Tao of Pauly

Alley Sounds Reprise

By Pauly
Los Angeles, CA

A cricket sings, but only at night.

At the Midnight hour, the alley sounds are a bit different than their day counterparts. The lack of warm sun changes the environment. There's the crazy Asian lady who constantly screams at her husband in her native tongue. I have no idea what she's saying but her husband must be one helluva fuck up that she's always calling him out on things. Either that, or he's deaf.

The guys upstairs stand in the alley, talk about football, and smoke cigarettes. The apartment building is a no-smoking structure. I should say -- no cigarette smoking -- because there's plenty of herbal toking going on. Sometimes they smoke twice an hour. Most of the time, it's about once an hour.

The out-of-work actress/waitress from across the alley sings at odd hours. Her vocals are better than your average karaoke lounge star but not quite American Idol material. In the mornings, she's singing pop in the shower. In the afternoons, she's practicing her scales. At nights? I assume she's just drunk and happy, one or the other, or both.

I haven't heard the moans and groans from the couple having sex in the pool house behind us. The lady unleashed shrill sounds -- sort of like a goat being shredded to death by a lawnmower -- which echoed across the alley and into almost every room in our apartment. She hasn't been riding the pipe recently.

And sometimes, just before dawn, you hear the can homeless people digging in the dumpster looking for something. Anything. There's more and more of that going around. I have been consuming an alarming rate of canned seltzer water. The result? At least a six pack of aluminum per day. We usually dump out our stuff to the recycle bin once a week, and on that day, the first bum who stumbles upon our dumpster hits the jackpot. And if the dumpster diver catches us on a Monday morning, he'll even luck into an even bigger score when you add in all the empty beer cans that the guys upstairs drink while they watch football on Sunday.