You don’t realize how much goddamn noise there is everywhere until you have a baby that hates to sleep. Airplanes and motorcycles and cars without mufflers and screaming and breaking of trash and always some kind of infernal cutting, mowing, trimming, blowing everywhere. It’s as if we are being overrun by some ever-creeping pestilence, the way everyone hacks at their greenery constantly with all kinds of gas-powered torture devices. Especially when my baby is trying to take a nap. Then they all take turns. It has to be an exhausting schedule between all of them, coordinating everyone’s time and noise responsibilities backstage so as to allow it all to appear so natural and random. But they’ve done a most excellent job. I commend them all on their passion and inventiveness.
I wrote my first book during Sophie’s naptime. My first real book, exciting fiction that was so pressing and gratifying and awkward and horrible. I was committed to it. But considering Sophie took one hour-long nap a day, if I was lucky and had done the right walk and danced the right Willie Nelson dance and laid her down soft as a cloud in her darkened room, I was quite proud of the discipline I achieved during this period, more than anything else. Including the book that came out of it. I had one damn hour. I crept out with the monitor, turned it on loud enough to hear her breathing, and started writing immediately on the yellow legal pads that I wrote on those days. Wrote until I heard her rolling over and babbling, little made up words except for the sing-song “Daddaaa..” Her voice still lingering in the heaven that babies resided during their sleep.
But when I came out and sat down, that was also the moment when the real battle began with the rest of the world. She never slept hard enough to sleep through the loud stuff, and all the assholes got off their coffee break of silence to slip back onstage for their onslaught. The omnipresent gardeners that had been hovering in the neighborhood all morning descended to kill everything green. The loudest motorcycle in the world, (everyone voted and this asshole won,) would turn down our street and gun his muffler-less Harley down our street, just ours, for whatever reason. She would wake up every time, whether at night when he was returning from banging whatever demon trannie skank guys like him snuggled up to from 12-3am, or in the afternoon when he got his casting call for Sophie’s nap. But some days I lucked out. No yelling or breaking up of recycling or massive sirens or any of that. Then it was the birds’ turn. The goddamned birds that were maybe the worst offenders of all.
We had the biggest yard in a few blocks radius, stuffed behind the bright green Victorian. And it was nothing but trees, four big ones and seven small ones, nothing but trees and a walkway and the tiny table I sat at. Prime Territory for city birds. So the scrub jays and the crows were constantly going at it, fighting over our yard anew every day. Redefining their boundaries every time a new winged interloper stumbled into the area, or one of them was feeling uppity. Or one of them felt so secure in his ownership of my yard that he would actually start yelling at me, daring to sit in my own yard under the jasmine and bitter mandarin tree, smoking a cigar by the crackling baby monitor and writing. Write write write. CAW CAW CAW.
Who knew that birds were this Territorial? They would sit by her window and in the trees and above my head as I tried to write, and battle each other. The crows with their horrible cackle from the netherworld, stretching their dark form to the sky as they barked out their nefarious commands. The scrub jays with their raspy, car-alarm call, over and over and over at the other two or three that were warring over this choice spot. Just like the Indian myth of the grandmother raccoon with the shells stuck in her throat yelling at her nasty grandson who tricked her, suddenly turned into the screeching scrub jay of the forest. I no longer found them so beautiful or endearing. Now I would hiss shut up! as I threw the tiny, bitter oranges that were strewn from our tree at them, as well as the crows, and often spent the first fifteen minutes of her nap clearing the horrible beasts off of the property like some crazy old man, flinging fruit to the four directions of the wind as I cursed them and rained oranges on all of our neighbor’s property. But you had to hit them, or at least nearly so, as they had seen my kind before and knew that most of us slightly more advanced primates could not throw accurately. So I would have to summon my pitching past and really try to nail them before they woke her up, sometimes twice to make them believers, all while trying not to break any of my neighbors windows. But even broken windows would have been worth it. The naps were so few and short and sacred. These infernal beasts had to piss off.
It wasn’t crazy, I wasn’t crazy, I was pretty sure about that as I ran around the yard as the biggest Territorial bird, casting my own domain, enduring the curses as they finally left. Winning some silence until the Harley horseman of death would round the corner and wake Sophie up crying with the infernal exhaust of his pointless rage. And yes I would throw bitter oranges at him too. Never hit him, which is why he kept coming back. Those kinds of dark spirits don’t ever believe you until you hit them, either.