by Kellye Whitney
Thin walls are a small part of the price you pay for living in a big city apartment complex. When your place is one of several dozen units, if all you get is a little noise pollution, you can count yourself lucky. There are tons of undesirable critters and rodents that love your conveniently-located, close to the city, single person pad even more than you do. Not to mention the interesting smells that can waft along hallways and up and down stairs…international smells of spicy curry or the earthy, funky scent of collard greens and other soul food cooking.
Hearing your neighbors cursing at their spouses or yelling at their children is par for the course in the city. Raised voices in a city apartment complex are as commonplace as telemarketer calls during dinner, but thin walls can also mean the difference between maintaining your privacy and having your neighbors invade it. Christian music on a Sunday morning filtering through your bedroom wall as you sleep? Fine. The sound of running water as someone in the bathroom above you washes his bum or brushes her chops? Fine. Boyfriend and girlfriend snarling profanities at the top of their lungs for over an hour? Uh-uh. Not cool at all.
There I was, finally unwinding in front of the tube after working all day at the office and making my way around Chicago's side streets to avoid a congested rush hour expressway on the way home. I had my bagel bites on my left, a large glass of pulpy, sweet lemonade on my right, and the opening credits to a tape of Sex in the City unfurling in front of me. But instead of Sarah Jessica Parker's distinctive voice offering an opinionated view of life and love in another big city, I heard the "bleep, bleep, bleep, and you're a bleep, bleep, bleep!" of an angry neighbor and his even angrier spouse screaming at each other.
They're at it again, I thought, and got up to adjust the volume. But after I managed to muffle the sounds of the tempestuous argument broiling above stairs, the volume of the screams increased. The fight had reached some mysterious, new, and apparently ridiculously loud level of plaster cracking viciousness, and I thought, now what? Briefly, I considered knocking on their door and asking politely but firmly if they could keep it down, but confronting two angry, emotionally entangled city dwellers is not something you want to do after slogging your way through downtown traffic. Who knew what they were fighting about? An extra-marital affair. An outrageous credit card bill. Perhaps a sick mother in law who desperately wanted to spend her last days in the bosom of her barely-accommodating and compactly-housed next of kin.
I could have called the police, but that's not the best way to endear yourself to your neighbors, nor to befriend the local fuzz in a busy city neighborhood like South Shore in Chicago. So I picked the only other alternative: I closed my bedroom door. This helped some, but not enough. Next I tried stuffing an old towel into the crack at the bottom of the door. Still better, but not good enough yet. I dismantled the bedroom sound stopper and tried the towel against the front door, went in and closed off the bedroom, and applied a new towel there. Not great, but things were getting quieter, and the yelling had slowed to sporadic bursts of sound. This was it. I could wait for the argument to die a natural death, or risk life and limb if I dared to knock and complain. I stayed inside. I had a slight headache that next morning from listening to my TV on loud all night, and my neighbors probably had towels stuffed underneath their doors to block out my noise, but I had kept some of the precious distance apartment living can make it difficult to maintain. And I had kept my head attached to my shoulders, and not let it be bitten off and chewed up by an angry neighbor rendered temporarily uncaring of my thin-wall complex.
