Oh shit, Gary! Here's an oldy but a goody. My first year in Tucson, I lived in a one bedroom apartment a few blocks away from campus in a complex named "Casa Feliz." That's "Happy House" for those of you without a rudimentary knowledge of la lengua espanol. In this sparsely furnished apartment, I had a recliner saved from a dumpster, office furniture left behind by another grad student, one box that served as a coffee table and another for a bedside table, and a queen-sized futon for a bed. All that was in the bedroom was the futon, the box, and a flimsy particle board bookcase. It was truly an apartment made for and by a 22 year old male. I even had a clear shower curtain with no curtain liner. Classy by all accounts.

After a night out drinking one, two, or three too many cold beverages, I came home and crashed on the futon. Some time around 4:00 in the morning, I woke to what sounded like someone getting the crap kicked out of them next door. "Unh! Uhh! UHNHAHH!" Too tired to care, I tried to ignore it and fall back asleep. But the grunts and groans from next door kept on going until I realized that my neighbor was getting freaky. After a little while longer, the loud sex ended, and I fell back to sleep.

A couple of weeks went by without any more disturbances, until when on another night I woke to the sounds of my neighbor having more loud sex. And then again another weekend after that. So, for xmas that year, my legal-counsel-in-training got me a digital sleep machine so that I could drown out the noise with the sounds of a rolling stream, ocean waves crashing, crickets chirping, or white noise. I generally went with the ocean sounds.

The sleep machine did its job, and life at the Happy House continued without incident for some time. But then at some point in the spring, I woke up in the middle of the night to my neighbor's groaning and shrieking. "UNNHH!!! OOHHH!!!OOOHH!!! Oh Shit! Shit! SHIT! UNNH!!! Oh shit, Gary!"

Oh shit, Gary, indeed. Gary was a machine. But having had enough of this, I pounded on the wall hoping that they'd either quiet down or take it to another room. No such luck as my neighbor yelled back, "I can't help it, baby, it's good!"

I had never actually seen my neighbor until a couple of weeks after this last incident when I saw her outside with some kids, and she referred to herself as "Grandma."