In the interest of being friendly

I took a nap last Saturday in the afternoon when my roommate Sloan was cooking. She needed to blend and was afraid to wake me up, so she and her boyfriend Alex decided to take the blender into our storage space next door. They found an outlet over the washing machine, and Sloan, with a blender full of tomatoes and jalapenos, commenced cooking. And our upstairs neighbor, Ben, who is two, pushed open the door and found Sloan standing there in our dimly lit cement storage space.

"What are you doing?" he asked. He is a foot and a half high.

"Well," Sloan said, "I'm blending."

As Sloan tells it, Ben considered this for a moment before continuing in his little British accent, (his parents are from Belgium), "Why are you blending in here?"

And Sloan, in her grown-up voice, had to explain that she was blending in the storage space because her roommate was asleep in the next room, which Ben did not understand and summarily rejected as an explanation as to why his neighbor was blending in the washing room. "Blenders are for kitchens," he said, and Sloan continued in vain to explain the situation in a loud whisper, and I finally heard this story later that night when Sloan and I were on a couch together at a party, drunk as hell, and I thought this was hilarious.

Depending on where you live, San Francisco can be a very neighborly sort of place. For instance, we are very friendly with our upstairs neighbors from Belgium. This is the only way to deal with Ben, who, among the many concepts he does not understand especially does not understand walking quietly. At around 7:30 every morning, weekday or weekend, he begins running back and forth across his living room, which to us is the far side of my ceiling to the far side of Sloan's ceiling, and then jumps at the end, although sometimes he jumps on the way, and it sounds like he's wearing cleats or clogs. Then he drags something, like a Radio Flyer or a rocking horse, rolls it across the floor -- our ceiling -- and into the walls. But Sloan and I continue to be nice to his parents, because besides the fact that they really are incredibly cool people, they are paying for the washer and dryer we share, which they don't know, or at least we think they don't know, because Sloan and I have decided not to tell them, kind of because of Ben but also because wouldn't you wait for the other person to bring up their huge electric bill in this situation?

On the other hand, when we lived in the Haight our downstairs neighbors cranked their stereo every night of the week until the wee hours of the morning. And it was always one of those awful CDs George Michael made after "Faith" or Aretha's greatest hits, which was completely ruined for me by the time I moved out. At that time I had anywhere from three to five roommates, what with people going off to Santa Cruz and Las Vegas and jail, but each of us had at one point made the long trek to their apartment door in a bathrobe to ask them to turn the music down. If someone actually knocked on their door, they would turn the music down immediately, and then wait five minutes before incrementally turning it back up. You know, since you don't notice loud noises so much if they come at you slowly instead of all at once.

After that, my roommates and I communicated our frustration and loathing through the floor. If we weren't jumping up and down and screaming or bouncing a soccer ball, we took to dragging one of the kitchen stools into my room and pounding on the floor with that. I finally called the police one night I thought I would slaughter them all - my neighbors, not my roommates -- and this was a huge thing for me. In my whole life, I have only called the police one other time, and that was when a car alarm under my girlfriend's window went off - actually off and on and off and on - for more than forty-five minutes. I was so groggy and angry and fully unconscious by the time I called the non-emergency line that when an officer answered, all I could scream was, "Can you hear this?" and honestly held the phone up to the window as my complaint.

But neighbors are as neighbors go. I have never thought of myself as a good neighbor, or a bad neighbor, or anybody's neighbor period. Somehow that was everyone else's relationship to me, and not the other way around. The only noise complaint I have ever had was when I had sex with the windows open, although I happened to know the people who complained, and they were more happy for me than anything. But that was in Chicago, where we lived in houses that had yards between them. You had to throw a raging party to have the police called for a noise complaint, which was never a surprise and a part of the evening you counted on. But in the crowded metropolis of San Francisco, everyone makes noise in close quarters, and it's the kind of noise people make balanced by how you tolerate it that gives neighboring here such a unique quality. I recommend adoring the two-year-old who makes your mornings hellish, and charging his parents for a completely wasteful load of laundry. Like the load I did last week that comprised a pair of pants and a few skivvies. I thought about my neighbors the whole time, and smiled.

Jenny Pritchett

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