Maybe I’ll Go to Court…

Away went civility.  The guy ended up giving me a lesson about cars on the phone.  And that’s on top of making me feel like a potential carnapping suspect to boot.  For your information all cars have alarms, he had said.  The last time someone like you called me about my car alarm, my car was stolen soon after.

Luckily I wasn’t that Russian in the news before who knocked on his noisy neighbor’s apartment door and shot that neighbor at once.  Or maybe he should be glad I wasn’t that Russian.  But, hey, don’t we usually apologize hereabouts when a neighbor complains to us about some sins we commit or omit?

They say that pollution, that addition to the natural environment of unwanted substance like carbon dioxide, or energy such as heat, sound or radioactivity, is the unintended upshot of human activities.

We have pollution of natural resources such as air pollution from manufacturing and transportation residues (with global warming warnings from the so-called pessimists, according to the number one polluter, the US of A), water pollution, also from manufacturing and careless agricultural practices, and land pollution from waste disposal.  Add our chemical pollutants, the most toxic of which are the chlorinated hydrocarbon pesticides like DDT and metals like mercury, lead and arsenic.

But the forgotten form of pollution in our place and time is noise pollution.  Sound’s intensity as measured in units called decibels is said to increase a hundredfold even if there’s only a 10-decibel increase.  An 80-decibel sound irritates; constant exposure to a 90-decibel sound is said to cause permanent hearing loss.  The latter includes common urban sounds like planes and extremely loud music.  They are also said to have adverse effects on human health, including flaring tempers which aren’t good for the head and heart, and work performance.  Never mind my health which may deteriorate with aging, or my work performance such as burning boiling water or ending up with stone-hard boiled egg instead of egg benedict.  I just want a good night’s sleep.

For months now, the alarm of a red car has made sleeping sporadic and restless.  It’s an alarm that wails and spews different sounds at regular intervals that could be heard throughout the night from one end of a big block to another.  The car is parked at the sidewalk from across the street where we live.  Its sound is real torture.  I have called the police a number of times and got a different response each time.  Still the car wailed.  I have even called a towing service, and still the car is there.

A check with the LTO gave the name of the car owner.  Talks with his next-door neighbors gave away the fact that they, too, have complained more than once to the antagonistic car owner.  There were also subtle warnings that to complain too much is to risk life and limb.

Further research finally produced the car owner’s workplace phone number, hence, that fateful call.  ‘You don’t have to rob your neighbors of sleep just because you are afraid your car will be stolen!’  I finally let go of all pretensions at civility.  ‘You have no right to complain because you don’t live next door. My next-door neighbors aren’t even complaining,’ he shot back.  (Uh-uh, I knew something else from his next-door neighbors.)  He was as immoveable as the pyramids of Egypt.

‘How come of all the cars parked there, only your car wails throughout the night?’  ‘Other car alarms are cheap, mine is not!’  (So there he said it.  Cheap, indeed.)  Then he challenged me to make an official report.  So I did.

I settled first for an official report to the bosses at his workplace, then set aside a copy for the barangay captain whose address I still have to look for in this urban jungle which I found out has no barangay hall at all.

No need to file a copy with the mayor’s office in this Metro Manila city where we are.  It’s not only that it’s unnecessary and unworthy of his attention, I feel that he, too, is noisy.  When he passes by to and from work, he has a convoy of cars with police escorts on motorcycles, sirens wailing.

The mayor’s in the car in the middle, waving and smiling.  I thought that I was an Englander privileged to see the royal wave of Queen Elizabeth II or, better still, a rabid teenage fan of Piolo Pascual being brought to heaven by just a wave of his hand as he promotes his latest movie.  Amazing, yet I couldn’t imagine anyone voting for a mayor so he could do that.

But back to that red car’s noise and its owner; I’m biding my time, waiting for results, sleepless I may be more often.  For as long as I don’t lose my sanity, I can still hope that fate would intervene before I contact a lawyer.  Fate can be kind sometimes.  Who can say if the car would be repossessed if it’s on unpaid financing, or even carnapped in poetic justice?

For now, at least I have my own grand plans.  I could not be like that Russian who was made murderous because of noise.  Even my fantasy couldn’t come true, like this car owner who loves his car so much, probably more than he loves his wife, so he ends up making his beloved car reproduce, and who cares as long as it spares the rest of us from sleeplessness.

Much as I hate going to court or coping with a potential pyrrhic victory, if at all, it is the last resort in this battle that I just have to wage.  Some neighbors may have given up in exasperation and imagined fear and I may fail just as well or end up looking at the wrong end of a shotgun.  But like the warriors of old, if I must go down in battle, at least I’ll go down honorably.  Free at last from the tortures of this incessant noise pollution of an expensive car alarm.

(2005)