sublingua

(Be present.)

(It's past.)

(Go there now.)

Part I: In The Ghetto...

Life in the student ghetto is usually pretty interesting. There are the amiable skater punks next door in Sophistica's old apartment, and I keep an eye out for the one I like to call Smiley because he has the most genuine and infectious smile that I have ever seen in my life. (And, writing that, I am reminded that all babies have the same smile.) And there is the apartment across the street which is a miserable tenant magnet of a place. (That apartment has attracted just a string of the most annoying and annoyingly loud tenants in the world. So much so that my landlady, who is relatively easy-going after years in the landlady business, was prompted one night to get out of bed and march across the street to confront the partiers.) And then of course, there is the ever present sound of the neighbors having loud sex.

Usually, the sounds emanate from hottie neighbor Angelique's Apartment of Sin (which shares a wall with my little apartment) and consist of lots of "Are you sure I can't stay?" "No, it's too late" types of conversations followed by a volley of drunken moans and Oh, baby's, etc. But the other afternoon, I was watching a movie (Pretty Baby I think it was) and I heard the loud moaning that means that some neighbor be gettin' lucky. My first thought was, of course: I didn't hear Angelique come in. And I was right. Angelique hadn't come in. The noise was, in fact, coming from across the courtyard, not through the thin partition that the landlady likes to call a wall. And I'll bet you're all dying to know who the lucky lass was. Well, it was--

Drumroll please--

The Demon Who Does The Right Thing. She and and The Demon Grrlfriend (a.k.a The Demon Who Tolerates Intolerable Behavior). And, apparently, it was The Demon Grrlfriend who was doing the right thing this time, because I knew demons could be noisy, but I don't think I've ever heard any of them making those kinds of noises. What could I do? I just closed the front door and turned up the sound on the TV.

But last night, as I was making dinner, The Demons Who Be Gettin' It On In The Middle Of The Afternoon knocked on my door. "Sublingua!" they called. "Can we borrow some Splenda?" (This is an inside joke that won't, trust me, bear up under a re-telling.) I let them in and we were joking around and chatting and somehow the conversation came around to The Demon asking if I could hear them having loud sex. I said of course I could. She asked, "What did it sound like?" I said, "What? Are? You? Talking About? You don't know what you sound like?" "Well, no," she said. And she asked me to imitate her having loud sex with The Grrlfriend.

Yeah.

And I've entertained some pretty bizarre requests in my life, but I've never heard that one before. I though immediately of attempting to reenact the infamous diner scene from When Harry Met Sally, but in the end I refused to do so. We joked about recorded sex (video, audio, etc.) and the conversation moved on. But then it came around to allergies. (I think someone went to sneeze?) And so I made to sneeze, only drawing it out: "Aaahh- oooooo-uhhhh-CHO!" and again, "Oooohhh-uuummmm-ahhhhh-CHO!" in loud, moaning sounds. The Demon Grrlfriend cracked up and The Demon blushed a bright and flattering pink.

I think Max had the best line of the conversation when he said, in response to The Demon admitting embarrassment at my imitation: "At least when those sounds were coming from your apartment, there were two of you in there." And everyone turned to look at me, dear reader.

Part II: I Am Not

I'm not that loud. I am not.

Part III: Will Work For Food

Now what? Shit.