The Staging Ground

By Ben Leib

When I went out to check my laundry and found that somebody had taken my wet clothes out of the washer and set them atop the drier, I was enraged to the point of impulsiveness. That drier lid had never been cleaned that I knew of, so I interpreted the act as one of aggression. Such inconsequential dramas may seem things easy to overlook, but I was at a point in life at which I was unwilling to let people walk all over me. Powerless and subjected to the whims of a populous unconcerned with my dignity or sense of well being, I could no longer bite my tongue, take pause, and allow for such selfishness. So I took my neighbor’s clothes out of the washer, set them atop the drier – just as had been done to me – and I began my last dirty load.

As I turned around, I was surprised to see my next door neighbor, Kaitlin, standing in the doorway to the laundry room. “Why are you touching my laundry?” she asked, lips peeled like an animal demented with rabies, feet planted square.

“Oh, I was just moving it out of the way so that I could do my wash,” I said.

“But I’m still in line for the drier, right?”

“Yeah, of course,” I told her, “I’m going to finish the wash I started, and in about two hours the drier will be free for you to use.”

It wasn’t what she wanted to hear. “Excuse me? I did this load already; I should get the drier as soon as those clothes are done.”

 “Look, you’re the one who chose to come along and mess with my laundry. You took my clothes out of the wash, I’m gonna do the same,” I explained, “What’s good for the goose is good for the gander, right?”

“You’re a fucking asshole, you know that?”

“You knew that you were doing something wrong, am I right? You knew that you’d be pissing someone off by moving their laundry while they were in the middle of it.”

 “You’re a little fucking baby, you whiney little bitch.” I stared at her. Kaitlin started crying. “I’ve worked two shifts today, and I’m fucking tired. This is fucking bullshit!”

“I worked a double today also,” I told her.

—

I first heard Kaitlin crying within two weeks of moving into my new place. I heard her through the walls. It wasn’t a soft whimper either, but a loud, groaning wail. I didn’t know either Danny or Kaitlin very well. Nevertheless, I had already made up my mind that the next door neighbors would not become friends of mine, and were, in fact, folks who I should avoid.

On the day I moved in, Danny invited me into their apartment. Before I even knew their names, Danny and Kaitlin were slandering the neighbors. “Those homos,” Danny said, “are always having their gay little dramas in the driveway. We call the cops on them at least once a week,” Danny informed me, “Finally, I had to tell Zelma that, if they got ticketed for a noise complaint, she would be responsible for paying it. I did my research,” Danny smiled proudly, “and I know that it’s the landlords who are responsible for residential fines. After I let her know, Zelma had a talk with the neighbors, and they’ve been behaving so far.” Those particular neighbors moved out by the end of that month.

It was maybe three weeks after I’d moved in that I first heard the screaming, the fighting. It sounded like an earthquake was localized, against all probability and against the laws of nature, in the confines of my neighbors’ apartment. I heard their household items being thrown against walls, I felt the reverberations of their stomping, I heard the horrible things that they said to each other, and, occasionally, I would hear the brawl as their disagreements turned physical.

—

Once again my laundry had been moved, and once again Kaitlin was the culprit. I responded in kind.

“Um, yeah,” she said, storming across the driveway, “I need you to take your clothes out of there right this second.”

Maybe she thought that a direct order was more likely to meet with results. “Excuse me? You want me to stop the drier and take my clothes out?”

“It’s my turn, you leap frogged me, now get your fucking clothes out of the drier.”

“Sorry, but that’s not gonna happen.”

“Fuck you, you asshole piece of shit, get your goddamn clothes out of there.”

“Look, you took a gamble, you cut in front of me hoping that I wouldn’t say anything, but you lost. I’m going to finish my laundry, please don’t ever move it again.”

“I didn’t move your laundry,” she said. “I didn’t fucking touch your laundry.” This was beginning to sound like true insanity.

“You fucking touched it and you moved it when you took it out of that washing machine,” I pointed to the washing machine, “and set it on top of that drier,” I pointed to the drier. “You did take it out of the fucking washing machine, right?”

“You’re the one leap frogging,” she said.

“You’re the one cutting.”

“You’re a little fucking child, with all this cutting shit.”

“Cutting, leap frogging, they’re the same thing. But you’re right, this is beginning to feel totally childish. I’m not moving my goddamn laundry, period. I don’t think there’s anything else to say.”

Kaitlin screamed. She mocked my physical appearance, and questioned my mental capabilities.

Finally, I’d had enough. “Look, there’s no reason for me to stand here and listen to this. Tomorrow the landlord’s getting a call, we’ll let Zelma sort this out, but for now I’m finishing my fucking laundry.”

Kaitlin stormed out of the laundry room, using both hands to slam the door closed behind her. I caught the door before it slammed shut, angry as I could ever remember being. But it wasn’t over, because Kaitlin ran into her apartment, and, front door still open, began screaming to Danny, “That little piece of shit fucking leap frogged us.”

If she wanted to get the old man involved, I was more than game. This was a fight I wasn’t going to run from. “If you want to fucking talk about this, Danny, I’m right fucking here!” I hollered into their open door, “I’m not going anywhere.”

“What’s going on?” he asked innocently.

“This fucking asshole won’t let me do our laundry.”

“Hey man, I was there first. I’m finishing my fucking wash,” I said.

“How much more do you have to do?” Danny asked.

I gritted my teeth and replied, “One more load.”

Kaitlin ran to the doorway behind him. “This little fucker leap frogged,” she said, “He’s always pulling this bullshit…”

“You know what,” I said, interrupting her, “fuck this. I’m fucking calling Zelma tomorrow, and that’s it.”

—

I was lying in bed, feeling as if I’d been the one in a fight when the cops finally showed up at around two AM. Kaitlin had been screaming and banging and throwing and breaking, and I was surprised that she still had an apartment left when the officer knocked on the door. “Uh, oh hey,” she said upon answering, “what can I do for you?”

“We’ve got a report of a domestic disturbance,” one officer said.

“Really? Nothing like that’s going on here.”

“Nevertheless, we got a complaint. Is Daniel Mendez a resident here?”

“Yes, Dan’s sleeping right now,” Kaitlin explained.

“Well, we’re gonna need to have a word with him.”

“Really, I mean, he’s got to get up for work early tomorrow. I’d hate to wake him up.”

“Look Miss, we have to talk to Mr. Mendez because the individual who called us expressed concern for his safety. The caller believed that you were threatening him, and that his life was in danger.”

Kaitlin was tongue tied.

“No need for the melodrama, Miss. Get Daniel out here, we’ll see that he’s still alive, and then we can go.”

—

 “Hi Zelma,” I said when I got her on the line, “I’m having some problems with the laundry room.”

“Why?” she asked, “What’s going on?”

I explained the situation. I wasn’t positive that she’d agree with me. Maybe it was fine for people to move a wet load as soon as the wash cycle had run its course, but I suspected not.

“That’s terrible,” Zelma said, “I just don’t know why people can’t act like adults.” Then she asked something that took me by surprise, “Was it Kaitlin, in B?”

—

Hearing the two women fighting, Kaitlin and the woman from Apartment C, I couldn’t discern what had prompted the animosity. They were both screaming at each other. The woman from C held her own against Kaitlin. Both went for the jugular. Kaitlin screamed what a poor, undesirable, piece of trash our neighbor was. And the neighbor had no problem calling Kaitlin a lunatic, referencing the nightly fighting taking place in apartment B.

There were other incidents over the next couple of weeks. Kaitlin and the woman from C had their semiweekly verbal sparring matches out in the driveway. What’s more, things began occurring in the laundry room. First, somebody emptied the carton of detergent belonging to the woman in C. I knew this because she left an angry note taped to the drier, demanding compensation from whoever had used all of her soap.

Sometime after that, the laundry belonging to that woman’s teenage daughter, a hamper full of clean clothes, vanished. It was half of the girl’s wardrobe, and I can only imagine what it costs to dress a teenage female. The girl’s mother, the woman who’d been feuding with Kaitlin, approached me to ask if I’d seen anything. “Yeah, she’s an irresponsible teenager,” the woman explained, “She left her clothes in the laundry room for over a day. She forgot about them. But they weren’t in the way. Her hamper was in there, and I’m sure somebody just moved them to the side. I just want to know if you’ve seen anything suspicious. People have been leaving the laundry room unlocked, and I want to find out who took my daughter’s clothes.”

“I didn’t see anything. I’m really sorry.”

It was my day off and I had slept in. I was still in bed when I heard, through my bedroom window, Kaitlin talking on her cell phone to the landlord. “She’s crazy, Zelma,” Kaitlin said, “and she’s messy. She leaves trash all over the property. She’s got a cat too, and I know that’s against the rules. Yesterday, that cat got into my house and scratched up all my furniture, totally damaged my couches. Now I don’t know who’s going to pay for those couches, but… yeah, cats. I can’t even leave my door open without having to worry now about something going wrong.”

“And she gets into fights,” Kaitlin continued, “the cops came over and talked to her and her boyfriend just last week… Yeah, they were fighting all night and someone called the police on them. The police actually had to get the guy out of their house.”

Because I’d been waiting for someone to come and unclog my shower drain, I had a reasonable motive for calling Zelma. If Kaitlin happened to come up, well, then, that was just the nature of any casual interaction. After confirming a good time for the maintenance man to swing by, I asked, “What’s up with the ladies in Apartment C?”

“Well,” Zelma, who was a glutton for gossip, revealed, “they just put in their notice, so they’ll be gone in a few weeks. But I guess that it’s for the best, because I’ve heard that she’s been fighting over there, and that the police have gotten involved.”

“Really,” I said, “I’ve never heard the police knocking on the door of Apartment C. That lady and her daughter? Really? They actually keep to themselves for the most part, but I know that the police have broken up fights between Danny and Kaitlin several times.”

“No! In apartment B?”

“Yep, that’s right.”

“Oh my. Kaitlin was just on the phone with me, and she said that the lady’s cats had scratched up her couch.”

“Really?” I said, “Well, I’ve never had any animals get into my house without my knowing it. I don’t see how a cat would ever get into my place long enough to do damage to my furniture.”

—

I began to notice little things. For example, garbage began appearing in my laundry. It would somehow enter the drier, and I would find it, either at the moment I unloaded my dry clothes, or when I was back in my apartment, putting things away. Once there was a thin rubber examination glove half melted onto a pair of jeans. Once there was a condom, in about the same condition. I suspected that, maybe, someone was entering the laundry room and putting trash into the drier while it was running. But there was also a little bucket for lint and other garbage, and the bucket was perpetually on the verge of overflowing. It was conceivable that I had simply tracked some of that garbage into the drier by mistake. But it seemed unlikely.

The roof of my car got scratched. It was a long, single scratch, beginning above the passenger seat and extending to the driver side door. I knew that the scratch was recent, though I couldn’t pin point a certain day or time that it had happened. I just looked at the roof of my car one day and thought to myself, fuck, that sucks. But Zelma was renovating the house at the back of the property, and there were builders and carpenters constantly at work in our little parking lot. Maybe, I thought to myself, someone was parked too close to my car, and was careless with a beam that they were unloading or something.

—

It started with the usual screaming, throwing things against the walls, that type of thing. I had to work an opening shift at six in the morning, and my rage grew exponentially in proportion to the intensity of the fight keeping me awake.

 Kaitlin stormed outside, slamming the door behind her. Once outside, Kaitlin took a breather. She chain smoked cigarettes, and, I hoped, cooled herself off a bit. But, while she paced back and forth in the driveway outside of my bedroom window, Danny was in their apartment calling her cell phone incessantly. Kaitlin’s ring tone sounded like whistling. So two or three times a minute, while I lay there trying to go to sleep, I would hear a haunting whistle outside. Kaitlin allowed the thing to ring for a little while, and then hung up without answering, at which point Danny dialed her number once again.

Kaitlin finished chain smoking, and didn’t so much walk back inside as she charged at full speed like a one woman SWAT team, screaming an unintelligible battle cry. During Kaitlin’s final smoke break that evening, at about three in the morning, I heard their front door open. “What the fuck do you want?” I heard her scream at Danny. I then heard the sound of liquid splattering onto their front porch. At first I thought, Is he pissing right there? But then Kaitlin found began screaming. “That’s my booze,” she screamed, “You’re wasting my shit. You’re wasting my money. You’re stealing from me.”

She charged, and the fight escalated inside. Kaitlin kept screaming, over and over, “You’re wasting my shit. You’re stealing from me.” I heard them tussling in their apartment, heard Kaitlin’s protestations rising in pitch and in fervor, and then I heard her speech suddenly muffled. I imagined Danny grabbing her by the head, and shoving his hand over her mouth. I could still identify Kaitlin’s muffled cries as the two of them struggled. When Kaitlin broke free from Danny’s grip, she vocalized a single, uninterrupted, screen rattling scream, which she sustained for the better part of a minute. It wasn’t a second into that scream that I was reaching for my phone and dialing the police.

—

I rolled my eyes in exasperation when I went to move my laundry. My first load was finished and sitting, wet, at the bottom of the washing machine, beneath a layer of powdered soap. Someone had come along and poured a bunch of dry detergent onto my clean clothes. Maybe, I told myself, it was just a mistake. Maybe someone didn’t see that there were clothes in the machine, and, in their haste, threw a cup of detergent into it.

But I sat at my desk thinking about that detergent, dwelling on the half an hour of sleep that I would not be getting, on the dollar fifty I had to pay to rewash my clothes. When I went back out to change my wash, Kaitlin was sitting on her porch. As I glanced at her, I thought that I caught her smirking ever so slightly in my direction.

 “Are you messing with my laundry?” I asked her.

She looked at me with an expression of disbelief. “I haven’t fucking stepped foot in the laundry room today. Fuck you, you little fucking asshole. How dare you accuse me of anything…”

I interrupted her, “because I can’t think of anyone else who’d have any inclination to do something like that.” I interpreted it as a sign of guilt that she didn’t bother to ask what specific offence had befallen me, that she wasn’t curious what, specifically, she was being accused of.

Kaitlin was still on her porch as I dragged my hamper back across the driveway. “Thanks for harassing me!” she yelled.

Oh, now she says I’m harassing her, I thought to myself, now she thinks she has something on me. “Thanks for messing with my laundry!” I yelled back.

had taken great will power not to sit at the edge of my bed, lights out, blinds cracked, staking out the laundry room door. I don’t want to feel like a hostage, I told myself. And I was able to complete the wash without further incident. At least, that is, until I was pulling out the last of my dry clothes. I’d felt relieved when I walked out of my house and Kaitlin’s porch chair was vacant. But she must have heard me walk by, and by the time I was returning from the laundry room she’d resumed her usual perch.

“You ever find out who was fucking with your laundry?” she asked with a tinge of glory in her voice.

“I fucking think it was you!” I snapped, turning to face her.

Danny appeared in the doorway as if conjured by witchcraft. “Hold up, hold up,” he said, “what’s all this bullshit about? What the fuck are you accusing her of? She’s not a fucking child. She’s not about to start playing these little games with you.”

“I’m not trying to hurt anybody’s feelings here,” I said, “If she’s innocent, then she’s fucking innocent – she’s got nothing to worry about and she can forget I ever said anything…”

“No one’s feelings are hurt…” Danny said.

“…but if your fucking with my possessions,” I pointed a finger squarely at Kaitlin, “I think it’s you, I’ve called you out on it, cut it the fuck out.”

“Fuck you, your awful little piece of shit. You’re a fucking…”

“Hold up here,” Danny interrupted her, and then turned back to me, “Now I know that washing machine’s a piece of shit. It shakes all to hell, shit falls in there, it’s just what happens. It’s happened to me and I’ve complained to Zelma about it.”

“This is bullshit,” I said, “Somebody opened that fucking door, walked in there, and poured fucking detergent all over my clean wash. Period. And I think it was Kaitlin.”

This silenced Danny. He turned from me to face Kaitlin, who sat in her porch chair, cigarette dangling from her finger tips, an innocent smirk on her lips, and, for a moment, none of us said a thing. Kaitlin broke the silence, “Get the fuck inside your apartment, you fucking dick.”

“Excuse me?”

“You heard me, get the fuck out of my fucking sight, you little asshole.”

I needed the last word. I pointed at Kaitlin once again, “If anything else happens to my laundry, or to anything I own, I’m going to assume it’s you, so cut it out!” and then I ducked into my apartment.

—

 “You’re a fucking asshole, and I never want to see you again you piece of shit!” Kaitlin was standing on the porch, screaming into her phone. She screamed loud enough to interrupt my sleep, and for that reason I was angry.

“C’mon Kaitlin, grab your things,” it was another woman’s voice, older than Kaitlin, and I guessed that her mother was out there giving her support, “You don’t need to waste any more time on him. Just hang up.”

Within moments, the eerie whistle of her ring tone erupted, and her phone did not stop ringing for some time.

There were other voices out there in the driveway that night. One man, a brother I assumed, was furious, and insisted that Kaitlin allow him to answer the phone so that he could have a word with Danny. When Kaitlin refused, the man tried convincing her to erase Danny’s number entirely. The woman’s voice agreed, “You’re not strong enough to face that ringing day in and day out,” she said. How does this woman have a family who loves her? I thought to myself

Kaitlin refused to delete Danny’s number. “I’m going to need to talk to him about getting the TV,” she said.

“Fuck the TV,” the man’s voice instructed, “make a clean fucking break.”

“I need to explain things to him,” Kaitlin said.

She alternately cried, a kind of wailing, sobbing cry, and discussed the situation with her family. “He hit me,” Kaitlin said, “that fucking asshole laid his hands on me, and I can’t take that shit.”

“You don’t need to,” the woman said, “You’re not going to take any of it anymore.”

“But I feel like an asshole,” Kaitlin said, “because I was doing shit to him too. I’m not innocent.”

“The victim always blames herself, Kaitlin.”

“But I’m not just a victim,” Kaitlin proclaimed.

I heard them entering and exiting Apartment B, emptying it of Kaitlin’s belongings. And, despite the fact that her situation with Danny was miserable, I didn’t initially interpret this episode with her family compassionately. It was just another ruse, I told myself, a means to announce to the neighbors, that, hey, I’m doing something about this; I have people who love me and will stick up for me. But just the need to make such announcements somehow, in that moment, couldn’t help but define Kaitlin’s humanity. Her pain was infectious, and I could relate to the insanity of love and the insanity of resentment. Goddamn it, I thought to myself, empathy’s my traitor, for there was something painfully unpleasant in realizing that my nemesis was, too, human.