Do You Like to Watch?

What I learned this weekend:

My neighbors paid too much for their house.

I’m not a real estate expert, but is a house really worth anything when you’ve got me staring into your bedroom window most nights?

Let me rephrase that. I live on the second floor of a two story apartment building that was built around the same time Harry Truman was learning how to ride horses in Blue Valley. I like to sit outside on the balcony in the evening and take in the sites that Los Angeles offers.

Century City is visible in the distance, marked by the Fox Towers that stood in for Nakatomi plaza in the original Die Hard. A few skyscrapers dot Wilshire Boulevard. At a football field across the street, high school kids make me tired just watching them run drills.

And, of course there’s my neighbors’ brand new picture window into their bedroom which some underpaid laborers spent the better part of five months installing along with a new patio and a fresh coat of pea-green stucco.

My neighbors are not exhibitionists, so I’m not sure why they installed a big window into their private lives. Maybe they forgot that they lived next to an apartment building with tenants who could view their coital habits when fumbling through the living room at two a.m. trying to figure out what in the hell it was the cat was crying about.

Look, I just wanted some warm milk. I didn’t need to see your wife slipping off those granny panties any more than you did, buddy, so don’t swear at me.

I know they aren’t show offs, because every night when I go outside for a few minutes of cool evening air (the smog lifts at night, I think), they frantically shut every curtain in the house whilst giving me dirty looks and throwing voodoo curses my way for having the nerve to use the space I pay for every month.

My guess is they got a little too used to the guy who lived here before me. Apparently, he was a reclusive crazy person. The kind of guy who put foil on the windows and thought he’d get caught on the grid if he used a credit card.

This false sense of privacy led my neighbors to assume they basically had a brick wall across the street, one that may as well have been painted like an empty field for all the privacy it offered.

I took that personal space, washed away the masking tape and set up camp in their private lives. They didn’t like that.

Admittedly, buying the night vision telescope was probably unnecessary, but it’s hard to see the monogram on those granny panties when they turn out the lights.