too hot in the hot tub.
© 1996 Jamie Zawinski <jwz@jwz.org>

At my last apartment, there was a hot tub on the deck right outside of my living room, which I shared with my upstairs neighbors. Most of the time that I lived there, my neighbors were fratboy law students.

These fratboy law students were prone to having drunken sex in the hot tub, or right out on the deck, with surprising regularity. On several occasions I was sitting in the living room watching TV, and they would start going at it; at first it made for an interesting side-show to check in on during the commercials, but frankly, they weren't very attractive, or even athletic.

What would Miss Manners have done? Should I have gone out there and pointed out to them, ``excuse me, but I can see your pubes?''

Should I have critiqued their style?

Or should I have just turned the hose on them?

Another trick of theirs that I had the displeasure of witnessing was that of them being too lazy to go back inside to use the bathroom, but instead, standing up in the hot tub and pissing off the edge of the deck, into the neighbor's yard. I suppose this started to seem like a good idea after an evening of ``suckin' back brewskies.'' The last time I saw one of them do this, he later sloshed some of his beer onto the railing. I guess this was his token attempt at sterilizing it after he missed.

Once they were draining and cleaning the tub during the day, so I went out to chat; it hadn't seemed that dirty to me, after all. They were rather evasive about why they were doing it. From what I could gather, either someone had puked in it, or, well, there were some bodily fluids which had failed to be properly exchanged...

The walls and floors of this house were paper thin, so I got notification of all of their indoor sexual exploits as well, usually just after I had fallen asleep. For a while one of them had a girlfriend who sounded exactly like Meg Ryan's orgasm scene in the restaurant in When Harry Met Sally.

These guys made for good stories, but all things considered, it's nicer to have neighbors that one doesn't hate.

I did have one set of upstairs neighbors whom I didn't hate; they were neither fratboys nor law students, and in fact I became quite good friends with them.

But my upstairs neighbors, no matter who they have been, have always gotten laid a lot.

Once, when the set I was friends with still lived up there, I was visiting them for an evening of movie-watching in their living room. We were all sitting on the couch, which was against a wall of the living room that was shared with one of the bedrooms.

Well, the movie lost the attention of one of my neighbors, and she and her boyfriend said their goodnights and wandered off. Five minutes later, and quite audibly, the bed in the next room began banging against the wall. Then the moaning started.

There were six of us sitting there watching a movie, loudly, and the bed was whacking the wall, and we could hear them like they were in the same room.

Nobody said a word. Not even a snicker. It didn't even phase them. I guess they had been putting up with this for a long time.

Some time later, she reappeared. ``Oh, hello,'' she said, sounding surprised that we were still there. She picked up a bag of potato chips, holding her bathrobe closed with her other hand, and turned to leave.

``You guys are still watching this crap?''

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