Noises

Just so you know, this one might be a little gross. It has to do with the things you discover about another human being when you live in close proximity. As the old saying goes, familiarity breeds contempt. And whether they be spouse, sibling, friend, roommate, or coworker, the more we are around other people, the more we become aware of their quirks and eccentricities.

The confines of prison force you to spend more time with another individual than most people would ever choose. When people ask me what prison is like, I tell them they can discover the answer themselves in four easy steps: 1) move two beds into your bathroom; 2) pick a random stranger on the street to move into the bathroom with you; 3) have someone else close and lock the bathroom door from the outside; 4) spend the next several years getting to know and appreciate each other.

You cannot help but notice everything your cellie does. And sometimes his actions become unbearable, which leads to tension in the carceral relationship. But what do you do when your criticisms of your cellie sound petty, even to your own ears? How do you live out the Christian faith when you cannot stand some of the things the person “closest” to you does?

After I’d been with a previous cellie, Princess, for about two months, I ran into his old cellie, Tim. Tim asked me how things were going with Princess, and I replied, “Fine.” Fine is one of those ambiguous responses that covers a lot of ground, from “tolerable” to “horrific, but I don’t want to complain.”

“Fine, huh?” Tim seemed to know that there was tension in my cellular life with Princess. And then he asked me a most peculiar question. A question that I’ve never been asked before about any fellow human. “How can you stand those mouth noises?”

Unfortunately the question made perfect sense to me, and I exclaimed, “No kidding!” Then Tim and I spent the next half hour covering the plethora of oral and nasal and other expressions that Princess produces.

1) The Deep Snort. And I mean Snor-or-or-or-ort! He claims that he can’t breathe through his nose. He has to breathe through his mouth instead. But in order to maintain a partially clear airway through his nose, sinuses, and throat, he does a full-bodied, extended-stacatto inhale that is part machine gun and part ShopVac. The Deep Snort is generally followed by…

2) The Earsplitting Throat Clear. Cuh-CUH! If this occurs in the close quarters of the cell, the decibel level of the Throat Clear can cause tinnitus. If your ear is anywhere in the direct path of the Cuh-CUH concussion, you risk ruptured eardrums. One handy side effect of the Throat Clear is that you can locate your cellie anywhere, even out in the yard, just by listening. There he goes – out on the block, back row of chairs in front of the block television. And I didn’t even have to look!

3) The Self-Initiated Belch. When you were a child, you might have discovered that you can make yourself burp by gulping air and swallowing it into your stomach. Gagunk-gagunk-BURP! Princess was apparently so amazed at his childhood auto-belch that he continues it even at age 61. He loves to start out the mornings with a chorus of Gagunk-gagunk-BURPs. And if he overhears me performing my own occasional natural belch, he immediately counters with his air gulping, inflating his stomach to the required pressure to generate a BURP that is longer and louder than mine.

4) The Air Sample. Sniff-sniff-pause (repeat endlessly). If Princess senses a potential odor floating around the cell, he begins to Sniff-sniff, despite his claim that he cannot breathe through his nose. Any time I open food packaging, sprinkle detergent in my wash bin, or seat myself on the toilet, he starts Sniff-sniffing. The detection of any irritating scent triggers his countermeasure – lighting a homemade cinnamon incense stick that he keeps by his bunk. He waves the incense around and continues to Sniff-sniff until he’s certain the smell emergency has passed. He is particularly averse to Tide detergent and packaged chicken breast.

5) The Dying Breath. Gasp-gasp-gassssp! Although Princess claims to be in excellent physical condition, any mild exertion, such as rooting around through his multiple boxes of chips, cupcakes, and other food stored beneath his bunk, causes a fit of huffing and puffing. One day a younger black inmate was at the cell door, begging a few pieces of candy from Princess. After he mined some candy from his under-bed treasure trove, he presented it to the inmate at the door with a Gasp-gasp-gassssp! The inmate responded to the labored breathing with, “Get that old man noise sh-t out of my face!”

6) The Orange Slice Shlurp. Princess has determined that eating three oranges per day will keep him at the pinnacle of health. He quarter slices the oranges, inserts a slice against the few teeth left in his mouth, closes his lips over the rind, then gums the orange pulp while humming num-num-num. As soon as the juice is depleted, he extracts the rind from his mouth with a loud Shlurp! Do the math – three oranges, four quarters each, means num-num-num-Shlurp! twelve times in rapid succession, and I mean rapid! He hardly stops for a Dying Breath, going through the fruit with such haste that you would think they were the worst tasting medicine on earth and he was in a rush to get it over with.

7) The Gas Pass. Okay – obviously not a mouth noise, but it is nearly always followed by the whisper-muffled apology, “Oh, excuse me,” which comes across as, “Oo, a-oo-ma.”

8) The Mocha-Slurp-Uccino. Princess makes one cup of coffee each morning. He calls it a mochaccino, a concoction of powdered cappuccino, creamer, sugar, and instant coffee. He never takes a sip from his cup – it’s always a long slurp.

9) The Triple Slurp. Princess owns a second cup with a spill proof lid just for water. Like the mochaccino, he never sips, he slurps, though he doesn’t slurp his water just once – it’s always in clusters of three followed by the satisfied lip smack and gasp of “aaaah.” The Triple Slurp is best enjoyed at 4 am, right after Princess has risen to urinate for the seventh time that night.

10) The Chomp and Breathe. Princess likes to cook things in the cell, and he likes to eat them hot. After taking a large bite of hot food, he tries to chew and breathe at the same time. But remember, he says he can’t breathe through his nose. So it’s an open-mouth chew that goes, Chomp chomp gasp… chomp chomp gasp.”

There are other mouth noises, but this gives you an idea of the repertoire of sounds that Princess produces. And of course the mouth noises come in combinations. Here’s a for instance. Princess is reclining on his bunk watching “Dance Moms.” (He loves that show, but that’s a story for another time.) At the commercial break he clears his throat, Cuh-CUH, and then sits up to reach for his sippy cup of water, Slurp-slurp-slurp-lipsmack-aaaah! The action of sitting up has dislodged a bubble in his intestines which results in the passing of gas and the mumbled apology, “Oo, a-oo-ma.” With the chance that he has generated a malodor, he scans the cell air – Sniff-sniff-pause, Sniff-sniff-pause. Satisfied that the expulsion was benign, but before settling back onto the bed to continue with the dramatic joy of Dance Moms, he curtails the sniffing and launches into three auto-belches. Gagunk-gagunk-BURP! (x 3)

I know this may sound like I’m just whining about the struggles of life with a cellie, but my hunch is that you may know something of what I’m talking about. While you probably don’t have a cellie, you might have a spouse, significant other, child, parent, friend, coworker, neighbor, or someone else who knows how to annoy you with a mouth noise or two. So what I want to share with you is my journey of self-discovery as I wrestled with how to live with the mouth noises without choking out the source.

I turned first to psychology, where I was surprised to learn that my irritation with my cellie’s mouth noises is apparently a problem with me, not him. I read an article by Elizabeth Bernstein entitled, “I Love You, But I Can’t Stand the Way You Chew,” in which she asks, “If you can’t stand the sound of someone’s chewing, does that person need to close his or her mouth? Or do you?” She goes on to write that “people who have an extreme aversion to specific noises – most often ‘mouth sounds’ such as chewing or lip-smacking, but also noises such as…sniffing – suffer from a condition called misophonia,” which may affect up to 20% of the population, according to researchers.

One woman in the article says that she is aware of her misophonia, and “feels solace knowing she’s not alone.” I already knew I was not alone because Princess’s old cellie had described his own misophonia disorder quite clearly to me, “How can you stand the mouth noises?”

As much as I had been tempted to launch into a verbal tirade and stuff socks into Princess’s mouth, the article made it clear that this was not an appropriate response. “The person who is annoyed by the sounds is the one who needs to change and learn coping skills. If others accommodate you by changing…they are only enabling you.”

What are these coping skills that I was supposed to learn? According to the article, I should not seek to avoid the sounds. “If you always put on headphones [which I tried] or move to another room [which is hard to accomplish in a prison cell], you aren’t fully participating in the relationship. The idea is to learn to tolerate the symptoms.”

So, to sum up, I suffer from a psychological condition called misophonia. If I complain to my cellie about his mouth noises, I am being unfair to him. If he stops making noises because I complain, then I have caused him to become an enabler for my condition. If I try and block out the noises with head phones, I am harming our cellie relationship. The only solution is to learn to tolerate the symptoms.

Therefore, on the one hand, I want to shove a sock in my cellie’s mouth. But on the other hand, psychologists say I need to own my condition and seek to be more understanding. What do I do? Or, as a Christian slogan goes, WWJD?

Not surprisingly, scripture is fairly silent on mouth noises. Historically, we know that in biblical times, people lived in much smaller homes and shelters, and were in closer proximity without the benefit of headphones or white noise generators. I would have expected at least one disciple at the Last Supper to be bothered by the way one of the other guys was chewing with his mouth open. But in order to keep them from getting on each other’s nerves, perhaps Jesus healed his followers of any existing misophonia.

There is an apocryphal scripture, Sirach 19:9, which says, “Let anything you hear die within you; be assured it will not make you burst.” Though this is about gossip and refraining from spreading what you hear, it also works with mouth noises. Deal with it. It won’t kill you. No one ever exploded from listening to someone making mouth noises. There is a risk, though, that I could explode in anger and hurtful speech.

After more searching I came across Psalm 59. In this psalm, David is in trouble. King Saul’s men have been sent to seek out and kill David. David says that his enemies roam around searching for him, “making noises like a dog.” And they “belch out with their mouth.” What is God’s response? David writes, “But you, O Lord , laugh at them.” God laughs at these noisemakers. And so I wondered, if God’s response to grunting miscreants is laughter, could laughter as a response to my sonorous cellie work for me? Turns out, it does.

I discovered that if I gave a little fake belch, then Princess fired off a series of Gagunk-gagunk-BURPs. If I cleared my throat lightly, he proceeded to ahem and Sno-or-or-ort, culminating in a blast of Cuh-CUH! From my top bunk I could quietly produce a cycle of his own noises, initiating a fury of echoing sounds until it wore him out and he stopped for a while.

If I gave a little raspberry noise with my tongue and lips, he Sniff-sniff-paused repeatedly, trying to detect the odor from a suspected flatulent that he thought I had released. And sometimes he even lit his cinnamon incense!

When he Shlurped his three oranges, I turned my TV to the prison information channel that displayed a clock, and I timed how many seconds it took for him to race through his fruit slurping. His record was twenty-five seconds. Not bad for three oranges!

When he chomp, chomp, gasped through his hot food, I put on my headphones and played Rossini’s “William Tell Overture,” otherwise known as the Lone Ranger Theme. The headphones didn’t completely cover up his chomping and breathing, but the accompaniment made me smile.

I turned the very things that annoyed me into mischief and mirth. Of course, I was doing nothing to cure myself of misophonia, but I was, with laughter, improving my relationship with my cellie. I was adapting as I was able so that I could live in peace with him, lower my blood pressure, and avoid the consideration of where to find duct tape to cover his mouth. I’m certain that Elizabeth Bernstein would be appalled by and frown at my actions, but there’s only so much psychology one can bring to bear in a seven-foot by eleven-foot box.

Laughter for me did indeed prove to be the best medicine, and I was able to endure my years with Princess. Eventually, I moved to another cell, and Princess brought in a new, unsuspecting inmate to serenade. It wasn’t long before that inmate sought me out in a quiet corner and asked, “How did you stand it?”

“God got me through it,” I replied.

“What, did you pray or something?”

“No, I read my Bible and I laughed.”