It began shortly after we moved in. We would be sitting in the living room, when he would begin to pound.

Bam bam bam bam bam bam!

At first we had thought the display of anger correlated understandably with the cats — fat on beef with gravy, chasing each other madly around the apartment like two drunk buffalos. Pipsqueak could tumble off a bookshelf, or Jack would initiate a surprise-attack from behind the laundry basket, and two seconds later we’d hear it — bam bam bam bam! Bam bam bam! We guiltily locked the kitties into our bedroom, and made a note to apologize to him later, talk to him about it some time. I wrote him a letter, and we just kept editing it, never actually slipping it beneath his door.

But then it began happening when we were reading in bed, the cats asleep at our feet. It could be three in the morning, six in the evening, noon. Noon! Weekdays, weekends: our floor would shake, the frames would rattle on the walls. Jurvis would be out of town for a couple of days and in the wee hours of the morning I would hide, locked away with the cats as he threw thunderbolts of rage from below. The door quivered — I would clutch the sheets and freeze, plan an escape route out the window.

“That dude is a dick,” I said.

“The cats were sleeping!” Jurvis would cry. “Was he pounding just now because the steam heater was rattling? We don’t even control the heat!”

“Total, super dick,” I said.

Jurvis talked to our super, who said that this guy had already complained to him about us. The super had told this guy that he should just come talk to us about it. But that was a long time ago. “He’s still pounding?” the super asked.