bout three weeks ago, my landlord and I had a talk. I was about to turn my sublet into a year-long apartment lease, increasing my rent while substantially decreasing the likelihood of a decent shower in next 365 days, and the talk was expected. Actually, I wasn't talking with the landlord, I was talking with her daughter, who translated the conversation for her mother, a Dominican immigrant who speaks no English. I speak a little Spanish, but unless you want to sell me a train ticket or a hotel room, I’m fairly useless. So the conversation went like this:

Mother: “Los Spanish words muy rapido.”
Daughter: “She says you’ve been slamming your door.”
Me: “Really? I didn’t think I was slamming my door.”
Daughter: “Ella dice que los Spanish words muy rapido.” And so on.

I thought they wanted to discuss rent—perhaps apologize for (once more) raising it despite the fact that my shower door still did not close and the water pressure was like a dripping hose. But this is a bit like assuming you’re being called into the principal’s office for good attendance. It just doesn’t happen. Of course they wanted to list off a bunch of things I’d been doing wrong, which included the aforementioned slamming as well as running up and down the steps in the middle of the night.

OK. As a tenant, I am not without guilt: I have failed to cover the floor with rugs to damper floorboard noise as my lease instructs. In my first week here, I hammered a nail into the wall only to discover that, afterward, every electrical outlet on the left side of the room no longer worked. Sometimes, I smoke in the apartment. But here are two things I don’t do: I don’t slam my door, and I do not—ever--run up and down stairs.

The source of these complaints, it turned out, was the landlord’s elderly mother living across the hall from me. (In a complex of eight units, their family takes up four.) I had never met her, although an ambulance came once around midnight and carried her out on a stretcher, all of which I viewed fish-eyed through the peephole. “The problem,” as the youngest daughter explained, “is that once she wakes up she can’t get back to sleep. She’s very sick. She has Alzheimer’s.” I wanted to ask then how she remembered it was me, but I’m not a complete idiot.

For weeks after, I ran this through my head. I’d never been accused of being a bad tenant, even back in college, when I had been one. I felt bad, and then angry, and then contrite again. Perhaps I was slamming my door—after all, didn’t my cat sometimes try to escape, and didn’t I overcompensate by closing the door fast? On occasion, I ordered food late at night, and perhaps what she heard was the delivery guys rushing up and down the steps. It seemed my infractions were slight, minor, forgivable, but it still seemed the neighborly thing to do was introduce myself, apologize for whatever mistakes had been made, ask her to tell me personally if she had a complaint. Maybe I could write a note. Broken Spanish would be better than nothing.

I considered this for days. I even asked Ramon, a bodega owner who’s a bit sweet on me, to help with the letter. But Ramon’s English is as good as my Spanish, and we ended up just confusing each other, not talking about sodas and beer.

In the end, I didn’t write the letter. While I’ve almost always been a good tenant, I have rarely been a good neighbor. Which is to say I feel shy around the people who share my walls. I’m not the only one—most everyone in my building hangs their head as I pass. Neighbors here are not particularly nice; in fact, the nice thing seems to be avoiding each other entirely.

The other day, I watched the movie Rent, about East Village bohemians at the dawn of the ‘90s. I thought the movie would make me feel better about living paycheck to paycheck as a writer in New York. Instead, it made me insane: Here were a bunch of snotty artists refusing to pay their rent while living in giant warehouses on Avenue A. Neighbors didn’t just know each other, they climbed through each others’ windows, sung to each other, and fell in love. It’s ridiculous to complain about the lack of reality in a musical, but still, nothing was worse than this: All that music, all that singing—and not one noise complaint?!