Shifts

I get home every morning dog-tired. The sun beams through my window, despite best efforts to blot it out with crude, improvised black-out curtains. Usually I need to start winding down immediately, crawl into my little rat’s nest of sheets in the corner between my dad’s bed and the sill. I lay down drowsily as he prepares to meet the new day groggy, grinding coffee, shaking off coma cobwebs, recovering manna and restoring himself gradually to requisite bon vivant élan. In his wrinkled bathrobe, my father retrieves the daily paper, fixes himself a hearty breakfast on the stove. All the while I am mummified, in shambolic, crypt-like refuge cloistered away, finding imperfect sanctuary cocooned within a one-bedroom oubliette, of this condo we share on the eighth floor… That is when the Piano Man in the unit below ours, as my pop – king of nicknames –refers smilingly to him, invariably comes pommeling to life. He loves nothing better, cares for naught more than to tickle his ivories fanatically, always over the course of the six to eight hours my occupation mandates I attempt slumbering. This drives the pair of us ever into quarrelsome, awkward conflict; the incompatible impasse of our binary, opposite goals, frictions generating perpetually make for quotidian frustrations again and again.

suspended
a bamboo lives
in water

My father, being an accommodating, considerate fellow, ‘understands’ the great enjoyment and meaning our elevated neighbor gleans from this customary ritual tumult of his, and neither of us cares for rocking rickety sailboat unless it became absolutely necessary. So suffice to say, we do our utmost not to carp or engender discord, for the most part. But this religious rehearsing, how it just rattles our flat day-in day-out, preventing my ever hoping to achieve untroubled slumber… The situation is downright hellish most bedtimes—flagrantly, in willful violation of familiar and explicitly understood rules and regulations prohibiting noisy practicing of instruments in the building. Every performance represents a new act of defiance, each serenade one fresh thumbing of distinctive nose at the commonwealth. How he can ever consider such deplorable conduct acceptable in a building lodging residents of over two hundred units sandwiched together, many with three occupants living in them, sardines sharing dingley tins, each with walls so paper thin they hear neighbors’ every atchoo, it’s simply beyond me. Characteristic of so many in his generation, I can only assume reasoning goes something along the lines of: ‘Well, fuck everyone but me.’

eruptions in blacktop
this side
of noise barrier

There are two or three other instrumentalist offenders who conduct themselves similarly. These reprobates are ever passing the proverbial buck, almost as though they are conspirators in conscious collusion, redirecting blame at one another whenever egregious practice schedules force neighbors into sheepish complaint to the draconian ‘Board’, necessitates begging them to intercede, and negotiate diplomatically some mutually bearable solution which may allow for undisturbed respite in the slim and critical window third-shifters are required to recharge. I am not the only resident, moreover, on such a timetable. Recreational music performance and construction are the two most exasperating burdens of working evenings for the long haul. Even with the patience of Siddhartha, there ultimately arrive many instances, swathed in sweaty blankets, writhing about the floor, pillows pressed vainly to ears, the ferocious pounding of scales nonetheless penetrating to the depths of my very soul, that at last I leap up, to my feet, and scream despairingly at the floor like a madman: “Shut up, damn you! Can’t you please be quiet!?”

buttermilk
the limited influence
of service

He’s promised my old man, and the management at this point too – quite convincingly, I’ve been told – that he will refrain from playing during the time period I need to get to sleep, between when I reach home from work and midday, at which time I am expected to be sawing logs. But, like any incorrigible addict, the Piano Man always proceeds to crack, and violates these deliberated and agreed upon constraints with increasing frequency and urgency, slippery slopes into earlier and earlier practice times as obsessions giving way to compulsivity, devastates my afternoon slumbering and precipitates never-ending antagonistic ordeals. To avoid detection and reprimand he often disguises his concerts shoddily by performing ‘pianissimo’, using other customs of muffling. These only aggravate matters worsely, replicate buzzing mosquitos in constant hover about one’s head. …I storm upstairs and stand outside his door, can feel the throbbing shaking our hallway, resounding across length of the seventh floor!

rocks peeking
from the current
staying dry