Monday, December 09, 2002
Am I Going to Hell?
Am I Going to Hell? Part II: So You’re Going to Hell
We live upstairs from our landlady and her family. I don’t pretend to understand much about them. She has one daughter and one son still in their teens and living at home, and one daughter who’s moved out. Her husband shows up sometimes. There are several aunts and cousins; I think the handyman is related somehow; and of course there’s grandma in the in-law downstairs at the back of the garage, audibly scowling and stomping around in her house slippers. Grandma cooks some kind of greens so rank that even she can’t stand to boil them in her apartment, so she drags the hotplate outside; the humid stink fills my bedroom and makes me wonder if the dog has somehow fatally deflated. Grandma also refuses to speak english, so a lot of the communication among family members is in chinese. They seem usually to communicate with each other by shouting, or on other occasions, by yelling. The son has a loud voice that carries well through the floorjoists and drywall; when he speaks it’s audible throughout my whole apartment. He also suffered a serious injury several years ago, leaving him heavy-footed and limping, possibly developmentally disabled, and certainly with a serious speech impediment. His voice is thick and clumsy; you can hear him think his tongue into place as he speaks. I have great respect for his ability to overcome the frustrations of his injury; he does his best to be a normal kid in his late teens with a screaming mom and a pot of rancid leaves boiling on the porch. So far so good.
They bought the boy a karaoke machine, which he turns up to a volume high enough to rattle my chandeliers. (Remember, I live upstairs from them.) The bass makes my television reception fuzz out. The vocals are inescapable - especially when the boy gets soulful and moans and hollers and shouts out with the joy of artistic creation or whatever it is that motivates karaoke singers. Mind you, he only does this when he’s home alone. (I don’t count.) He makes a hell of a lot of noise and it’s often when I’m trying to take a short nap on a saturday afternoon. And that’s okay. He can’t drive, he gets yelled at all the time, it must be so hard for him - I can’t begrudge him this experience, this chance to soar in his own soul.
Except for that now he has a “christmas hits” karaoke disk, one that seems to feature remixes of xmas classix from boy bands of the mid 90s. The thumping and ululations are indescribable. If I didn’t know better I’d honestly think something terrible had happened. I lie there on the big green couch, trying to rest. The moaning and retching downstairs is barely in time with what I would barely call music on a good day, and this is surely not a good day. If he knew - was made aware - that I could hear him, he would stop. I want to let him know. But I restrain myself because his life is so difficult and my inconvenience is so selfish. So here’s my question: if I made him aware that I could hear his caterwauling, and thus shamed him into denying himself the harmless pleasure of screaming tonelessly into a microphone, WOULD I GO TO HELL?
