A Story From Last Night

I’d like to try and relate a true story that happened to me early this morning around 1:00 AM. It’s a lighthearted story, unlike most stories that occur at that hour, and I hope you enjoy it.

Last night I had trouble sleeping and I failed to get cross the REM finish line before loud music started to play outside my window. I live in Brooklyn and I grew up halftime in a small city, so when I hear loud music usually I try to ignore it. Who am I to complain? If you can’t handle the city, I tell myself, move to the fuckin burbs.

I can be kind of a bully sometimes. But only to myself.

Everyone has a bully inside of them I think. After 27 years of studying bullies, that’s the only conclusion I’ve drawn. The bully hates himself so completely and consistently that the bullied person outside grows hateful and violent, and that’s what we see. That’s who bullies us.

I’m totally not a psychiatrist. I’m just very interested in not becoming a bully.

But to myself; I’m allowed to bully myself. And if I yell at myself enough to stop complaining and move to the fuckin burbs, doesn’t that mean I’m due for a good night’s sleep?

The music they’re playing outside is in another language, which is also infuriating, like it’s pestering me for not trying hard enough in the seven years I took Spanish. The language, I think, is Arabic, but it could easily be Farsi, Urdu, Kurdish, or Turkish. I have no idea what the language is, I just know how tired I am, and I wish they would move their fucking car to the burbs.

Why are you such a loser, Sam? A reasonable person would have his bathrobe on right now. He would have his slippers on right now. He’d already be at the door, kindly beseeching the olive-skinned men to shut it down.

All I could reasonably do was look out the window, and I came very close to shouting, “Will you PLEASE.” But what I saw made my tongue go limp.

And it softened my heart.

What I saw was a circle of young men, unattached in their lives, congregated in a circle, enjoying each other’s company. What’s more, they were dancing, and one of the young men was teaching the others (again, in that foreign language I wish I knew) how to dance.

It was beautiful; sort of embarrassing for me, until I realized that they probably weren’t dancing for just themselves. They were dancing for the circles of the future, at a wedding maybe, where dancing was considered a social requirement. One of them maybe was too shy to dance and his friend insisted upon bringing his SUV up to the curb of my downstairs bodega (their cousin owns the place) and teach him.

Light spilled out from the bodega, making a dance floor that could easily be removed later when it was time to be a sidewalk again. But for now, the numinous figures kicked in time to a beat I could really get into if I wasn’t such an idiot.