Morning Noise

IT STARTS with a grating rustle of coin-washed linens, but I am sure that were even the finest virgin silk introduced to her insouciant skin it would produce no less an abrasive effect. Said sound abruptly pulls me, each and every morning, from the heaviest of slumber.

She is two rooms away, with the door nearly shut tight and a curtain to further dampen the light and sound from without.

Half a second later the inevitable aural a.m. onslaught commences.

It explodes with a quick tearing sound, as if someone's tongue is being torn out. It is not unlike the kind of heavy, wet and reluctant hand towels that were once advertised as having bred Bolsheviks back in the 1950s, being deliberately ripped in half. A series of phlegm-filled smoker's coughs rend the already ruptured air. And then she is up, hacking her way to the toilet. As if a corbelled arch whose heavy bricks are held in loosely place by a single thick thread of curved re-bar rather than tightly with mortar, her bowed legs do not so much as propel as bounce her into the bathroom. Inebriated elephants with bowling balls for toenails would be more graceful and less loud. By this time, the horrific flatulence has already made its way out of her unimaginably wrecked lower G.I. There are occasional oral flourishes that would put to shame a chorus of drunken sailors at a frat party. I wish I had the mettle to tear off my ears and plug the resultant holes with that which nevertheless remains to funnel in the awful sounds.

Even if she had the single social grace to close the closet door, I would be privy to every tiny tinkle of pee that jets out of her hole. The cacophony of excreta reaches a fever pitch with a diarrhetic release made inevitable by her daily diet of cheap chinese noodles, pot, beer, coffee and asparagus. From every rancid aperture pours forth filth: spit, piss, shit, gas, hack, belch, et al.

This goes on for no less than two hours; longer if she is not needed at work or it is a weekend day. How she manages to ingest the coffee, cigarettes, pot and whatnot would amaze me were I not so disgusted by the debacle. The brutal burps and forced farts, singly, LITERALLY, make the herringbone hardwood floorboards shudder.

I understand from folk where she works that her morning noise is no longer confined in the morning nor at home.