Welcome to the Shit House

A recent Saturday found me sitting in my car in the curbside pickup area at the Walmart just outside of town, waiting for the week's groceries to be wheeled out to me on one of those little flatbed carts. While I waited, I took out my phone and started typing what may be the longest and certainly the most aggressive text message I have ever composed.

Walmart is a cancer, of course, offering enticing conveniences like curbside pickup with one corporate hand even as, with the other, it crushes local competitors and tightens its grip on the dried husks of communities it has been hollowing out for a generation. One day, we must of course rise up, but on this particular Saturday I had weighty correspondence to attend to.

"Dear Ginny," I typed. "It's Otto. I live across the street from your Waldhurst house."

Ginny, who lives in California, had bought the house in question three years earlier as a residence for her granddaughter, Kara, a student at Waldhurst College who graduates this May. The previous residents had painted the house an eccentric shade of brown, and during Ginny's tenure as owner I had come to think of it as the Shit House.

At first, Ginny had rented out the house's other rooms to classmates of Kara's, then a few of the rooms had been listed on Airbnb, and then—with the onset of the pandemic—the students moved out and we grew used to seeing strange faces coming and going and unfamiliar cars clogging the street. We also grew accustomed to student parties, the one constant at the Shit House—not every weekend year-round, I will admit, but in spurts during signal college-party seasons: at the beginning and end of semesters, during the town carnival, on three-day weekends, in observance of fraternity and sorority high holy days, and so forth.

Lately there had been more parties than ever. The night before, as just about usual for the last few weekends in a row, Petra and I had been awakened at around 1:30 a.m. by the sound of drunk college students being disgorged onto the street under our bedroom windows.

Car doors slammed, bass emanated from car stereos, and the young Greeks—chronologically old enough to be taken for adults in the right light but actually on the four-year maturation pause known as the modern American college experience—milled around in the street, not yet ready to end their revels, nerve endings awash in hormones and Natural Light. The girls giggled and shrieked, the boys postured and barked, and our quiet little block became, for a half hour or so, a stage for the performance and sorting out of a dozen or so sets of stunted social aspirations, pathetic status anxieties, and disparate degrees of interest in mating.

Nothing out of the ordinary so far, in other words, I told Ginny.

"What was different last night," I typed into my phone, there in the Walmart parking lot, "was the guy who walked across the street, unzipped, and pissed on my lawn. That's new. Usually, when we witness public urination stemming from parties at your house (and yes, it's happened more than once), it's just on the front of someone's parked car or in their bushes. But this guy took it to a whole new level."

Indeed he had. Petra had been over at the window, quietly observing the scene while I remained abed and only half-conscious. Suddenly I heard her scrabbling at the lock and throwing up the sash. Lest I embarrass her, I will omit to record here the string of profanity she unleashed in amplification of her opinion that the baby-man in question should go flap his shriveled little member around somewhere else. I will just say that I do not think I have ever heard anything like this from her before. Something ticked over in me—after three years of periodic episodes like this, a sort of limit seemed finally to have been reached—and I woke on Saturday morning in the grip of a vengeful fury.

Then I found out about the Sigma Epsilon party planned for that very night.

There is a certain default level of irritation one can't help feeling at being prevented by others from sleeping, and then there is the incandescent rage that can arise from being kept awake for no good reason.

During my first attempt at college, there were several weeks when a construction crew began work just outside my dorm-room window each morning by 7 a.m. At that stage of my life, this was an hour when I preferred to be asleep. I remember regretting not being able to sleep in but I don't recall feeling genuinely angry about it. I don't mean to suggest I was a sage, calm young man in possession of a mature perspective beyond his years or anything like that. I probably just understood that this project was necessary and inevitable and that to rage against it would be like objecting to the arrival of a raincloud over one's picnic.

Perhaps getting woken up early in the morning is just different from being stymied at falling asleep in the first place, but the degree of vexation one feels when being kept awake also seems to depend on whether or not the culprits seem to be having fun. Warped as U.S. culture is by inputs like Puritanism and the so-called Protestant work ethic, we are trained from birth to consider the things people do for fun as discretionary. When we are not only being kept awake but being kept awake by something that feels unnecessary, it can feel as though our very status as human is being disregarded.

A year before the dorm renovation project, when I lived in another dorm on the other side of campus, I shared a cinder-block wall with Stacy, to this day the loudest human being I've ever known. She spoke at top volume in a strong New Jersey accent and possessed a howling, horsey laugh that I was eventually able to pick out even in the dull roar of the campus dining hall at mealtime. She was a techno fan, and her car, a severely rusted Camaro of advanced age, badly needed a new muffler.

I might not have noticed or minded any of this if Stacy hadn't also been basically nocturnal. She was some kind of art or theater major and all of her classes seemed to be in the evening—at any rate, she clearly wasn't on the same class schedule I was.

I was taking German Immersion, a demanding 12-credit course advertised as delivering two years' worth of regular-paced instruction in one semester. This class met daily for four hours and kicked off each morning at 8 a.m., so I tried to turn in by 10 p.m. at the latest. Stacy's routine, meanwhile, usually had her arriving back at her room—possibly from some off-campus restaurant job—around midnight, when she would get high and spend the next few hours listening to music at top volume and socializing with other night owls.

Initially, Stacy's wee-hours activities would wake me up, but eventually I grew to anticipate her arrival so tensely that I could not fall asleep in the first place. I just lay there in the dark, dreading to hear the throaty rumble of her Camaro's inevitable approach along the campus road, roiling with hot surges of hatred and resentment.

So there you are in bed in the middle of the night, seething at whoever is keeping you awake, and the question is what do you do about it?

Direct confrontation can be an amateur mistake, especially when intoxication is involved. When the noise is coming from a party or social event, one can also feel strongly obligated to just tough it out, as opposed to inhabiting the role of drab stick-in-the-mud trying to ruin everyone else's fun. Call the police? That's just being a drab stick-in-the-mud by proxy, not to mention that mature adults with fully functioning personalities generally feel ridiculous bothering police with something as trivial as a noise complaint.

Besides, one resents being placed in the unappealing posture of the supplicant. In a just world one wouldn't have to beseech or employ state coercion to force others to remember that one is human and has certain ineluctable physical needs, including not only food and water but regular sleep. The prospect of begging for such consideration tastes ashy indeed.

One's thoughts turn, naturally, to revenge. Inherent to any situation in which Person A is being kept awake by Person or Persons B is that Person A probably needs to get up relatively earlier the next morning. Thus Person A may be awake many hours before Person or Persons B would prefer to be, and a prime opportunity for turning the tables presents itself—if Person A dares.

Over the last three years of frat parties at the Shit House, many have been the occasions when I have lain awake fantasizing about pounding cop-style on the house's front door early the next morning to share feedback about the previous night's festivities with whoever answered. This never seemed like as good an idea in the cold clear light of dawn. I have long tried to live by the maxim that, where neighbors are concerned, one should overlook as much as possible and try one's hardest to forgive the rest. Tough it out, in other words.

I have from time to time taken revenge against people who have kept me from sleeping in the past, but my record on this score is a slight and impotent one. When I lived next door to Stacy, I made sure to be extra loud when I got up in the morning and at least once I actually kicked her door as I walked past it on my way to class.

Similarly, when I was recently kept awake in the communal bunk room of a hostel by the astoundingly loud movements of a late-arriving fellow guest who seemed to have everything in his backpack stored in crinkly potato chip bags and who spent something like an hour, around midnight, rearranging it all before going to bed—and then turned out to also be a loud, gurgling, gasping snorer—I made sure to slam the bunk room's door resoundingly when I checked out the next morning. (He was the only guest still in bed.)

In neither Stacy's nor the hostel snorer's case did I receive any indication that my retaliations even registered, however.

Then there an incident from the years when I lived in Miami, in an apartment that looked out onto a canal. One night—when I had to get up extremely early the next morning, to take the 24-hour in-port watch on the Coast Guard cutter where I worked—there was a party in the backyard of a townhouse on the other side of the canal. Something about the lay of the land between us functioned to funnel and concentrate the sounds of music, conversation, and laughter so that it was as though the party were taking place right in my bedroom.

The situation eventually grew so intolerable that I went out to the bank of the canal, and—with a weather eye out for alligators—tried to get the hosts' attention with a yell, but to no avail.

Another hellish hour passed. I began to fantasize about climbing onto the roof of my four-story apartment building with a dozen eggs and barraging the townhouse's backyard. I don't know if I really would have followed through, but I did reconnoiter as far as the fourth floor hallway only to find that the roof access door was securely locked.

I gave up, went back to bed, and—eventually, with a pillow over my head—fell asleep.

"I understand there will be a Sig Ep party at your house tonight," I typed.

I was still sitting in my car in the Walmart curbside pickup area. My groceries had already been loaded into the back of my Element, but the muses were singing to me and so I kept typing—long enough that, at one point, another "associate" tapped on my window to make sure I'd been served.

Earlier that morning, as I'd walked to my car preparatory to driving to Walmart, I'd seen two college-age boys with Greek letters on their t-shirts exiting the Shit House. I braced them on the sidewalk to share my feelings, at length and with a not insubstantial amount of profanity, about the previous night's episode of public urination. With the smarmy politeness of a school bully trying to charm the principal, they affirmed my opinion that this was unacceptable, disavowed connection to that party—and then promised that tonight's party would go better.

"Sig Ep parties are very organized, sir," said one of the little men, indicating the walkie talkies they carried. "That's why we have these. We're working the door tonight, and we won't let anyone like that in."

I did not ask exactly how one identifies a public urinator upon presentation for entrance to a party, nor did I share that, really, I didn't care if they let such a person in, as the real issue seemed more connected to what happened after they were let out.

To Ginny, I typed: "I will be moving one of my security cameras to the front of the house to monitor tonight's party, in case I need evidence to be used in seeking a nuisance-property designation for your house. [Waldhurst law contemplates no such designation, but I liked the thought of Ginny worrying about that and maybe wasting some time researching the possibility.] I will also call the police if I am awakened after 10. I believe I understand you plan to move here after Kara's graduation in May. I would think carefully about what kind of relationship you want with your future neighbors. You don't have a lot of fans on this block now."

Tingling with righteous fury, I pressed "send," then drove my groceries home.

Petra took Axl camping that night, and I went to bed wearing ear plugs, with one of the children's old white-noise machines exuding its electric roar. The next morning, I poured a cup of coffee and sat at the kitchen table with my phone to review what, if anything, my newly repositioned camera had captured.

I didn't know what to expect. I hadn't been awakened, so for all I knew the two Sig Ep boys really had managed to keep a lid on things. But no—apparently it was just that my ear plugs and white-noise machine had worked well.

A stream of motion-activated recordings from between 11 p.m. and 2 a.m. showed cars and people coming and going. Highlights included three dip shits in basketball shorts (redundant, I know) expressing loud displeasure with another neighbor, visible on his porch after—he told me the next day—having threatened to call the police (1:30 a.m.); a figure urinating outside, this time with his back turned and on Ginny's property, for a change (2:10 a.m.); and the slow, ominous arrival of a police cruiser (2:30 a.m.).

I saved a selection of video clips and still frames, then attached them to a new text message, this one addressed to both Ginny and Kara.

"Frat infestation at the Shit House..." I began, before captioning my attachments and concluding with: "also shared with college administration, so Monday should be fun!"

These last words felt like something of an empty threat. Although I count the college's vice president of student affairs among my social acquaintances, and although I had indeed transmitted the same exhibits to him that I'd shared with Ginny and Kara, multiple previous attempts to interest him in intervening in this situation had been fruitless, suggesting that the college website's airy vision-statement verbiage about "challenging students to act with responsibility as citizens of multiple communities" was nothing more than marketing blather.

Yet, by Monday afternoon, he was informing me that Ginny had "kicked Kara out of the house" and that the college's athletics director had promised Kara would finally face "consequences" (she is a varsity "acro-tumbler," whatever the hell that is).

A few days later, I sent a conciliatory message to Ginny. Petra had pointed out that, compared to other possible outcomes, the best development we could probably hope for would still be for Ginny to move into this house in a few months, after Kara's graduation, as opposed to ditching that plan in favor of operating it as a full-time Airbnb flophouse or simply selling it to one of Waldhurst's slumlords. We didn't want to scare her off, in other words.

"Sorry for my harsh tone," I began my next text to Ginny. "Blame it on two sleepless nights in a row..."

This was a slight exaggeration, of course, but only because of my ear plugs and white-noise machine, which I shouldn't have needed to deploy in the first place. I have no idea if Ginny felt conciliated. She has yet to answer a single one of my text messages.

I don't feel proud of causing trouble for Kara, but—after so many unsuccessful attempts to get her to act with some consideration toward her neighbors—I can't say I'm sorry, either. Talking to the two young men on the sidewalk in front of the Shit House, I realized I'd forgotten how young college students are.

Having once been one myself and having, at the time, been quite satisfied that I and my friends were all grown up, I never lost the habit of thinking of college students as being at least just inside the door of adulthood. They're not, though—or at least, in the United States in the year 2021, it is not safe to assume they are, especially in the case of fraternity and sorority members. Kara and her friends are children, not adults, and in my experience this is unlikely to change before about the age of 30, if in fact it ever does. It takes a village, and all that, so just number me among the villagers and never mind my pitchfork.

Back in Miami, the morning after the party on the banks of the canal, I awoke bleary and exhausted to the sound of my alarm only a few hours after I'd finally fallen asleep. I showered and shaved. As I made my breakfast, my eye fell on a senescent tomato that had been overlooked at the back of the fridge.

When I was done eating and had put my dishes in the dishwasher, I took the tomato outside and walked down to the canal. In the grey pre-dawn light, I looked across at the aftermath of the party. Chairs sat willy-nilly, and a table was still covered with beer bottles and glasses. Apparently the hosts had decided to wait until the morning to clean up.

I took some deep breaths and swung my arm in a circle a few times to warm up, then—with a gesture not unlike a GI lobbing a hand grenade over a fortress wall or a basketball player attempting a Hail Mary shot from the other end of the court—launched the tomato in a high soaring arc over the canal.

I am no athlete and lack much practice throwing things, so I really had no idea where the tomato might land. I liked the thought of it crashing down onto the table full of bottles and perhaps causing one or more of them to fall and smash on the concrete patio. That would have perfect, because it probably would have woken someone up without causing any real damage. As the tomato left my fingertips, however, I found myself praying that it might somehow, improbably, actually smash right through what I hoped was the bedroom window.

I watched the tomato climb, reach apogee, descend—and land, with a satisfying splatter, square on the townhouse's grey-shingled roof.

It seems likely that the residents neither heard the tomato's impact nor ever noticed the result, but for the next week or so I enjoyed stepping out onto my patio after work, drink in hand, to gaze on my handiwork. To be kept awake by oblivious partygoers is to be in some essential way disregarded, to be treated as if you do not exist, much less matter.

Even if my tomato had not forced my actual tormentors to reckon with their offenses against me, the sight of its splatter on their roof shingle still made me feel better, as though I had stood up for myself in the face of an unfeeling universe, not to mention managing what had turned out to be a pretty decent throw, under the circumstances.

Then the summer rains came and washed the tomato away, and it was like none of it had ever happened.