--The house we’re in now might just be the quietest place
I’ve ever lived.It’s
very suburban and tranquil, and sometimes entire hours go by without a
single car driving past our door.Sure, Half-Shirt sometime flies off the handle, and threatens
to kill his entire family.But
that’s a relatively rare occurrence...It’s very quiet here.
I was thinking about it in the shower this morning (where much of my
most valuable meditation
takes place), and realized I’ve led a fairly noisy life.From childhood all the way to Scranton, I’ve lived amongst clamor and commotion most of the time.And I don’t think I even realized it until today…
When I was in fifth grade our family moved from 21st Street, to
17th Street.I know that doesn’t
sound like a big deal, but it was.Because, you see, my parents bought a house on
the other side of the tracks.
My hometown of Dunbar, WV is split almost exactly in half by railroad tracks.There’s the river side, where we lived during the 21st Street
years, and the hill side, where we moved when I was ten or eleven.I knew nothing of the hill side, and didn’t want to know.The kids over there were a mystery to me, and the thought of
going to their schools… well, it made me sick to my stomach.
But, thanks to God and my mother, I was allowed to finish out my grade
school career at Dunbar Elementary, which was grades 1 through 6 in
those days, even though we’d technically moved out of the district.I wouldn’t have to attend Mound School
after all, a place as foreign as freakin’ Mozambique.A huge weight was lifted
off my skinny chicken shoulders…
Anyway, this house was/is located right beside the railroad tracks.Literally, just a few yards away.And every hour or so, day and night, a big coal train would
come barreling through, and knock shit around.
I remember shortly after we moved in, my mother put some kind of fancy
little decorative doo-dad on the toilet tank.And within hours one of those giant earth-rattling trains came
ripping through town, and bounced the thing into the floor, shattering
it in every direction.
And you simply haven’t lived until you’ve been woken from a deep
sleep by a freight train whistle blaring a few feet from your ear, and
a rumbling, rattling cacophony, just impossibly loud and seemingly
taking place right in the bedroom itself.
Remember that flashback scene in Annie
Hall where it shows the Woody Allen character living underneath a
roller coaster, and the house shaking every few minutes?That was pretty much the way I grew up. I needed some of those
noise-canceling headphones Paul Harvey's always talking about.
Funny thing, though…After
a while you don’t even notice it.Within a few months the apocalyptic night-noise stopped waking
us up.We didn’t hear it
anymore, or we tuned it out, or something.Visitors would stay with us, and come running out into the hall
all wide-eyed and sputtering, “WHAT IN THE EVER-LOVIN’ SHIT?!”And we’d be going, “What?What happened?!”
In Greensboro I lived in a big apartment complex, and shared walls, ceilings, and
floors with other people.And,
of course, those other people were frequently loud and inconsiderate
(ever felt the voice of Bob Barker in your teeth?I have.), and sometimes horny as all hell.
When I first moved to North Carolina there was a young couple living above me, and they had sex all the
time.These two looked
like teenagers, but were probably in their early twenties.And I could hear the slapping of their headboard, and the
bouncing of their box springs, several times per day.
What they lacked in longevity, they more than made up for through
frequency.
I mean, it was constant.I’d be sitting there eating a bowl of Rice Krispies, trying
to watch Andy Griffith,and the rhythmic pounding would commence (again?!).Then all the low moaning, and the retard sounds…
I couldn’t even look ‘em in the eye when we passed in the hall.And I didn’t much care for any of it.Heck, my girlfriend was still living in West Virginia...I didn’t need that
crap.
In Atlanta I lived across the hall from Arrested Development, and above a
sports-crazed homosexual who would sometimes get himself worked into
such a frenzy, it sounded like he was down there beating his chest
like King Kong and shoving over china cabinets.
The Arrested Development folks were nice (this was obviously before
their first album sold ten million copies or whatever), but really
loud.They played music
all the time, and had parties…I
didn’t care what they did, it was no skin off my scrotum, but it
could get a little irritating at 3 am.Ya know?
When Toney and I moved in together, we lived in the Little Five Points
area of Atlanta, and our apartment was surrounded on all sides by bars, restaurants,
and rock clubs.Really
cool when you’re awake, but when you’re trying to sleep… not so
much.
I remember lying in bed, eyes wide open, knowing I had to start
getting ready for work in just a few hours.And right outside our window was what sounded like the LA
riots.Drunken
hollering… crackpot profanity… horror movie screaming… car
alarms going off… breaking glass…It was like living in the middle of a mental institution.
One night we were in bed, wide awake and irritated, and somebody
started ringing our doorbell.It
was one of those apartment buildings where people would have to buzz
you from outside, and you either let them in or not.You know, like on Seinfeld.
Except this place was really old, probably from the 1920s.And every time the drunken stranger, or hobo, or whatever would
push the button, a shower of
sparks would come shooting out of the doorbell box, and land on
our couch and end table.Holy
shit!
One morning Toney went out the back door to take a bag of trash to the
dumpster, and there was a guy sleeping on the porch wearing nothing
but a pair of white briefs.Rattled,
she slammed the door and told me what she’d seen.
Not knowing what I was getting myself into, I grabbed my trusty Hal
McCrae bat, went out there, and told the guy to move along.The dude seemed to have no idea how he’d gotten there, and
was very apologetic.He
wasn’t a bum or a street person, apparently he’d just gotten really
bombed the night before.
He started walking down the stairs and found his shirt.And a few steps later he found his pants.Then a sock, etc.I
watched as he stumbled into the distance, unsteady and disoriented.Heh.
Another morning Toney went outside, and there was a full set of human
legs sticking out from beneath the bottom step.I went to investigate, and found a man who looked like Peter
Tosh snoozing under the staircase.I just let him sleep; screw it.
When we moved to California we lived on a cul de sac populated by a
million children, all of whom possessed the ability to cut loose with
a piercing tone that could almost literally shut-down a man’s
central nervous system.There
was only a small window of time, during the middle of the night, when
the shrieking stopped.And
that’s when the coyotes started howling, like something off Gunsmoke.
So, as far as I can tell, this is the quietest place I’ve ever
lived.What about you?Have you lived in any especially loud places?Or how about unusually quiet places?Use the comments link to tell us about it, won’t you?
And I’ll leave you today with another big batch of Smoking Fish
sightings, all captured outside the United States.Check ‘em out, right here.
You guys have yourselves a great weekend, and I’ll see you on
Monday.
Mrs. West walked around all day
singing that Viva Viagra! song. So I locked her in the basement.
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