Throughout my 5+ years of married life, I have found neighbors to be a consistent source of entertainment. It seems the people I work with, the friends I have, they are often no match in pure degree of character to the people I happen to find myself living near.

When we were first married, we lived in an apartment across the hall from Retardo Cat. He was the largest beast of a feline we had ever seen, and his eyes didn’t point in the same direction. He would sit outside the door for hours waiting to be let in. He owned Mumbling Drunk, a man who would come home in the wee hours of the morning and loudly fuss with the lock on his door, unable to find the coordination it takes to insert the proper key into the keyhole.

Our first house was a duplex, and we shared a wall with Streghetta, a full-blooded Italian grandma with really bad teeth who could cook like a god. She spent her days cooking, cleaning and yelling. At any given moment during the day, you could hear her yelling, vacuuming, or yelling over the vacuum. It wasn’t all angry yelling; she yelled her daily conversations with her husband.

NO, I THINK THOSE ARE MY SOCKS! MY SOCKS HAVE BLUE STRIPES ON THE TOES! YOUR SOCKS HAVE RED TOES! WHAT DO YOU WANT FOR DINNER?

We liked he well enough, but made a point to avoid her if possible if we saw her standing outside. The woman could talk the limbs off a tree. And she was never lacking in opinion.

“Why do they let them into this country if they don’t speak Engalish? This is America. We speak ENGALISH! If they can’t speak Engalish like everybody else, they should not be here.”

“Did you speak English when you immigrated?”

“Of course not. We didn’t speak Engalish in Italy!”

Streghetta’s husband was Bionic Man. I’m guessing her constant yelling (and incessant talking) had a negative effect on his health, but he was a trooper and kept on trucking…through 13 heart attacks, 2 strokes and 2 car accidents that resulted in back surgeries.

On the other side, our neighbors were Boo and Monstar (real names), a lesbian couple that liked to walk around their house naked. Their large dining room window was approximately 5 feet from our large dining room window, and neither of us had blinds.

When we moved to Texas, we pretty much avoided our neighbors as much as possible in the little duplex we rented for a two years. But we couldn’t avoid checking the mail, which resulted in the meeting of another talkative old woman, Nosey Chatter, and her dog, Walking Automan. I think WA was supposed to be a Welsh Corgy, but it was as wide as it was long, and you really couldn’t tell the difference when it sat down because its stomach touched the ground when it was standing up. It wheezed. A lot. When it walked, its fur rippled.

Nosey Chatter would tell us what the vet had warned her about, that she had to quit feeding Walking Automan table food. “But she likes ice cream! I can’t just deny her!” Dog killer.

Among other things (yawn), we learned in no uncertain terms from Nosey Chatter how the growing Asian population in the area was ruining the neighborhood because “they don’t make good neighbors.”

Now we own a house in another city, where we are once again the only white people in the neighborhood, aside from our neighbors on the left. The neighbors are no less interesting though.

There’s Old Guy Down the Street, who is constantly standing in his front yard staring at his car. See, even though the garages are in the back of the houses, we’re the only people on the street who actually use the garage to PARK IN. Everybody else parks on the street. Sometimes I just want to walk up to him, grab him by the shoulders, and SHAKE HIM.

“WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING AT? It’s the same car - it looks the same as it did FIVE. MINUTES. AGO. And the same as it did YESTERDAY. And the DAY BEFORE!  Is somebody leaving you cryptic messages scrawled in code on the side of your car?  WHAT ARE YOU DOING???”

Every once in a while he’ll switch things up on us and stare at the OTHER side of the car.

Yesterday, we had a conversation with Ghastly Growth Guy and his wife, our neighbors across the alley. Dude has a MULLET growing out of the MOLE on the SIDE OF HIS NECK. I am so not kidding, I had no idea it was even POSSIBLE to have that much hair grow out of a mole. It’s way longer (and thicker) than the hair on his head.

What, is his mirror too high on the wall that he can’t see the tail sticking out on the side? And what about his wife…why on earth would she let such a thing go unattended? Is it some sort of cultural status symbol that I don’t know about?

Anyway, that’s my rundown of neighbors. I guess I could consider it a lesson in … diversity? Do you have weird neighbors too?

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 17th, 2006 at 10:05 pm and is filed under Daily. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.