Masturbation is properly a solitary activity. Don't get me wrong; jacking off in front of a loved one can be a whole lot of fun, but that's more of a once in a while, let's-do-this-because-it-feels-dirty thing. Most of the time, if you've got a partner, you're going to want to have an experience that's a little more...interactive. We all know the trick about using your left hand but, let's face it, it feels way more like someone else's hand on your dick when it's someone else's hand on your dick. This is why I say, except as noted above, beating off is primarily an experience to be enjoyed alone.

So you can understand why I was a bit perturbed when I discovered that my neighbors were watching me commit my nightly sins. What kind of world do we live in, after all, if a person can't sit on his own couch, in his own apartment, and play with himself without the neighbors - male neighbors, mind you - pulling up a chair and making an event of it? For all I know, they were cooking up some microwave popcorn and inviting their friends over for the show. It's an outrage.

It has now reached the point where I simply can not abuse myself in the "living" room anymore. Overlooked in all of this, of course, are the real victims: porn stars. You see, I don't have a TV in my bedroom, let alone a VCR, so my prized collection of porno tapes is just sitting beside the couch, pathetically collecting dust in the box in which they were delivered to my door one happy day last March. Well, not really collecting dust, because they're in a box, but you know what I mean. And am I going to buy any more porno tapes in the immediate future? Not as long as I'm living in this apartment I'm not. Thus literally dozens of talented actresses are being denied a small but important part of their overall earning potential, solely because my thoughtless neighbors cannot mind their own business(es). And then there's the ripple effect: what about the porn movie directors? The film crews? The people who work for the tape distributors? The proud employees of Leisure Time Enterprises, from whom I buy all my porn? The drug dealers? The abusive boyfriends...the list goes on and on. How many people have to suffer because of those inconsiderate yahoos who live in the building across the alley from me - people with nothing better to do with their time than spy on someone happily engaged in what, as I pointed out earlier, is, and should be, a very private activity?

I suppose I should explain to all of you how this sad state of affairs came about. The first thing you have to understand is that the rental market in the Bay Area is, to engage in a bit of understatement, fucking insane. Currently, there are four available apartments.

In the Bay Area.

Five, if you count the refrigerator box that was dumped behind the 7-11 a couple of days ago, which, now that I think about it, is actually bigger than my current apartment, so I will count it.

Currently, there are five available apartments in the Bay Area, and approximately 10256 people looking for available apartments. This makes landlords very happy because they can, among other things (a) charge whatever the fuck they want for an apartment - and get it; (b) rent "apartments" that, in any other city, would be called "the closet;" (c) provide no maintenance whatsoever, and I mean NONE, even if your bathroom ceiling falls in because the pipes in the apartment above leak every time your upstairs neighbor takes a shower; and, most significantly for our little story here (d) fail to put the proper size venetian blinds on the window in the living room. (You can probably already see where I'm headed, but this column is not long enough yet and I'm nowhere near finished bitching about the SF rental economy, so just hold that thought.)

Now, I knew that things were a little tight in the Bay Area before I moved here, but maybe I wasn't fully prepared for what I would find. I guess you could say I was "naive." (To my ears, that sounds better than "stupid," so we'll go with "naive.") I figured I'd drive into town, spend a few days looking at apartments, pick the best one, write out a check, and move in. Total elapsed time for the entire process, in my estimation? Three days. Four days tops.

As it turns out, my estimate was off by a bit.

For starters, it took me three days just to find an apartment - any apartment - for rent that was located roughly in the area in which I wanted to live. I'm serious. Pick up a copy of The Oakland Tribune and take a look at the apartments ads. What? You can't find the apartment ads? Exactly. Ultimately, I had to resort to paying an apartment "locator" service fifty-fucking-dollars for the privilege of receiving a computer printout of six or seven apartments that were - maybe - for rent.

After getting the list, I realized right away that I was going to have to up my I-Cannot-Pay-More-Than-This amount, because there was a grand total of nothing available in my original price range ($600). So I raised my rent ceiling to $650. That opened up vast new rental possibilities: I now had the choice of two apartments.

The first one, which was renting for $675, had the advantage of being only four blocks from my work place. It had the disadvantage of being, in every other respect, the polar opposite of the kind of apartment I wanted to live in. At the time, I called it the anti-apartment. It was smallish: I could stand in the exact center of the living room, stretch out my arms, and nearly touch two walls. It had no dishwasher, no garbage disposal, no closet space, no laundry facilities, no view (except of the dumpster in the alley), and no interesting architectural features, unless you consider the quaint particle board cabinets to be interesting architectural features. On the other hand, it did have cinder block walls, two-prong outlets, exposed pipes (with exposed ripped-up-T-shirt insulation), a convenient "kitchenette," and what I could only conclude was indoor/outdoor carpeting. As a final bonus, it appeared to have been built during the 1970s, a decade appropriately revered for design excellence. If I'm not mistaken, it was from the Motel-6 school of architecture. And they only wanted six-hundred-and-seventy-five-dollars per month for this place? Thanks, but I think I'll keep looking.

Apartment number two had all the features of the anti-apartment plus the added benefit of being located immediately adjacent to the freeway. But this one was only $670 per month (utilities not included), so I was tempted to take it. By this point, I was overdue in getting the rent-a-truck back and each day was costing me an extra $75. Plus, I wasn't exactly crazy about the idea of having all my worldly possessions, neatly and carefully packed in boxes, sitting in a truck parked on the streets of Oakland, California. I might as well have put a "steal me" sign on the dashboard. So I'm just about to make out a check, right, when I hear this: "YOU FUCKING WHORE! YOU GOD DAMNED WHORE! I'D KILL YOU NOW - SLASH YOUR FUCKING THROAT RIGHT FUCKING NOW - BUT YOU'RE NOT FUCKING WORTH GOING TO JAIL FOR! BITCH!"

I look at the rental agent, who is also the apartment manager. He smiles. "Oh," he says, "Jeffrey and Tawana. Apartment number seven. Heh. They're always arguing, those two? Every other day it's, `you-fucking-whore this' and `you-fucking-whore that.'" So he leans his head out the door and yells, "HEY, SHUT THE FUCK UP OR I'LL EVICT BOTH YOUR ASSES!" I swear this is true.

What could I do? I had to rent the anti-apartment. "It won't be so bad," I told myself. "One day, when I'm rich and famous, I'm going to look back on this place with fond memories. My first California apartment, I'll say. That's where it all started!" That foolish optimism lasted about a day. After that, and continuing to this very moment in time, it's been a struggle just to maintain my will to live.

But let's get back to "the incident." As I intimated above, the venetian blinds that my paternalistic management company carefully installed over the living room window do not quite fit. Did I mention that they've already raised the rent on me? Oh yes. I'd been in the place for six whole months and the fuckers upped the rent by $25 per month, so now I'm paying $700. First, they deny me a parking space, despite the fact that the apartment ad clearly stated that the rent included a parking space. Sure, I don't have a car, but why should that matter? If the ad says I get a parking space, I want a parking space, dammit. But, no, they screwed me out of that. Then, the ceiling in the bathroom falls in - I might have mentioned this. Do they come and fix it? Nooooo. They don't come and fix it. Instead, they helpfully engage in lies and deception, first telling me - get this - that they aren't obligated to fix it because the problem was caused by my upstairs neighbor. What did he do to cause this damage, you might be asking? He took a shower. So there's a month, at least, of yelling into the phone before they finally, FINALLY come to "fix" the ceiling (they tacked up a garbage bag over the hole, which I have to untack daily to let the accumulated water out). Jesus. Just recounting all this is getting me steamed. I won't even bother telling you about the sundry other problems, but believe me, there are sundry other problems. Then...then...as if all this other stuff wasn't enough, they have the audacity to raise my rent by 25 bucks per month. Oy vey!

Ok, so the blinds don't fit the window. But because I'm not an idiot (most of the time), I checked from outside whether or not you could get a decent view into my apartment through the gaps. You could.

I had a Plan B, though, which was to tack up a tablecloth over the window - kind of like a "curtain." Incidentally, when I'm not pulling it, I like to keep my windows wide open: I love to have fresh air and sunshine coming into my apartment. So, as a consequence, I only ever used the curtain when I was feeling, shall we say, amorous. Thus, the tablecloth (which is green) was only up for, at most, 20 minutes at a time, once or twice per day (on rare occasions, three times a day, but I'm over 30, so, you know). Hence I came to refer to masturbating as "raising the green flag," which was amusing to me no end, but then one day I caught the professor I work for jacking off in his office. At least, I think that's what he was doing. He cupped his hands over his groin area as soon as I walked in, and plus I was embarrassed, so I never got a clear look. But I'm pretty sure that's what he was doing. In his haste, he blurted out, "Larry, I can't have any interruptions now! I'm picking an intern." So now I call jacking off "picking an intern."

Anyway, I get home one night and there's a JC Penney sale flyer in my mailbox. I start thumbing through it and I come to all these pictures of women in bras. They're having a sale on bras, you see. It's JC Penney, after all, so most of the models are rather uninteresting, but they've also got the "Junior Miss" bras on sale and, well, I didn't get laid much in high school, so I have this thing for teenage girls. [Special note to JC Penney: If there's any way you folks could have the Junior Miss models wear cheerleader skirts in addition to the bras, I'd be most grateful. Ohhhhh - I have to digress here for a moment. I used to know, personally, a Washington Redskin cheerleader. Yup. She used to work at my office. Blonde, blue eyed, 19 years old, and every once in a while, when she was running late, she'd put on her in her little cheerleader outfit right there in the office before dashing off to Redskinette practice. Some interns were picked, let's just put it that way.] Ok, I'm looking at the catalog. And I'm only human, after all. And, really, I've got nothing in particular to do for the next five minutes, so...the green flag goes up and I pop a tape into the trusty VCR.

So I'm sitting there watching Savannah butt fuck this other chick with a strap-on dildo and my hands are...let's just say occupied, right? I'm very near the moment of ecstasy when I hear riotous laughter from the apartment behind me, interspersed with comments like, "Oh my god!" and "He's at it again!" They can't be talking about me, I figure, but I stop and cover up anyway, just as a little test. Sure enough, the laughter stops. That must be a coincidence, I'm thinking...the curtain's up, after all. Unless they've got those X-ray glasses, or they're a race of Supermen, no way they're seeing me. By now, however, anal girl has her face planted in Savannah's lap, so I lose my train of thought and go back to my original mission. The laughter starts right up again.

Hmm. I quickly turn off the light, click off the TV, and sit there for a second. How is this possible? By now, I can no longer deny that my neighbors are laughing at me, but how on Earth do they know what I'm doing? It's like they can see right through the curtain or something.

Bing! A (figurative) light bulb goes on. They...can...see...through...the...curtain.

Slowly, I turn around and look at the window behind me. Huh. With the lights in my apartment off, it's almost like the "curtain" has disappeared. I acquired this tablecloth when it was discarded by a Key West hotel and, it turns out, one of the consequences of the heavy industrial use of a tablecloth is that it becomes worn and rather diaphanous. That means "see through." I might as well have strung up a curtain of Saran Wrap(tm).

You know that feeling you get when it's as if someone's holding an iron up to your face? You know, you've just said something incredibly stupid in front of a room full of your peers? Or you interject a tremendously cogent point in a business meeting but - too bad for you - the rest of the group moved on to a whole new topic about ten minutes ago? Or you find out you've been jacking off in full view of your neighbors? Yeah...that feeling. I got that feeling just then. And, of course, there's nothing better for your self esteem than slinking off to your bedroom with your pants down around your ankles while the dying strains of your neighbors' laughter echo in your head. I couldn't even go into the living room for the next week or so.

And thus I am unable to watch pornos any more. Which is why I thank god for the Internet and ACLU v. Reno. The only problem is that whenever I have house guests who are likely to use my computer (ok, this only happened once, but still), I have to spend a couple of hours sanitizing my PC because, for one thing, the "Documents" folder in my Windows Start menu consists solely of files with names like suck.jpg, 2girls.gif, and teen7.jpg. Plus, this ISDN service is costing me a fortune.

Those fucking bastards.

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