Thursday, July 31, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Goldberg: Turn that noise down

By Tod Goldberg

It happened like this: I'm sitting in my office trying to adapt another person's book into a screenplay that will likely be rewritten completely by somebody else when the throbbing sound of big band music begins to waft into my home. I look at the clock. It's 4:30 in the afternoon, a reasonable time for Glenn Miller or Artie Shaw or whomever to begin the beguine, but annoying no less when you're trying to concentrate. I click on my own stereo and Neil Young screeches about rocking in the free world and for a moment everything seems okay. I get back into my flow, Neil finds a thousand points of light and then I think, okay, I've drowned out Artie Fucking Shaw and then all I hear, of course, is Artie Fucking Shaw.

This cannot last. I'm a goddamned professional and I must have my silence! I turn off my stereo, save the work I've squeaked out on my computer and step outside to find out where the offending noise is coming from. What I find is a row of very large American cars parked along my street and up the driveway of my next-door neighbor's house. I pause and think: Did someone die? Did my next-door neighbor die and no one told me? It's possible. My neighbors are a 75-year-old woman and her 95-year-old mother. It's conceivable that one or both of them died and failed to inform me, or at least failed to inform my wife, that they would be having a loud and raucous wake during my normal working hours.

Whatever. The music is loud and it's bothering me and I pay $365 a month to my HOA so I can complain if I want to. I can hire Gloria Allred if I so deign.

I go inside and find my wife. "What's going on next door? I can barely think with that music blasting through our house."

My wife shrugs. We step into our back yard and peer over our fence to investigate. There must be 50 blue- and gray-haired matrons sitting about drinking iced tea and chatting. "Looks like a garden party," my wife says, leaving me to continue peeking. A DJ wearing a tuxedo is silently going about his business, albeit with four large speakers pointed toward my house. This is an odd and ironic and sadly maddening turn of events: I am a 32-year-old man and I'm about to ask the ladies who lunch to turn that damn big band music down or else I'm callin' the cops, ya hear?

I decide to chill. I decide that since it's 4:30 they'll probably only hang out in the back yard for another 15 minutes since in my 'hood it's woe be the man who misses the early bird over at the deli. So, instead of writing, I busy myself around the house for a bit. I flip through Vanity Fair looking for scantily clad photos of Paris Hilton. I investigate the freezer. I pull thick black hairs from the top of my right ear.

"I'm a goddamned prisoner of war in my own home!" I shout at my wife. "I'm going over there and telling them to turn that music down!"

My wife stares at me with passing interest. She's seen me like this before.

I stalk outside and pound on my neighbor's front door. No one answers. I ring the doorbell; nothing happens. Of course nothing happens. They are all in the back yard sipping tea and listening to that devil music! I make an executive decision and unlatch the gate to my neighbor's back yard and make my way into the fray. My plan is this: I will find my neighbor, whose name I think is Janet, though it also could be Linda, and I will ask her if it might be possible for her to kick the jams down to 11.

"Hi, Scott," a tiny woman in a wheelchair says to me. It's the 95-year-old mother. Good. She's alive.

"Hi," I say, because I don't feel quite right telling her my name is Tod.

"Would you like a cracker?" she asks. In her hand is a paper plate filled with elegantly appointed Triscuits.

"No thanks. I just wanted to see if you could turn the music down a notch. I'm trying to work next door and it's bothering me a bit."

The 95-year-old looks at me like I've just stepped on the line to her oxygen tank, which, to be honest, I've been very dutiful in avoiding. "You should get out of the sun, Scott, because there's no music yet."

Am I in The Shining? I look around at the old women, their faces flush from the heat, their low-pitched voices a chorus of "huhs" and "whats," and it occurs to me that I may be the only person out here physically able to hear the music.

"My apologies."

On my way out, I make eye contact with the DJ and give him the thumbs down sign. He turns the volume up another level. I flip him off and all he does is smile.