So the last few nights someone has been hammering at odd hours. I've got a real hair-trigger anger when it comes to low level irritation… my father always told me when I was young — or at least this is how I heard it — that the worst way to die is the death of a thousand duck bites.
Anyway, the hammering was going on again, and making it hard for Nefarious to sleep and for me to keep my cool. I thought it was coming from the apartment below us so I went downstairs and pounded on their door. No answer. However, the pounding had stopped so I went back to work. But then, a few minutes later, bang… bang… bang…
At this point I'm starting to shake slightly and my muscles are all tensing up and my vision blurs around the edges. I really start becoming a different person, or at least a dramatically more dangerous person. I'm really very laid-back most of the time, honestly. It's probably something I should worry about, but anyway. I went downstairs again, and pounded on both the apartment below us and the one next to it. The Chinese stoner kid that lives below us, and the Chinese grandmother that lives next to him both opened their doors at the same time.
“Are either of you two doing construction right now? As in hammering?”
“No, we thought it was you!”
They're scared of me so they didn't want to say anything. I went down another story and pounded on that door. A vacuum was running. I pounded insistently and a woman in her late thirties answered the door. The apartment was unkempt and it was obvious they were just moving in. I had found my culprits. The woman looked somewhat disturbed by me. While I was restraining myself, she must have been able to tell that the person she was talking to had just a little bit too much “twitch” going on.
“Listen, I don't care if you want to vacuum, but don't hammer at night. It wakes our baby. I live two stories above you and it's very loud in my apartment.”
The woman looked somewhat distraught — “You'd better talk to my husband.”
Her husband, slightly taller than me, probably five to ten years older than me and balding came to the door. He stood very close to me, presumably to demonstrate his manliness. I stepped in closer — god, I love that feeling where you're waiting for the other person to fuck up and hit you so you can pulverize him (it's a middle-class building in yuppietown Canada, so it's not as if I'm risking getting shot) — and let him know I didn't want him hammering at night. He backed down, said he understood, and I assumed that was the end of that.
But within minutes of me getting back upstairs he was hammering again! Rachel shouted at me that she didn't want me going and getting myself arrested, but I was already out the door. I clubbed their door with my arm, which I'm sure all 27 stories could hear and opened it. The woman jumped off the couch and I could hear hammering from the back of the apartment. Barely resisting the urge to enter the apartment, I shouted — extremely loudly — something along the lines of, “what the fuck do you think you're doing?”
I slammed their door and went back upstairs. If I'd stayed I'd be in prison right now.
Maybe five minutes later our door got knocked on. Rachel told me to stand back and opened the door. I could see it was the hamming jackass and stepped in front of Rachel. He started retreating down the hallway, keeping fifteen feet between us. As he ran away he called out, “Thank you very much for coming to the door — 2701 — now I know what to tell the police when I file tresspassing charges.”
After he ran away, he kept hammering down in his apartment — it was 9:20 PM now. Since he'd decided to play it this way, I figured I'd better make an official noise complaint. I hate calling the police about little things that could more easily be solved with physical violence — or at least a little common decency — but I didn't really have a choice. At 10:15 he was still hammering, but then it stopped.
About five minutes after he stopped, another knock on my door.
This time it was the police. A little (maybe four inches shorter than me, with about my build) white cop and a very large South Indian cop for backup were at the door. I stepped out into the hallway — never invite vampires into your house — “my daughter is trying to sleep.”
“So, did you talk to the guy in 2501?”
“He says you came into his apartment and verbally assaulted him and his wife.”
“He's lying to you.”
Shockingly, the smaller of the two cops actually appeared intimidated by me… and I'm smaller than I've been in five years (to say nothing of the fact that I'm a shoeless guy in summer wear and he's carrying a Glock). He didn't even try and argue with my story and let me force the account to be flipped around entirely. At the end of the whole thing they left to lecture the guy in 2501, letting me know that if he ever made noise I didn't like again — even in the middle of the day — they'd be happy to take my call.
And he hasn't hammered since.
Anyway, I suppose I'm just lucky I didn't get arrested!
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