The Party House Next Door

The house next door sold last year. Four college kids moved in. They seemed nice. They waved. They smiled.

Then Thursday happened.

At 10 PM on a Thursday, bass started thumping through our shared wall. Not loud music. LOUD music. The kind of bass that makes your water glass vibrate on the nightstand. The kind that makes your dog hide under the bed. The kind where you can feel the kick drum in your chest cavity.

At midnight, I went over. Twenty people on the porch. Red cups everywhere. I asked them to turn it down. They said sure. They turned it down by exactly one notch. The bass was now only registering 4.2 on the Richter scale.

This happens every Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and increasingly on Wednesdays and Sundays.

I've called the police four times. They come. The music stops. The police leave. The music starts. The cycle repeats.

The kid who seems to be in charge told me, "Bro, we're young. This is what young people do." I'm 34. I'm not elderly. I just want to sleep on a Wednesday.

My other neighbors and I have started a group chat called "The Bass Watch." We take shifts monitoring the noise levels. We coordinate police calls. We are a neighborhood militia organized around a single shared enemy: the subwoofer in unit 4B.

They graduate in May. We're counting the days. There are 47 left. We have a countdown calendar in the group chat.