Her long hair hung down around her shoulders like chunks of brown seaweed all dry and tangled on the beach. Her dark tanned face had a distant look of youth to it. That tan had carried her face through a few decades of being past the prime age of twenty, but now it could no longer disguise the fact that she was pushing sixty.
“Hi, how are you?” she rattled off to me as we moved in opposite directions. There was an abnormal electricity in her eyes. The deep wrinkles around her eyes and the crevices running into her cheeks seemed to deepen under my gaze, in opposition to that electricity. Each wrinkle was a tattle-tale itching to tell its story. They were the deep wrinkles of someone that had really abused her body.
“Beautiful day,” I said upward to the blue sky, to look safely away from that squirrely electricity. She was too jittery—too friendly. Something was up.
I found out soon enough.
My jittery neighbor has been the queen of eccentric drunken episodes. There was the time she trashed her house, including her own belongings. There were the numerous arrests for driving offences, some of which became belligerent shows in her front yard. There were the impressive screaming matches that proved just how well sound can travel through walls and around trees, all the way to my porch. All of this coming out of the blue one day, after having lived next to her uneventfully for ten years.
Since having her license suspended, battling a failing marriage, and losing all her friends, her funds to purchase more alcohol have dried up. The solution she had come up with on that beautiful blue-sky day was to walk door-to-door asking for donations.
At first her requests were for a friend whose child had medical bills. Apparently that was not a very convincing lie, so she moved onto collecting for St. Jude’s, because who can decline to help a child with cancer? Apparently some of my fellow neighbors still smelled a rat, so the story changed again. Next, it was money for Alcoholics Anonymous. I suppose that one is fair—she wasn’t entirely lying. She was being semi-anonymous by only knocking on doors of neighbors she didn’t know, and she is an alcoholic, after all.
The Day Turned Less Beautiful
Rain had misted down so that everything was nice and damp—not wet, but damp. You could feel it in your lungs, and see it sprinkling daintily onto the windshield. It was frizzling my hair. Dampness, everywhere. I turned onto the four-lane divided highway, picking up speed; the speed limit was sixty-five. I slowed. On the opposite side of the road there was the stalled traffic of an accident having just happened, and no one had yet decided who was going to get out. Everyone was thinking Maybe that guy next to me will check it out, and I won’t have to?
Something had happened with some motorcycles. There was a woman sitting on her butt in the middle of the lane and looking shell-shocked but intact. My eyes followed the trail the other motorcycle had made through the grassy median, across the lane of traffic directly in front of me, and to the ditch on the other side. A man was standing next to his motorcycle, also looking shell-shocked but intact. He had somehow managed to careen across two lanes of traffic on a very busy highway at the exact perfect time when there was a short gap in traffic. If I had been a minute earlier he may have crashed into my vehicle—him dead; me traumatized.
After another minute of driving the sirens were zooming in their direction. The heroes of society with the worst jobs were zooming ahead to help, having no idea what scene may await them. A memory of my neighbor popped into my mind then. She had completely missed a turn in the neighborhood and instead cut across someone’s side yard, swerving blindly into the path of some kids on their bikes, and she hadn’t a clue they were there at all. If they too had been one minute earlier…
So many times she drove drunk while only thinking about herself. The contrast between the EMT driving the ambulance and the drunken neighbor was so stark—so disgustingly stark—that rage bubbled up to my surface for a moment. A quick burst of flame flared, then rapidly burned through its tender, and went out.
A Week Later
And the neighbor has been staying out of trouble. Her begging off the neighbors has stopped. There has been no recent police presence. I saw her walking, and there was a look of anguish on her face. She was dressed like that housewife persona that used to be hers, and her hair was brushed. She wore her pretty purse on her shoulder and tidy white tennis shoes like she was just stepping out of her minivan at Publix, instead of walking in the heat because her driver’s license is suspended and her car repossessed. The whole picture was just pure and plain sadness. She was sad. She was sad to look at.
“Maybe she has finally hit rock bottom,” my other neighbor said, hopefully.
I doubt it. She looks like this every other week: a normal week, followed by a shipwreck of seaweed hair and chaos chasing after her. She is a bottomless pit—a black hole that sucks in anything useable around it. I’ve learned from her that addiction is a strange mishmash of this is heartbreaking and get your shit together.
Addiction is a tangle of heartbreak and disgust. It’s that dried up seaweed tangling around your flip-flop. Sometimes it trips you, other times it is just an ugly sight to see until the angry ocean takes it back.
Rock bottom is one of those ones that is further down than anyone can realise. Even then it still doesnt change people. I love that description of seaweed hair it really plays in the minds eye. Shame though, I lived in a flat across from a wreck of an alcoholic and it was a similar story, chaos and lies and noise followed by small islands of calm.
This sort of behavior is so interesting to me because I come from a family with no addiction issues. Everyone is a jolly drunk. I drink and I'm like Oh my god! Life has SO MUCH MEANING! Lol. People that go the other direction, well it is just interesting. Small islands of calm, yes, that is what she has going on.
I thought of you about a month ago. I was walking in the woods on a trail. I drove there and parked in the lot outside of it, and there was nobody parked. The woods was entirely mine, and my dog's. This particular dog of mine is a rescue and came to me as an abused, unsocialized plott hound, which is just a really rough combo for a plott hound. They are protective natured to begin with. So she has appointed herself my bodyguard. Which is fine - she has definitely calmed down a lot in the year I have had her and is far less homicidal. So anyway, at some point I decided to meander down the bike trail because I was sure there was nobody else out there...and I was wrong. I had about a ten second warning of this biker that came out of nowhere at full speed. My dog decides to hold her ground in the middle of the narrow path, but without her characteristic growling, so in that ten seconds I didn't immediately grab her by the harness and yank her out of the way. The biker stops to avoid crashing into her. She promptly reaches up (she is fairly tall) and latches onto his arm. She didn't bite down, just put her mouth there, basically it was a warning saying Stay away from my woman. She lets go. He looks nonchalantly at us like he respected her concerns, and took off without a word. And the guy really looked like you. I stood there for a minute like My dog just attacked Meesterboom and he was totally cool about it. I knew I liked that guy. Seriously, despite that there was no blood drawn, your average American would have lost their shit, possibly called Animal Control, who knows. Or maybe not - maybe I have little faith in my own culture. Either way, I thought it was pretty amazing. So ride your bike in my woods anytime :)
Ha, that's the same as my family. Well, apart from my brother, he had a torrid time with alcohol. But apart from him everyone happily drinks and thinks life is fab.
It was me!!!
Lol, that is awesome. Your dog is the biz. It must be quite reassuring gadding about with her. I bet. Thankfully the guy wasn't a hysterical maniac!!
If he wasn't me... ;0)
Damn. How does she even still have the house??
Good to read your words again. I feel like I haven't seen you around in a bit, or I've just kept missing your posts.
I love watching people and taking in their character qualities, so it has been really interesting seeing the interactions next door, and definitely sad. So her husband is a hardcore homebody who just wants everything to go back to normal. He definitely doesn't want to divorce and sell and turn his life upside down, so he keeps putting things off, while verbally duking it out every week or so. I'm guessing his hand will be forced soon.
I have been gone three months I think? I'll have to look back at my last post. When I break I break hard. :)
Breaks are good! I had a spontaneous break, didn't realize how long I was gone until I saw my notifications were all at least 6 days old. Long breaks are good, too. Haven't done that since August.
I can't imagine living with someone like that, and I've been in some pretty shitty relationships. I would think that divorcing the wife would turn the husband's life right-side up if things are that bad. Then again, I only know the entertaining aspects of their lives that you share. There could be lots of boring sweetness in between the chaos.
This is beautifully written. Addiction does drive one insane and seeing your neighbor in her begging state is nothing to write home about.
Thank you. Yep, my neighbor is quite a character, and not exactly a good one, but a character nonetheless.
Haha... I understand well. Well done.
Moral of the story, don't have neighbour 😄
That's beautifully written. Every time I read something gritty about "alcohol & eccentric episodes" I think of Bukowski, because that's the only example that I have in mind. But at the same time, I don't think Hank would have written it like this, he would have probably celebrated her in some weird ways.
Funny how you are talking about her like she was a member of your family, not a neighbour. There is that "What did she do this time?" feeling to it, that you only have with family members, or people that we know well.
Sometimes all it takes is to fake it long enough, for a change to really happen.
I still don't know what to think about this "character" of yours. I like damaged people, they're interesting. It's them or it's the NPCs out there...
I guess I like damaged people in stories, when they aren't knocking at my door, then I say "fuck off you crackhead".
Good point, ha! I have this fantasy where I get one of those old broken down Victorian houses in the middle of the Florida nowhere, surrounded by palmettos and ideally a little spring, and I won't even care that I will have a few million mosquitos as my neighbors.
Hmm, interesting. Now that you say that, I see it. Maybe unconsciously I do feel kinship toward her. Probably because I too am a stay-at-home mom, although I homeschool my kids, so my situation is quite different from hers. Maybe there is a part of me that is invested, or just extra disgusted given our similarities.
Yep, I like a good bad character too, when it doesn't knock on my door. Unfortunately this one does. Although I've taken to letting my dogs answer for me. They don't care for her, and they are so much better at getting the point across than I am, and they can even do it without needing to open the door :)