Neighbors going bump in the night

The people living above us are either training to be professional wrestlers or just rolling bowling balls down their hallway. I’m not sure it matters – the decibels seem to come out about the same. Here I am in my living room with my roommates, watching our nightly dose of economic news on the “Lou Dobbs Report” – yeah, maybe in like 35 years. We’re actually getting our suckle at the teat of piss-poor reality TV. Why watch some senile old fool babble about the Federal Reserve when you can tune in to see nubile babes cut loose the last moral fibers suspending the moth-chewed fabric of their dignity for the guy who sang “Every Rose has its Thorns”? Right about the time a former stripper and a waffle-house-parking-lot prostitute are about to turn their Lee Press-ons into deadly weapons, a thunderous crash rings out overhead. The ceiling quivers. Lights flicker and sway, the energy of the activity above momentarily jars filaments loose inside their bulbs and interrupts the flow of electricity. Small puffs of chalky dry-wall dust explode from the top corners of the room. The thunder rumbles down the hall, seismic waves pulsating as they flow through the apartment. “That was a big one.” That’s all. We are vets, no longer rattled by such events, not even taking our eyes off the TV. “Look, you can see that one’s implant scars.” “Damn. You can.” Although we remain unshaken – unlike our light fixtures, which I feel probably can’t stand many more 7.5-plus seismic events – it wasn’t always like that. We spent hours postulating theories about what was going on up there. 1. The World Championship Wrestling Theory: I posited this several months ago. It’s my belief that the people upstairs are hardcore fans of professional wrestling and simply can’t let the now-defunct WCW die. One specific night, I’m pretty sure we heard, in succession, the unmistakable thump of someone getting hit by a metal folding chair, the breaking of a card table, a double moonsault elbow drop and someone getting power bombed. I’m fairly sure if we went up and knocked on the door, four girls – dressed as Goldberg, Kevin Nash, Rey Mysterio Jr. and Hollywood Hogan – would answer and throw us into a steel cage match for their tin-foil-and-electrical-tape World Title Belt. 2. The Activist Theory: This wasn’t mine, but it involves the marshaling of troops to get behind some fabulously flawed political ideology. It doesn’t have to be politics, either. These work, too: a gaggle of Scientologists stomping on pictures of Sigmund Freud, or a cult swilling arsenic Kool-aid and dropping dead, which explains the thumps. The best would be a group of backwoods-Appalachian snake handlers stomping around, speaking in tongues and tossing Black Mambas around like they’re pitchers and catchers reporting to spring training. They would be too far in the middle of a debilitating religious freakout to realize they’re standing in our living room after falling through the hole they stomped in our ceiling. 3. The Bowling Ball Theory: We may live below a 24-hour re-enactment of “Kingpin.” Or maybe Pete Weber has turned the upstairs hallway into a place to practice picking up his 7-10 splits. That was depressing, I know too much about bowling. Explains a lot, I guess. But it could be anything. Maybe the noise is a byproduct of America’s obesity problem. I can’t speculate further. What I really blame is apartment living. People weren’t meant to be packed into particle-board castles that were thrown up in one summer. God didn’t say, “Let’s put these miserable bastards in a card house and see if the ones on the bottom floor come up with chains and cast iron skillets to quiet the people upstairs.” But I bet God did swear, because I hear that’s all the rage these days. All the popular kids are doing it, and you should too. Here’s a bad segue: Speaking of swearing, (See what I did? I used a word from the last sentence and the phrase, “Speaking of,” to flow sporadically into this one. It’s what you do when you aren’t good enough to find a smooth transition to a new idea. You can all use it on your next English paper.) I spill a lot of profanity when the rough housing or political demonstrations upstairs turn into the soft sounds of intimacy at around 2:30 a.m. I’m not saying the people above me are having sex. Don’t want to suggest that. But the bed sounds like it’s moving in a specific gyrating pattern conducive to fornication. Maybe the person upstairs is a very active sleeper, often doing squat thrusts or mimicking the hip movements of a ’60s go-go girl at the Playboy Mansion while they’re comatose. I’ll never be totally sure, but my mind can’t help drifting to things of a sexual nature. So under the impression that mating is afoot, I curl into the fetal position in my bunk bed and violently sob angry tears into my Star Wars pillowcase, wondering why it’s not me – after that description, it’s fairly obvious, I guess. Things would be different if I knew these people. If I fell into the uncomfortable position of hearing one of my friends in the next room storming the beach at Normandy, I’m not going to be super pissed about it. First off, he/she is my friend and I’ll go to pretty absurd lengths to preserve their hookup opportunity. No blocking, guiding. Second, and this is going to sound sick, if my friend is hooking up and I’m facilitating it in any way, it’s like a small part of that hooking up is mine. I’d walk in and get some high-five action going on, but that usually doesn’t fly, so my lack of bitching and pounding on the wall is my silent, understood high-five. Oh God! And then there’s the peeing. There’s nothing comforting or heartwarming about hearing the people above you pee. Urine hitting water. The light splashing of two liquids merging into one. Holy hell, if I can hear this stuff, the people below me – we are the middle floor of this awful voyeuristic sandwich – can hear everything I’m doing. Maybe I should go down and apologize for the African tribal bouncing from the other night, and the ball-handling drills I was doing in my room after watching the “And1 Mix Tape Tour” last Friday night. To hell with that, I hear some nutjob singing like they’re Pavarotti or some fat opera dweeb. I bet cave-dwelling hermits don’t have to put up with this horse@#$%. -da.bake@aggiemail.usu.edu