from the Archive
The first few nights I thought he was trying to flag a cab. Then I thought he was trying to flag a hooker. Then I thought he was keeping six, and this was a more subtle form of yelling “Cheez it!” when the cops turned up. Still don’t know, but it’s damn annoying.
There’s a whistler in this town, and he comes out after midnight. If this were the Scottish moors he could call a collie a mile away; this is the kind of whistle that passes through stone and steel and my bedroom window as if they weren’t there. He sounds off about once every 90 seconds, for couple of hours, and downpours do not deter him. Sometimes there are bursts of whistles, sometimes just one. The bursts are not musical, just the same rising note, a nonverbal questionmark. I wonder what the question is.
The screamers are back. Tonight, there were two: a man and a woman, and a yeller, all going at once, having, to all appearances or accoustances, a grand old time, screaming and screaming and yelling. Yeller isn’t angry, just loud enough that I can hear him a block over, and he yells alot. Some day instead of tuning him out I’m going to listen to it. I’ll either be bored or forced to testify: guess which is more likely!
And then there is Whoo! Whoo! (not to be confused with John Woo, the Hong Kong phenom of film) Whoo! is a guy whose vocabulary has been reduced to a single word, the aforementioned “Whoo!” and a single volume setting, maximum. Foreigner was playing in town recently, and Supertramp is coming, so maybe he’s just reliving the glory days of rock, when your Bic lighter and your Black Sabbath T-shirt were all you needed for a party. It’s nice to hear someone having such a good time in the neighborhood, but if I get him in a dark alley I’m going to…tell the junkies the cops might investigate all that noise…and then I’ll just walk away. No fingerprints.
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