This is happening in the apartment above us:

Activity at all hours of the day and night.
Lots of people coming and going all day and night.
Rhythmic pounding for a few minutes at a time.
Running water in the master bath for hours at a time.
An odd “Cat Urine” smell with chemical overtones coming from the master bathroom.

These are the direct annoyances we (everyone in our apartment) have been dealing with for the last few months. If you were trying to figure out what was going on, what would you think?

Well, maybe they are really active people? Maybe they have really odd schedules? After all, this is Vegas, half of everyone has a real odd schedule due to the casinos and such. So maybe I need to learn to live with it.

But it is that pounding that is really the biggest bother. When it can happen at any time day or night, sleep is not easy to come by. Then there are times they are thumping around up there as if moving furniture. Very distracting. Maybe one of the people is an interior designer and experimenting on their apartment. Again, got to live with it.

But what if it were not so savory a situation up there? Maybe we got a pair of hookers plying their wares. If you think about it, it fits. People and activity at all hours, rhythmic pounding, are all good and sort of support this if you place your imagination in the gutter. You could even say the water and the smell make sense too if you think about it. They could be hooking, then between tricks doing meth and taking a bath. Why not. It all fits now. Or does it.

Well, when we started looking into these distractions and talking to people, we realized that it was probably not prostitution happening, but rather methamphetamine production. Why? Well, the rhythmic pounding and smell are the give away. The pounding is rather strong for sex (although not beyond conceivable) but very short lived. Hmm, if you are going to get your rocks off you sure would hope it lasts longer than 30 seconds. So the pounding is not sex, but rather the pulverizing of ephedrine or pseudophedrine or some such, used in the making of meth.

The smell is the other give away. The stink from meth labs is described as smelling like cat urine. But if the smell really were cat urine then it would linger longer and all the time. But the fact of the matter is the smell comes and goes at very odd hours of the day and night. The smell when present is VERY strong and then goes away. This would not happen with cat piss.

Finally, there is one more thing that is a dead give away… the odor gets me buzzed.

This is not good, the effects are really killing me. I can’t sleep, I am irritable. My skin itches. I am seeing funky colors and my balance is off. In short it is getting me stoned. This is not so good as I do not want this.

So life has been less than perfect in our little Eden.

But what is worse than all the crap we have been enduring from upstairs is the bull that has been flung at us as we try to remedy the situation.

First we wrote a letter to the apartment managers describing the situation. The reply we got from them was basically, and I am paraphrasing, “If you do not like it, move.” I kid you not, the apartment management basically came out and said that they would not do anything about it even if they (the people upstairs) were violating their lease by conducting illegal activities. Oh, they phrased it nice, offered to let us break our lease without penalty or even move to a different apartment, but they were not going to do anything.

So that left us with taking action of our own.

Calling the police was a very strange and round about way of getting nowhere. We were told to call the narcotics division, but they are not on duty during hours when they are making the meth upstairs. So it was to call the patrol officers. So I called when the smell was strong, but the hour and a half later when they arrived the smell was gone and there was nothing they could do.

I called again when the smell was really strong and indeed the cops got here and could indeed smell the meth being made. What did hey do? They went upstairs, knocked on the door and did nothing because “nobody was home”. Right, or there was no one answering the door. It does not take a genius to figure out that they were not opening the door unless they knew someone was coming and all other knocks at the door are ignored. So, nothing happened, but they said they might be able to do something else.

An hour later they had their sergeant come in take a smell, but guess what… the smell was gone and they sergeant said the smell was not meth. Now nothing was going to happen because a stupid sergeant decided I was wrong. I was not wrong.

Then we were told to call the apartment managers. Oh the vicious circle.

OK, so here was the thing, if I could get employees of the apartment management company in to whiff the meth, then they could enter the apartment above because it showed a threat to the whole building. The could then enter the apartment and inspect it. If they saw anything (in plain sight) they could then call the cops and hopefully that would be that. No problem, right?

Wrong. The people upstairs usually do their production in the middle of the night. This way the odor is gone by the time the apartment management is on duty. By 8:30 am the smell is gone for the most part and there is nothing I can do. And yes, I called the apartment management emergency line, but after the third dropped call (my phone never drops calls) I gave up.

I don’t get it, why is it that I have to put up with a meth lab upstairs? I was here first (in fact I was told I am the longest tenet in the complex), why should I leave? Why can’t there be someone looking out for me? Why can’t the apartment management just lick them out?

Seems that the criminals are more protected than honest people being poisoned by the criminals around them.