Not unlike many New Yorkers who inhabit tiny, shabby apartments with rice paper walls, there is too much noise emanating from the apartment above me, and apparently, from my apartment as well.

My neighbor, Felix, had always been a minor annoyance, complaining about the occasional footfalls or a random noise coming from my apartment. Once I got married and my husband moved in though, the situation deteriorated. Felix, who lost his job as a computer programmer about 8 months after my husband’s arrival, began to complain seriously about noise. It wasn’t that our TV blared or that we cranked the stereo until 3AM. We were walking too loudly. At first, we tolerated his complaints and promised to do better, but the problem was that we rarely walked around the apartment with our shoes on. If anything, I sometimes wore rubber-soled shoes, but my husband trolled around constantly in his socks. How could we be walking too loudly? We had carpets with carpet pads in all the high traffic areas (as much as a 300-square-foot apartment can have high traffic areas), and we had never received any complaints from the neighbors below us, a reasonable expectation if we were, in fact, making too much noise. We were mystified. One evening as I lay in bed reading and my husband sat on the couch watching television, Felix knocked on the door. "I’m hearing a squeaking noise coming from your apartment. It sounds like a rocking chair, like eek ahk, eek ahk," he said. My husband and I looked at each other, nonplussed. It was then that we decided he was nuts.

About this time, Rohan and Abdul moved in upstairs. A couple of free-wheeling Arthur Andersen consultants, they liked to party and listen to house music. Or the same two songs, anyway. We began to hear loud thump-thumping at all times of day and night. Finally, we went upstairs to introduce ourselves and kindly ask that they take their speakers off the floor. They were nice enough when confronted and would turn the music down for 10 minutes or so, but invariably they’d jack it back up to previously unheard-of levels. We began to write down when and how long the music played, just for laughs, or for evidence in a possible criminal court case in which I might have to stand trial for killing them both. The record for earliest time was 6 AM. Latest, 2.12 AM. I was about to have a nervous breakdown.

Meanwhile, Felix, our next door neighbor, stopped complaining. We weren’t able to figure out exactly what we’d been doing right until one evening we saw him with a girl. Felix finally had a girlfriend. And God bless her, during the time she dated him we didn’t hear a peep out of him. We were happy. Felix even brought us a slab of filet mignon one evening, the remnants of a romantic dinner that Mary, his new girl, had cooked for him. We were sure he had probably peed on it before giving it to us, so we tossed it in the garbage but still considered it a nice gesture.

That same evening, at around 9.30pm, our bedroom ceiling began to leak. Water was pouring in over the bed and we scrambled for buckets and trash bags to repel the incoming tide. When the Super finally arrived, he was awed by the amount of water that had accumulated in the row of buckets we had set across the floor. Apparently, the radiator in Ro and Ab’s apartment had sprung a leak so the Super ran upstairs and turned it off, warning them not to turn it on until the plumber could repair it. Luckily, the weather had not been too cold, so this was not a hardship in our terminally overheated building.

My husband called the next day to make sure the plumber had fixed their leaky radiator, but the management company told him that Ro and Ab could not agree on a time, and that the radiator would be fixed later in the week. Two weeks later, at about 3 AM on a Wednesday morning, the ceiling began spewing dirty brownish water over us as we slept. My husband leapt up out of bed --it was leaking primarily on his face-- and we hustled into the kitchen for our trash bag drop cloth and the buckets. We could hear Ro or Ab walking around above us, so we ran upstairs. They would not answer the door, no matter how much we pounded and called their names. Finally, we had to get the Super out of bed to get them to open up. When Ro finally answered the door, he claimed that he thought intruders were trying to break in and that’s why he was scared to open up. I heard the Super brush past him and head for the back of the apartment, with Ro trailing him and whining that he had not turned the radiator on. A moment later the Super reappeared in the hall and told us, sotto voce, that the radiator had been going full blast.

I got on the phone to the management company and left an outraged, but, from what my husband tells me, pretty even-toned message demanding the radiator be fixed immediately. Five hours later, we heard the plumber huffing and puffing up the stairs with his equipment.

Six weeks later and it was over. Felix’s girlfriend, Mary, had moved back to Ireland to attend school and Felix was suddenly alone with himself again. He started to complain sporadically. We figured he, who now was extendedly-jobless, was perhaps was a bit lonely with Mary gone and wanted to engage us in anyway possible, so we did our best to walk around quietly and ignore him. But Felix was not to be ignored. Two weeks later, I received a registered letter from Felix, threatening to report me to the "proper authorities" if I didn’t quiet down. Who would that be? The shoe police? I called a lawyer friend who drafted a response to Felix, intimating I might haul him into court if he continued to pester us.

Upstairs, Ro and Ab began to quiet down after I wrote a letter to the management company intimating that I might take them to court for harassment (my only hope was that I could arrange to have both cases heard on the same day), and that’s when the fancy walking started. Clickety, clickety click, like tap shoes on metal. This new torture had replaced the music, for the most part. But still, some nights, they liked to mix it up with a little of both. I kept my mouth shut, remembering the management company had told me that Ro and Ab would be leaving in less than a month. I was so happy that I decided to stand outside on the stoop and give them an extended ovation as they loaded their things into a moving van. Hell, I might even help.

The delicious irony of the situation was that I had to tiptoe around my apartment in socks, while my upstairs neighbors played a mind-numbing stream of house music in two-time beat and pranced back and forth all night in what sounded like high heels. Towards the end, I thought about reporting them to the FBI as suspected terrorists. Damn the consequences. At least it would keep them out of the apartment for a couple of weeks (or months) until they were cleared of all charges.

One morning, I saw Felix on the stairs. Ro and Ab had finally moved, but Felix was still making a pest of himself. He had received my letter and didn’t understand what it meant. I was hurrying to teach a class, and I couldn’t stop to talk, so I encouraged him to call my lawyer directly to discuss the matter. That was the last we heard of him until this morning, when, in a fit of insanity, I put my shoes on as I was heading out the door and then decided to traverse the width of the bedroom, still shod, to move a plant out onto the sill. Bang bang bang, Felix pounded insanely on the wall and I, in a fury, slammed the rickety window shut as hard as I could. When I returned home this evening, a note was taped to my apartment door, no doubt about this morning’s noise. And there it will stay.