“The nosy neighbor is not an urban figure,” insists author Fran Lebowitz in Public Speaking, the 2010 documentary about her life directed by Martin Scorsese. I recalled this riff as I read “Children with Hangovers,” a short story by Jonathan Lethem originally published in the fortieth issue of Columbia Journal (October 2004).
In this story, an unnamed narrator observes his neighbors with a gimlet eye. Rambunctious and irresponsible young people take out the garbage, a man displays a baffling array of political and seasonal flags, and a taxi driver returns from his shift carrying a bottle of alcohol in one hand and a pistol in the other. As day passes into night, the mundane gives way to the ecstatic. The titular “children with hangovers” revel around a backyard bonfire, burning their belongings. The narrator remains at a remove from these festivities, despite the fact that the “children” rely on the narrator to sort their mail and speak with bill collectors on their behalf.
Although the exact location where this short story takes place is unspecified, many New Yorkers will recognize the narrator’s descriptions of stoops, trash-piled sidewalks, and the experience of hearing a downstairs neighbor’s alarm clock buzz through an apartment floor. Unlike in life, in this story, the tension between an unavoidable intimacy with one’s neighbors and the resistance to entanglement vivifies even the smallest gesture.
Children with Hangovers
Jonathan Lethem
The children with hangovers are taking out the garbage. I watch from above as they lurch out of the basement apartment. Their garbage is in brown paper sacks, the kind you have to request to be given anymore at the grocery checkout, and the paper socks are rotten and soggy, splitting like tomatoes. The children with hangovers stagger out cradling the sacks, hoping to keep them from bursting before reaching the curb. They slump them in a heap in the street, coming away with fingers stained with salad dressing and coffee grounds. Then they turn back to the apartment, squinting groggily in the morning sun. It is early for the children with hangovers.
The man next door stands out on the curb, beside his neatly-knotted green plastic garbage bags, scowling at the children with hangovers. I am sure he can hear the bass thrum of their music through his walls, as I can hear it up here on the top floor of the house, pulsing clear through the apartment between. I am sure that, like me, the man next door does not understand how the children with hangovers can keep it up.
The man next door has five flagpoles. He displays three at all times, an ordinary flag, a rattlesnake coiled above the words Don’t Tread On Me, and a P.O.W./M.I.A. flag, with crossed sabers on a black field—prisoner of war, missing in action. On the fourth pole he shows a flag for every season, an Easter flag, with pink stripes and bunnies for stars, a scary black-and-orange Halloween flag, a Valentines flag, a Thanksgiving flag, and so forth. The fifth pole is always bare, ready for some crisis or affiliation not yet born.
The recycling trucks come before the garbage trucks but no one has left anything for the recycling men, not the man next door or the children with hangovers or the man in the apartment between, or me.
The postwoman comes next, and as always she comes up the stoop and pushes a single fat bundle of mail, bound with a rubber band, through my slot. Then, as she has done lately, she goes down the stoop and rings the bell for the basement apartment. Though she’s left all the mail for the house upstairs she rings the bell of the children with hangovers and when they come to the door the postwoman goes inside.
Often when I go to sort out the mail I run into the man who lives in the apartment between, just as he is coming from his night shift driving a taxi in the city. He drives all night and early morning and returns to sleep through the late mornings and afternoons and early evenings, and then he awakens again near nightfall. I hear his alarm clock buzz at eight or nine. Then he begins drinking and cursing and readying himself for his shift, which begins after midnight. He continues to drink in the taxicab as well and by the time he returns in the mornings he is usually looking as bad as the children with hangovers, or worse. When I run into him in the hall I offer him his mail, and then his hands are too full, with his bottle and his pistol which he keeps under his seat while he drives his cab. He asks me to hold his pistol while he looks at the mail I’ve handed him, then finds his keys and unlocks his apartment door. Once his door is opened he reclaims his pistol and goes inside. The mail for the children with hangovers I bring upstairs into my apartment.
I live in fear of hailing a cab one night in the city and finding that my driver is the man from the apartment between.
I never see the postwoman leave the basement apartment but she must at some point go and resume her rounds. I just never see her go.
This evening the children with hangovers build a bonfire in the backyard. Perhaps this is why their bags of garbage are so exclusively oily and damp. They have been hoarding their paper and cardboard for the bonfire. The bonfire is many feet around and grows to a quite impressive height. I can see magazines burning, centerfolds, glossy paper the color of flesh wrinkling in the blaze. Soon I see they have begun stacking broken chairs and shelving and other items, plastic and ceramic vessels from their kitchen, onto the fire. The children with hangovers dance laughing in a circle around the fire, with bottles in their hands. They light cigars and smoke as they dance and sing around the fire. The postwoman is there with them in the yard, dancing too. I don’t know whether she’s been in their apartment all day or whether she came back.
I hope she has not burned the mail.
The alarm clock of the man in the apartment between buzzes while I am looking out the back window at the tower of flame, which rises well above the heads of the children with hangovers now.
The mail for the children with hangover is all collection notices and credit card offers and I sort through it, making two piles: collection notices, credit card offers. I have two large piles. The only mail the children with hangovers will accept are the free gifts which sometimes arrive, videotapes or CDs or CD ROMs, which I brings downstairs and leave at their door.
The children with hangovers have never invited me inside.
I think the children with hangovers are fucking the postwoman.
The garbage has not been picked up from the front curb. Today may be an obscure garbage holiday, a patriotic or religious or civic occasion nobody can keep track of, not even the man next door.
The smoke from the bonfire curls through my back windows, so I shut them.
The children with hangovers have begun giving out my phone number when bill collectors call. I handle these calls for them, explaining just as well as I can, trying to spare any misunderstanding.
The collectors rant and fume on the line. I am patient with them, soothing them exactly as one would an infant. This sometimes takes hours, but I’ve decided it’s the least I can do.
