The Death of a Hometown

Oh, Bethesda, my Bethesda. A quarter of a century ago you were a sleepy little suburb, the end of the subway line, a quiet little community with no skyline and you curled up and went to sleep when the sun set. There were groovy head shops and record stores where I discovered the last vestiges of the zine culture, grabbing copies of Pagan’s Head, ANSWER me!, the Krylon Underground, and so many others. These strange, Xeroxed voices screaming their rage into the empty streets of the wealthiest suburb in the wealthiest county in America. I learned to love horror movies at the local ma & pop video store in those days before we ever heard of Blockbuster or Hollywood Video. In the days when everyone only had seven TV channels to choose from, maybe more if you held the antenna just right.

There was a strange, hard edge to this community, as well. A little bit of bubbling, creeping horror just beneath the surface. Everyone’s favorite basement pub doubled as DC’s cocaine headquarters, everyone I knew had been attacked or threatened on the street at some point. One girl was snatched and had to throw herself out of a moving car, another was brutally raped and killed at the same spot where another murder had happened just weeks before. Where now there’s a gleaming rail trail, there once was a dark train tunnel that was home to a sub-culture of cave dwellers. Where now the footsteps behind you come from a blonde in yoga pants carrying their emotional service poodle, they would once have been cause for alarm. Where once those lovely houses stood, and the best indie bookstore in DC, and the best Irish pub around, there are now expensive condos in buildings that claw towards the sky.

And here I am. 671 days since I moved back to this New Bethesda, my old high school town. But now the town’s full of weird milquetoast neo-Yuppies.  Now I have to share space with Neighbors From Hell.

Our little community of townhouses has replaced one of the grand old mansions of Bethesda, at a prime location right near the Metro station. They’re beautiful homes but, as with everything built in the last 20 years, they seem to be made out of tissue paper and cardboard. We hear every step our neighbors take, and can make out every word they say in their master bedroom. We stopped setting our alarm in the mornings because we have theirs to wake us up each morning. In the evenings, their entertainment system rattles the pictures on our walls, rolls through the floor with ominous seismic reverberations, and we once mistook a police chase on their TV as the real thing and rushed out front to find…weeknight calm and silence.

I’m sure we’re just as annoying, but that’s all part of sharing walls. While I’m glad to admit our own noise-level may be inappropriate at times, I feel it’s also necessary to note that we work our asses off 10 hours a day and are gone while these neighbors are one-percenter layabouts who clatter around their house all day without, seemingly, a care in the world.

Our little gated community forms a neat square surrounding a poorly landscaped, mosquito-infested “village green.” Our neighbors rarely make use of this space, though, preferring to retreat to their patios where they can stare sullenly at anyone who attempts to use the common area for recreation. Everyone’s house has a space in this little square – tiny, fenced-in porches which some of us like to decorate. Half of the residents are absentee owners, their porches bare and empty save for the occasional slime-crusted puddle or rotting pile of phone books and newspapers. Those of us who do actually live in our houses have porches that can go from lush gardens to primly maintained ornamental bushes depending on how much of a stick in the mud you are. Ours features the most aggressively loud water fountain we could find and the railing is strung with beads. Out of a community of 20 households, we’re the only ones who really make use of our porch. We have a tiny little music system, and we love to crash out beneath our umbrella and enjoy the weekend air.

But, then, a killjoy surfaced. In our shared garage, each house has a little mailbox by their garage doors for internal mail. For the past few months, anonymous notes have appeared in several people’s boxes. Sometimes they’re borderline racist, implying that our one minority neighbor isn’t welcome. Sometimes they’re vaguely threatening warnings — “remember your place” or “you’d keep silent if you knew what was best for you.”

All these notes are printed out and then cut from their original sheet of paper, so they look like twisted fortunes. Last weekend, we were finally hit with one, bemoaning how we drink too much and how noisy we are. “Day after day…week after week…your drinking and lewd conduct disturb us all.” The note goes on to warn us that we should “act our age” and “stop embarrassing ourselves.”

It’s almost like these people don’t realize that they live next to a book publisher and a gal from New Orleans! But, of course, they might not…because they’re all shut-in sociopaths.

There are two groups in our community. There are the cool fuckers — that’s us and our little drunken cabal — and then there are the dirty lying fuckers. That’s everyone else. That latter category is full of amazing characters. There’s the guy who everyone believes is a serial killer, to the point where half the community spies on him Rear Window style. No one has heard him speak a single word, not even a “hello” in passing. There’s the old guy who likes to spend his days at the local gym watching people in the shower. There’s the pervy guy whose face is glued to the window every time the neighbor’s 14 year old daughter is on the move. He even texts her and shows up asking for her at weird hours. There are others, all of varying degrees of uncomfortable insanity. They are the shock troops for The Enemy. The opposing clan with whom we share our communal space, and from whom the mysterious notes are coming. We all have our suspicions. Could the racist notes be coming from the guy who told our minority neighbor that “brown people bring down everyone’s property values”? Nah… Because he cheerfully said that to her face. Why, then, author an anonymous note along the same lines? Some believe it’s the president of our HOA, all smiles and support during the day, a passive-aggressive note bandit at night. Some think it’s one of the spouses from the dirty lying fuckers party. By and large, the spouses are all dark horses. In the case of the neighbor who shares our wall, I’ve only seen her husband once in 3 years. We spend our lives a foot apart and have never exchanged a word.

(By the way — the consensus is that it is our HOA president. If so, people like that worry me. He tries so hard to be our friend face to face, and, then, in secret, he’s a bigoted madman. It’s people like that who stalk through the halls with a high powered rifle. It’s not the weirdo living in the woods, it’s the normal rich guy who’s all smiles until his door closes and he has a Buffalo Bill style meltdown.)

Anyway, the problem with the notes, I think, is the same problem that terrorists have. They believe that blowing up buildings and people will change things. They rely on that, in fact. Yet all they actually achieve is to rally the populace against them, to inspire the community to unite and fight back. That note hit our mailbox and our first thought was that we had to step it up a notch. The music would have to get louder, more angry, more aggressive. The alcohol would flow. And lewd conduct? Well, they may have us there. As we are now, we sit like Lucy and Ricky in separate chairs and share an occasional kiss, a slap on the ass. As good white, Anglo-Saxon Catholics, that’s about the limit of our lewd conduct comfort level. We discussed how to step up our game, but the dirty lying fuckers party has us beat. One of them stands naked at her window for all to see, and then we have short-eyes perving on the 14 year old, and the locker room peeping tom. One of our neighbors orders male prostitutes on a regular basis, and another has converted his garage into a kinky, mirrored playroom. The dirty lying fuckers party are so far down the road of bizarre decadence that we’re unsure how to go about alarming them. Annoy, yes. But really shocking them? They shock us with every action they take.

But, now, we have no choice. We must push forward. We must stand united in the face of terrorism and despair! So I just ordered a bunch of Satanic symbols and rude, fornicating garden gnomes for our patio.