White Noise - SHU Style

 

First I recall they sold tapes with white noise (ocean waves, soft rain, maybe a breeze rustling through leaves), then came the dedicated “sleep machines,” and I’m sure by now there must be dozens of apps that help ease you off to slumberland. Well, after all this time dealing with the noises of the SHU, I’m gonna have to find one with three unique sound settings:  (1) constantly flushing toilet, (2) incessant Echo Man, and (3) “Chicken.”  The soundtrack of nighttime on the SHU, lulling me to sleep like a sledgehammer to the skull!  Allow me to elaborate:

Constantly Flushing Toilet:  Okay, this is a stainless steel toilet with some serious flushing power. On the International Scale of Flushing Strength, ranging from 1-10, with 1 being a gently swirling eddy barely taking down a tissue, and 10 flushing a whole roll of 4-ply Charmin, these things are cranked to 11.  I’ve seen them suck down a whole apple and a t-shirt.  Legend has it that a guy lost his arm in one.  Now imagine that on the other side of the wall where you are nestled in your pile of orange fuzz, in your marginally clean prison garb (see earlier posts), that one of these Defecation Hurricanes gets stuck in Flush Mode Non-Stop!  ALL NIGHT!  What am I to do?  What will soothe me to sleep?  Don’t worry, there’s always…

Incessant Echo Man: Turns out the stainless steel shower is a great place to produce an echo through the pipes.  Apparently, like a child discovering his voice for the first time, some guy just can’t get enough of this echo effect. Every damned night he hoots and hollers nonsensical ramblings into his shower, inflicting these howls on the rest of us. I thought, surely the novelty will wear off after 1, 2…10 days?  No such luck. I mean, won’t his cellie get tired of it? No sirree, you can also hear that idiot in the background cackling with laughter, Echo Man’s personal laugh track.  We all decided to treat them like children.  Ignore them, and they’ll stop, right? The Ferber Method for annoying inmates. But just when we appear to be making headway, someone will shout, “Shut the F___ up!” and we are back to Square One.  On occasion, though, we get lucky, and Echo Man takes a break, leaving us with good old reliable “Chicken.”

Chicken:  This guy sleeps all day and stays awake all night. He begins and ends any verbal exchange with deranged chicken-hen-rooster sounds.  A typical example:

Dude:  Hey Chicken, what’s up?

Chicken:  Bab-Bah-Bowk, nothin’ just readin’.

Dude: What you readin’?

Chicken:  A book called 1984 written in like 1940 about the future, but it’s now in the past, aww shit my head hurts.  Chicken out – cockadoodle-doo!

Dude: (laughing hysterically), Damn, that Chicken’s crazy! 

These barnyard conversations continue until 2-3 am every night.

So, finally, blessedly, you drift off to sleep, only to hear the dreaded click of the light switches coming on between 5:30 and 6:30 am.  Thus we launch another Groundhog Day of our non-punishment SHU Covid Quarantine. I must have missed the CDC guidelines on this protocol!