TIFU by yelling at my neighbor's kid

I (19M) recently moved out with the little money I had and now live in a pretty crappy apartment complex in the downtown area of my city. The location isn’t great, but the price for the size of the apartment is a steal, and the rent is cheap, so I don’t really care.

My floor isn’t too bad. I live next to a single mom (46F) and her teenage son (14M) and daughter (18F), and on the other side there’s an old couple who smoke cannabis indoors (they’re chill). This started a couple of weeks after Christmas. It was clear that the mom had gotten her son some kind of game console, along with some competitive games. Late at night, he would start screaming some of the most racist, homophobic, and sexually offensive things I’ve ever heard. The level of detail was genuinely repulsive. It would usually begin around 2 a.m. and last until 4 or sometimes even 5 a.m. It was horrifying. He’d scream racist r*** threats at the top of his lungs at 3 a.m., then greet me the next morning like he was a cool neighborhood kid.

One particular night on a Thursday, I had an important midterm the next day, and I had legitimately spent 16 hours studying. Then the worst thing happened: I heard him turn on the console. About 15 minutes later, he started screaming racial slurs and r*** threats at the top of his lungs again. I tossed and turned in bed, used pillows to cover my ears, and even tried moving to the living room, which is farther from the noise, but nothing worked.

I lost it. I got up, aggressively ate a bowl of Greek yogurt, walked over to the wall in my bedroom that’s directly across from his room, and started banging on it as hard as I could. At first, he didn’t notice. He kept screaming. I banged harder. Eventually, something must have shifted because he paused mid-sentence and said, “What the fuck?” It turns out I was banging near the outlet that powered his monitors, and I apparently knocked it loose. After a while, he got up, turned off the lights, and shut down the console. I went back to bed.

The next morning, I happened to be leaving at the same time as him. I caught up to him on the stairs and tried to talk, but he seemed bitter. I asked what was wrong, and he said his mother heard the noise the night before and took away his console (an Xbox). He accused me of being overdramatic and a narc. I lost it again. I yelled at him that I needed sleep for an exam and that his racist screaming wasn’t helping. I usually never yell at people, but it just came over me. He looked at me weirdly and said something like, “Chill, dude.” We ended up taking separate buses.

About a week later, I received a friend request from his mother on Facebook. I didn’t think much of it and accepted it, assuming it was just a neighborly thing. But she went off on me. She accused me of being a “manbaby” for yelling at her son after he called me a narc. She also said that while she understood the inconvenience of his gaming sessions, it wasn’t my place to discipline her son. I didn’t want to argue, so I apologized to both her and her son.

Since then, I’ve been getting weird looks from some of the other people in the apartment complex. Most of them I don’t know, but the ones I do seem to avoid me now. On the bright side, I did ace that exam.

TL;DR: I banged on the wall to silence a neighbor’s 2 a.m. racist gaming marathon. I aced my midterm, but now I’m apparently the “apartment narc,” and his mom is harassing me on Facebook.