Do you make up nicknames for your neighbors?
I do; my husband laughs at me endlessly for the habit. To wit: I have a family of fucking crazies living across the street from me, real out-and-out loons, with most of the funhouse atmosphere centering around the adult female, whom I like to call the Red Devil. The Red Devil can most often be found working in the yard at 3am, or, in the unlikely event of a snowstorm, building a snowman in the yard, barefoot, in a cotton nightgown. She's a real odd duck; I can't tell if she's faking this Chaillot routine or if she's really batters. The husband (whom I call Fat Pat) is just as bad; he has a thing for cranking up his outdoor construction lanterns and bopping things with a hammer in the middle of the night. These people are pack rats; they have a fenced-in quarter acre behind their house in which you literally cannot see the ground. So. Much. Crap. Their garage is the same - no car has ever darkened its door. It's so filled to the gills with boxes of useless shit and broken appliances that you can't even reach the back door, much less aspire to park there. They homeschool their children, poor things; the youngest girl, at twelve, has a poor appreciation for all modern concepts of personal hygiene, weighs in at around 250 and is still attempting to dress like Britney. I won't speak of the boy; it seems that, in lieu of schooling, he mows lawns all day. Every. Day. I can't vouch that the elevator actually reaches penthouse. As a unit, they're The Crazy People. Come on. Can you blame me?
Then, down the street, we have a pack of Jehovah's Witnesses or Mormons or some such; I call 'em all Mormons for expediency, and sort 'em by color. We got the White Mormons, and the Black Mormons. Both sets are nice enough folks, but they tend to gasp in terror if you hand 'em a Coca-Cola or, heaven forfend, light up a cigarette in their presence. Not exactly "come over for barbecue and some cold ones" kind of neighbors. Also, they have Meetings every week, Meetings of a somewhat nebulous nature, but which invariably result in a traffic jam on my own goddamn suburban street. Just try to find a place to parallel park in my hood on Meeting Day. Forget it. Fucking Mormons.
Around the corner, we have Doctor God. He's a single man living in a family hood, which is unremarkable enough, I suppose, but I insist on remarking it. He's six foot eight, bald as a billiard ball, cadaverously physiognomied, and totally obsessed with a) his BMW fuck-you! series, and b) his lawn. Seriously, the guy will come home after a thirty-six hour hospital stint and trim his fucking hedges with a scalpel. He never speaks, nods, smiles, or in any other way acknowledges the presence of other beings. It's Doctor God's movie, and as an extra, you're damn well supposed to know your place. And for God's sake, don't look Ms. Lopez in the eyes. Total medical diva, for which I have no tolerance. I insist on pestering him whenever I see him, smiling, waving gaily, hollering, "HI, DOC! HOWZIT HANGIN'??" at the top of my lungs when I happen upon him shopping at the neighborhood Publix. Doctor God can rot - he's never opening up my head, the insufferable prick. I plan, instead, to Kill him with Kindness.
I think I've really passed my prime on the nicknames, though. I crested when my husband and I were first married and living in the downstairs apartment of a duplex house. We had a nice enough guy, a pilot, who lived there when we first moved in. Got along great. He got transferred, and in move two twenty-three year old girls, University rejects who'd decided on long-term careers as bartenders and Retail Merchandisers. THAY BOWTH TAWLKED REELY LOUD IN REAL LAHK VALLEY-GIRL GOES TO ATLANTA accents; you could hear every droning, insipid word they said. They wore horribly clunky shoes, booming up and down the stairs to the side of the house at all hours, usually with a drunk boy or other in tow. Them girls did plenty of fuckin', I'll give 'em that. There was practically a revolving door on the place - a new set of cars parked on the curb almost every night. They did plenty of partyin', too...they threw a kegger that collapsed the back deck outside our house...the night I brought my newborn son home from the hospital, the bitches. We were scheduled to move out of there and into our own home within two weeks, and they knew both when I was due and when we were moving...and they had five hundred people dripping out of and around my house, all night long, the third night of my son's life. It got even better when the ambulances and police started arriving. Damn. I hated those chicks.
Oh, their nicknames? Short, sweet. I called 'em the Cuntbags. To their faces, even, after the Deck Incident... bitches...
Posted by Queenie at November 8, 2004 09:40 PM