My new neighbors hate me.

It didn’t start out as such a sordid relationship. In fact, upon their arrival across the hall, I helped them heave a sofa through their doorway. They sort of poked their heads into my apartment. “We love your wood floors!” one of them exclaimed, and I pictured having afternoon tea with the both of them on the back veranda, comparing stories of our respective illustrious weekends.

Being Silverlake, the couple is, of a course, of the gay variety. One of them is considerably older, well kempt, sporting glasses of the subtly stylish genre. The other seems to be of Puerto Rican descent, with a passive, whiny voice that seems to echo through the air ducts of the fourplex in which we all inhabit. They’re a strange couple, strange in the epic sense, like Mutt and Jeff, or, better yet, Harold and Maude.

I’m loving that my house has a sort of Melrose Place vibe. The walls are thin, and I could pretty much give an up-to-date account of the dramatic lives of both my neighbors upstairs to the right and the cute lesbian couple to the left. As I was shaving one morning, the telephone conversation of the girl upstairs drifted through the wind shaft to my eager ears:

“I took a whole box of laxatives this morning,” she said through the phone, followed by a long and pensive pause. It was as if she was talking on the phone with me, her voice was that clear and intimate. “And I’ve started vomiting again.”

“No you DIDN’T!” I whisper to my lathered reflection, razor suspended in mid-air.

“I think we ought to have lunch sometime soon, to talk about this,” she continued. “You know you’re the only person I would talk to about this.” She apparently hung up the phone, and proceeded to call another friend with the same story, also assuring the friend that he or she was “the only person I would talk to about this.” She then blared contemporary Christian music, and it was completely pathetic. But I was delighted to know that the Girl Upstairs wasn’t the picture-perfect princess she flaunts herself to be, but rather she is a crazy bipolar like the rest of us. I later learned, through another meandering conversation, that she lived with her sister and her boyfriend because she was emotionally unstable and couldn’t handle living on her own. Now they’re all apparently moving out, drifting up and down the stairs, bearing a countenance not too dissimilar to that of Jennifer Connelly in the House of Sand and Fog.

The gay couple across the hall, now an entire month in residence, began their Beautification Extravaganza approximately four weeks ago - basically the day after they moved in. The Puerto Rican furiously hacked away the hedges, our hedges, that aligned the alley where the trashcans reside, in an attempt to clean up the area. He looked like Faye Dunaway, playing Joan Crawford, in Mommie Dearest, beheading the entire rose garden with angst. I didn’t really think much of it at the time, as I had no particular attachment to the shrubbery in the first place (basically a Christmas tree decorated with cigarette butts.)

The older half of the gay couple, with the subtly stylish spectacles, was seen the next day turning the back common area (a small patio with a grill) into a gay tiki oasis, with Pottery Barn party lights, Pier 1 candles, and “kitschy” glass flowers emerging from terracotta pots. This all nicely accentuated their yellow scooter, a fetish object for many urban gays. Once again, I didn’t think much of the spectacle, and admittedly enjoyed the new environment, however ridiculous and cliche it appeared.

Several days later, I was smoking a cigarette outside the back door, when I noticed a small gift outside my gate. My porch bore a terracotta pot (one finely “aged” with a green-moss colored veneer) filled to the brim with sand. Etched in the sand, in the vein of ashtrays at fine hotels, was the word “BUTTS.”

I didn’t know what to make of the gift. It appeared to be a nice gesture with ulterior motives. I did, in fact, need an ashtray. My butts were scattered around my porch, but it is my porch, and its totally disconnected from the gay love den across the hall. In fact, the only reason that they would have cross my porch would be to take out the trash. My roommate and I concluded that they’re trying to control the rest of the fourplex through passive-aggressive kind gestures. This assumption was confirmed when they installed flowerpots in the exterior window bays of the entire house.

The pinnacle of the one-sided duel occurred during my cookout fiesta a couple of weeks ago. I invited a few friends over for what I thought was going to be a nice barbeque. Instead, it was a complete and utter bloodbath. Total mayhem.

As I was unloading the groceries from the trunk of my car, I saw that they were having a late afternoon barbeque themselves. Casual greetings were exchanged, and I informed them that I would later be using the grill area. They seemed perplexed and dismayed by my announcement, and I couldn’t understand why. I didn’t plan on grilling for a couple more hours, but they insisted on keeping the coals burning. Every half hour or so, the older one would poke his head into my living room, saying such niceties as “the coals are still burning.” I later concluded that they were obsessed with cleaning up the grill area, and believed I would sully all of their efforts if I waited too long.

Hours later, my friends arrived, and we relocated to the patio to begin cooking. Casual conversation ensued; the coals were nicely flaming, and all seemed to be going well. Suddenly, the Puerto Rican stuck his pin-neck out of his bedroom window, which aligned the patio area, and crooned, “I can stand the constant chatter through my ear-plugs, but the fire-balls are keeping me awake.” We all started to giggle, of course, at hearing him refer to the grill flames as fireballs. Its not as if we were testing our baking soda volcano for tomorrow’s seventh grade science fair. We were goddamn fucking grilling hamburgers.

We did try to keep the conversation to a minimum volume, but apparently not minimum enough. Once again, the Puerto Rican stretched himself from the window, looking like a giraffe on painkillers, to announce that we ought to “move our party elsewhere.” We all refuted the idea that we were being boisterous, but acquiesced and moved to my living room, feeling defeated.

Several days later, after a mysterious absence of neighbor sightings, I saw the two gardening outside their porch. I waved at the Puerto Rican, who sneered at me (not obviously sneered, more like an unfriendly, passive-aggressive, diva-inspired lift of the eyebrows.) I sort of felt insulted, but continued to my car. Just as I was about to open my car door, I was attacked by their two small mutts (hideous miniatures of dogs that are usually much larger in proportions.) “C’mon, you two, you know Barrett won’t pay attention to you,” cooed the elderly one. How dare he passive-aggressively speak to me through their mutts! What he really meant to say was, “Barrett, you’re not paying attention to all of our obsessive compulsive attempts to control this entire fourplex, you’re ignorant, and an insult to the gay community as we have articulated it.”

Fuck waging peace. They’re waging war.

The aforementioned battles were one sided, as was their placing the pieces of their shattered glass flower (which they incorrectly assumed we broke in our boorish ways) in our trashcan. At that point, staring at the shards of glass which no longer composed a groovy flower, I knew it was going to be a war not of ambush and face paint, but of symbols and semantics.

My roommate and I covertly discussed plans of action. We whispered our ideas as the wind whipped violently around the corners of the house. All of the proposed tactics were furtive and sneaky, upping their level of passive-aggressiveness from orange to red. “We’ll invite the cute lesbians over for drinks one night, befriend them, slip them easily into our side. We have to build a coalition,” my roommate stated gravely.

I completely agreed, also suggesting we give them a gift of an even more authentic terracotta pot with the words ‘BUTT OUT’ engraved in the sand.

Gone are the days when I believed I could mend our lack of understanding with a note of apology, and perhaps a nice, scented candle. “I know we have had our mishaps and misunderstandings, but I wanted to offer you this candle as I reminder that I believe in the ability to grow together from differences, et al,” the note would say, scripted in calligraphy pen on fine stationary.

What a pussy-ass conclusion to the story that would have been. It simply isn’t that simple. Forget candles and fancy stationary. There’s going to be tiki-themed dog-kabobs, doors smeared with lambs-blood, cigarette butts arranged in nasty slurs, and real cacophony… replete, this time, with jack daniels breath and delicious combat - through rhetoric, of course. I will emerge, triumphantly, with bloodstained cuffs, a frayed collar, and a tattered shield - the Charlemagne of fags against insipid faggotry.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 13th, 2005 at 2:22 am and is filed under twotoned. 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.