Voice Of America

From the great rurritable: At one point in my college career my then girlfriend and I decided to rent a place a little off the beaten path, where she might indulge her fondness for pot and nude sunbathing, and I could avoid some of my old bandmates for awhile and maybe paint some pictures or read some books or something. We scanned the papers for a few days and looked at four or five places that were remarkably similar to the place we were living already. It seemed like every other house in that town was a duplex featuring an overweight bearded poet living upstairs with his own long-suffering girlfriend and three or four dogs of a hundred pounds or more bred for hunting waterfowl. We already knew that situation by heart.

Late at night you'd hear something being excruciatingly typed out, each letter separated by a significant number of beats, then a cluster of letters, then a fight breaking out among the dogs, then what sounded like a chest of drawers falling down the stairs as the Newfoundlands or Weimaraners were let out to add to the stunning fecal topography of the enclosed yard, a sort of monument valley heaped up from 8 lb. turds. Then you heard the chest being laboriously rolled back up the stairs while the poet and his girlfriend carped at each other, had loud make-up sex, followed by more slow typing, or a slurping, snoring noise.

Ultimately we found a place we were certain would be quiet.