Across the Hall

I know about ten of the 500 people in my building. When I say, "I know them," I mean, "I recognize their faces in a vague sort of way." I know for certain the first names of some employees in the building, and that's about it. It’s sometimes difficult for people who've never really lived in a big building to understand that most high-rise inhabitants may recognize maybe 2% of the neighbors.

For example, boarding the elevator the other day, a girl pushed my floor number and I was slightly taken back. "Oh man," I thought, "is that my girl next door?" It's not my style to walk over there to introduce myself high out of the blue. Obviously, neither is it hers.

It's rare that I'm even slightly bothered by the people who live around me. The biggest nuisance they might pose are occasional food odors, but those too are oddities. It’s easy to deal with the hallway smelling like curry or browning garlic from time to time, but sometimes people can be ridiculous. The apartment across from the elevator is particularly offensive on occasion. Occasionally they whip up pork chops with the windows closed. If I can smell that all the way down the corridor and into my apartment, their place must be hazier than a smog alert day in Los Angeles.

Goulash scents come wafting through the hall from the south end every once in a while. I'm not positively sure whether or not the dish in question is actually goulash. The people at that end of the hall are Eastern Europeans of one nationality or another--whether it's Hungary or Estonia, I really have no idea. It smells really good from time to time. Maybe I’ll go down there one day and ask for a bowl…not a chance.

My building is essentially a series of interlocking concrete units, so sound basically doesn’t travel much in here. You can hear televisions and voices in the hallway, but never through two closed doors. The doors have about one third the thickness of the walls, but you still hear slamming because they are still quite heavy and constructed of metal. I hear sirens and car alarms once in a blue moon, since my floor is high enough up that street noise is a non-issue. So it’s more or less a vacuum of silence up here.

Noise complaints came my way on just two occasions—when my brother and I were having a huge drunken brawl a couple months ago, and last month when a few of us were still partying hard long after a Panic show. (I admit, by the way, that the complaints were totally warranted. I would have been pissed too, because we were LOUD.) Apart from those two incidents, I haven't had any sort of run-in with regard to noise for almost three years, further limiting opportunities for interaction.

I do not tend to steal my neighbors’ newspapers, but if a few pile up and it appears as though the person is out of town, I toss the old ones and take the paper of the day. (This is not to say that I am completely above the random drunken newspaper toss, but I rarely steal them per se.) I hope they're grateful to me for taking the time to get rid of their garbage, because I loved it when I'd get back from the airport late and see an empty doorstep.

Come to think of it, throwing away old newspapers is just about the most interaction I have with the neighbors, and even then I rarely take a glance at the names in the address field. What's in a name anyhow? Until you've been introduced to a person, a name is just two random words with little meaning. It does me no good whatsoever to be able to say, "There’s Joanne Peterson's door," because it’s most unlikely that I’ll ever get to know what "Joanne Peterson" actually means.

I used to clear out the Barron's for my across-the-hall neighbor. It either stopped coming or he started getting up early on Saturdays. I might have glanced at his name once or twice, but I completely forget it. (It was...something or other. Alex Marshall? John Sanders? Who cares?)

As I was leaving for an iPod stroll Friday afternoon, I overheard banter coming from guy-across-the-hall's apartment. He was apparently taking part in relationship conversation #97b: you're treating me like I'm nothing more to you than a friend. The odd thing was, in a shocking role reversal, the guy was arguing that position.

I thought, "Take, guy-across-the-hall, take!"