Skippy's Mom

CHIP OF WISDOM: 

Proverbs 11, Verse 28

"To quarrel with a neighbor is foolish; a man with good sense holds his tongue."

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

We live next door to a real bitch.

And it is what it is, as far as that goes, because she lives next door to two goddamn Jews who don't mow their lawn enough.  So, in that respect, I feel for her.  That can't be fun.  We lower property values.  We are swine of the worst order: swine who won't eat swine.  

Anyway, this lady's what you might call a battleaxe.  Or a bully.  She's more of a bully.  She's my mother's age, probably, mid sixties and she has a dykey haircut, and that's fine as far as that goes, and her flowers and her garden and her grass are all pristine, and that is what it is, you know-- people make choices about what they invest their time in and horticulture is kind of her thing and I respect that but to be terribly and brutally honest with you it doesn't really interest me at all-- no real green thumb to speak of, no, not on these hands clacking away here at the old keyboard, no, not really interested so much in trimming the hedges every two weeks or edging the lawn so it's as crisp as a new Marine's hairline no that's really not for me but it's really important to her and so I'm like, if it's so important to you LESBIAN HAIR, then MAKE YOUR OWN FUCKING PROPERTY LOOK LIKE ONE GIANT TOPIARY AND LEAVE US JEWS ALONE.

So, there's that.  

When we first bought the house in 2008, my mother (who knows everything about everyone because she works at the local public library and they've got more shit on you than the NSA so don't be fooled) was all like, "Oh, Mrs. So-and-So lives right next door-- you went to school with her son Skippy (not his real name-- I mean, what is he, a fucking jar of peanut butter, for Christ's sake?) didn't you?"

DID I?  

Of course I did.

I went to school with Skippy.  

How did I, let alone my mother, remember that, all these years later?

Because Skippy DIED back when we were in elementary school.  

Everyone remembers the kid who DIED in elementary school.  

Always one, isn't there?

You probably had one, too.  A Skippy, all of your very own.  

To shape your formative years.

To bring mortality to your doorstep before you know about pimples or pubes, drunk driving or raves.  

Skippy had a hole in his heart.  Or he had half a heart.  Or his left vena cava was eating his right ventricle.  I have no idea.  When you're a kid, you half-hear something and you make up the rest.  You play Scrabble with words like "Hat" and "Boot" and you invent little stories to explain away the unfathomable because it's fun to pretend, isn't it?  

So, anyway, Skippy had swallowed a porcupine at age 2 and it was slowly eating his heart and, when it was done eating, one day Skippy would be dead.  He was small and blue and he was in a wheelchair and one day he died, and that's very sad as far as that goes.  I didn't know him.  I don't think I ever said a word to him that I know of.  But I remember seeing him and then one day I didn't see him anymore and they told us that he'd died.  And we had a walk named for him.  The Skip-a-thon (not its real name).  

Then, many years later, I moved in next to his mom.  And I thought to myself, "Wow, this woman went through a real tragedy all those years ago and I'm going to be very nice to her."

And I was.  

And she wasn't.  

She's always out there, watering something or pruning something or tending to something.  Giving life.  And I get it, she's giving life and nurturing and that's fine as far as that goes but, see, she's mean.  She's passive-aggressive and sarcastic and it took me a while before I realized that she just plain up and decided that she didn't like me.  My first clue was when I was out one day trimming the hedges and she looked my work up and down disapprovingly, eyeing me with the same disgust one might have looked at me if I had just walked into the Oval Office with my penis hanging out of my opened fly and she said to me, 

"You know, Mr __________ (the old asshole who used to live in my house) used to come out with a stool and sit on it and check the height of those hedges with a ruler every other week."

And I looked at her.

And I wanted to say, "Funny, he wasn't so fastidious about paying his 

MORTGAGE

or his 

REAL ESTATE TAXES

or his 

SCHOOL TAXES

or his 

SEWER BILL

or his 

ROOFER BILL

which, I might mention, all hadn't been paid for years forcing the bank to take possession of the house and necessitating that all those bills be cleared up before we could close.

There were other comments to follow.  She got nastier with us.  I grew more sycophantic.  I'll kill her with kindness, I thought, and hopefully not slowly.  I will be the sweet porcupine incessantly eating away at her coal heart.  The kicker was one day, when I wasn't home, my wife let our basset hound, who had just been in the doggie E.R. with a bad back, walk through her yard (not to pee or poop, but just to get to our backyard without having to navigate steps) and the skank (who must have been watching like a hawk from her window) bounded outside and said to my wife

"NOT in my yard."

And my wife stammered some sort of explanation about the dog's ill health and the Nazi repeated, more sternly this time, probably,

"NOT in my yard."

And when my wife told me about this incident, she was in or close to tears and I was all set to storm out of our house, bang on that bitch's door and say,

"WHEN YOU TALK TO MY WIFE, YOU'D BETTER USE A GODDAMN PREPOSITION, SUBJECT AND PREDICATE."    

Because I'm a sensitive fucking guy, okay?  I know what tragedy and loss does to people.  I know it can turn you into a stone cold botanical psychopath who can't relate to people of differing religious beliefs on any meaningful level, but boy oh boy any sixty-ish year old woman with a dykey haircut who can hold down a job can speak English like a civilized person, even when they're a little peeved, for Christ's sake.  

There are people who weren't meant to work for other people.  People like my father.  My father was meant to command troops, he wasn't meant to be a private.  I'm not sure who his time as a private was worse for, him or his superiors, but it ended soon enough.  And not without theatrics.  There are also people who weren't meant to have neighbors.  

You're reading the tome of one of those.

One day I know we'll be able to afford relative seclusion, but it's not going to be for a long time.  And we'll pretend to be nice for our children's sake so they think we're nice people, which, really, we're not.  We're just a couple of dirty Jews who are too cheap to buy a weed whacker, and too scared to operate one if we owned it anyway.  And, boy oh boy do we live next door to a real bitch.  

And that's fine as far as that goes.