said. I would like to tell you that his woes were typical of his age bracket: unrequited crushes, parental oppression, social strife. But Jared had no woes. Plato advised us to be kind, everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle, but I am here to tell you that I have witnessed Plato’s exception. Jared’s battles centered around selecting the right surfboard (for show or for use at a beach house, both equally abhorrent) and the occasional obligation to come inside and set the table. And that he didn’t have to do, so long as he ignored the sound of his own name. Jewish guilt is no match for teen-age entitlement.
I rarely saw the father, who was probably off somewhere devaluing my 401(k). The little sister was shy and kept to herself. The mother was an upscale fashion photographer. She had a Susan Sontag streak in her hair and doled out advice like “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.” Occasionally, she would pace in the back yard, phone in hand, all puffed up about some dead-eyed model. But for the most part the yard was Jared’s domain—a place to smoke cigarettes, molest a guitar, and throw raging parties.
Lest you think I don’t know what I signed up for by living on the most densely populated slip of land in America, rest assured that I do. There are sounds one learns to accept, even to be lulled by on occasion. Jackhammers that emerge seasonally and peck at the concrete like oversized woodpeckers. Screaming matches that make you grateful you’re not one of the two people in that relationship. I have lived over d.j.s, newborn babies, sheet-metal sculptors, and Ping-Pong patios. In Chelsea, I lived above a piano player who practiced scales. When I could stand it no longer, I sheepishly knocked on his door. He apologized and vowed never to practice scales in the house again. Which is how I wound up listening to “I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy” every day for a year.
But Jared’s noise was different. It did not disrupt me, because disruption implies separation of activity, the intervening of outside elements. Rather, Jared’s world became my world. I was paying rent like a single person but living with an entire family in what amounted to an inaccessible wing of my apartment. Every afternoon, Jared and his friends returned home from whatever educational womb they attended and clunked down the back-yard steps, blaring music and demonstrating familiarity with one another’s last names. Jared was quick to laugh, which would have been his best quality were it not for the laugh’s resemblance to a hyena being choked to death by bubble wrap. His cackle was like one of those purposefully ugly sculptures, the kind of art that considers your irritation an accomplishment. Really, I can’t say enough bad things about it.
Smell is reportedly the strongest trigger of memory, but let us not underestimate the bone-chilling power of sound. The sound of cigarettes being packed against a table. The sound of tracks being skipped. The sound of a porch door banging. These were the harbingers, the sounds of my torturers clearing their throats. Sometimes Jared would leave the music on after he left, a tactic generally employed by war criminals. But mostly he and his friends stayed put, multiplying like gremlins.
Does it seem like I was spying? I was and I wasn’t. This was not so much a “Rear Window” situation as it was a window situation. If I was home, I was on an involuntary stakeout. If I was out, some perverse part of me hoped they would be in the yard when I returned, because then I could stop worrying about them being in the yard. Anthropologically, I was fascinated. Never in my life have I had a social circle as wide or as regular as Jared’s. Then again, I also have never lived in a five-story town house. It’s hard to say how much the house itself factored into Jared’s popularity. Surely his cohorts—preppy boys with laughs that died in their throats, and coltish girls with sea-level self-esteem—slumbered in comparable accommodations.
Very occasionally it was just Jared, alone in the back yard, pouring out the decibels. The mother would appear at the top of the stairs, mumbling something about homework. And he’d tell her to fuck off, which she fully deserved. Jared was a menace, true, but who had let him get that way? I remember with a haunting clarity lying in bed one night, being kept conscious by Biggie Smalls, when the mother screamed Jared’s name. My heart fluttered. Finally. An adult. An authority figure. A savior with her finger on the allowance button.
“Jared!” she shrieked. “Where’d you put the corkscrew?”
Of course I did. Of course I asked them to be quiet. Hey, guys, sorry to be a buzzkill, but can you keep it down? Hey, guys, can you take it inside your mansion, because I have nowhere to run? To which they apologized in a tone that suggested “sorry” was more of a password than a feeling. So I bought a white-noise machine and fancy headphones. I slept on my side to deafen one chosen ear. None of it worked. Finally, I bit the bullet and called 311, a placebo service for cranks on the brink. Operators forward complaints to local police precincts, at which point the police have eight hours to take action, assuming they’re done mocking you. Also: An eight-hour window? Even Jared didn’t party from midnight until 8 a.m. He lived in a town house, not a warehouse.
I pretended to write down my service-request number because, for some reason, it’s impossible to admit you don’t want your service-request number. Alas, help was never sent—a bad sign for me, a worse one for my fellow-citizens who actually needed it. (...)
Out of helpfulness or exasperation, friends floated suggestions. “Why don’t you—”
“Shoot them?” I interrupted. “I can’t shoot them—”
“Move out.”
It hadn’t occurred to me. Rather, it had occurred to me that murder was more of an option than moving—a true test of a New Yorker if there ever was one. I was fully aware there were other apartments I could live in, other boroughs I could go to. But to live in New York is to weigh your traumas, and moving is a formidable one. Plus, while I might not have been here first, I was here truest. I respected my apartment. I did not litter it with beer cans and try to set the furniture on fire. Instead, I begged for mercy. Please be quiet. Please please please. I did this sparingly, concerned about its diminishing effects but mostly concerned about something utterly mortifying: Jared’s impression of me.
