Apartment Laundry Wars

Recently I heard that a true aging Israeli man has no hair and a giant potbelly. My neighbor fits the description gracefully, and he has it in for my apartment.

It began about two weeks ago. I had done hand laundry in a bucket, a common event. It's an energy-efficient (ok, cheap) way of washing my shirts. I was clipping the wet clothes to the clothesline outside our kitchen window when my neighbor, a bald man in a white undershirt, looked up and started screaming. Our conversation reveals some interesting facts about my living situation. Note: most Israeli homes do not have dryers. Hanging laundry here is as ubiquitous as sushi stands.

Neighbor: Hey!
Me: (frightened) Hi.
Neighbor: What are you doing? Every day you do your laundry and every day you drip right on us!
Me: Look man, this is what it means to live in an apartment building. Everyone else uses clotheslines too.
Neighbor: They don't drip! Do you need me to come up there and show you how to wash your clothes?
Me: (frightened) No!
Neighbor: When you take your clothes out of the washing machine--
Me: We don't have a washing machine.
Neighbor: --hang them on a rack in your living room.
Me: We don't have a living room. And it's early morning, isn't that a good time to wash the clothes?
Neighbor: You do it in the morning, you do it at night, you do it all the time!
Me: Look, we have no other choice.
Neighbor, disgruntled, gives up.

I thought we had reached a stalemate where we would continue to hang our clothes and maybe wring them out a little better, and the neighbor would stop screaming. This morning I was hanging laundry again when the neighbor appeared downstairs and glared up at me. I ran away from the window and cowered inside for a half hour, checking our peephole to see if he was standing outside our door with a hatchet. Sure enough, as I left the apartment the neighbor was standing outside on the sidewalk. I pedaled across the street and fled the area.

This may be ruining any chance of convincing him to start a compost pile in the backyard. On the other hand, the rest of my apartment building has turned into a hub of social activity because of the common roof. Gradually, from the top floor down, we are starting to hang out, to invite each other to gatherings on the roof, to eat ice cream together, to play guitar and smoke hookah. It's a really unusual stroke of luck that we are for the most part all between ages 23-30 and extroverted.