Rain Dance

The apartment complex I lived in during my 2 year stint as a resident of Baltimore City was unique from the typical apartment complex setup.

Instead of having a few large buildings, there were like 20 separate smaller buildings that looked like brick houses.

Each building contained 4 apartments- two on top, two on the bottom. There was no common staircase. Each apartment had its own front door entrance to the building.

If you lived on the top floor your front door would open to a staircase. If you lived on the bottom floor, like me, the front door just opened to your living room… The two doors that led to the top level apartments were in the middle, so there was two staircase hallways that separated me from the apartment next to me… I don’t know how well I’m explaining that, in fact I’ve probably made it seem more complex than it was.

The point I’m trying to get to is that because of the staircases, I could only hear noise from the apartment above me… the apartment next to me was a world away.

For the most part, this was a good thing. There was only one apartment to potentially disturb me, and only one apartment for me to potentially disturb.

On the flip side, any disturbance that did go on seemed very personal… In a large apartment building if you have one apartment making noise it affects many people, and all those people can band together as a group to say “hey you, in apartment 512, stop making noise!”

But in this situation, that won’t work. It has to be a one on one confrontation.

For the first few months the apartment above me was occupied by a single mother with two kids… She would often leave the kids alone for inappropriate amounts of time and they would scream, cry, and generally make a bunch of noise.

When she got home from wherever she had been she would start yelling at the kids in a way that lead me to believe she was, at the most insane and at the least, an unfit mother… I made a couple of passing comments about how thin the walls were but she didn’t seem to care… Luckily for me, just when things were starting to border on intolerable, she moved out.*

The apartment stayed vacant for 2 gloriously silent months until finally it was rented by a middle aged school teacher who looked and sounded just like James Earl Jones.

He lived alone. He had no visitors. The only time I heard any noise from his apartment was when he talked to his sister on the phone and I could hear his baritone “Yellow Pages” voice creep down into my bedroom and echo off the walls.

Luckily he only called her once or twice a week and the calls only lasted 5 or 10 minutes. Without question, he was way better than the crazy mother.

But after a few weeks, some strange noises started to emanate from his apartment.

It started with some muffled chanting sounds… Almost like a religious sounding thing. It wasn’t very frequent however, and never really loud enough to disturb me, just peak my curiosity.

Soon enough though the chants began to get louder and stranger yet, they were accompanied by thumping sounds… It sounded to my untrained ear like a Rain Dance. Or at least what I imagined a Rain Dance might sound like.

Visions of my James Earl Jones look-a-like neighbor dancing around in a Native American outfit and pounding a drum flashed through head… and again, the noise wasn’t bothersome, just… weird.

At first the Rain Dance would only take place on Saturday afternoons, like around 11 or so… but then that expanded to the occasional weeknight.

I hadn’t spoken to the man since the first day he moved in but I would occasionally see him walking to and from his car in the parking lot… He seemed very shy. He would walk directly from his apartment to his car or vice versa… He never spoke to anyone. He was always dressed very conservatively. By all accounts he was a mild mannered guy.

Sometimes I’d see him walking to his car the morning after he had performed one of his more vigorous Rain Dances and it just didn’t add up. How could this quiet man be making such crazy sounds?

When football season rolled around things got even more interesting. Just before the afternoon game started he would, without fail, perform a very emotional version of his dance.

Then the games would start and he would really get going…

When there was a big hit he would scream out “YIPPIEEEEEEEEE!” or “POWWWWWWWWWW!”

He didn’t seem to be rooting for any team in particular; just big hits.

And sometimes he would start to laugh historically for no apparent reason… The quarterback would throw an insignificant pass into the air and it would bounce out of bounds and he would scream with delight… “HAAA HAAA HAAA, you didn’t see that one comin' did ya, you dirty son of a bitch!!!!!”

Sometimes he would make train sounds, “Chooooooo Chooooooo!”

And all of this went on in his deep James Earl Jones voice of course.

It still didn’t bother me... In fact, I found it amusing. It didn’t feel like Sundays until he would start his show and the games would come on.

But of course, inevitably I suppose, his noise started to occur at later and later times… And he no longer needed football to set him off… He could be watching the 11pm news and decide he needed to break out the Rain Dance.

Gradually, his antics went from amusing, to annoying, to down right frustrating.

Sometimes I would bang on the ceiling and he would stop. Sometimes he wouldn’t.

I’d think of ways I could politely approach him about what was going on in his place, but then I’d see him walking timidly to his car and I’d decide that it was no big deal after all… I could delay our eventual confrontation for another day.

You can imagine my surprise then when James Earl Jones decided it was time to confront me about my noise…

It started one night when I had my girlfriend over. This was the crazy ex-girlfriend I have written about in the past… and of course on this particular evening we were doing what we did best- arguing.

I don’t recall what the argument was about, but I do recall that this was a particularly vicious battle… Despite our constant fighting, very rarely had we ever fought in my apartment. The first year I had lived there I had a roommate and after that, when it was just me in the apartment, the girlfriend and I happened upon a good stretch in our relationship and the fighting was (for us at least) minimal.

When fights did take place they seemed to always happen either at her house or in my car. In fact, this is the only time I ever remember arguing with her at my apartment.

Like I said, I don’t remember the ‘why’, just that it was a very bad fight.

I recall that at one point she tore up a picture of her I had tapped to my mirror… then at another point I was crying and wouldn’t let her leave the apartment… and yet at another point SHE was crying and it her refusing to leave the apartment… somehow the whole ordeal ended peacefully, and I ended up walking her to her car with a hoarse voice but very content because we had “worked out” whatever the hell it was we were fighting over.**

On my way back from walking her to her car I noticed that my upstairs neighbor was sitting at his window and peering down me. He was giving me a not so happy look, and when he noticed me noticing him- he pointed to his watch. (I guess indicating that it was very late at night and that he did not approve of my late night noise)

It was only 10 pm, and it was a Saturday night… This jerk had woken me dozens of times, at later hours, and during the week!

I was now ready for our confrontation… I was not afraid of hurting James Earl Jones’ feelings anymore.

The next morning I made a point of leaving at the same time he usually did… Sure enough, as I was getting in my car I saw him come around the corner… he walked straight towards me, and not in his usual timid manner either.

“I don’t like the noise that late at night,” he angrily proclaimed in his deep voice.
“But more than the noise,” he continued, “it’s the foul mouth that I don’t like.”

I thought for a moment at the absurdity of his statement and then replied, “The entire argument was in Spanish so how would you know if it was done in a foul mouth?!”

“From the tone of voice!” he angrily shot back without even a pause to contemplate what I had said… “That tone of voice had to be filled with dirty words, no matter what the language…”

I didn’t even know how to respond to that… On the one hand- that was an insane thing to say. On the other hand- he was right, there was plenty of cursing in Spanish during last night’s argument… I took a long pause to decide how I should continue this conversation.

“What about you and that Rain Dance nonsense that goes on at all hours of the night?” I was finally able to retort… I had played my trump card.

James Earl Jones squinted his eyes at me in anger. His fists clenched. He looked like wanted to hit me… Finally, he unclenched his fists, pointed a stubby finger in my chest and said, “I’ve got Tourrette’s Syndrome you asshole!”

And with that he walked away leaving me alone in the parking lot. I felt like the biggest jerk in the world, and maybe I was… We never spoke again… I continued to endure his antics for another 6 months or so before I finally moved out. (For reasons unrelated to his Tourrette’s Syndrome).

When I think about the whole thing now I’m left with a lot of questions… why did it seemingly take a few weeks before the noises started? Why did they gradually get worse? Why did they only happen at certain times? Why did football seem to set him off? And most of all- why didn’t he mention to me before that he had Tourrette’s and that he might be performing a Rain Dance every now and then? That would have solved everything.

Or maybe the whole thing was a lie… maybe he didn’t even have Tourrette's and he just liked making goofy sounds at strange hours of the night? Who knows… it will probably forever remain a mystery… But as the NFL football season approaches I can’t help but wonder where my James Earl Jones look-a-like is, and if he’s still doing his pre-game Rain Dance?







*(coincidently or perhaps not, this lady was VERY hot in a Lauryn Hill kind of way and that may or may not have had something to do with me never confronting her about the noise)

**(This was probably the end of our good patch because if my memory serves me correctly, this was the beginning of an entire year long fight that always seemed to end with a hoarse voice and me optimistically feeling that things were now fine… even though they never were)