Memories...
In medical school, my roommate Enzyme and I had a dorm apartment next to a German couple, who were both grad students. We shared one big wall with them.
This pair were into REALLY loud sex. Moaning. Screaming. And she would scream "Fuck me, Heinrich!" repeatedly, with a bizarrely musical intonation. Like an opera number.
I have nothing against sex. Or others having sex. And noise like this in a cheap apartment is part of the college experience.
But this pair could really go at it. And it drove us nuts.
It's easy to tell someone else to turn down the TV or music. It's a lot harder to say "Hey! Can you stop humping so loud?!!!"
I think the idea was Enzyme's, but after 20 years I'm not sure. I found a used classical music CD at the college bookstore, and brought it home. We were listening to it while studying when the idea began.
We set up some speakers facing the mutual wall, and waited for the Brünhilda and Heinrich show to begin one night. It didn't take long.
And then, LOUDLY, we put on Wagner's piece "Flight of the Valkyries". Although it was tricky, we were able to time the main "dah-dah-dah-DUM-dum" part to coincide with her repeatedly screaming "Fuck me, Heinrich!" It actually sounded pretty good, like some sort of operatic porn.
After the curtain went down, we turned off the music.
A few minutes later there was some loud discussion in German (likely them swearing at us).
We never heard them going at it again. I suspect they started using another room. At least then it was the other neighbor's problem.
When I was in grad school, my upstairs neighbors would put on Beethoven's Ode to Joy after sex.
ReplyDeleteSo when we got married, I wanted to have that song as our recessional, as our little in joke. DH refused. :(
Ahh, the joys of cheap apartments!
Operatic porn...I literally LOLed. That was genius...I'll be sure to use it next year during my internship if my neighbors are having loud sex. Haha.
ReplyDeletePS...sorry if the spelling is off....I am the world's worst. :)
OMG that's hysterical- luckily the only noise I hear from our neighbors are their children screaming.
ReplyDeleteLike it - had a similar experience in our last but 2 home when the new neighbours decided to put the headboard against the communal wall, mainly so the 90 inch TV was as far from the bed as possible for the soccer (he was a 23rd rate professional). Our bedroom was further away and we noticed nothing until our daughter came to stay. She was so T-d off at not being able to sleep she hammered on the wall and shouted until they stopped and moved into their other room.
ReplyDeleteBut I like your style much better.
wv - imeutede - as in I'm outed??
So, even though they were German, in their throes of passion she screamed in English? No wonder she found Wagner to be such a turn-off. If you'd played Elgar, on the other hand...
ReplyDeleteI'll never again be able to listen to Wagner without giggling!
ReplyDelete"Kill the wabbit, kill the wabbit..."
ReplyDeleteThis is why I've always taken the corner bedroom in apartments & houses... and then played loud music. Much safer for everyone all around.
ReplyDeleteI absolutely adore your solution!! But I do have to say, that if you'd knocked at my door saying "Hey! Can you stop humping so loud?!!!", I'd have immediately apologized. Then I'd have asked what your schedule was to see if I could find a time when you were out to have sex or go to another room if you were going to be in.
Yes, I'm a polite screamer. ::perky innocent smile::
brilliant! Did the same thing with my roommate last year, except with the 5 6 7 8's woohoo song.
ReplyDeleteAlso reminds me of an XKCD comic strip: http://xkcd.com/316/
I had some friends who had the opposite problem - their neighbors would complain about their stereo being too loud (before 10 PM, so not illegal). After something like the 5th visit from the super, they decided to treat their neighbors to really loud sex after 10 PM, since that's conjugal relations and legally protected. The next day the super came back and said the neighbors preferred the stereo. Way to go, Dave + Becky!
ReplyDeleteHad the guys in the duplex next to ours playing all kinds of death metal the week before finals at Oxford University (England). Had a year's grade riding on one final exam...did NOT appreciate the death metal. They wouldn't answer their door or respond to notes or phone calls, so....borrowed extra speakers to hook up to the stereo system, put them all against the common wall with offenders, and warned the other neighbors they might want to be out for 12 hours. Put Mussourskgy's "A Night on Bald Mountain" on continuous play for 12 hrs, and left. When I got home there was a note on our door that said "You win". No more noise after that. Ever. Sweet. :)
ReplyDeleteI really, really laughed out loud about Night on Bald Mountain, after being prepped about what others did.
ReplyDeleteReturning to the alma mater last summer, I noticed the Korean War era ROTC housing that we inherited for Married Student Housing had been condemned for some time. We foreign couples vied for apartments in the middle of the 4-plexes (to stay warm in winter). Our teeth were chattering so loudly that no one else could've been distressed or disturbed.
The problem on our campus was that my married name was distinctively ethnic in the cowboy student population and the kids always called us and left obscene calls at mid-term and finals week when they were 'under' either the influence or stress.
Now, we live in a college town, where our unusual name is not unfamiliar at all! (Which is a good thing when one's offspring turn out to be a bunch of reprobates.)
This just reminded me of when my husband was up in the Arctic Circle hunting. He told us about two of the workers there (Inuits) who got together and they could hear her shouting, "Oh MARtin! Oh MARtin!" Too funny.
ReplyDeleteps. word verif. is forailik
I love this post and the stories in the comment section. Simply brilliant.
ReplyDeleteP.S. We had a neighbour who'd scream loudly every couple of minutes, over hours! I wonder what sort of game they were playing, but we didn't have to take any revenge measures because our windows would shut the noise out (mainly).
While I would love to say that home ownership solves all these problems, most homes are designed so that the master suite shares a wall with at least one, maybe two kids' bedrooms.
ReplyDeleteWhich doesn't seem quite as much of a problem until your kid is 16 or so.
Hubby and I had a similar experience in Tahiti-an Australian couple next door kept us awake all night with their very loud sexual antics. Hubby and I were were still laughing about it the next morning.
ReplyDeleteWe make sure that the kids are asleep personally and I've gotten better at being quiet and just let go when they're out of the house. ::weg::
ReplyDeletePS Hours?? Ummmm, that wasn't my fault. No, really!! I was just born that way!
PPS I'm watching Dr. G Medical Examiner and as I was writing that last someone said, "They just keep coming and coming." ::snicker::
This is hilarious! I was reminded of the same XKCD strip, Sara!
ReplyDeleteI giggled just at the thought of you refering to your roomate as enzyme!
ReplyDeleteWhen my husband and I were first married, our unit's loungeroom wall backed onto the next unit's bedroom wall. We realised that our neigbours young teenage daughter was having sex with her boyfriend when Mum was out.
ReplyDeleteWhile they were at it rather loudly one day we banged on the wall and yelled "we sure hope you are both using protection!"
It never happened again :-)
College, visiting a friend in the dorms: Idiot across the hall played "The Girl Is Mine" repeatedly (yes, Jacko and Paul McCartney). After the 7th iteration, my friend responded... with Scottish bagpipe music. Guy (!) didn't do that again...
ReplyDeleteFlight of the Valkyries will never, ever be the same now!
ReplyDelete"And she would scream "Fuck me, Heinrich!" repeatedly, with a bizarrely musical intonation. Like an opera number."
ReplyDelete....and i couldn't read any further due to rolling repeatedly, uncontrollably on the floor.
Bless you Dr. Grumpy-you've brightened up my day.
-nik
Ok. Now that I'm done laughing, how many people want to admit that they went over to trusty youtube, and listened to Wagner's masterpiece, just to fully appreciate the Grumpy/Enzyme awesomeness?
ReplyDeleteThere's nothing like it.
Superb post.
-nik
The air vent in my freshman dorm room seemed to have been directly connected to the room above mine. The perky little sorority girl in that room very much liked her gentleman callers, so we would often hear a telltale rhythmic *squeak squeak squeak* coming from upstairs. One day, we hear this instead:
ReplyDelete*squeak squeak squeak*
*thud*
Either someone fell out of a bunked bed or this particular gentleman didn't meet her expectations.
this story reminded me of many things but then when the post about bagpipes i couldn't stop laughing again
ReplyDeletemy parents had the same problem in army quarters in new jersey. the neighbors music just too loud and they partied until wee hours. weekend after weekend.
my moms answer (in the 60's mind you) she played bagpipe music with the stereo on repeat and LOUD while we went to early church service. i didn't know why we moved the stereo until we got back home.
anytime i hear bagpipes now i laugh and remember my mom
One of my personal favourites is 'Yakety Sax' - Nothing like the theme tune to Benny Hill to put off noisy sex!
ReplyDeleteAnother neighbour repeatedly had noisy sex with the window open, so the entire street could hear it. Me and some friends set up some chairs outside, grabbed some cans of beer, then cheered, whooped and clapped wildly when they finished. A pair of wild eyes appeared between the curtains, the window slammed shut, and we never heard them ever again!
While I was at the dorm last year,I heard that kind of thing all the time.The horribly stiff mattresses made a particular sound, easily heard through the paper thin walls, and it's something you can never forget. I bought an extra pair of sheets after hearing it the first time and realizing that my mattress probably at some point... well....The dorm I was in was co-ed. Your roommate would always be the same gender, and we had separate bathrooms (we each had our own male or female key and nothing was worse then really needing to go-- only to realize your bathroom key was all the way down the hall in your room). Anyway, it wasn't uncommon at all for people to simply wait for their roommate to be gone and then invite their partner over from down the hall, or the next dorm over, or whatever, in order to screw each-other. Apparently our dorm wasn't the worst place to be-- there's another dorm, also co-ed, where everyone gets their own room- so no pesky roommates to deal with. It has many informal names.
ReplyDeleteThe most embarrassing thing to happen to me was, well my friend basically got fed up of his roommate being really loud and obnoxious when he had an exam to study for, so he came over to my room to study that night. My roommate always studied at the late night cafe until like 4am or something, way past my bedtime (unless I had an exam at which point sleep? There's no such thing-- hand me another energy drink...). But anyway she was never around at that time of night,it was still like 9 o'clock, so no big deal. Well, everything was going good-- we were quizzing each-other, he was sitting on my bed swinging his legs back and forth-- Anyway, we were studying for an hour or so, and since the dorm is old and the furnace is on at all hours regardless of how horribly hot and stuffy the building actually is inside, well we were both super hot and sweaty... so he took off his shirt to cool off, and yeah you guessed it-- not one minute after that, right when I had stood up to open the window behind my bed, so I was pretty close to him, my roommate decided to walk in right then-- the one night she actually shows up early-- only to see my friend with his shirt off sitting on my bed, looking like he just ran a marathon and me right next to him... didn't help that I hadn't combed my hair that night after my shower, before he showed up to study... anyway, it didn't look good... she kind of just eeped and slammed the door... and I quickly got up to chase her down while my friend just laughed and laughed and laughed, and she kept apologizing... Now that was fun to explain... "No really, we were just studying... I mean really...." hahaha Eventually it all worked out... but I don't think she ever really believed us....