inferno beneath the floorboards.

woke up to this first morning back from nyc to the familiar sounds of hell beneath my feet. the strange new clan that has taken up habitation in the apartment below still have the remnants of their christmas guests lingering.
vocal cords still intact, unfortunately.
the gratuitous obscenities that drift up from beneath my floor boards are Intolerable, and the guffaws over mumbled vaguaries, tiring.

one night a few weeks ago the "lady" of the house was singing along to a whitney houston song. with but moments before the onset of some imminent and vile self-combustion at the mercy of her bad taste , i yelled at the top of my lungs that i couldn't Possibly listen to her Any longer, threw sisters of mercy onto my tape deck and jacked the volume up.

i had a chuckle at my obstinacy, didn't really think she would hear, but the cold stony greeting i got on my fire escape when i introduced myself a week or so later indicates that she most certainly did.

sigh.
why can't i just play nice?

i suppose they aren't as bad as the prior denizen of apartment 14, or whatever number graces that abode: facing onto the back alley, it's not privy to the street assignation of the rest of the civilized world, and i've often wondered if it actually Exists.
hell-ga.
yes, hell-ga.
my previous neighbour, terror to all who knew her, hell-ga was a crack addict, expletive-driven psychotic, who spent her nights howling at the moon.
or my floorboards, as the case may be.
she would emerge each morning to turn her soiled garments on the laundry line, a camel-toed marshmallow-man nightmare in sweat pants pulled up above her waist, her eyes sunken and violet, her hair a dishevelled crew cut, her demeanour, well, Un-accomodating to say the least.
when i first moved in she was dating a man with no legs. he used to sit outside in the alley in his wheelchair with a 26er and drink all day. at night someone would wheel him in and he would hover and swear at her — all night long.
never full sentences of course, nothing rational to be gleaned from his bitterness, just layer upon layer of vituperous calumny let loose across the room.
he didn't sleep. it was beyond real.
every so often there would be an uncomfortable grunt, a couple of moans, a momentary pause, and then, like a needle set to a gramaphone that refused to die, he'd be off and running again.
sex was the only thing that could eclipse his tirades, and never for long.

one night i awoke to a voice so hollow, loud and grating that it went straight through my futon, into my ear and resonated through my brain. hell-ga, of course, the linda blair of the back alley off gerrard, yelling, "I HAATTTTTEEEE MYYY LIIIFFEEEEE".
sigh.
not as much as we do, hell-ga, not as much as we.

hell-ga got moved a while ago. out of our building and across the alley to another address of questionable origin. i still see her wandering back and forth every so often. word on the street says she's found her zen in organizing the rubbish. there is some truth to that — the refuse piles have never looked better and life has returned to (relative) normal.

heheh. "normal". just an album of vacuous ballads from the trailerpark family of outlaw philistines.

welcome back to toronto, miz lenk.