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Page 14
Kaye elbowed me in the ribs and I woke up.
“What?” I said.
“It’s noisy,” she said.
And it was. The bump thump of bad dance music blasted somewhere behind our bedroom wall.
“I’ve got to get up at five,” Kaye reminded me.
I reached over to my nightstand and turned the light on. I got out of bed and stretched my naked body and then scratched my balls. I bent over and put my jeans on. “I’ll tell them to turn it down,” I said. I didn’t want to go out and confront a bunch of drunks. But Kaye was working at a bakery and taking a full course load at school. I owed it to her to at least see what was going on. So I put on my shirt and my shoes and then made my way out of the apartment.
I was surprised to see that the music wasn’t coming from the apartment next door. The party was two apartments down. The sound had actually been traveling through another apartment before it got to ours.
The door was open and college frat- and sorority-types were everywhere. They were spilling out into the parking lot. A skinny brunette girl who couldn’t have been more than twenty years old stumbled outside and hiccupped. A muscular black-haired kid in a tight black t-shirt approached me, smiling.
“Hey, man,” he said, “come join the party. Want a beer?”
I did, sort of. “I need you to turn the music down. My wife has to get up early tomorrow.”
He stopped smiling. “We’re having a party,” he said.
A fat blonde kid wearing a white sweat-stained t-shirt walked up to the black-haired kid and put his hand on the guy’s shoulder. The Piggy Boy stared at me, trying his best to intimidate.
“Look,” I said, “just turn the fucking music down, OK?”
“We ain’t turning nothing down,” Piggy Boy said.
“Look,” I said, “it’s Monday night. My wife has to get up early. I’m calling the cops.” I turned around and started back toward my apartment. Piggy Boy followed me, shouting.
“This is college,” he said. “I’ll kick your ass. This is college.”
I walked into my apartment, turned around, and faced Piggy Boy and said, “Then do some studying,” before closing the door.
I went back into my bedroom and started taking off my clothes.
“What’s the deal?” Kaye said.
“I guess I’m calling the cops,” I said. Half undressed, I walked into the kitchen, where we had a magnet on the fridge with emergency numbers on it. I called the police. A dispatcher told me that an officer would be along shortly.
I went back into the bedroom and took off the rest of my clothes. I got into bed and turned off the light on my nightstand. I lay on my back, pulling the covers up to my neck.
“They’ll be by shortly,” I said.
It was ten, fifteen minutes later and the music was lowered to a reasonable level. We could hardly hear it anymore. But five minutes passed and they turned the music up again, this time louder than before. Kaye elbowed me in the ribs. “Fuck,” I said. “OK, let me call them again.” I turned the bedside light on and grabbed my cell phone from the nightstand. I called the cops again.
“We just sent an officer out there,” the dispatcher said.
“Yeah, I know,” I said. “But they just turned the music back up.”
She sighed. “I guess we’ll send him back.”
I hung up.
Kaye folded her pillow over her head to muffle the noise. She groaned. It was another fifteen minutes or so before the music stopped again. This time it never came back on.
The next morning I left the apartment to go to work and as I made my way to Kaye’s little green Toyota Tacoma, I saw that there were seven or eight clear garbage bags piled into the truck’s bed. They were close to bursting with beer cans, paper plates and other assorted party shit. I drove the truck across the parking lot, got out of the truck and started tossing the bags into the apartment complex’s communal red dumpster. Could have been worse, I thought. Suddenly, I felt guilty and told myself that I probably deserved this punishment for the way I had acted . Cops had been called on me before, not two or three years ago.
I was on the other side of the law now. I didn’t like it.
A Drunk’s Breakup