Domestic Disturbance or “Reality on Pine Street”

My neighbors are fighting. It’s 2:38pm when I check the time, but I can’t be certain how long they’ve been yelling. This is what goes through my mind, noting the time, picturing myself in front of police officers, on the stand, in news reports: “Area Man Notes Domestic Dispute in Blog: Predicts Murder.” Put a camera on me, on them, and it’s my own reality show.

“I fucking hate you…I fucking hate your guts. I hope you fucking die today.” The one yelling, he’s crying, you can hear how wet his face is, how flushed his cheeks are. I can only hear one of the two guys and now, thinking back, even minutes after, I can’t remember why I think it’s one guy yelling at another. There’s something in the way he sounds that makes me think he’s yelling at a man. It’s too easy to blame it on the voice, to make some assumption based on, what? Cadence, tone, quality? It’s the impression I’ve got, it’s how I picture it, but I can’t be certain.

“I can’t even enjoy anything in my life.” It’s a breakup. He’s telling the other guy to leave. He’s saying he has to yell because the other guy wont listen. I think I hear another voice but it’s too low. Maybe it’s my imagination. In truth, I’m not even entirely certain what window the voices are coming from. I’m surrounded by walls. Acoustics like that, you can’t be certain of testimony. I’d call in an expert from Bose to cross-examine.

And that’s the funny part of my perspective on this. My mind goes straight to Law and Order.

Moments like these, they make me reflect on my tendency to project myself into handle-it mode with only an instant of stimulus.

I’ve always predicted the worst. Say what I will about being generally optimistic, but my mind always flashes to the worst. I always go back to eight years ago. I’m nineteen and the phone rings. It’s my mom. She’s upset. Dad’s in the hospital. It’s nothing serious, but serious enough. She goes on, but I’m not even listening, I’m picturing the funeral, I’m picking out a suit, I’m drilling the speech I’ll give. It’s thirty minutes till I’ll be at the hospital, and I’m already saying my farewell. I’m already planning out a life without a father.

It’s a defense, on my part. Facing the grief as early as possible. I picture the rooms, the conversations. I ready myself for the smells, for the sounds, the feeling of hands on my shoulder, of walking down a street with the lights all yellow and empty. I practice the dialog. I let my face droop, then reset into something sterner, then more somber, into something softer. It’s that dramatic, that overblown. This is my preparation for grief, my way of staving off the shock.

I can’t believe other people get so side-swiped, are so unprepared. There were signs. Didn’t you see them? Why weren’t you ready?

It’s the shock that seizes people. I have to be ready for the shock.

I do this for everything. The friend whose drunk again, he’ll die from an overdose, an accident, something. The fight she and I had, the differences, the resentment…they’ll lead to breakup, to being on my own. Wont I be so brave? The phone rings after ten. It’s my mother. Somebody must have died.

I hope my neighbors sort it out, take a breath, and worth things out…whatever that means. But my mind always goes to the worst. I picture the cops, the lights flashing, the stretcher. My steady but slow steps over to the officer in charge. I tell them what I know. For a moment, I’m the center of everything. Maybe this is the storyteller in me. I write the scene. I edit.

I really do believe in optimism. I know that things will work out, but that is always balanced by knowing that life isn’t always on the up. Behind every success is that phone call, that grief. Behind the grief is further success.

I don’t want my own reality show, but I’m damn well rehearsed for how to enter the stage when it comes.