Bad Neighbors: Part 2

"Hey, you kids put those knives down and get me another pack of smokes."

In the fall of 2003, my husband and I were broke. Flat broke. Dumpster-divin', barely-thrivin' poor. We both lost jobs within six months of each other and could no longer afford the charming half-house next to the cat-cooking Chinese restaurant/family with the godfather teenage son. Forced to downsize, we moved into an old church that had been turned into apartments in the 1950s. Charming on the outside, Skid Row on the inside.

It was a dump, but I was determined to turn it into a home. It was harder than I thought, considering the bathtub that had so much mildew build-up that my husband's buddy once told us he felt like he needed to bath in Clorox after showering in it. The water ran constantly and the landlord didn't care. His idea of "fixing" the problem was to show up with a wrench and tighten the faucet handles so much that it took another wrench to turn the water on to wash our hands.

The stove in the apartment below us blew up one day. You might think I'm exaggerating for the purpose of writing an entertaining story, but I am the George Washington of neighbor stories - I cannot tell a lie. It blew up - kaboom - flames, smoke, everything. My landlord's solution? He bought our neighbor a hot plate.

There was a minor mold problem in our apartment... nothing too extreme... just, you know... mushrooms growing in the corner of our bedroom carpet, which was always wet, which the landlord also ignored. Oh, and the apartment produced strange, unidentifiable odors. Every day was a new adventure. What will the apartment smell like today? Raw sewage? What sorts of diseases would be develop from the mold contamination? Why were my eyes crusted shut every morning? It was never boring.

The town was not nearly as Rockwell-esque as the last one. It was more rural, with a dive bar on the corner of our street, but not entirely unfriendly. The neighbors smiled, flashing their tooth at you in a welcoming sort of way.

A single guy in his 30s called the basement home. The other people in the building described him as a "washed-up, wannabe rockstar." He boasted of sleeping with a middle-aged woman and her daughter on a regular basis, and left notes on my door asking me to "walk softly" because he slept during the day. (Too bad. It's a rickety old wooden church. Get a real job.)

At first, we loved the tenants in the apartment beside us. It was a single mom we'll call "Stella", her boyfriend, and her two teenage daughters. Four people, one bedroom, and a living room the size of a Pop Tart. I don't know how they did it. I worked nights and the single mom took pity on my husband by feeding him their leftovers and making small talk in the evenings. The oldest daughter, 17, had dropped out of high school. The younger one, 13, was in a special program for kids who needed a gentle beating now and then. They were the type of people, though, who would give you the shirts off their backs, and they once spent an entire afternoon doing us the favor of improperly installing a fuel pump in our car.

I was working with teen moms at the time and I enjoyed kids, so I was friendly with the neighbor girls. Unfortunately, I sometimes have a hard time being nice and helpful without turning into a complete doormat/therapist/safety net. The girls and I got along just fine until the night the youngest one wanted me to take her and her friends to the mall in the pouring rain at night and I refused. The little estrogen monkeys stood in the front yard and started pelting my front door with rocks. I hurt no one. I merely threw the door open as they scattered, and challenged them to a fight to the death. No more rocks after that.

They were hurting for money just as much as we were. Being the entrepreneur that Stella was, she decided to start a home business... running a daycare for 10 toddlers...out of the apartment. It was totally illegal, but I didn't care. I was a little bothered by the fact that Stella and her daughters chain-smoked and watched TV all day while the youngsters ran wild, but the cigarette smoking couldn't have been a mystery to the moms dropping off their tots. Just walking by their apartment gave you a whiff of smoke so strong you nearly passed out and needed oxygen right there on the front steps. If they were that dumb, who was I to say anything?

I got my book contract right before we moved into Le Toilet, so I wrote during the day and worked at the group home at night. No easy task. The walls were about as thin as toilet paper, and our living rooms shared a wall. Ten toddlers...one bedroom...a living room the size of a Pop Tart...paper-thin walls... I wrote my book to the sounds of a herd of children running and screaming from one end of the apartment to the other all day, every day, with no pauses.

Stella and her herd finally moved out a year later. She had broken up with her boyfriend to start dating a drug dealer. The oldest girl got pregnant. Shortly thereafter, I ran into the youngest daughter, who was working at a gas station and had just dropped out of high school herself. She told me her mom had become a crackhead. Nobody can say my stories are anti-climactic.

The Partridge Family was replaced by a kind 50-something trucker we both enjoyed chatting with. When his electric heat vents died, the landlord blessed him with a cooler-sized space heater. He had an adorable, sweet Akita who had a deviated septum or sleep apnea or...good Lord, I don't know what was wrong, but he snored to loudly we could hear him even when we went in our bedroom and closed the door.

It was the man living in the house next-door to our building who would eventually challenge my sanity and cause me to demand that we find another place to live...




Pin It

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

All's Not So Good In Da Hood

As if I needed to be reminded yet again... I have crazy neighbors.

It's Return of the Ghetto People out here in the country, if you can believe it. Yesterday around 2:30am my husband and I hear this guy rapping - yes, rapping... as in, you know... Snoop Dogg or whatever - something about "go ahead and call the cops, I'll f**king kill you." Husband looks out and there's Ghetto Neighbor's friend, who I'm starting to think lives here. A few minutes later, hubby looks out the window, and Ghetto Neighbor's friend is breaking into our car.

If I stop and think about it, it's almost laughable. He broke into the 1989 Buick. Nobody in their right mind would want to steal it. And the only thing he found inside was trash... oh, and my niece's blue Snuggie. HAVE AT IT! Still, it's not what he did or didn't take, it's the principle of the thing. Dude was breaking into MY PROPERTY. Hubby ran down the stairs and by the time he got to the bottom, Ghetto Neighbor's friend was already walking away from the car. Must have taken one look inside and thought, "Forget this!"

I debated what to do. I mean, really. He was out front rapping about killing anyone who called the cops, and not to stereotype, but... he looked the part. I decided to let it go last night, because he drove away with Ghetto Neighbor. I then decided this morning to confront them.

I took the sympathetic approach. Ghetto Neighbor is 20, his wife is 17, and they have a baby. I said I knew they were young, I knew they were struggling, and I didn't want them to get into trouble. But I also told them I knew "someone" had been in my car and to stay the hell out. The friend was sitting on the couch looking at me the whole time I gave my speech to Ghetto Neighbor, who was visibly stoned. Was I really sympathetic? It was about 10% sympathy and 90% please-don't-kill-me.

But then I started thinking. Hey, if I just let this go, these people OWN me. That's no way to live. So I called the cops, filed a report, and they told me they couldn't do much, but they'd have it on record. I called my landlord but didn't reach him. I guess that's on the agenda for tomorrow. You know the saying - 'evil wins when good men do nothing.' Or women, in my case. I wouldn't have cared about the rap session. I wouldn't have even cared about them being drunk and stoned. But in the end, I don't want to live with these people, and I shouldn't have to. Not only that, but there's a little girl living in this nightmare of a family. That changes everything.

I had just been talking to my friend downstairs about how quiet and peaceful things had been. JINX! It's a nice place to live, in a nice area. There's just total psychos living around us. When things get bad I say, "We have to move NOW!" but then I realize... you can't escape crazy. Know how I know? Because I've never lived around NORMAL. I've always had crazy neighbors, and I don't think location has much to do with it.

That doesn't mean I can't try to make it a little more sane, does it? Pin It

At Long Last... The Neighbor Blog... Part 1

It really seemed like a nice joint when we pulled into the parking lot; it really did. A lovely, flowing creek nestled beneath a blanket of brilliant autumn leaves, a quaint park across the street, and a seemingly nice fella who came out to show us the apartment.

AND - this is the important part - the apartment was NICE. You had to see where we were living at the time... we were growing alien-like mushrooms alongside our toilet, in our bedroom, in all of the places you never thought you'd ever see mushrooms growing. The ceiling leaked. On any given day, the place could randomly smell like an egg factory or a funeral home for no explicable reason. The neighbor in the apartment next-door ran an illegal daycare out of her one-bedroom apartment, the guy downstairs had sex with a lady and her daughter - at the same time - and the man in the house next-door killed deer and threw the bloody carcasses in our dumpster. It was not the kind of place you'd want to raise kids in... unless you're a psychotic, crackhead of an abusive parent.

It was so nice, we were convinced we'd never get it. So much for positivity, huh? But we did get it, and we were thrilled. The man who showed us the apartment (let's call him Ed) lived in apartment #1 and he seemed so sweet. He was a burly, carrot-topped dude in his late fifties; an ex-Marine. He lived with a younger guy we'll call Steve. Actually, our first thought was that they were gay. We didn't really care one way or the other, it just seemed... well... stereotypical, frankly. Either way, they were nice guys that made a hobby of smoking on the front porch all day. Hey, whatever floats your boat.

We thought surely nothing could be worse than what we had been living with, so chain-smokers on the porch was no biggie. And so 2 weeks after getting the go-ahead from our landlord, our small group at church moved us in, I decorated for Christmas, and we were good to go.

It was great at first. Ed told us everything we needed to know, from how to turn up the water temperature, to how get on the landlord's good side (paying the rent helps), and he helped us out with a few things here and there. He took care of the gardens out front and called me "sweetie" and seemed the grandfatherly type. There was a family downstairs consisting of a husband & wife, and two sons, one around 10 or 11 years old, and a baby. The boy and his father fought constantly, slammed a lot of doors, and screamed, but we sucked it up. Not much you could really do about family drama. Everyone else was nice but kept to themselves and that was fine with us.

I have since concluded that as long as you are living among the rest of society, there is no "nice" place to live. There's no Mayberry. It's all Crazy Town.

I don't remember when it all started to tank. There is no one incident in my mind that tipped me off to the reality that this place was just as much of an insane asylum (typical that I would live in an insane asylum...) as The Bates Motel where we came from. It was in a nice area. It was a nice building coated in fresh paint. No leaks, cracks, or salad items growing in the bathroom. Heck, Ed even drove a Jaguar. Never judge a book by it's cover... or a parking lot by its Jag.

Slowly but surely, Ed's "sweeties" became "honeys" and eventually "babies" and eventually we graduated to "sexy." Pats on the back became hugs. YAY! HUGS FROM GRANDPA! Right?!? RIGHT?!? Wrong. Hugs turned into kisses on the cheek. I'm not a naive person. I know it sounds like I'm totally naive and my Mormon mommy never let me ride my bike down the street alone, but seriously... I've been around the block. Still, I let the old sleaze ball kiss me and thought it was innocent.

Till that hickey.
Yes, that's what I said. I said hickey. He gave me a hickey. I was standing out front commenting on the weather one day when he leaned in to give me what I thought was going to be a peck on the cheek, and instead he grabbed my neck with his yellow-stained smoky chops and started sucking.

OK, I take it back. That was the first time I realized I was on the threshold of hell. Because, honestly, I can stick up for myself just fine. I come from a family where you can't be heard unless you're able to scream above everyone else. I'm not easily intimidated. But when an old man sucks on your neck... it's... something different. Can you slap a veteran? Don't you go to hell for that? I didn't know what to do.

I told my husband, who promptly proclaimed that he was going to kick some [expletive]. But he's not the [expletive]-kicking type. (And, yes, I'm very grateful for that.) He said he would at least say something to him, tell him he needed to leave his wife alone, go give Steve a hickey or something.

Just one little problem.
By that point, we had figured out that Steve was a druggie and a drunk. We're pretty sure he deals. He got violent a few times, slit his wrists once, even went after Ed with a knife, and was hauled away for it. I had visions of Scott telling Ed off, and Steve coming after him with an axe or something, his eyes all red and bloodshot. After much begging, pleading and arguing, I got him to agree to let it go. I'd just avoid his chops as much as possible. I'd rather have my carotid sucked on then slashed by a drug addict.

But Ed and Steve could not be avoided. They lived on the front porch. They didn't work. They just stood around and smoked and spit. When I walked out the door or got out of my car, they hooted and hollered and called me sexy and told me to "work it." If I wore high-heel boots, things really got out of control. I didn't tell Scott about that part. Listen, I've lived through sexual abuse and rape. I figured I could handle cat-calls. Looking back, I have to say that was ridiculous on my part. I might as well have hung a sign around my neck that said, "PLEASE ABUSE ME AGAIN!" But it wasn't a matter of self-respect. I just wanted to live. And the rent was affordable. Plus, there is admittedly a part of me that desperately wants to seem non-prudish. Prudes freak me out - I don't want to resemble one. Again... stupid, but that was my thought process.

In case you're wondering how we concluded that Steve sold drugs...
Well, there were the subtle things. The fact that he wore designer clothes, didn't have a job, and didn't even have a driver's license. (Lost it because of repeated DUI's.) He bought antiques and electronics and ferociously played the stock market. Random "friends" stopped by at random times during the day, and they'd disappear into the backyard. If we went anywhere near them, they promptly changed location and stood about 2 centimeters apart to talk.

Oh... and they grew pot in our backyard. At first, we didn't know it. It was hidden among the trees and we didn't know it was there until Ed flat out told us one day. But then Steve brought home an enormous pot plant... the thing was the size of a tree, no joke. It was growing in a pot and they kept it next to the picnic table out back. The landlord's kids mowed the lawn and raked the leaves and their mom waited for them while they did so, so clearly they either have no idea what marijuana looks like, or they were like us - they just wanted to live. As they say in the hood - "No Snitching."

Now, if I had seen Steve across the street at the park selling dime bags to little kids on the see-saw, yes, I would have called the police. Otherwise... OK, fine, great, you grow and sell drugs. Please don't kill me.

And, you know, it just sucks because I always told myself I'd never be one of those jerks who turns a blind eye to that stuff. But when it's literally right in your own backyard, you don't know what to do. Scott was worried about me; I was worried about Scott. It doesn't matter how far you hide in the land of Suburbia, the crap will find you, and it found us... or we found IT, however you want to look at it.

But things were about to get worse, when Steve's mother moved with him and Ed.
More to come... Pin It