The Guy Next Door

The guy next door becomes everyone in the building; he is, in fact, a portrait of the building. Every resident is combined into that one single guy next door that you can hear through the vent in the bathroom. In the city location is everything, and proximity is the price we pay for that location. What we give up to live in the city is privacy and space.

I once lived in an apartment where we were stealing cable, and by once I mean many times, some of them intentional. This particular apartment, above the Holiday Club on Irving Park for a staggering three hundred and sixty dollars a month, had a cable outlet that was inexplicably tied to our neighbors. Unfortunately we couldn’t change the channel. If we changed the channel to anything but channel two all we’d get is snow. But on channel two we could watch whatever the neighbors had on their television. The problem with this situation was that if they changed the channel or paused the DVR recording our television would follow suit. And if they turned of the television then the channel went blank.

We got to know our neighbors by what they watched, when they watched it. We planned our TV watching time around it. We got up to get food at the same time as them, took bathroom breaks at the same time, and occasionally we rejoiced when they fell asleep with the TV on. These people, these American Idol watching people, we had never met and yet we had an intimate knowledge of their viewing habits. We could tell when the male neighbor was watching and when the female neighbor was watching and when they were fighting over what to watch.

The downtown version of this invasion of privacy is listening to your neighbors in the bathroom. At first I assumed it was our immediate neighbor giving his baby a bath that I was hearing one night as I was brushing my teeth. Then the crying baby turned into a conversation in french. The next day it was a man yelling at his girlfriend or wife or whatever “lying bitch” happened to be sharing the space with him. By this point I had surmised that all of these voices were not coming from “the guy next door,” that guy in fact being a single thirty-something female lawyer who travelled for long periods of time, but from all of the adjacent units on other floors. I was listening to a mash-up of every southeast unit in the building every time I used the bathroom.

Isn’t this the same--or worse--than stealing cable from my neighbors? And yet it’s the price we pay to live in a high rise. We’re stuck watching our neighbors shows, listening to their fights and hearing about everything that happened at work that day, but we’ve never met them. How close are we to the “guy next door?”