A month or so ago, I attended the Spring Fling, basically a marketing opportunity for various performing arts organizations in the city.  I gave my contact info for a chance to win tickets at a number of venues.  While it doesn’t appear that I’ve won anything, I did receive a nasty reminder of something I’d rather forget.

There are a few periods in my life that I consider the worst.  The first is the period of my mother’s illness.  The second is the hell of living with my father’s fourth wife in the aftermath of my mother’s death.  The third is my last two or so years in New York, when I suffered serious depression and anxiety.  The fourth took place just this past winter.  I was subjected to the ugliest, most hostile living conditions since I left New York City.  The worst New York had to offer couldn’t compare.

When things get really, horribly bad, I strangely clam up.  When I was subjected to a mildly annoying and very passive-aggressive neighbor, I had no problem bitching about it to my friends and on my blog.  But my neighbor situation last winter was practically unspeakable.

The noise.  It was constant.  Loud music practice, blasting electronica, blaring TV, hysterical laughing, loud talking on the verge of shouting, sometimes actual shouting.  Whenever I heard a commotion on the street, I needed only to count to ten before I heard the downstairs apartment’s door open and close.  And then there was the bathroom fan.  A hum at about sixty-five decibels.  Vibrations reverberating throughout my apartment.  It would turn on at 1 p.m. (downstairs slacker’s wake-up time) and turn off late at night.  Sometimes it would start up at 3 a.m. and stay on for an hour.  This noise was rarely accompanied by the sound of water running.

I’m naturally a homebody, but I particularly need to nest in the fall and winter, especially in gray, rainy Seattle, but I had reached the point where I dreaded going home at night.

My patience having been put to the limit, I started to complain.  My complaints were honored (at least on that particular day or night), but the male unit of the couple made sure to shout “What a bitch!” and other epithets at the ceiling once I returned to my apartment.  I’d come home to find the music downstairs to be somewhat tolerable, but the neighbors made sure to jack it up to intolerable levels once I’d walked through the door.

And then the gaslighting.  The neighbors treated me like a bitch, like a lunatic.  Everything they were guilty of they lobbed at me.  I was vindictive.  I was childish.  I was a liar.  I was a nuisance.  Any noise I made for whatever reason or at whatever time of day was intolerable to them.  I started to feel like I was going crazy.  I started to believe that I was a shitty person undeserving of peace or respect.  And the noise never, ever stopped or decreased.

Things came to a head, and they were forced to shut everything down (ironic, since I merely wanted some peace and quiet).  Ultimately, though, I couldn’t bear the venom seeping up through my apartment floor.  Cheap rent and the permission to paint and otherwise modify my space weren’t worth that shit.  So, as soon as I was able, I moved out.

The reminder:  One of the major theater companies (Intiman, Seattle Rep, whatever) sent an email with a photo of the female part of the equation at one of their events.  I’ve thankfully let go of much of the awful feelings of that time; it helps that my new apartment is amazing, replete with friendly and respectful neighbors, and that my life is better than ever.  But I still retain some of the bafflement of that experience.  What kind of issues does a person need to have to treat others that way?  Certainly the husband was a bundle of barely contained rage (I’m almost certain he reacted to the apartment manager’s cracking down on him by throwing furniture around), but what accounts for his wife’s behavior?  Most of the projection from that quarter came from her.

Perhaps unsurprisingly they did not learn from the experience.  I heard from another neighbor that they moved out under duress a couple of months later.  I guess whoever moved into my old place didn’t appreciate their antics any more than I did.  Who’s to say if they will ever learn/ever grow up.  What I do know is:  living well is the best revenge.

I don’t understand the question “What is your first childhood memory?”  Is it even possible to know?

I remember being pushed in a stroller, pushing my own doll carriage as my parents and I took a walk, driving my plastic toddler tricycle–designed to look like a motorcycle-down the path to our townhouse complex’s garden.  I remember eating dinner with my parents in that garden.  (A very early memory indeed since it didn’t take long after my birth for their relationship to turn to complete shit.)  At at least one of those dinners, I know we had lamb chops with mint jelly.

I remember wearing water wings in the swimming pool.  I remember having chicken pox, which gave me fever-induced nightmares about my father.  I sort of remember my mormor (maternal grandmother), and I definitely remember her asher and wienerbrod.  (I have not been able to find an almond danish that could rival hers.)  I remember playing in my turtle-shaped sandbox and hanging out in the cardboard playhouse on the deck outside my parents’ bedroom.

I have many memories of my early childhood, but I don’t have the faintest idea which is my first.

I will admit there was one time when I had respect for my dad’s fourth.

It happened one evening when the three of us went out for dinner and a movie.  My dad dropped us off with his assumption that Ellie and I would get a table while he parked the car.  When he returned, he was dismayed to see that we simply waited for him outside the restaurant.  Bear in mind, there was no wait at the restaurant at all, nor did he have reason to think that there would be.  It was yet another instance of Mr. Skornia getting unreasonably peeved over nothing at all.

He would not let it go.  We went into the restaurant, sat down at the table, perused our menus, all while he was bitching at Ellie for not reading his mind.  She eventually got fed up and stalked out of the restaurant.  Dad followed her to get her to come back, but no dice.  She had her purse, but not her house keys, and we were a good 25 miles from home.  She took the train back to San Jose and waited at a neighbor’s for Dad and me to return.

I had mad respect for her that day.  If only more women in my father’s life had done that sort of thing more often.  He might have learned to control his temper a little earlier in his life.

I hate to harp on the craziness of my father’s ex-wife (Oh, who am I kidding?  I love to do this.), but I have a classic crazy story about her.  It doesn’t even involve my teenage antics.

Sometime early in their marriage, even before I moved in, Ms. Smith was diagnosed with breast cancer.  She opted for a double mastectomy with no implants.  She wanted to nip a chance of reoccurrence in the other breast in the bud, and she was pretty much unattached to her breasts.  (Yeah, that’s weird.)  The appointment for the surgery was all set.  There was just one problem:  she never told my father about any of it.

The night before the surgery, my father was checking his answering machine.  There was a message from the hospital confirming the appointment for the surgery.  Busted!  Seriously, though, what was she thinking?  She was counting on disappearing for a couple days and then showing up completely flat chested?  Like my father wouldn’t notice?

I guess I can understand simply not wanting to deal with the problem, and there are people like this who just can’t face it and choose not to get treatment at all.  I could even understand her walking out on my father if she simply couldn’t deal with the possibility of her illness putting a strain on their marriage.  But simply not telling him?  Letting him worry for a couple of days when she disappears and turning up again post-op?  She was sixty years old, way too old for that kind of immature, bizarre behavior.

My father’s fourth wife was the queen of passive aggression.  It chapped her ass that I would go to my room to watch TV and study after school, because clearly I should want to spend time in the cold, drab kitchen with her while she watched sports*.

Her solution to her annoyance was to call me down to dinner via a dinner bell.  She couldn’t come up to my room and knock on the door.  She couldn’t even set a specific time for dinner and simply ask me to be punctual.  Nope, not Ellie Smith.  She had a knack for finding the most absurd methods of getting even for real or (usually) perceived slights.

Understandably, it annoyed me to be called down to dinner in this manner.  One afternoon after school before ma bête-mère came home, simply out of curiosity, I picked up the bell from its resting place next to the kitchen table and examined it.  I discovered how to remove the, um, clangy thing in the middle.  (Aha!  The dictionary saves me yet again.)  I figured out how to remove the clapper from inside the bell.  It was simply a matter of unscrewing the top of the bell’s handle.  Loosen it enough and the clapper fell out.  I put it back in but left it loose, just loose enough for what I hoped would happen later that night.

At around 7 p.m., I heard a clank, clank, thud.  The clapper flew out of the bell and hit the floor.  All the king’s horses and wife number four couldn’t put the bell back together again.

Problem solved!  Until she decided to call me on the phone to inform me dinner was ready.

*The really frustrating thing is that, even had I done what she supposedly wanted, she still wouldn’t have been satisfied.  If I had hung around too much, she would have found an excuse to be get upset; she likely would have decided that I was cramping her style.  She certainly didn’t like it when I had dinner with her.  I had an unfortunate habit of speaking my mind.