Won’t you be my neighbor?
I used to write a regular blog about my building and neighborhood. There’s just something about it that’s so very David Lynch. It’s a vortex of some kind that attracts the bizarre. Add the picture-perfect setting and there you have it.
There’s a faux-tribesman who lives here and I’d love to blog about him but I’m sure he googles himself ad nauseum and I don’t need him knocking at the door. Suffice to say, it’s a small town and we’re not the first building to be graced with his presence, or creepy comments to the female tenants. I heard that when the tweaker first laid eyes on him, he ran inside to get a baseball bat.
The eastern-european bachelors who barbecue (I love how they’ve taken on Americanism with such zeal: they barbecue almost every day and drink only Sam Adams!) are now sunbathing alongside the building, covered in baby oil and using paper towel rolls for pillows.
“I’d put something else down on that grass - all the dogs pee there,” I tried to warn them.
“Ok, that’s okay, we’re fine,” the bald one w/the gold chains reassured me. Well, I tried.
Walking with my neighbor yesterday, we caught up on the building gossip.
“I never see you,” she says.
I got out of the habit of never going past the mailbox to the other half of the building when I first moved in, when our building was dominated by a perverted building manager, a drunken Hungarian who would have a planting war with another crazy neighbor. I caught him one morning when the pup had an emergency run, at 5:30 am, crouched over, shovel in hand.
“Um, someone was digging up the plants, I have to put them back in.” Whatever.
Anyway, he’s long gone but my habit of avoiding the front of the building remains, so after my neighbor moved to a bigger apartment, I never saw her.
“This building is something else, girl! How did I end up here?” she mused.
“Well, you lost everything in a hurricane and had nowhere else to go.”
Which is true. She and her husband and two tiny kids and another on the way, and a dog who would follow via a shelter rescue flight all landed here, just like the Wizard of Oz. I told her my theory that it’s the edge of the continent and there’s just nowhere else to go. If you tilt a checkerboard or one of those little hand-held pinball games with the tiny metal ball, you get the idea. Tilt the continent and it all slides down or across.
That’s the only sense I can make of it, anyway.
As we walked, a man on a bike rode by and she waved.
“There’s the guy upstairs,” she said.
“I don’t recognize him. Where does he live?”
She squinted. “Fuck, I don’t have my glasses … that’s not him!”
The guy stopped his bike and moved in our direction.
“I’m sorry, I thought you were someone else - our neighbor,” she yelled.
“I am that someone else! I am your neighbor!” he yelled back. But he wasn’t. Luckily I had the pup so he moved along.
