Biography
Some people moved into a cheap apartment complex and after hearing the nonstop belligerent rants, hateful harangues, drunken soliloquies, death threats, and the sound of wrestling bodies thumping against the wall coming from next door they decide to begin recording it.
The two men being recorded were Raymond and Peter and they fought with a raging abandon and total disregard for everyone in the building.
According to the people who recorded Raymond and Peter, “we were angered by the volume and recurrence of the arguments, but equally we were intimidated by the threatening content. Whenever we got angry enough to go next door, confront them and ask them to keep the noise down, we were forced to give the idea a second thought. Perched in their front window, facing the walkway greeting all who dared pass, was a human skull; what horror would greet us?”
After finally confronting Raymond they were greeted with death threats from him and decided that recording the two men would be a good idea in case it should ever be needed for proof of a criminal assault.
The first crudely recorded “session” featured a monologue by Ray muttering to himself about his desire to kill. There was something so nakedly sinister about the recording that the neighbors recording it were shocked. At the same time, it instilled in them a hunger for more. They invested in the technology for crisper recordings and fell into their own obsessive routine of taping. Eventually, their desire for capturing fresh dialog led them to employ phone prank tactics. The material that they successfully taped was deliciously dark and incredibly infectious. Day in, Day out, they rehearsed Raymond and Peter’s dialogs; the phraseology and curious logic became their own. After several months of taping, they became Peter and Raymond.
Their recording was not as secretive as one might suspect. Several times during Peter and Raymond’s extended shouting matches they placed a speaker on the walkway outside their door and subjected them to the tyranny of their own taped voices. At some point in the process, they recorded Peter saying, “The neighbors are taping us again,” to which Ray responded, “Good. Hey, next door! I want to tell the whole world that Peter ain’t nothing but a lyin’, thievin’, piece of shit.”
Clearly invasion of privacy is an issue here, but as their friend Seymour Glass once said, “You have to wonder how much right to privacy a person who’s screaming at the top of his lungs expects.”
It should be noted that neither Pete nor Ray worked. They drank. They watched TV. They fought. They rarely left the house, except to go to O’Looney’s convenience store for liquor or to Walgreen’s for smokes. There were frequent visits from the San Francisco Police Department, the Fire Department, and Paramedic teams. Sometimes they spent the night in jail, sometimes in the hospital. To make matters more interesting, Tony — a Southern-bred Vietnam vet and white trash drifter — moved in and out of their apartment during the time the neighbors lived next door. In many ways he was the scariest of the three, recalling a movie extra from Deliverance. Tony provided the catalyst for more fighting, new jealousies, and shifting alliances.
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