2001-09-25 - 11:20 p.m.

Living Above Afghanistan (1)

Things being what they are, recently I've been thinking about the downstairs neighbors at my old apartment. They were from Afghanistan.

You know, I'd like to say that this entry is going to be all about brotherhood and the fact that they were really nice people, but I can't. The fact is, they were assholes. I hated them. They made me so glad that I was getting away from them and moving into my current place, the Hamster Palace.

I lived at my old apartment for about nine years. It was a duplex with two flats in it, and I lived in the top flat. Throughout the years I was there I had a variety of neighbors who lived below me, but none more annoying than the Afghan Horde. I think they were there for the last two-and-a-half years that I stayed there. It seemed longer though, a lot longer.

I had a lot of problems with them during the couple of years that we shared that house, and instead of wringing myself out turning it into a narrative, I'm going to break it up into anecdotes. It will probably stretch over a couple of entries.

The biggest problem with my downstairs neighbors was that there were so damn many of them. It wasn't that there was just a mother and a father and a couple of kids. There were innumerable cousins and nieces and nephews and grandparents. I could never keep straight who actually lived at the house and who was just visiting, or staying for a while. The apartment was obviously the focal point for a whole clan of people from all over.

It started off small and got worse and worse as time went by. I recollect coming home from work one time and literally finding thirty people, all dressed in Afghani costumes standing and chatting on the lawn outside my building.

One August I remember that their cousins from Texas came to visit, and it seemed like they stayed for the entire month, or more. There were three adults and at least three children to add to the already noisy, smelly, crowded conditions downstairs. It was so noisy that I thought I was going to lose my mind.

Of course, you can't lose what you never had. Heh.

When that many people are living in one place, and when a lot of them are children, it's noisy. I was constantly being disturbed by the sounds of children shouting, shrieking and running around. The noise seemed to start at 6 a.m. and didn't stop until 2 a.m. It sometimes sounded like I was living above a re-enactment of the Battle of Stalingrad.

They also frequently played lo-fi tapes of Afghani music at high volumes during the day and night. It's a cultural thing: to me the music sounded like someone strangling a cat to the accompaniment of a guitar that badly needed tuning.

However, I wasn't exactly unarmed when it came to loud music. I have a stereo system with rather large speakers. Generally a little Led Zeppelin at 7 on the volume knob was enough to get them to turn down their shrill, nasal, atonal music.

I am a meanie.

However, sometimes worse than the noise was the smell. Almost constantly they seemed be cooking downstairs and pungent smells were forever attacking me upstairs. It was especially noxious during the summer when I had to open the windows of my non-air conditioned apartment to keep from sweltering. When my neighbors were cooking downstairs, I had an unhappy choice: I could stifle with the windows closed or I could gag with them open.

Usually the smells of cooking are quite pleasant, and tend to make me hungry. However the odors my neighbors subjected me to were stomach-turning: foul, greasy meat and rancid curry predominated.

You know, at one point I was kind of developing a fondness for Indian food, but the cooking habits of my neighbors have made it so I still don't like anything with curry in it, even five years later.

It was terrible, and eventually the smell of curry seemed to be on everything: my hair, my clothes, everywhere. When I showed up at work the Manager often noticed that I smelled like my neighbors' cooking.

If it was just the noise and the smell, I suppose my neighbors would have been tolerable, but the Afghan Horde also had no respect for the communal areas of the building and my own personal property.

Behind the house was a small back yard, and an alley. There was some off-street parking back there, but frequently all the parking spots were filled with various cars that belonged to the Afghanis. They also had a habit of parking very close to my car, so I occasionally had to get in the passenger side and then clamber over to the driver's side. One time they parked me in on both sides, so I had to climb in via the hatchback. Good thing I could do that since I was late for work anyway.

Continued...