San Diego Reader

My cell phone was apparently assembled at gunpoint by drunk Yugoslavians in the year 1984. The only way for it to receive any sort of discernible transmission within my house is for me to hold it about six inches above my left ear while I stand one foot on the toilet and one foot on the rim of the tub. Triumphantly perched as though I’d conquered all the porcelain in my house, I can talk to another party if I shout, and I can hear them if I strain my neck and focus my ear.

It’s a pretty poor system of communication, made only worse by the traffic, Weed Eaters, ice cream bells, and norteño music of my working-class neighborhood of Cherokee Point — a border section between North Park and City Heights, on University Avenue between the 805 and 15. If I’m in a fun and forgiving mood, I’ll describe my street as “lively” and “blue collar,” or “a rich tapestry of many cultures.” If I’m working, trying to watch a movie, or talking on my phone, and what keeps invading my home is the sound of someone lying across a work-truck horn, or a family ringing in a young lady’s 15th birthday with a band, chickens, and fireworks, then I call the place “the damn ghetto!” or simply “shithole!” My street is incredibly loud.

I get crabby at all the racket and sometimes come firing from my front door to confront the offending noisemaker. I’ve been dangerously close to being socked in the beak because I’ve demanded that someone shut off a car alarm or quiet (shoot if you have to!) a pack of baying dogs. Which seems like common sense to me, but the people of my neighborhood don’t perceive sound the way I do. I’ve run out of my apartment to request from parents that their children stop pitching pennies, glass bottles, and small rocks onto my tile roof, and we’ve all — me, the parents, the children — stood there dumbfounded by the others’ actions, our heads cocked to the side like puppies presented with math.

And I’ve lived in nearly every neighborhood in central and coastal San Diego. Same thing. Although, in my Pacific Beach youth, I was more likely the offender than the offended. Looking back, I clearly thought that stumbling home drunk by way of Garnet Avenue at 2:00 a.m. on a Wednesday and playing frenetic and brassy jazz records was a way of liberating the stuffy tenants of my apartment complex from the moorings of their conformity. Coltrane might agree with me, but find my old neighbors, and I’m sure they would hold a different opinion.

Which got me thinking I should go and look for the loudest and quietest areas of the city, to see if there is a neighborhood that respects silence. If I ever want to get any work done, I might have to move there.

First thing to do is buy a decibel meter. Not usually one for purchasing gadgets (see cell phone description above), for this experiment I want an objective electronic authority. So I drive to the sprawling big-box store called Fry’s. Normally, when confronted with vast aisles of wiring, cameras, circuitry, laptops, and televisions, I wander as though lost through a great plastic forest, until a sales executive finds me huddled over a trash fire, naked, bearded, and drinking the remnants of a discarded backwashed Pepsi for sustenance — so I am a shade hesitant to go inside this megalopolis of computing hardware. But this time, with incredible luck, I walk directly to the pertinent section of the store, find the decibel meter, pay at the front register, and walk out. Standing in the parking lot, I look at the sundial on my phone and calculate that I’ve been inside only seven minutes. Astonishing.

Armed with my new toy, I begin to take readings around my place, holding the meter an inch from anything making noise. My air conditioner: 44.3 dB. Running water in my sink: 64 dB. Having a piss: 75.1 dB.

I call my friend and sometime-assistant Casey at her dungeon, where I force her to slave over hot search engines and reference manuals, to tell her my findings.

“You’ve got some loud pee,” she says.

“If I had a nickel for every time I heard that…But that’s not why I’m calling. Do you know of any place in town that might be pretty loud?”

“Gay Pride Parade is this weekend.”

Sweet Molasses, the Mother Lode. (Bonus! Compact, half-naked, energetic Puerto Ricans.) But I have a couple days to kill before the festivities start, so maybe I’ll visit some neighborhoods around town to see how they measure up on bothersome sounds. I wonder how the City of San Diego classifies and attempts to abate noise pollution?

Well, as always, the city website is a jumble of legal information and horrid, boring garbage that I’ll attempt to summate. (Bear with me, this promises to get a little dry.) Our fair hamlet allows for construction, generator, animal, and machinery noise, and a whole list of other audible irritations, between 7:00 in the morning and 7:00 at night every day except Sunday and holidays. From sandiego.gov, I foxed out this oddly worded rule:

“It shall be unlawful for any person, between the hours of 7:00 p.m. of any day and 7:00 a.m. of the following day, or on legal holidays…with exception of Columbus Day and Washington’s Birthday, or on Sundays, to erect, construct, demolish, excavate…any building or structure in such a manner as to create disturbing, excessive or offensive noise unless a permit has been applied for and granted.…”

I’m sure that the intent of that statute isn’t to allow absolute anarchy — destroying any building you see fit, whether it belongs to you or not, with any means available, be it dynamite, chainsaw, or pack of horses — on Columbus Day and Washington’s Day, but that’s how I read it. What a way to perk up holidays normally associated with mattress and linen sales. Anyway, carrying on.…

Poring over more info on the site, I find that the city defines offenses of noise by a host of variables, according to zoning and time of day. Without delving into the fetishism of the city for under-thinking and over-printing, I’ll tell you that for most of us who don’t live on farms or in industrial zones, and for those who do not drive garbage trucks or fly helicopters, the loudest we citizens can get around our houses during the week is 60 dB during the day and 45 dB at night — from 10:00 p.m. till 7:00 in the morning. This is something that I soon find almost wholly ignored in my neighborhood.

To see if anyone in San Diego complies with these guidelines, I leave my apartment with my incredibly dorky-looking gadget and stroll around my neighborhood. What I learn first is that if you want to look like a huge goddamn doofus, carry a dB meter around with you. Mine is tan and boxy, sort of like a 1980s’ cell phone, but with a puffy microphone out the top of it that would only look stupider if it were clown-nose red.

Right away, I bumble upon a yard decorated eclectically with a pool table, broken plastic stackable furniture, and dog turds. From the house blares something that someone might consider music, I’m sure, although I can’t for the life of me understand why, because it features a crowing rooster, honking car horns, and a squeaky-voiced man who’s fond of the word “corazón.” Really, that’s pretty much every element of the song. It goes: “B-Gock! Honk! Honk! Something something corazón. B-Gock! Honk! Honk! Something something corazón!” and so forth.

I check my display to see that the flapping and fluttering speaker on the porch is punching out 79.5 dB. I’m about 15 feet away. Interestingly, it doesn’t seem overly loud, especially for this neighborhood and at this time of day: about noon. A man comes to the porch and over the din shouts, “Hey, what the hell are you doing?!” (84.4 dB)

“Nothing,” I say, and haul ass away from the tumbledown shack. A couple blocks away, I find myself comfortably out of earshot of that last racket and encompassed by the soothing tones of a leaf-blower and an irate dog barking and snapping at it about 60 yards away, which, from where I stand, register at 56.6 dB. That’s around the upper limit of allowable noise, and I’m a good block away. The leafman’s immediate neighbors are taking in a hell of a lot more, but again, it doesn’t seem too loud. The necessity of the yard work, and the idea that it will be all finished up in less than an hour or so, make it at least tolerable.

I figure I’m going to drive myself stupid by measuring how loud everything in my neighborhood is, so I find my trusty carriage, Lucille the Wondertruck, fire her up, and aim her toward a place with a quiet reputation. Ah, the suburbs.

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