on Bad Neighbors

We used to live in a wonderful and artsy area of Portland, Oregon, just off Alberta Street.  The houses were all either traditional bungalows or Portland Style (four-square houses with the large front porches), or a combination thereof.  The neighbor to our South was a nice quiet family of four.  The father was a professor, the mother a retired teacher and the kids were smart, quiet, clean and polite.  Nearly every night I could see the mother and daughter washing dishes from an angled view out my kitchen window.

The neighbor to our West was a very elderly woman who required the use of a mechanical chair lift installed at her front porch.  You rarely even knew she was there except for the occasional whir and clang of the lift as she came home from grocery shopping.  Unfortunately this little old lady was getting forgetful and her granddaughter had discovered the gas stove left on far too many times.  The woman was put into a home and her two granddaughters moved in, along with their motorcycle-riding boyfriends.  From then on we were treated to extremely loud tailpipes, angry arguments, heated battles, sirens and cops blocking the street, loud death-metal music, and the near constant sound of that darned mechanical lift going up and down (all four persons living there were very, very obese).  They had two enormous dogs who would bark at any tiny instigation.  One day Robert was sitting on our porch swing when he heard the following loud declaration emanate from their house: "The whole house smells like shit, but I looked around and couldn't find any shit!"

Keeping it classy.

However, these were not our worst neighbors, by far.  To the immediate North was a man, probably in his fifties, who fancied himself to be a radio broadcaster.  There had been a fire in his house at some time in the past and for at least a decade the walls had no covering, just exposed studs and pink insulation.  He rarely ever left the house, but occasionally would have a few people staying there.  To his North was a small connector road which he would line up large boulders and park vehicles across so no one could use it.  His backyard and front porch was completely filled with horded items from broken washing machines to plastic chairs, all stacked up, rough and tumble with barely a pathway between.  He ran an electrical wire along the top of his fence to keep trespassers from entering.  And he erected a 50ft steel tower to broadcast his signals.

You would think he was breaking the law with the tower except that he didn't actually exceed the height limit for "antennae" in the city.  He also typically kept his amplification rate just barely under the legal limit.  This really didn't matter much because all the houses in the area, including ours, had old knob & tube electrical wiring. While this kind of wiring is fairly safe (despite many people's panic about "old" wiring) it kind of acts like a giant antenna, turning your house into a giant receiver.  When we'd plug in anything that had a speaker, including our telephone, it didn't matter if the item was turned on or not, the speakers would broadcast anything our neighbor was outputting.  Neighbors got together and complained to the FCC and to the councilpersons, but he was actually within the letter of the law.

I still remember a conversation I had with my grandmother.  She had called me and suddenly the neighbor began to broadcast his intermittent "show" which consisted mostly of saying "holy guacamole" over and over with an echo, or playing one of those Christmas songs featuring dogs barking the tune.  This time he was repeating, "you're a dirty bitch, you're a dirty bitch", to which my Grandmother replied, "what did you say, Bud?"  I tried to explain that it wasn't me, but his volume was far too high for me to get this across.

We even tried to talk to him, but it seems we were part of the "establishment trying to take him down".  He was paranoid and delusional and felt this radio broadcasting was his way to get back at the "man".

I don't miss him.