I’m trying to write with a loud and obnoxious neighbor, and
since we’re renting the house we’re living in, we are seriously considering
moving when the lease is up end of November. I mean really. Houses in this part
of the country are notoriously close together (I’ve seen some you could barely
walk between, but ours are more like 3 yards apart). When this woman isn’t
screaming profanities at her children, she’s yelling into her phone (like she
is Right Now, /sigh). And she has such a loud voice that I can understand most
of what she says—whether I want to or not—even when we both have our windows
closed.

This woman, a hard-voiced smoker in her forties with three children, moved in
this past summer. I can’t tell if she’s a single mother or not—sometimes there’s
a man over there and sometimes there isn’t. Often, she fights with him, whoever
he is. He wasn’t there on the infamous Night of the Drunk Guy.

It’s infamous in our house, at least. You see, there’s a bar down the street. According
to Business Insider, Pittsburgh has the fourth highest number of bars per
capita in the country—what can I say, it’s a Drinking Town With A Sports
Problem.

Anyway. As I was saying. That night, when the bar nearest us closed and ejected
its patrons, one of them ended up in the road that runs behind both our houses.
Now, my neighbor keeps very late hours, and that night was apparently no
exception. I was awakened somewhere around 2am by Drunk Guy issuing a mating
call, seemingly convinced he’d stumbled upon a bordello.

Did I mention, our houses are built on a hillside (a common situation in
Pittsburgh), and the road behind is at the level of the upper floor windows?

When my neighbor finally noticed he was talking to her, the fun started. That’s
when the entire neighborhood was alerted to her state of undress and to the
fact that her curtains were wide open with the lights on, giving Drunk Guy a
real-life peep show. I don’t know if she covered herself, since I never left my
bed, but I do know she threw open the window and started spewing profanities at
the top of her capacious lungs, offended to her very core that anyone could
think she was That Kind Of Woman, Since She Is A Mother.

And I’m groggily thinking, She kisses her children with that mouth?

Meanwhile, I hear doors opening and footsteps on porches and a tired male voice
saying, “Just close your curtains, okay? Just close your curtains.”

The furor lasted for some few minutes. The general gist of it seemed to be on
the one hand that Drunk Guy should have known she was a mother (perhaps by her
mystical aura?), and on the other hand my neighbor must have wanted something
because she was starkers with her curtains open. Eventually it settled down,
and Drunk Guy continued his stumble up the street, muttering, “I thought
she was a <unintelligible mumble>.” I can only guess at what he
said. It probably wasn’t
“mother.”