The man next to me on the bus has his headphones on. He thinks he is being discreet, mouthing the words to the songs on his playlist. But I am keenly aware of his actions and his presence. I can hear the whooshing and hissing fricatives and the sputtering stops, and it is unhinging. It's plucking at my nerves one by one. I can't wait to be free of this bilabial bebop, this velar vocal vacuity. Deliver me from these tees and esses marooned on islands of staccato sound.
"Amateur," I thought to myself.
Rewind to 1989. Seven years into my life and seven years before Monty Python taught me--by means of a VHS rental--the "importance of not being seen," I was learning something more useful: the importance of not being heard.
It was a normal summer late afternoon. Dad was asleep upstairs, recharging for another 12-hour night shift. Mom was resting on the couch, headachey from a busy day at work. The phone was taken off the hook with the earpiece muffled by a dish towel so that the outside world would not interrupt this delicate peace. It was in this environment that I learned to be inaudible. During such times, it was prescribed that my brother and I play in the basement. He with a DOS-loaded video game from a cassette or floppy disk and me with a set of Legos or Lincoln Logs, usually. There, we had a bit of a buffer to create a sort of a muted din. My mother would tell us to keep the door closed, but there was a trick to it. You see, it closed rather tightly so that when it was opened, it would make a loud screech. This was a problem since inevitably we would need to come upstairs to fetch something or use the bathroom. So we closed the door only partly until it wedged just a little against the door frame. When we came upstairs we would lean into it and hope that the resulting noise was only subtle.
There were other tricks I learned to employ as well. Walking on the balls of my feet helped cushion the impact of my weight on the floor. One learns quickly by trial and error where the floorboards most audibly creak and that it is best to keep as close to the walls as possible. A single false step elicits a Pavlovian response similar to the one that occurs when the buzzer is triggered in the popular children's game, Operation.
Unlike that vintage Milton Bradley diversion, however, my game of sneaking around the house had a lot of replay value. Every trip to fish something out of a drawer in my bedroom was a new quest. The act of entering or exiting the house undetected--best accomplished through the sliding door in the back whose friction was audible in a lower register than their squeaking, hinged counterparts--was an adventure in itself.
As it turns out, the modern home is filled with all kinds of potential auditory perils. Every door represents a slamming thud. Appliances can become the vile producers of shrill dings and beeps as their timers go off. Pots, pans and dishes clang as they are removed from cupboards. One must navigate with care amidst these snares.
If this kind of attitude and these behaviors seem strange to you, then count yourself lucky. For the kind of irrational sensitivity and hypervigilance with which I was born are not easily switched off. Imagine always being self-conscious but lacking in self-awareness--always looking with wariness at the things around you but never addressing the impact such thinking has on your feelings and moods. Now, imagine projecting those inward impositions onto others. The man on the bus for whom I have such great disdain, is not at all deserving of it. Yet, his attenuated lisping is all I can think about, amplified by my own obsessive mind.
I am happy to get off at the next stop, sliding off my seat, shuffling through the aisle and slipping out the doorway quickly and silently and not warranting even a fleeting glance from a fellow passenger.
