A Love Like That · 31 May 2002
I never saw Dee’s face, only imagined it while I hollered down the phone line. I imagined the sort of angles and jut and long blond streaks and studio tan worn by the urban surfer dood of the time. He was the restaurant manager. I was the angry neighbour. It was 1989.
A godsend apartment: the entire top floor of a crumbling walkup perched above the lifestyle porn and display-case kitsch of Robson Street, downtown Vancouver. Roof garden out back, huge rooms, bay windows. The only neighbour had the second floor, and was never there. The rent was $487 a month, of which I paid half.
The street noise from Robson was constant, sure, but nothing to which you couldn’t grow accustomed. And this was the dawn of the bass cannon era: boom cars from Surrey drove up and down all night, rattling windows; bad white boys in shiny low riders, pumping the NWA. Sometimes we would pitch eggs at windshields and fall to the floor laughing hard.
I came home one afternoon and saw, across the street, opposite my room, a sort of party taking place on the balcony of a space that had until then been boarded up. Shoulder pads and glazed cocaine smiles clinking glasses of sparkling wine, toasting – it surely must have been – a primo investment. A theme restaurant was opening; the theme was the Beatles. The menu would boast Ringo onion rings, strawberry fields shakes, octopus garden calamari, and so on. Food, fun, fab four.
Late into that night, through the tin outdoor speakers, ten Beatles songs played in, as they say, heavy rotation. It would stop for a while until, I suppose, someone flipped the tape, and then the tomtom fill and She loves you ya, ya, ya would swell again. I remember thinking, boy, I hope this party doesn’t go on too long, because this is getting annoying!
Of course it went on for over a year. Day after day, night after night, the same ten Beatles songs played, permeating everything. Somewhere in that year I developed a tic in my eye that can still be fired off with ‘Norwegian Wood’. In that apartment I learned I can handle virtually any distraction – I can read calmly while roomates fuck, I can doze while hockey playoff riots surge on the street outside – but I cannot escape the ten-ton weight of the same songs, spun in a row.
I learned I had no legal recourse: the street was zoned commercial, and there weren’t supposed to be any residents there at all. This was at least part of the reason why the rent was so cheap. One can’t exactly complain to City Hall from a position of illegality.
The phone calls started amiably enough, I’d ask to speak to the manager, hey guy, it’s after midnight and I gotta work in the morning type of thing, and he (I remind you his name was Dee) would say okay guy, we’ll turn it off real soon, and it would go on and on.
After some months I rented a small programmable signboard and propped it in my bedroom window – anyone at the restaurant who cast their eyes across the street would have seen FUCK YOU FUCK YOU scrolling by in LED, on a permanent loop. Sometimes when the restaurant was busy on a hot summer evening – a miracle, the food and service were awful – I’d open the windows wide and aim the stereo speakers across the street and play some Big Black or Scratch Acid. I wanted to share, you see.
—I see a lot of apartments over there, and you’re the only one who ever calls to complain.
—I’m the only one here, chowderfuck!
It went on until the wretched, horrid, refills-free nightmare finally went out of business after thirteen months; clumsily, weakly, to the sound of numbered corporations dissolving.
* * *