I like to listen to this couple in the building next to the one I live in. I like to listen to them have sex. I like to listen to them argue.

They’re old. In their seventies, I would guess. They wash their dishes in the nude. I see her breasts almost every week. Sometimes, when they fight, he tells her he doesn’t need her. She laughs at this.

When they don’t fight, or have sex, they disappear. No noise. I don’t know what they’re doing, because I can only see into their kitchen window, where her breasts are on display during dish-washing time.

I know he wears briefs. He sits on his balcony in his briefs. They are usually red. He wears them with socks, pulled up past his ankles. When he comes outside, he sits on a foldable lawn chair. He doesn’t have a book, or a newspaper, or a magazine, or a cigar, or a cigarette, or a drink. He’s got nothing, but he sits down and stays there for up to twenty minutes.

Then he goes back inside.

Slides open the door, shuffles back in, and starts either fighting or fucking his wife.

I love them so much.

I’ve lived in many apartments and had many neighbors, but these are by far my favorite of all time.

My first ever apartment was in Miami. My roommate was this drop-dead gorgeous girl who was nice to me even though I was really awkward and depressed most of the time, and when I wasn’t, she could clearly hear me having sex with my college boyfriend. She and I would go out to have sushi once a week, and I once heard her defend me to a group of her girlfriends who couldn’t understand how she could live with such a weird girl.

She and I had an ongoing battle with our neighbor. Our neighbor didn’t like us because we once had a guest who parked in her spare parking spot for ten minutes. From that day on, it was war, war which climaxed one day when my gorgeous roommate came running to my room, screaming.

“Lenore! There’s a chop! A chop! There’s a chop on our doorstep!”

“There’s a chop?” I asked.

“A chop!” She insisted.

“What the hell is a chop?” I asked.

“A chop! A chop…of meat!” She said.

“Like, a t-bone?” I asked.

“I don’t think it’s beef,” she said.

“A lamb chop?”

“I think it’s pork!” She said.

“There’s a pork chop on our doorstep?” I asked.

“And, Lenore. There’s more,” she said.

“There’s a pork chop, and there’s more?” I asked.

“I think it’s rotten,” she whispered.

And she was right. The neighbor had placed a rotten pork chop on our doorstep. It was accompanied by a threatening note, if I remember correctly.

From that apartment, with the meat lady living next door, I moved into an apartment with my then-boyfriend.

This was a big deal, that we were living together. My friends were all very excited and squealing like girls do, and I was silently screaming and panicking that moving in with this man meant that I would have to marry him.

A couple of my friends wanted to see the apartment before we moved in, so I took them by the place. We decided to knock on the door, just to see if I could show them the new digs. I knew the owner was supposed to be cleaning it out that day, so I assumed it would be okay.

I knocked on the door. A child answered.

I kneeled down to the ground and said to her, in a very high-pitched voice so as to capture her age-limited attention span, “Is your mommy home?”

No, her mommy wasn’t home, and she shut the door on my face.

I turned around to see my friends staring at me in horror.

“Why did you do that?” They asked me.

“What?”

The little girl was apparently not a little girl, but a midget. It seemed I’d missed a couple of details that would have clued me into this fact, such as the beer in her right hand and the cigarette in her left hand.

This midget turned out to be my neighbor. And she was a very unforgiving midget. There was never a friendly moment between us. Not after I spoke to her as though she were a child.

My first apartment in Los Angeles was in a large building in Los Feliz. I moved here knowing almost no one. I was escaping Miami, the city that had thoroughly crushed my self-esteem, and I was beginning grad school for fiction writing.

My hypothyroidism was undiagnosed at this point, and as a result, I was probably thirty pounds heavier than what I weigh right now. I exercised three or four hours a day, ate apples and lettuce, and cried. For a year. I couldn’t understand why I was getting fatter and fatter when every day I ate less and less and exercised more and more.

My neighbor in this building was a doctor. He was extremely attractive, and I was, in my estimation, extremely unattractive. In the elevator one day, he told me that he wanted to take me out to dinner, and he’d been working up the nerve to ask me out for months.

Immediately I became riddled with anxiety about how much more weight I would gain if I went out to dinner with him, this way-too-attractive-for-me man, because on a date I’d have to eat, really eat, and I couldn’t even eat lettuce and apples. So, instead of accepting the invitation, I started crying. He didn’t know what happened, so he apologized and kept his head down. I couldn’t tell him the truth, so I told him my mother and father had just died in a horrible car accident.

After that, it was uncomfortable when I saw him. I wasn’t yet accustomed to the emotional explosions I now frequently experience in mixed company.

These neighbors I have now – these old, naked, fighting, fucking, dish-washing neighbors. They put it all out there. And they’re never embarrassed. And I know they’ve seen and heard things coming from my apartment that I should probably be ashamed of, but I’m not ashamed. They don’t judge me. They smile at me when they go on walks.

I hope I will be like them when I’m in my seventies.

TAGS: appreciation of your elders, battles between neighbors, hypothyroidism, Lenore Zion, old naked neighbors, rotting meat

Lenore Zion earned her MFA in fiction writing in 2004 and then ventured forth into the cruel world of working at Blockbuster Video. Shortly after being unharmed in a wimpy DVD robbery, she retreated to the safety of academia and began a doctoral program in clinical psychology. In May of 2010, Lenore will once again be released into the real world, this time armed with a more important sounding graduate degree. Lenore is currently working on her first novel, a quirky and twisted exploration of her internal world that she has cleverly masked as a "story." She can be reached at LenoreZion@gmail.com.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 20th, 2009 at 2:16 pm and is filed under Health & Lifestyle, Nonfiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.