upstairs

i was sitting here thinking about nice ways (oh, how pervasive the truth is! bursting right into the middle of my lie)–

i was sitting here thinking of accurate ways to describe the potentially indescribable effect of the noises above my head. i am in my apartment; there is a child upstairs running around in work boots, it seems… maybe the kind a man might wear to work in a mine. my child is asleep. it is 9:30pm on a school night. and yet…. the boy, i believe – by now, i am able to guess by the strength of the banging, precisely who the current perpetrator is – has been running in a single circle, in the living room that is directly above mine (a homemade track! above my head), in the character-building little building in which i reside. it’s not enough, indicates our lord (and perhaps savior, jc), that i have to listen to the sounds of the outside night–the street walkers and drunk drivers and cart pushers and stop sign ignorers and teenagers and lost neighbors and stoop dwellers. no. i’m strong enough, apparently. the universe dictates that i challenge myself to stay calm and listen to the sounds of the child running in its circle when i desire absolute silence. in my living room. on my couch. (how dare i!)

when i go to bed, maybe around midnight, i will lie down, and the stereo, surround sound, plasma, hd, whatever it is (i don’t even have cable; why should i know what quality of noise emanates from their box?) will play movies (thank god, no more x-box) and commercials at a level that is surely unconscionable. but wait, while i was sitting here thinking of ways to describe the endless thumps above my head, and how i resisted the temptation to go get my old school wooden handled broom out and BANG until little indentations appeared in my cheap plastered ceiling (i know just how cheap it is because once, twice, three times, when the maintenance man came to drain the water that overflowed from the drunken grandmother’s kitchen sink in which she defrosted chicken under running water for apparenlty an eternity, he stuck my broom handle straight up into my ceiling without much force at all and made a perfect hole that drained her stinking chicken waters down into my sink.), i fantasized about breaking a hole in the ceiling, with something much larger than a broom, something that would make a hole large enough for me to just look at the people upstairs for a moment…. to glare in silence…. to let my eyes alone ask that woman (that WOMAN), what. the. fuck.

and while i was thinking of ways to describe the noise, the intolerable, neverending noise, the bang bang bang bang bang bang bang bump. bang bang bang bump bump. bang bang bang bang bang bang bang bang bang bump. bangbangbang bump. bangbangbang bump. bangbangbang bump bang banging and bumping fucking noise, suddenly there was the crash! turns out it was the baby girl. the clumsy one. sounds like she broke her head on the floor. there was the inevitable silence, the oh so welcome silence, the calm before the storm silence, and then she screamed. ( ) i have a knack for guessing kid’s ages in general, based on how they look, but these little bay-bays, i can guess how old they are based on their screams and i’m convinced, this crash was delivered by the littlest one. the one who played outside alone for a while yesterday around dinner time in little yellow boots. she must be 3. and just turned. she doesn’t look like she says many words, but somehow is able to ask many questions of her rapidly aging older brother and not-much-older older sister who looks like she cusses. the boy, who in one school year seems to have aged four years, definitely cusses with the boy from down the way who also aged rapidly this past school year. but the girl crashed and screamed and maybe the dubious and likely manic, old drunken-looking grandmother put her to bed because it’s quiet now. thankfully, she didn’t put her out into the dimly lit second floor hallway to scream and echo and beg to be let in. (i realize now, she was only 2 last summer when this used to happen.)

sometimes, i look at the grandmother and wonder what she used to look like. the few times i’ve gone upstairs to talk to her, i noticed her hair. it’s blonde. and scant. she has to dye it. but i’m dumbfounded. shouldn’t some other things happen in lieu of or addition to? her husband(?) had dreadlocks and is one of the oldest/most deeply bow-legged men i’ve ever seen. frankly, he reminds me of a monster. his skin, his walk, his horizontal, wobbling, rectangular build and tendency to grunt just seem nefarious. but obliquely so. doesn’t make sense. i know. but they don’t make sense. and i don’t make sense being tortured beneath them. when they first moved in, i complained to management about the late-night tv. miss, they said, we talked to them about the noise. they apologize. but they’re hard of hearing! oh! i felt bad. but only slightly. the knowledge didn’t help me sleep at night. what helped is my eventual frustrated banging on the wall with my fist to which they amazingly respond(ed), by rising from the dead (the bed), walking (creaking) across the wooden (rickety) floor and (lo and behold) turning the god-awful racket down to a tolerable din (and sometimes all the way off!). and to be fair, i usually don’t bang before midnight on a week night. i find that more than generous considering what i suffer even in waking hours on a sunday.

and so.

it is quiet now. there is only the traffic. the occasional police siren. the cranky, rebellious kitchen faucet. baby girl is asleep, baby boy might be playing with fire, grandma might be passed out, and someone is surely falling asleep with the tv on. i’ll deal with the sleeper, though, when i get situated in the other room, and ready to enter my own field of dreams far away from this street. i’ll try my best to stay calm, snuggled in deep and waiting for sleep, but inevitably, the noise… and so my right fist will emerge, and i’ll bang weak bang weak, hoping they get it the first go round. and if they don’t, i’ll bang Bang BANG (which seems to horrify my bf who prefers niceties even with them, even late at night), the undeniable repercussion to which the old man (it seems) will rise from his living ashes, and creak his 243 bow-legged pounds of stones across the floor to turn the volume down or the tv off. and then, we will both sleep–together, one floor, and worlds apart.