Come on, Feel the Alleynoise! (Part 2)

The rumor my aunt Nancy tells me is that when I was a baby, I only cried on two or three occasions. I find this hard to believe, but maybe it's true. She says that every time she babysat me, I woke up angelically, cooing and giggling, happily entertaining myself until someone came and picked me up.

I've heard that there were times when my mom and dad, harried working-commuting people with a new baby, sometimes forgot I was in my crib because I was so quiet. (By contrast, my younger sister Julie, made crying into the casual sport for which Ralph Lauren would design a whole ready-to-wear line.) My aunt Sue once told me that when I used to spend the night at her house as a five-six year old, she would reach down in the middle of the night to touch my back -- I was such a deep sleeper, so quiet, that she was not altogether sure I was still alive.

So. This is where my need for quiet begins. When I think about who I was as a baby/child and who I am now, the differences are only minimal. I'm still a deep sleeper, so deep that whole scenarios have gone down in the middle of the night - with dogs and alley drug busts and thunderstorms - which I've missed completely. People may not describe me as angelic, but I get "nice" and "cute" quite a lot. I'm still pretty even-tempered, not one to get worked up about the proverbial shitty diaper.

A few weeks ago, I was in the Long Beach English Department, hanging with Chad, and he asked me about my family. "You never talk about them," he said. It surprised me. I spent years in therapy talking about them, years telling long-suffering friends about them, years writing in my notebooks about them. I guess I'm a little tapped out. But it did make me think about them, especially back in the day, when they were so different from me, so much louder. As she gets older, my mom is becoming much more quiet, reflective even, choosing to stay at home and listen to the Cubs games on her wind-up radio while floating in her pool. On the other hand, my sister, who has three kids under seven, is constantly in the middle of noise -- even if she wanted quiet, she'd have to work really hard for it and banish her kids somewhere soundproof. My dad, who died (un)suddenly a few years ago, was never quiet. He was the kind of person who talked straight through movies and then, became extremely hurt when I expressed I actually wanted to watch the movie. He was incapable of being quiet and I was usually quiet and so, we formed an odd dance of listening and talking.

My dad was a very opinionated man and like all extremely opinionated people, he liked nothing more than to talk about why he was right. He was extremely racist (he would say that he hated everyone equally) and that also found its way into his monolgues to me on the couch. As I got older, I began to chafe at his comments about celebrating MLK Jr. Day ("He cheated on his wife!") and his intolerance for the diversity of others ("I won't shop anywhere they post stuff in Spanish - this is America, let 'em learn English!"). My eighteen-year old self would sit and squirm and politely give him my attention, but I would feel my insides - my soul, my mind, my psyche - burning under these passionate but extremely offensive rambles. Just like with Donnie in the alley, I would begin contemplating my escape, in the form of a phone call, a bathroom break, a Diet Pepsi refill. But I stayed quiet and prayed for cases of strep throat, laryngitis, voice box removal.

Right before he died, I broke my silence. For the first time in my life, I yelled at him. I told him to shut up. He hung up on me. That was the last time I ever talked to him. A few people who've heard this story ask if it was hard to end it that way, if there was any guilt involved, but let me tell you, I've never felt badly about that interaction. Instead of being the angelic one who never cried, never demanded, I let him know that quiet was something for which I would fight. It's ironic that my need for him to be quiet is what brought out my fighting side. Perhaps it's morbid to put it like this but, in a way, he respected my request.

When I was in Illinois (now) two weeks ago, I noticed lots of things, but the thing that struck me most was the lack of fences in the backyards of houses for whole blocks and courts and routes. One rolling green lawn melted into another and the kids ran between yards with no sense of this-is-mine-and-this-is-yours. Adults waved or conversed from patios and backyard gardens. In theory, it's a beautiful, communal type of living. But I don't think I'd like it and it may explain why I'm so comfortable in the alley where I live. Everywhere you look, there are boundaries and fences. There's no question where you stop and somewhere else begins.