Dave & Tara vs. Party House: It’s War

Remember Party House? Well, they had another party on Saturday — the worst, loudest one yet. It was so bad that it significantly increased hostilities.

So here’s a slightly abridged version of what went on. We came home from our social engagement on Saturday in the early evening, to hear the sounds of the band tuning up in the back yard at Party House, and a red Sharpied sign taped to the front screen door, advising guests to go around to the back. I started getting angry in advance about the loud, annoying night I was in for. And, not to wreck the end of the story, but my rage, though it kicked in early, was not unwarranted.

I’ve commented boringly here on how poorly I’ve been sleeping at home lately, which may have been part of the reason I was cozily tucked in at 10:40 on a Saturday night (another part might be that I’m not just an old lady but also the neighbourhood crank, suddenly), so I was at the front of the house when 11 PM (when quiet hours start) came and I could still hear the Party House band in the back. Which is why I called the police at 11:05. By this time, Dave had also ended up in the bedroom and was sort of making fun of me for calling almost as soon as I possibly could. But twenty minutes later, he had turned off the bedroom lights and TV, the better for us to see the cruiser when it pulled up — containing, I hoped, not a mellow older cop like Dave’s dad (before he retired), but a really young, angry jerk with a chip on his shoulder and something to prove.

Meanwhile, guests were still arriving. We had opened the door out to the little balcony off our bedroom to eavesdrop on the cop conversation, whenever it would occur, and could hear them yelling to each other. One tidbit that caught our interest was a girl saying she had “an exam” on Monday; we had thought the tenants were in their mid-twenties but, no, it sounds like they’re university students. Awesome. A taxi pulled up and disgorged four party guests and a case of beer; three of the dudes went to the house, and the fourth wandered across the street to pee in our neighbour’s front yard. Oh, and because the guests had to access the party via the walkway between our house and Party House, many of these drunk dicks were strolling up OUR front walk to get to the alley. How many of them have peed in our front yard without our knowing?

The bongos stopped sometime before midnight, but there was still plenty of yelling — including from a knot of about twenty of them right under our bedroom window, as some of them made plans about where to go next and others declared their intention to stay.

When an hour and a half had gone by and no cops had shown up, I started to wonder if the reason was that I had called them, first, from our business phone line, but when asked had given them my home phone number. So I called again, just to be sure, to say there were at least fifty people there still kicking it and making a nuisance of themselves all over their and our front yards. The dispatcher promised that the cops were just busy, but were going to come.

It’s probably around this time — 12:30 or so — that even Dave started to get angry. Normally I’m the rage engine of our household and he just lets shit slide, but our neighbour had rented this house to a bunch of dickheads — maybe more than she even knew of, since another thing we heard in our eavesdropping was a girl saying she was moving into Party House on Thursday — who were treating it like a frat house, which isn’t exactly considerate of the homeowners who purposely didn’t buy property within forty blocks of U of T. We moved out to the balcony and started openly spying on them, trying to figure out which of the asswipes actually lived in the house. This is how we were able to witness a couple of them leaning on our neighbour’s car while they smoked; another guy demanding a ride from some girls in an SUV by standing in the middle of the road so they couldn’t drive around him (and, when they relented, he left his near-empty plastic cup on the sidewalk in front of our house); and yet another dude peeing into our neighbour’s garden (not the same one that had been peed on before). We started to despair of the cops ever coming, though Dave — again, usually sanguine — called them again shortly after 1 AM, from his cell phone, to register another complaint. This would be just after one superdick emerged from Party House with an ear-splitting “WOO!” It was just before a group of them left in a taxi van, screaming to each other from our front yard to the Party House back yard about who was going to take it and who had cash and so on. As one girl shuffled drunkenly down our front walk screaming for an Elias, I shouted at her (from the balcony) to shut up. She looked around, bewildered, but obviously couldn’t see me (did I mention I was in black pyjamas? I’m a ninja of Party House surveillance); I would like to think she thought it was the voice of her conscience.

Around 1:20, a group of five stragglers made their extremely loud exit. A girl ordered the elusive Elias, “Go back and make sure her front door is locked.”

Elias: Huh?

Girl: Make sure the door is locked before we leave; someone could just walk in and steal that computer.

Elias: I don’t give a shit; it’s not my house.

They left. Still the cops hadn’t come. After we hadn’t seen or heard any action around the house, we started to wonder: had the host of the party actually left earlier, trusting some of her obviously upstanding friends to lock up for her? And had they failed to do so? Was Party House empty, with its front door wide open and a sign on the screen door more or less indicating that the house wasn’t quite occupied? Dave darted over, rang the doorbell, and took cover. No one came. They had left our neighbour’s house — probably still full of her possessions — for any shady person to violate. We wished we knew one we could call.

At 1:45, a squad car pulled up the street. It paused outside Party House. No one got out of the car. It drove off.

SO, the next day, we went to the police station to ask what we were supposed to do. “We know this isn’t really a police issue, strictly speaking,” Dave said. “Other than the noise, they’re not breaking any laws.” “Some of them probably smoke weed back there,” I offered. “Oooooooh,” said the officer sarcastically. Uh, okay. She gave us the number for by-law enforcement, and yesterday I called to get an inspector to…do whatever they do. I’m not really sure what happens if the inspector shows up and (a) no one’s there, or (b) what is enforceable if the person making the noise isn’t caught in the act. But several of our neighbours on either side of Party House have compared notes and are pretty pissed — not least at our neighbour, who I’ll call Flossie, who’s apparently spending the entire summer travelling abroad. Thanks for doing such a great job screening your tenants, lady.

Anyway: during the party, I didn’t really see the merit of trying to go over there and confront the tenants at that moment — all 5′4″ of thirty-one-year-old female me against forty-odd giant drunk frat boys. But now, if I ever saw one of them around the house during daylight hours, I won’t scruple to tell him or her some shit. And if I never do catch one of them when the odds are in my favour that he or she will be sober, at least now I know that all the wrath of a municipal by-law enforcer is about to come down on them like a fiery rain. Deal with that, Bongo Jones!