Sex Machine: Listening to the Neighbors Have Sex
By AnonymousDecember 15th, 2008, 4:53 amComments (12)I went to bed early on Friday night. I felt guilty for not doing more to inaugurate the weekend with something social, but I was exhausted. Thursday was our office holiday party and I was out too late, up too early the next morning, and bleary eyed by sundown. As I was brushing my teeth I heard some moaning coming through the walls of my apartment. I was immediately curious because my neighbor is an older woman, near seventy, and lives alone. The idea of her having sex at 10:30 on a Friday night immediately tickled at my curiosity.
In the year that I've lived in my apartment I almost never hear anything from my neighbor. She cranks the TV up when Dancing with the Stars is on, and I've listened to some of her rambling diatribes on the subject when she's caught me on the balcony some nights. She gets visits from her son, who is the super for our building, and baby-sits her new grandson every now and then. Otherwise her social life is entirely comprised of television and her overfed cat.
The idea that she had suddenly had enough, decided to put on some lipstick, walked out to the smoky jazz bar on Twenty-Fifth Street and brought home some spot-bellied gentleman caller to listen to her vinyl collection was exciting. It's easy to take for granted the more basic physical needs of those around us. There is a fundamental shame about body function and nakedness that sits in perilous opposition to the idea of close-quarters living in an apartment building.
I feel an embarrassment some mornings when I walk to my dresser after showering and realize I'm naked and in plain view of anyone on the sidewalk or in the building across the way. I was looking at some porn clips in between bouts of writers block the other night without realizing that the volume on my computer was turned all the way up. As the trumpeting cries of the actors came blaring from my speakers I literally jumped out of my seat.
My neighbor on the other side is a young and attractive woman who just moved to the city. I hear her talking on the phone some nights or talking to her small terrier when he's acting up. I was certain that this blast of truck-stop porn was coming through loud and clear on her side of the wall. What would she think of me the next morning as we passed each other in the hallway, me late for work and her on her way out to walk the dog? She would see me as the anti-social porno monster with a Jenna Jameson screen saver and a weekly email updates from AVN.
When I lived in Madagascar people used to shit on the periphery of my yard every few days. I would look up from my desk and see some mischievous twelve year-old or a woman headed back out to the countryside after market day, squatting in the long yellow grass where a curb might have been had the scene been moved to America. If they would catch me staring at them emptying their bowels, they would say hello as if they had just stopped to tie a shoelace or pick up some dropped papers.
Sex was also conducted without much thought to the immediate surroundings. Families of six or eight lived in single-room huts, and when husband and wife or boyfriend and girlfriend wanted to have sex, it necessarily happened with a room full of relatives dozing right next to the lovers. Confronting those most basic physical functions was unavoidable, and it became meaningless.
Living in an apartment building in a big city should, theoretically, be similar. When I lie down to sleep at night, my head is probably four feet away from my older neighbors head. Two sheets of dry wall and some fuzzy pink insulation is all that separates us. When I snore, I'm sure it reverberates through the walls, when I share my bed with a woman I'm sure the sounds of sex are unavoidable.
When the only sounds I hear from her apartment are the announcer building up drama for the big finale on Dancing with the Stars it makes me sad. Is that how things end up? Thinking of her body, swollen with age, slack and speckled, still writhing on her bed, twisting the sheets, mixing her sweat with someone else's made me smile. I want to think of her in that way. I want that experience to be something she still seeks out.
After a few more minutes of teeth-brushing I realized it wasn't my elder neighbor, but the Guatemalan couple directly above me having sex. The moaning and the dull thud against the mattress sounding like a loop, two people perpetually falling, grappling with each other against the rush of air and unavoidable gravity pulling on their naked bodies. Maybe I should start looking more closely at some of those bored old men in fedoras sitting in the park on sunny afternoons, watching pigeons circle the garbage cans. One of them might wind up being a fan of Dancing with the Stars. Maybe they could use a date too.
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Comments ( 12 )
So this woman has married, or at least partnered, produced a child and been given a grandchild. That's already pretty cool. And maybe her social life happens in the afternoons when you are at work given that she is, presumably, retired. Maybe she watches dancing with the stars and daydreams about the sex she had in the bathroom that afternoon at the Bingo Hall.
You can project sadness or loneliness, but it don't make it so.
ahg: What's the difference between our projections? I know her, at least. I speak with her every couple of weeks, and have been for more than a year. You're projecting some lurking truth about her based on you mistrust in my frame of reference as a narrator, which, in truth, has even less to do with her.
She may well be having illicit love affairs in the afternoon, but if that was the case wouldn't you imagine she would have some evening spillover at least a few times over the course of the year, or a little morning sex? Likewise, she complains an awful lot about her wishywashy sons, who she describes as lazy and unmotivated. She worries more than a little bit about the kind up squalid upbringing her grandson will have, being raised by her loping sons who subsist on pizza and heavy doses of television.
She's a lovely woman, scatterbrained, and neurotic. It would amuse me greatly to know that she had someone nice to get naked with from time to time.
Does she have sexy thick aged hands?
There's nothing "wrong" with your projections - just that you seem to find sadness in many situations. My point was that you can choose not to.
You asshole, you think I don't read this? Mind your own fucking business, punk!
ahg: well life can be a sad trawl. that's not the sum total of the truth, but it's one side of it and I, for one, don't see many people truthfully acknowledging those experiences out loud. We blow lots of smoke up each other's asses about living happy, healthy, and successfully, but we never talk about the vulnerabilities, the irrational disappointments, and the inevitable disintegration at the end of it all. Acknowledging those things is, to me, more an attempt to be honest than an attempt to find sadness in something. I do not suspect these experiences are unique to me, though I might not be the best person to articulate them.
all of which is a long way of saying that i do not want to forgo sex when i'm 65 just because i'll have "other" things to preoccupy me.
Dude, my grandmother (I can't tell you a thing about her sex life or lack thereof) used an expression:
Crepe hanger:
a person of consistently pessimistic outlook (from the use of black crepe for the manufacture of ladies
Dude, my grandmother (I can't tell you a thing about her sex life or lack thereof) used an expression:
Crepe hanger:
a person of consistently pessimistic outlook (from the use of black crepe for the manufacture of ladies' mourning dresses, men's hat bands and arm bands, and funeral wreaths)
one who enjoys going to funerals
This is not a comment on the quality of your writing but your posts are the most consistently gloomy screeds I've ever cringed through. When you talk about sex I often read with one eye shut. There's always a thread of imminent heartbreak, or venereal disease.
When describing an older person you often focus entirely on "the ravages of age," both physically and spiritually. THAT speaks profoundly on projection and perhaps your own dread of growing old.
Life can be a "sad trawl," but it can also be pretty sweet, and age can bring an awful lot more than thick hands, spotty bellies and loneliness.
Lighten up, Francis...
Recycledbrooklyn emailed me because his comments keep disappearing...
Hahum (clearing throat)
"Dude, my grandmother (I can't tell you a thing about her sex life or lack thereof) used an expression:
Crepe hanger:
a person of consistently pessimistic outlook (from the use of black crepe for the manufacture of ladies' mourning dresses, men's hat bands and arm bands, and funeral wreaths)
one who enjoys going to funerals
This is not a comment on the quality of your writing but your posts are the most consistently gloomy screeds I've ever cringed through. When you talk about sex I often read with one eye shut. There's always a thread of imminent heartbreak, or venereal disease.
When describing an older person you often focus entirely on "the ravages of age," both physically and spiritually. THAT speaks profoundly on projection and perhaps your own dread of growing old.
Life can be a "sad trawl," but it can also be pretty sweet, and age can bring an awful lot more than thick hands, spotty bellies and loneliness.
Lighten up, Francis..."
Recycledbrooklyn emailed me since his comments are not going through and asked me to say the following:
ha hum (clearing throat)
"Dude, my grandmother (I can't tell you a thing about her sex life or lack thereof) used an expression:
Crepe hanger:
a person of consistently pessimistic outlook (from the use of black crepe for the manufacture of ladies' mourning dresses, men's hat bands and arm bands, and funeral wreaths)
one who enjoys going to funerals
This is not a comment on the quality of your writing but your posts are the most consistently gloomy screeds I've ever cringed through. When you talk about sex I often read with one eye shut. There's always a thread of imminent heartbreak, or venereal disease.
When describing an older person you often focus entirely on "the ravages of age," both physically and spiritually. THAT speaks profoundly on projection and perhaps your own dread of growing old.
Life can be a "sad trawl," but it can also be pretty sweet, and age can bring an awful lot more than thick hands, spotty bellies and loneliness.
Lighten up, Francis..."
Ok, I am now trying this for the 4th time! Recycled can't get his comments to go through so he asked me to say the following:
ha hum (clearing throat)
"Dude, my grandmother (I can't tell you a thing about her sex life or lack thereof) used an expression:
Crepe hanger:
a person of consistently pessimistic outlook (from the use of black crepe for the manufacture of ladies' mourning dresses, men's hat bands and arm bands, and funeral wreaths)
one who enjoys going to funerals
This is not a comment on the quality of your writing but your posts are the most consistently gloomy screeds I've ever cringed through. When you talk about sex I often read with one eye shut. There's always a thread of imminent heartbreak, or venereal disease.
When describing an older person you often focus entirely on "the ravages of age," both physically and spiritually. THAT speaks profoundly on projection and perhaps your own dread of growing old.
Life can be a "sad trawl," but it can also be pretty sweet, and age can bring an awful lot more than thick hands, spotty bellies and loneliness.
Lighten up, Francis..."
Dude, my grandmother (I can't tell you a thing about her sex life or lack thereof) used an expression:
Crepe hanger:
a person of consistently pessimistic outlook (from the use of black crepe for the manufacture of ladies' mourning dresses, men's hat bands and arm bands, and funeral wreaths)
one who enjoys going to funerals
This is not a comment on the quality of your writing but your posts are the most consistently gloomy screeds I've ever cringed through. When you talk about sex I often read with one eye shut. There's always a thread of imminent heartbreak, or venereal disease.
When describing an older person you often focus entirely on "the ravages of age," both physically and spiritually. THAT speaks profoundly on projection and perhaps your own dread of growing old.
Life can be a "sad trawl," but it can also be pretty sweet, and age can bring an awful lot more than thick hands, spotty bellies and loneliness.
Lighten up, Francis...
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