The Noise

Here I am in front of my house. Kevin’s in his kitchen. Windows always open. He thumps around. Clatters pots while screaming. You can ask him to stop making a specific noise at a specific time. But he doesn’t internalize the bigger concept. You shouldn’t do meth and play drums at 2AM. Crank your enormous top of the line subwoofer you bought the day after your new neighbor moved in, before sunrise. Judo throw your fat girlfriend, who screams from the diaphragm like a theater major, into load bearing studs and hollow core doors.

Never during business hours. Always when your neighbor’s home. Writing or sleeping or on a date. Likewise the construction project up the block which must implement machine gun loud industrial power tools at 7am. Every single fucking day the entire time I’ve lived here. When they stop it’ll be something else. My co-gentrifiers, the yoga mat Bumble Creative Directors with their packs of Bernese mountain hounds left alone all day to bark about social justice. So there just hasn’t been good writing coming out of me for what. 9 months now.

Kevin likes to scream FUCK. SHIT. FUCK. GOD DAMMIT from two to six AM. Although the white noise machine largely takes care of it at those hours. But also when I get home from work. Whenever I open a window. FUCK! FUUUUUUCKKK and Muay Thai kicks his appliances. Would earplugs stop this. Would earplugs plus airport guy who waves in planes with two big flashlights headphones, plus a white noise machine cranked up to 10 with maximum bass settings– I believe this is called “brown noise”– well I know this wouldn’t work because I have all this shit on now and I still hear the motherfucker. Would buying a shotgun or an AR-15 and judiciously– not doing a sloppy mass shooting spray ‘n’ pray but judiciously placing a single center mass bullet or buckshot load into each of these inconsiderate people work.

Soon too cold to type outside. Can’t go to the park. I’ll need to actually use the interior of my home as a shelter. While the building up the block slams on another Pieter Bruegel the Elder amount of floors and Kevin enjoys menages a trois with additional fat drug women he beats with sousaphones and Les Pauls plugged into Marshall stacks. No helicopters at least. In Spring when Mexicans fired guns in the air from their yards across the valley at stochastic Chinese water torture intervals no police showed up. No sirens. No Apocalypse Now chopper blades like my last neighborhood of former heroin addicts getting into music PR and father-of-five unlicensed plumbers/ Tier 3 sex offenders. So that’s good.

Well does he hear me singing the N word to the tune of Bowie’s “Changes” in the shower with the window up. Clean and jerking clattering ringing weights grunting. Droning out the St. Francis prayer before work so I don’t end up like him. That where there is hatred I may bring love, that where there is error I may bring truth, that where there is sadness I may bring joy, that where there is discord I may bring harmony, that where there is wrong I may bring Jesus Christ could you not fucking EDIT this slightly, St. F*ggot? Can he tell there’s no God and I just want it to be over.

Have to construct a situation where I’m somehow just as bad. I’m not. I leave the curtains opens so he can watch me digging out fat Asians. Dimples in her golden back winking below some other guy’s name as she flexes back and forth on top of me saying are you sure you’ve been tested.

In Pittsburgh a brother and sister lived next to us. Jewish family. Once every 10 days he’d blast Van Halen. Scream and scream YOUR’E A DIRTY JEW! DIRTY JEW! over “Hot for Teacher.” In Silverlake the lapsed Catholic Salvadoran landlords spoke in tongues upstairs with 30 church friends. Raced their grandchildren stomp stomp stomping across the hardwood floors. Why do none of these people have jobs. Why am I the only person on Earth getting worked like an old mule.

Why am I always under a cult and next to a too old to be hipster childless white man like the Ghost of Christmas Future. You’re gonna end up alone getting high, I’m warned. Obsessing over soon to be abandoned plans for art projects. The pattern keeps repeating. I learn less each time. My money, my body, my books– it’s Michael Jackson scourging his skin. Hacking up the scaffolding of his face trying not to be black. My death alone clear and unavoidable as ground coming up fast through an airplane window. Editor’s note: I’m never going to kill myself. Send nudes.

I’m a cautionary example for them. The sad man who gets up at the crack of dawn. Doesn’t get back till dark. You only ever see him at night, politely asking you to please stop living your life so he can quietly hate everything about you and himself and the planet.

I need to kill this guy. Could I leave a handgun out while she’s there. Will his dealer take 20 grand to slip him 5,000 mikes of fentanyl. Could I help him down the stairs. Could I suggest after 15 drinks that he take a nice drive. What can I do. Can I talk to him again, for the tenth time, can I explain man you can’t stomp loud as possible and scream at your fat 52 year old girlfriend when she’s not even there. Why don’t you say something about the beatings. Because no one leaves a lover who beats them. A fist feels like love to Irish people.

He’d scream DIRTY JEW all day and that got it out of his system. Kevin has fun and goes to concerts, gets it out of his system at home. Why am I crazy in a way that only bothers me and gets me no check from the government. I used to compulsively look at the undersides of tables. Because Satan might be hiding under them. Bend over deep and crane my head up at a cerebral palsy angle, in front of people, in front of my teachers, my classmates, to inspect for Satan. Whenever I think of the dead I think they can hear my thoughts. A part of my mind I don’t control starts “thinking” the worst thoughts imaginable. So they’ll hear. They’ll think it’s what I think and their ghosts will feel bad and hate me. Could I make this go away by yelling FUCK and DIRTY JEW. Beating my girlfriend. I can’t get a girlfriend so I guess I’ll never know.