Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck (7 page)

I opened my front door
onto a beautiful, balmy Southern California night, only to see a guy in the city parking lot across the street looking straight at me as he peed on the chain-link fence.

My boyfriend had given me a powerful flashlight—the kind night watchmen use to patrol aircraft factories for intruders. I grabbed it. Whaddya know, the beam carried all the way across the street.

“Hey, blond dude … urinating on the fence!” I called to the guy in my spotlight. “It makes my neighborhood smell like a giant men’s bathroom when it rains.”

He ducked down and hurried along the fence. “I’m not urinating!”

From my porch, I followed him with the flashlight beam, calling after him, “Let’s see, pants unzipped … small, fleshy object in your hand. Whaddya doing, checking for genital warts?”

Luckily for him, I was too far away to take his picture, as I sometimes do when I come upon visitors to my neighborhood who think of the Great Outdoors as their Great Big Potty. I use these shots on little posters I put up on telephone poles, suggesting ideal and un-ideal places to leave urine and fecal matter when you’re hitting bars and restaurants in my neighborhood.

Of course, my community pee-licing approach is not one the traditional manners experts support.
New York Times
reporter Douglas Quenqua asked some descendant of Emily Post for her thoughts on my vigilante tactics against the unrepentantly rude. “Two rudes don’t make a polite!” she clucked. Well, no … not if we’re talking about snapping at your great-uncle for slurping his soup, but showing that there’s a price to be paid for using my neighborhood as your toilet does seem to help those of us who prefer to stop and smell the flowers instead of the urinal cake.

HELL IS OTHER PEOPLE

If your neighbor finally loses it over how your tree keeps maliciously dropping leaves onto his driveway and he starts chasing you around the cul-de-sac with an ax, the legal system’s got your back. Armed police officers will be dispatched to your location—and possibly before one of your arms ends up as somebody’s mailbox ornament.

The neighborhood disputes that are the hardest to resolve involve unregulated piggy behaviors in shared public space, like the sidewalk or the street, and on private property. Sure, there are laws against some of these violations, like 4 a.m. stereo blasting and persistently yapping dogs, but just try getting them enforced. As I learned when my car was stolen and saw again as the victim of identify theft, police officers have about seven million more pressing concerns than solving nonviolent crimes, starting with watering the ficus tree in the police department’s lobby.
⁵

I don’t mean to police-bash. They lay their lives on the line to protect the rest of us, and I truly appreciate that. But how often do you encounter ax-wielding killers? It’s the lesser bad behaviors by neighbors and passing strangers that can make your life a daily living hell. This isn’t to say that it should be the job of the police to intervene, and it doesn’t have to be if we just understand and accept an essential fact about human nature:

We’re all jerks.

Come on, admit it. We all want what we want, when we want it, and we’d like other people to shut up and scurry out of our way so we can get it already. As depressing as it may seem to see ourselves this way, being honest about our jerkitude is the best way to personally dispense less of it and to decrease others’ emissions—and maybe even prevent them.

When
Homo Barbarus
moves in next door: How to stop rudeness before it happens.

Contrary to what the snippy next-door neighbor says in a Robert Frost poem, “good fences” do
not
make good neighbors, just somewhat more contained neighbors. And frankly, if you get off on the wrong foot with one of yours, a good fence will be patterned on the Great Wall of China and will include Chinese soldiers with shoulder-fired missile launchers patrolling the top.

Many people make the mistake of keeping to themselves until their neighbors do something annoying. Bad idea. Even if you use the gentlest tone and pussyfooty language, if your first contact with the guy next door is letting him know how wrong he is, how rude he is, and how his mother must have been off with the sailors instead of teaching him manners, you encourage him to achieve his natural human potential for assholishness. (Did you mention that your car takes its gas black, no sugar?)

Better neighbor relations start with canny strategizing and proactive neighborliness:

• Machiavellian altruism

Various biographers say sixteenth-century political theorist Niccolò Machiavelli is misunderstood as a bad guy for writing
The Prince
, a self-help book on how to be a royal scheming user. The truth is, scheming doesn’t have to play out with somebody’s getting screwed over. In fact, you can manipulate your neighbors for the greater good while manipulating them for your own good.

A little calculated generosity—I like to call it “boomerang altruism”
⁶
because it’s likely to come back to you—can help you deter all sorts of ugliness from the people who live around you. When new neighbors move in, bring over a plate of cookies or a bottle of wine. Wait—shell out for total strangers? Absolutely. And don’t forget to look out for the neighbors who’ve been living around you for a while. Text them when they’ve forgotten to move their car on street cleaning day. Bring the package to their door that the delivery guy chucked in your bushes. Replace the bulb in their porch light when it goes out while they’re out of town (and leave a little smiley note telling them so).

It’s not only nice to be nice but also in your psychological self-interest. There’s a growing body of research that suggests that doing kind acts for others gives you a helper’s high (a little neurochemical
yabbadabbadoo!
in the brain’s pleasure centers) and makes you feel happier and more satisfied with your own life. (More on this in the final chapter, “Trickle-Down Humanity.”) Plus, for the price of some wine or the time spent baking cookies for the new person next door, you’re putting a lot of positivity into the world: making them feel welcomed, creating community, and generating or reinforcing a social norm for neighborliness. Meanwhile, you’re also inoculating yourself against that person’s suddenly going all lifelong blood feud on you because your sprinklers killed their nap. (Doing this is particularly important if you can’t just walk away from some neighbor’s pointless but life-sucking daily hate-fests without also walking away from your heavily mortgaged dream house.)

• How the nice-neighbor sausages are made

A little preemptive neighborly gift giving can have such a transformative effect thanks to our powerful drive to reciprocate. As I’ve noted, a couple of million years ago, in the harsh environment in which we evolved, being seen as a freeloader or a mooch could mean getting booted from one’s band—a likely death sentence. Being an easy mark would have posed other survival and mating issues. To keep our giving and taking in balance, humans developed a built-in social bookkeeping department. Basically, there’s some little old lady in a green eyeshade inside each of us who pokes us—“Wake up, idiot!”—when somebody’s mooching off us so we’ll get mad and try to even the score. When somebody does something nice for us, our inner accountant cranks up feelings of obligation, and we get itchy to pay the person back.

A fascinating modern example of reciprocity in action is a 1971 study by psychology professor Dennis Regan. Participants were told it was research on art appreciation. The actual study—on the psychological effects of having a favor done—took place during the breaks between the series of questions about art. Regan’s research assistant, posing as a study participant, left the room during the break. He’d either come back with two Cokes—one for himself and one he gave to the other participant—or come back empty-handed (the control group condition).

After all the art questions were completed, the research assistant posing as a participant asked the other participant a favor, explaining that he was selling raffle tickets and that he’d win a much-needed $50 prize if he sold the most. He added that any purchase “would help” but “the more the better.” Well, “the more” and “the better” is exactly what he got from the subjects he’d given the Coke, who ended up buying
twice as many tickets
as those who’d gotten nothing from him.

Regan’s results have been replicated many times since, in the lab and out, by Hare Krishnas, who saw a marked increase in donations when they gave out a flower, book, or magazine before asking for money; by organizations whose fund-raising letters pull in far more money when they include a small gift, like personalized address labels; and by me after I did something nice for a bad neighbor.

A TV soap actress moved in next door and started throwing all-night backyard parties. (Sure, chickiepoo, have your hipster friends over for campfire-style guitar sing-alongs, but not at 3 a.m. in a backyard that’s five feet or less from four other houses.) Asking her to be more considerate was useless. The way she saw it, why should her neighbors’ silly sleeping hobby take precedence over her drunken friends’ need to belt out “This land is your land…” in the wee hours?

What finally changed this was my e-mail to my more neighborly neighbors, warning them about a spate of breakins in the neighborhood. I didn’t have Soap Snot’s e-mail address, so I printed the e-mail and slipped it under her gate, with a note scrawled at the bottom: “You aren’t very considerate of those of us who live around you, but I don’t think you should be robbed because of it, so FYI.” If memory serves me correctly, I think I added that my other neighbor and I would keep an eye out (for anybody who might be trying to break in to her house during the day, when she’s away).

Amazingly, from that day on, there were no more wee-hours guitar-apaloozas. A few weeks after leaving her the note, I ran into her at her gate, and she said, “Hey … just wanted to let you know I’m having some friends over tonight, but just for a dinner party, and we’ll come inside at 10 p.m.” As soon as I could rehinge my jaw, what was there to say but “Uh … thanks”?

• A Neighborhood Watch program that doesn’t require an actual human to be watching

Sitting out in a lawn chair by your mailbox with your twin Rottweilers and a shotgun is a highly effective way to keep passing dog walkers and litterbugs from violating your lawn. Should you find this impractical, you might take advantage of our evolved concern for preserving our reputation and post a picture of human eyes on your mailbox, tricking potentially rude passersby into feeling that they’re being watched and improving their behavior accordingly.

Yes, it seems even a
picture
of a pair of eyes triggers that feeling, according to research by UCLA anthropologist Daniel M.T. Fessler and his then grad student Kevin J. Haley. The picture they used was just a stylized drawing of a pair of eyes, not a photograph. But, in a computer game they designed to measure generosity, when the stylized eyes were displayed on a computer’s desktop, participants gave over 55 percent more money to other players than when the logo for the lab was positioned in the place of the eyes. These findings were echoed in a later study, by Newcastle University ethologist Melissa Bateson and psychologist Daniel Nettle, in which people put nearly three times more money into a university coffee room “honesty box” on the weeks when a photograph of a pair of eyes was posted above the box.

These findings seem to have a lot of application beyond the ivory tower—like on coffeehouse tip jars everywhere. In neighborhood terms, shit happens, but tape a picture of eyes to your mailbox and that Great Dane’s leavings just might get shoveled up and carried home in a baggie instead of being left in a big steaming pile for you.

Where there’s land, there’s room for land mines: Whether to approach a problem neighbor.

In a neighborhood spat, when you feel strongly that you’re on the side of what’s good and right, it’s tempting to let that drive your approach to conflict resolution. Keep in mind that it takes surprisingly little for even the pettiest neighborhood squabble to escalate to DEFCON Boiling Your Cat And Feeding It To The Squirrels. As entertaining as it can be to watch two housewives cage-fighting in the homeowners association gazebo, if you prefer that your life be consumed by living rather than revenge seeking, there are a number of things you should take into account when trying to resolve some issue with a neighbor.

• Proximity

In neighborhood dispute resolution, as in real estate, location is everything. The closer a neighbor lives the more forbearance you need to show. For example, a next-door douchenozzle who often plays loud music with all his windows open is to be communicated with using the utmost in polite restraint. Not because he is in the right but because he is in the right place to replace your sleep and maybe your every waking moment with music that makes your soul break out in hives.

• Protection from the elements

Is your house surrounded by a moat? If not, do you at least have a tall fence with a locking gate? How about a locking mailbox? Private, locking garage parking? And, when you leave the house, are you in the habit of carrying bear-repelling pepper spray?

Factor in how exposed you and your property are when you’re about to go after an abusive neighbor or a rude person passing through your neighborhood. Even if you approach them with great maturity and civility, your house may be vandalized or your car keyed, and you may find a little present in your mailbox—one that didn’t come out of the housewares section at Bloomingdale’s.