Miguelito

April 2004

My roommate, Dom, and I decided to move to my current address because we were tired of noisy neighbors. The three of us had lived in a low end apartment complex where the floor was practically made of bamboo, and, every time we complained about them, they complained about us, even though we made no noise whatsoever.

Anyway, we moved into this place. It was Monday, April 26, 2004. My parents had helped us move along with the moving company and we were done fairly early because of all the help. So my parents left in the middle of the afternoon, and we had everything set up by around 4pm.

At exactly 5:01 pm, we hear the thunderous bass-line of Latin music. If you do not know what I’m talking about, it is the most horrendous, terrible, ridiculous thing you will ever hear. It sounds like circus music. Mind you, all we could hear was the bass. Until we went outside. From outside, you can hear the foreign chantings of the singers, and the ridiculous sound of the trombones.

We were livid.

Here we are, on day one at a new place, and we have an asshole neighbor who blasts music, we didn’t know what to do. Furthermore, while we were sitting in my living room lamenting over this loss, we started hearing banging in concert with the music. It sounded like one of these

banging on one of these

My roommate decided to take it upon herself to approach the guy. It probably was the right thing to do. She was also of Latin American decent so it was better than me going up there and punching this guy’s teeth down his throat.

They exchanged stories. He introduced himself as Mike, and, ultimately, he gave her the “let me know anytime it’s too loud,” where we were pretty much stuck listening to that garbage. Because when can you complain after making friends like that? Well, she did complain to him a couple of times, and he didn’t appreciate it. It actually became very uncomfortable to run into this dude in the hallway.

I came up with the nickname “Miguelito” (which means Little Mike in Spanish), to describe him and his terrible musical taste. But because I’m fluent in Spanish, I liked to say it with a faux Scarface accent, so it sounded really funny to hear.

Anyway, we had to put up with that trash music for just about a year until he moved out.

Since then, I think that the longest anyone has lived upstairs has been 1 year…and the stories continue…