Bad Neighbors: Part 1

I did my best to ignore the stereotype...

Many people (many people) have asked me to write about the whacko neighbors I've had over the years. I haven't because it's like staring at a set of encyclopedias and trying to figure out which one to tackle first. Where do I even begin? Of course, I can't tell ALL my tales, for various reasons, but I thought I'd take a crack at writing down at least a few.

I guess a good place to start would be the Chinese restaurant next-door.

My husband and I moved into a half-house in a quaint town that looked like it had been painted by Norman Rockwell. It was right between his hometown and mine, and we loved driving through. We thought it would be a nice place to raise a family - the kind of place you could walk around after dark and not get murdered. That's hard to find these days, after all.

I was psyched about the fact that a Chinese restaurant was directly beside our house. So close, I could throw a rock out my living room window and bounce it off one of the cook's heads. It smelled so good on the day we toured the house that my mouth was watering. I couldn't wait to have eggrolls so easily within my grasp, even if it meant swelling up to the size of a rhinoceros. I had no idea that the town smelled like the local chocolate factory in the morning, like fried rice by noon, or that the two scents would combine into a noxious odor by evening.

People warned me about the restaurant. Wanting to be politically correct, I brushed them off when they said the pork fried rice was, in fact, kitty fried rice. Stuff like that doesn't happen anymore in America, does it? Sure, Jade Tiki in the mall had been shut down for cooking with kitties and pet food, but that was a long time ago. I ate up, all the while telling myself the texture of the chicken in my chicken lo mein was totally normal. My best friend at the time - a Korean-American - told me to stop being such a sissy.

But who was she to tell me to lighten up? I'd seen food in her house that scared me half to death. Her family munched on dried octopus tentacles as a snack and served up a "soft drink" that looked like something I can't write about in good conscious because of my conservative audience.

As time went by, I began noticing...oddities...over at the restaurant. There were always people riding bicycles through the kitchen, which was plenty unsanitary. I tried to ignore the large number of cats running in and out of the building at all hours. I told myself they were just "pet people," even though no one cat was like the other. They were different all the time, in and out.

One hot summer day, I went out back to put my garbage in the garbage cans and smelled something obnoxious. It smelled like death. Living in a farming community, I'm used to really bad smells. Farmers spray their fields with liquified cow manure in the spring. This kind of smelled like...liquified cow manure with a pureed decaying body thrown in. And there were flies. Where were those flies coming from? I followed one from my shoulder and up to my right...up to the top floor of the Chinese restaurant building. The owners of the restaurant lived on the second floor with their family. They never said hello and often threw tree branches in my backyard.

I looked up on their porch and saw where the flies were swarming - around a laundry rack with skinned, bloody, decaying animal corpses hanging on it. They were too small to be cats (do Asians cook with kittens or just cats?), but seemed too big to be dogs... unless they were cooking with Pomeranians or miniature Pinschers. I shudder at the thought... They appeared to be rat-sized, and they had rat-like tails.

Sometimes you see things...but you're not sure you're really seeing them. That's why I called a friend to come over and assess the carnage. My friend stared at the shriveling bodies, swatting the flies away, but couldn't figure out what kinds of animals were dangling above. "I don't know, dude. All I can say is, don't eat there anymore."

My husband wanted to call somebody, but we didn't know who to call. Animal control? The ASCPA? The Humane League? The local mental ward?

I was pondering what to do one day as I surfed the internet in one of the bedrooms upstairs. Through my window, I was within slapping distance of one of the family's teenage sons. On a nice day, we both had our windows open. We would glance at each other as if to say, "What are YOU looking at?" and then go about our merry way. On that particular day, I was listening to the whole family arguing with one another.

Usually, it was no fun eavesdropping on them because I don't know Chinese, but that afternoon, I heard the mother scream:

I KNOW ALL ABOUT YOU AND THE MAFIA AND I COULD CALL THE POLICE ON YOU ANYTIME I WANTED!!!

I don't know which family member she was referring to, but that was a defining moment for me. It was the moment I decided:

1. I wasn't going to call anyone about the skinned animals on the balcony because I was afraid they would skin ME and drape me over the laundry rack, too.
2. Not only was I never eating at their establishment again, I was going to warn people not to complain about the food...if they wanted to live to see another day.
3. No more eye contact with the neighbors.
4. I would let them throw as many tree limbs as they wanted in my yard and I would never say another word.
5. Just because it looks like a Normal Rockwell painting, that doesn't mean it is.

I thought it couldn't possibly get any weirder than that. Ha! So young, so naive. That was just the beginning of my neighbor troubles. Pin It