Wednesday, April 16, 2008
A Bedtime Story
It’s exorcism time, my peeps! Today’s demon: The hag who used to live next door.
(note: the old next door, not the present next door.)
Our first San Francisco apartment was a classic jazz-age 1-BR in a nice-enough part of town. Our building was on the corner; turn uphill and it was all mansions and manicured parks, turn down and you’d find a wide sloppy avenue of tourist restaurants and innumerable sketchmeisters. Our place, though, was sweet and petite, with original multipane windows and built-ins right down to a sawdust-stuffed icebox. We didn’t have any extra space, and we used everything we were renting, except, I guess, for the fire escape.
The FE hung outside our bedroom window, and it wasn’t purely ours - the apple-cheeked granny next door shared it with us. We didn’t have much truck with her; occasional smiles and nods in the hallway were the extent of our face-to-face relationship. But after about a year there, she started sharing a little more with us - indirectly, but vociferously; disturbingly, and thusly:
It was late at night; we’d long since crashed out in our cozy bed. Traffic had faded to a gentle lapping of white noise, and our world was at peace. Then a sound, new and thick, floated into our consciousness - a voice, almost human, wracked with anguish. We bestirred ourselves, creeping with reluctant disbelief back to consciousness, trying to distinguish this haunted howling from the reality of our dreams. But soon enough the dreams were forever banished and we both lay still and nervous as the moaning and keening built.
A woman - old, sad, and drunk. The sound of her despair filled our little bedroom. From the alley downstairs? The building facing ours? No, the sound was conductive, it was in our walls and surrounded us as the weeping sea embraces drowning men. It was applegranny next door, and she was pissed.
Inarticulate at first, words and themes soon resolved for our edification. Time has further obscured the already-garbled jumble of imprecation she uttered that night, curses and calumnies we tried to sleep through, then to ignore, then to excuse as the ranting of a lost soul wrestling with demons, but it was not possible. She was right next door, just the other side of the wall from us, our rooms even linked by a common fire escape that gave her a proximity amounting to immediacy.... and in the midst of her abjection, it was I that she cursed.
“Mwargh… fukin jew assho… kike bastards… g’dam christkillas… hate you… ooaugh evil scumjew....” It was hard to understand her but impossible not to hear, and in the hearing, to listen and try to divine the germ of her words. The verbs we could make out were violent; the adjectives, cruel; the nouns referred insultingly to my five-thousand-year-old family - vile words rendered darker and more putrescent than I’d ever heard them by her drunken vituperation. I lay still under my familiar old comforter with my wife and my cats, my eyes wide open, the gorge rising in my throat and my heart turning to burning stone within me.
After ten minutes or so the tirade petered out and silence again returned to the room - but sleep evaded me. The next night we retired with misgivings, wondering whether what we’d heard was an anomaly. Turns out, it wasn’t. It wasn’t every night she went harpy on us, but it was a couple-three times a week, each time the same hateful bile, sometimes with an accompaniment of thumping and crashing that made our floor shiver beneath us. I began to dread the bed.
We’d still sometimes see her in the hallway. She remained diminutive, puckered, sweet as an apple pie on a windowsill… but well we knew by then that those apples were sour and wormy, and the sill could come crashing violently down at any moment with a shattering blow. She’d give a little wave and say hi; we’d say hi back. What else could we do?
Turns out, there was something we could do - after several weeks of enduring her hateful ravings, we told our landlord that we were being constructively evicted. We couldn’t sleep in our own bedroom; we were filled with loathing and anxiety every time we walked off the elevator to our home. He argued with us but I’d done enough homework to move him to a negotiating posture. We settled for a full return of our deposit without penalty for breaking our lease.
It was about this time that Heidi moved to SF and found us a roomy, airy, non-bigot-ridden flat on the west side. We’re there still, and loving it. Maybe I should thank that kindly-faced jew-hating dypsomaniacal shrew for moving us on to the next phase of life, but actually, I’m still having a little trouble feeling the love.
