CAROLANN DRIVER doesn't like the sudden attention. "Can't you just quote me as a 'nearby building manager'?" she asks, declining at first to give her full name. Her arms cross defensively over a bulky green sweater.

Still, if you press her a little, she'll tell you what's on her mind. Yes, she confirms, she has been calling the Seattle Police Department to complain about Manray, a new club at 514 E. Pine, which sits just across a fence from the apartment building she manages on Belmont Avenue. She thinks the place is too damn loud at night. It's that outdoor patio of theirs. People sit out there and get tipsy, and get a little too merry. Every night.

"It's just people out there talking," Driver says. Her arms suddenly filet the air. "It's just this 'Ha-ha, woo-hoo' kind of thing. Then at 1:30, 2 a.m., they're taking out the trash -- 'crash-crash-crash!' -- [with] bottles clanking at 2 a.m." For Driver, a tall, 36-year-old, black-haired Portland native, it's worse than fingernails across a chalkboard.

Driver's complaints would be thoroughly un-newsworthy, except for the fact that Seattle's city council has recently taken up her cause. Although she's never talked with a single city council member on this, her basic gripes are incorporated into the new Noise Ordinance. The city council passed it out of committee three weeks ago, and it goes to a full vote on October 11. If the city council passes the measure as it's currently written -- and it probably will -- Driver becomes more than just a cranky neighbor. And if the Seattle police side with her, she could be the catalyst for closing down Manray.

That may be good for Driver, but some folks have ominous predictions. With the new Noise Ordinance, anybody with a phone and a bad disposition could wreak havoc on their neighborhood bar or club.

The Noise Ordinance fines are intimidating enough. The first violation is $250. The proposed second violation is a whopping $1,000, with a possible free pass to jail for six months (the "warning" ticket has been erased from the books). The only city council member to raise a peep in protest is Nick Licata, who thinks the first violation should be reduced to $100, and a middle violation of $500 should be included.

The Noise Ordinance is a 16-page document, and everyone from street musicians to organized labor has raised concerns about its restrictions. Labor, for example, worries that noise guidelines may put the clamp on demonstrations. For nightclubs, however, the crucial text lies in the section marked "public nuisance." When a club gets three violations within a one-year period, it falls under City Attorney Mark Sidran's civil-society rules, and it gets the "abatement" treatment. "Abatement" is an SAT word for "shut down."

"I'm not exaggerating when I say that this could be the end of nightlife in Seattle," says David Osgood, an attorney who has represented controversial clubs including Neko's, Jersey's/700 Club, and the Celebrity Italian Kitchen during Sidran's reign.

With Seattle neighborhoods like downtown and Belltown getting more and more crowded, new apartment buildings are finding themselves butting up against nightclubs and other evening entertainment venues. More people moving in equals more fun, right? Doom and gloomers like Osgood say no. Three complaints from one person like Driver to a cooperative police department, and an entire block could lose all their bars and clubs.

This brings us back to Manray, a bizarre place for someone to be calling the police about. A club with no dancing and live entertainment, Manray is a gay bar that caters to the neighborhood crowd, along with well-heeled software executives in their 30s and 40s. It is the furthest thing from a dive, boasting a clean, fantastically designed interior with a retro space-age look, à la The Jetsons. The outdoor patio is an airy wooden deck with a fountain as a centerpiece. In all, club owners Patrick Winslade and Mark Spalding say they've spent $500,000 redesigning the place.

Winslade says the police have visited several times since Manray opened two months ago. When they try talking to the officers, the police make the same demands Driver makes: Close the patio down earlier. One officer even made a not-so-veiled threat about the consequences of ignoring their requests. "He said they'd do to us what they did to Studio 420," Winslade claims. Studio 420 was a Capitol Hill hiphop club that closed down last summer, Studio 420's young owners contend, after a veritable neighborhood lynch mob went after them.

Officially, the Seattle Police Department says only one formal complaint has been filed against Manray, and the club is not seen as a potential menace. Winslade and Spalding, however, insist they're being targeted, characterizing Driver as a homophobe, and even encouraging the Seattle Gay News to interrogate her.

"With the Noise Ordinance, Manray will be gone," Osgood says. "Any bar with a deck is going to be closed down. The standards are just too vague."

If Osgood is right, then the thing for Winslade and Spalding to do is to appease Driver. Winslade and Spalding say they've already tried that. Having opened just two months ago, they can't just close the patio after 9:30 p.m. "She's extremely unreasonable," says Spalding. "We've made every effort to accommodate her." Spalding says they even close the patio down at midnight instead of last call at 2 a.m. "That's 14 hours a week [in lost revenue]," he says.

Driver doesn't see things that way. The owners were rude to her from the get-go, she says. She talked once to Spalding a year ago when he co-owned a restaurant called the Green Table, which stood where Manray now stands. She called back then, she says, and asked them to keep the noise down . His response, according to Driver, was to say "Fuck you" and hang up the phone.

She says she's only called the police twice about Manray. Other people in the apartment buildings behind the club have called the cops, too. And she says the club owners frequently don't clear out the patio until late in the morning.

"[Winslade and Spalding] have this perception that I'm an evil woman," Driver says, who vehemently denies their accusations of homophobia. Mostly, she's just tired of the whole ordeal. "I wish they'd just be quiet so I can go to sleep."

When the Noise Ordinance goes into effect, she may get her wish.