Last week I attended a meeting held on the 38th floor of a nameless, faceless midtown skyscraper. On my way up, the elevator serenaded me with “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” Muzak-style. Like most people, I can’t stand Muzak, but I absolutely cannot stomach “Bridge.” Not even in my folky college phase did I want to be in the same room with the album. The first few notes would send me screaming from the dorm, begging anyone on the quad to take me back to their lairs to listen to Public Enemy or Milli Vanilli. I don’t mean any disrespect to Messieurs Simon and Garfunkel. The album is seminal, not to mention a triumphant farewell for the artists. I get it. The problem stems from three seemingly unrelated factors coming together like the Bermuda Triangle: that song, my birth month, and the people who lived in the apartment below my parents.

“Bridge Over Troubled Water” was recorded in September 1969, released in February 1970 and grew into a bona fide phenomenon by mid-June of that year. I was recorded in September 1969, in utero during the record’s groundswell, and three weeks past my release date by mid-June of that year. Three weeks late makes for one big-ass baby, and between that and the record high temps the East Coast was suffering, my mother was not a happy person. To add insult to injury, for the past month the neighbors downstairs had started a little cocktail hour ritual: blasting “Bridge” over…and over…and over again, the first set starting every evening promptly at 5 p.m.

They must have had the precursor to Surround Sound, because my mother says the record was played at decibels greater than those heard at an airport landing strip. My parents heard it as clearly as if the record were on their own hi-fi. The people upstairs from my parents heard it as clearly as if the record were on their own hi-fi. Which means I could probably hear it in my mother’s womb. You know that study where scientists discovered that babies are familiar with their parents’ voices by the time they’re born? Well, apparently babies can be familiar with the works of Simon and Garfunkel before they’re born. I might be the first case of a person being sick of hearing a record even before I had the cognitive development necessary for identifying sound. The nightly concert showed no sign of stopping, no matter how many times my father had tried to appeal to these women’s sense of aural decency by asking them to “Turn the fucking music down.” Oh, initially they would acquiesce, but over the course of the night the volume would get jacked back up.

Most of the month of June had already seen record-breaking temperatures, but one day in particular the heat and humidity added up to something akin to a typical day in Bangladesh. My mother lay on the sofa, my three-weeks-late poundage protruding from her belly like something out of a John Carpenter movie. At 4:45 p.m., my father came home from a rough day at the paper mill. In response to the heat and lack of decent air conditioning, he stripped to his skivvies and flopped onto the sofa beside my mother. They had just dozed off when the first floor-shaking set began from below. Much like the movie Do The Right Thing, tempers and temperatures were already near ignition, so when the music started, my dad, who on a good day had a fuse the size of a grain of rice, went ballistic.

He shot up from the sofa and roared “Jesus Christ,” his go-to phrase for anything remotely irksome. Mom tried to prop herself up in order to get a better look at my father storming around the apartment, but the effort proved futile. My father thundered over to the stereo and rifled through the sparse album collection, finally locating the perfect ammunition with which to wage war. He placed it on the turntable and cranked up the volume to its limit. He kicked the speakers face-down on the floor, stepped into the middle of the living room and waited.

As the needle touched down on the record, the entire apartment complex was treated to the Hallelujah chorus of Handel’s Messiah played at earsplitting volume. As if this alone were not enough to make his point, my father proceeded to jump up and down in time with the crashing symbols. Picture it: my dad in nothing but his tighty-whiteys, all 250 pounds of him jumping in time to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir’s greatest hit. Fortunately, the police were not summoned, for the show lasted all of thirty seconds before the speakers blew.

Since my parents had very little money and were expecting a child in a matter of days, speaker replacement was out of the question. This was a big letdown for my dad, who loved his Motown and Steely Dan records. But all was not for naught, for his hysteria got the results he intended. From that moment on, the blasting of “Bridge Over Troubled Water” ceased. A few months later, everyone’s world had changed. After another week and no labor contractions, my mother’s OB-GYN declared “everybody out of the pool,” and I was delivered via C-section. Not too soon afterwards, my father got a halfway decent job and the family moved from the apartment to our very own house. I often wonder whether my parents would have gotten married had my mother witnessed this performance during their courtship. I’m sure when she repeated her wedding vows to the pastor on her wedding day, never in her wildest dreams did she imagine that “for better or for worse” would be tested by the sight of my father in a blind rage, jumping up and down in his BVDs, accompanied by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. I only wish I had gotten to see it first hand.

And as a result, by the time that elevator reached the lobby I was sweating bullets. I don’t normally fear getting trapped in elevators, but the prospect of getting trapped in one playing Simon & Garfunkel’s greatest hits was enough to send me over the edge. Hello darkness, my old friend.