Love Thy Neighbor
Watching, despising, and befriending folks on your block
I think Horny Neighbor might’ve broken up with his girlfriend, I text Max. She hasn’t been here for a few days.
Horny Neighbor is a man who lives in the building across the street from us. His apartment is directly opposite and slightly below ours with the curtains perpetually open and the lights on. I first noticed him a year or so ago when I couldn’t sleep. I glanced out my window and saw him having wild sex with a red haired woman in his desk chair. A couple days later, he did the same thing with a different lady in a different position, and then the same thing happened again three nights after that. Hence the nickname.
The rotation of Horny Neighbor’s partners continued for months. Without fail, every other evening he had a new person underneath (or occasionally on top) of him. Their antics started between 11:00 and 11:30 PM, and lasted about 35 minutes. Then around Halloween last year, the same girl kept showing up. She participated in the sexy stuff, but mostly they cuddled.
I provide these updates to Max frequently, though he is admittedly not as interested as I am. Before his move to London, Max said he found my data collection and commentary concerning Horny Neighbor’s bedding habits “odd.” He’d beg me to stop staring, to go to sleep. He raised an eyebrow if I brought party guests into our bedroom to show them Horny Neighbor banging on, as if he was a valued piece of artwork and not just a Murray Hill exhibitionist we’d unluckily ended up living near. I understood Max’s take. But to me, Horny Neighbor is kind of a novelty. Almost like my own version of Ugly Naked Guy from Friends, Rachel and Monica’s nudist neighbor who the gang frequently watches through a picture window, offering commentary as they observe.
I grew up in a small town 100 miles north of New York City. It was the kind of place where I knew the neighbors pretty well because I interacted with them outside of where we lived. My parents’ home shared a boundary with the house of my grumpy middle school secretary and her trees’ leaves fell into our yard every autumn. The dentist around the cul-de-sac ran the practice where I was a patient, never failing to remind me of an upcoming appointment if I trick-or-treated at his house on Halloween.
Outside of a murder case, the folks who lived near us were basically good albeit boring people. They walked their dogs. They shoveled their snowy driveways. Whenever my name was in the paper on the honor roll, they cut it out and put it in our mailbox with a “Congratulations” note. It was nice. But I always craved something a little more… interesting.
Colorful neighbors are part and parcel of living in big cities, especially New York. There’s a reason it’s a trope included in so many television shows. Rogue comedian Kramer across the hall from Jerry in Seinfeld. Laird, the recovering addict downstairs from Hannah for five out of six seasons of Girls. Obsessive, bordering on psychotic Val Bassett residing above Will & Grace. The Friends cast were doubly blessed, as they also had Mr. Heckles, the grouchy guy pounding the floor with a broom telling them to quiet down.
I’ve spent more than 10.5 years in Manhattan, and in that time I’ve experienced lots of neighbors. It started with a couple oddball roommates. My first while in the dorms at NYU came from Hangzhou, where there was a twelve hour time difference. She travelled back often enough that she chose not to adapt: taking late classes and sleeping her mornings away. I’m a chronic early bird, yet we somehow managed to co-exist. My second roommate was a more chaotic character. She slept normally, but woke me up with her night terrors, or by having phone arguments with fast fashion companies (she constantly tried to return clothing she’d worn and soiled). She also had a strange obsession with trying out for college Jeopardy, the practice test process for which occupied the suite’s kitchen for hours. After four months of this, I couldn’t deal. The answer, Alex: What is, Rachel needs a place all to herself?
In December 2015, I moved into a studio in Kips Bay. The building is rent controlled, which meant the majority of my neighbors had been there since units went on the market in 1967. Others were young doctors working at the NYU Langone campus down the street. I made eyes at a few in the elevator, hoping to have a moment a la Miranda in Sex and the City with Dr. Leeds. Unfortunately, it never resulted in anything but an exchange of smiles.
I did become friendly with some residents, though, particularly those on my floor. There was Kathleen next door in 4C. She had immigrated to New York from Ireland with her husband in the 70s and had a career as a nurse at Bellevue, the country’s oldest public hospital. I met Kathleen much later, in her 70s and widowed. She was frequently unable to figure out how the volume worked on her landline. Once a month, she’d knock on my door and request assistance “turning the damned thing back on.” I always stopped to help, even if I made myself late to class or work. I liked any excuse to step into her quirky, railroad-style apartment. It was much larger than mine and had all the original furniture, including glass cabinets filled with Waterford Crystal and Wedgewood china. I loved looking over every unique treasure. She moved out in the pandemic to a nursing home. I cried, and not only because I saw her last rent bill: she paid less than $900 per month. No wonder nobody ever left…
Another neighbor I fell in with was Robert in 4B. Like me, Robert had gone to NYU and Columbia to study storytelling, specifically theatre. He rented his unit in 1971. “I thought I’d be here a year, maybe two,” he told me one day as I picked up a package he’d held onto after it was delivered when I was out of town. “Fifty years later, I’m still here.”
Robert and I have become fairly close. We complain about oddities in the building. Weird smells, the temperamental poll heating, the incredibly loud woman above us who before she left seemed to constantly be moving her furniture. When water damage took out my bathroom mirror during a work trip, Robert was the person who texted to warn me he thought he’d heard a crash. If one of his many parakeets got loose, I’d inevitably find it perched in the flower basket hanging on my front door. He’d walk his beloved dog, Christmas, at the time I came home from raucous parties in college and it was always nice to see the little welcoming committee; to experience the many joys of living alone while still having someone there to ask if I’d had a good night.
Max and I have gotten acquainted with our doormen the past two years, but most of the neighbors we have now aren’t like Robert or Kathleen. They’re young, busy, too absorbed in their phones during elevator rides to even look up once they reach their floors, let alone say “hello.” I find them boring. Not the kind of people I want to be friends with, not the type of folks I moved to New York hoping to meet. Certainly not the sort of inspiration I want for my fiction writing, where my plot points are often loosely inspired by life. Horny Neighbor is the only remotely compelling character in this cast, which is probably why I’ve fixated on him.
It’s been a few weeks now and Horny Neighbor’s cuddle buddy has yet to come back, as far as I know. But don’t worry too much for him. Word on the street is that his nosy neighbor is working on a rom-com novel, and she might just write him in as a side character; with a happy ending, of course.
Rachel’s Weekly Recs:
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