A nut in every car
Last night, in the wee hours of the morning (around three am), I was in the Lower East Side FV subway station, coming back from seeing Reservoir Dogs at midnight. Some loud screeching noise kept occurring, but I assumed it was just some maintenance work at the end of the tunnel or something.
But it kept happening, and it was very shrill and amazingly obnoxious. It was dumbfounding. There were no trains coming and no lights were on in the tunnel, so where did this noise originate?
After a few minutes, Yoni noticed the source: some person screeching on a saxophone, making a noise we were unaware a saxophone could make. It was awful. It was so painful. It had to stop.
“SHUT UP. SHUT. UP. SHUT UP.” I bellowed down the length of the platform at the person. The noise didn’t stop. But what did happen is the floodgates opened. Suddenly a large number of people nearby realized that they too could yell at this idiot and they began to do so.
“If you have to play that, go outside!” and “We don’t want to hear your noise” were two of the shouts I heard. And the noise did stop. Yoni noticed that even a police officer was part of the shouting. It was early in the morning and everyone just wanted the pain to stop.
But it wasn’t until I shouted in the first place that everyone else even realized they could or should do the same. It was as if my shouting awoke the primal shouts in every person, the primal shouts aching to get out, waiting for some key to free them from the jail of civilized behavior that otherwise prevented the unleashing of a necessary savagery. We all need to get back to our uncivilized roots sometimes, and while music is supposed to soothe such savagery, I suppose it’s raw painful noise that riles it up in the first place.
