Showing posts with label neighbors. Show all posts
Showing posts with label neighbors. Show all posts

Friday, May 17, 2013

Home Sweet Home


When buying a home, you hear this phrase time and time again, "don't buy a house across the street from a crackhead" and there's a reason for that.

Sadly, this is advice I chose to ignore. The price was right and the house was old and weird and we bought it. There's not a day that goes by, usually about the time my neighbor's calling me a douche bag and throwing her smelly garbage into my yard with commendable accuracy, that I don't regret the purchase.

I've mentioned this neighbor before, right here as a matter of sad fact. 

Turns out three people on our street have restraining orders against her. The girl can fly right off the handle, it seems. It's the deadly combination of crazy and crack that gives her that edge.

She's still fond of sitting on her porch and making long winded, curse filled calls into a cell phone that is invisible to the naked eye. The emotional range of these calls is breathtaking. She usually starts small, just meat and potatoes chatter about murder or UFO's, then she moves into some dark rages that include hurling C-bombs and N-Bombs my way. She's also taken to listing certain states -  Utah, New Mexico and Rhode Island in particular. No idea what's going on there, but if I lived in those states, I'd start packing. Heat.

I've spoken to her sister, an exhausted woman who is just trying to get this lunatic locked up again. She stops by the house pretty much daily to make sure the knives are dull and the crack pipes are cold, I imagine. The sister kindly offered me a crumpled business card with the number of a detective who's handling the case. Let me repeat that, the detective who's handling the case. (Sweet mother of all that is holy, why did we buy this house?!) Turns out what you hear on Lifetime Television is true, we have to wait for our bug eyed neighbor to get violent before the authorities can step in. Fantastic. And calming. 

Listen, I'm sure she has a sad story, but don't we all? We've all been through the wringer, but we don't smoke crack and make fake phone calls about it. Or if we do, we don't swear at our neighbors while doing so. Listen, your life is your own, but don't be an asshat. 

So here I sit on this sunny morning, curse words falling like petals, the scent of freshly smoked crack giving me a contact high, as I eagerly await a violent attack so I can, at long last, call the authorities.

Home sweet home.

Monday, May 7, 2012

The Welcome Wagon

I'm trying to find just the right words to describe my neighborhood and I'm stalling out on "ghetto-y", so I'm just gonna stick with that. It's a little rough around the edges and by edges I mean gang members. Be that as it may, you have to hand it to the gangs when it comes to an entrepreneurial spirit. They seem to be constantly reinventing themselves around here.

They tag things and then sell whitewash at hugely inflated prices to the terrified convenience store owners. They've taken over the fruit stand on the corner and forced the little guy to sell Schlitz and unfiltered Camels.  Most recently (and most intriguingly) they've opened a barbershop/party decoration store just a half block away from me and I have to tell you, it's not too shabby. On the right side of their shop, they've got glittering Valentine hearts and bright green St. Patrick clovers. They've hung sexy Halloween costumes on a small metal rod and they boast a wide selection of colorful birthday balloons.  And if you walk through the beaded 60's style curtain, you enter the barber part of the business and to be frank, this is the shadier section. I've never seen anyone in there and it smells like weed.

Because the people in my neighborhood have never really embraced me as one of their own, I thought I'd try and break down their walls by supporting their most recent endeavor. Easter was my first chance to hit their newest business and for the most part I was happy with how it went. They didn't really talk much to me and eye contact was a at a minimum, but they took my cash and I took home some shiny egg decorations plus an oversized cardboard bunny. The entire purchase cost me $48 bucks. (Side note - I've seen better deals.)

Yesterday I saw one of the guys that worked there. I waved, maybe a little too enthusiastically, but he waved back. Not so much "waved", but it seemed to me that he felt like it. So, I'm making progress. You know what they say about slow and steady. And with 4th of July right around the corner I may just have it made.