the floors in the apartment sloped hard to the east , and the trains hammered past the brothers ' window twenty-one out of twenty-four hours each and every goddamned day , shaking the piece-of-shit three-decker so hard that most times the brothers fell out of bed and woke in the morning piled on top of one another , greeted the morning as irritable as waterfront rats , and pummeled the piss out of one another to clear the pile and start the day .