Mystery Neighbors
(Neighbors • Richmond)
After Peggy’s last trip to the hospital, her son told me they’d decided to admit her to a nursing-home kind of place in Rosenberg for a couple weeks, “and then we’ll just see.”
So it surprised me a bit when a slick-haired dude in a BMW showed up in her driveway about eight hours later and put a For Sale sign in the front yard.
Not many people seriously looked the place over in the next few weeks, but a few did. We eyed them with more than curiosity, wondering if they would be the sort of neighbor to move in and start a tow-truck repair business in the side yard.
You can do that in Richmond. There are no zoning restrictions at all, except that you’re not allowed to locate a mobile home within 20 feet of Larry’s Mexican Restaurant, because that’s where the city police and fire fighters park for their daily free lunch.
One of my other neighbors took advantage of the City Zoneless Ordinance to build something the size of a dairy barn 10 feet from my side fence, covering most of the area that used to be his back yard. Now not only does the sun come up two hours later than it used to on that side of the yard, when it rains I get a free temporary lake from the water running off the new structure. But that’s another story.
This story is about how, three days ago, the For Sale sign disappeared. No one had been mowing Peggy’s lawn, either, and the grass had hit about eight inches long. One more good rain and they’ll have to hire someone with a combine to come in and bale her two acres.
Yesterday I saw the mail lady fiddling at Peggy’s old mailbox, so I went out and snooped. Yes, she had new mail for someone at the address. Later I snooped even more and opened the mailbox to see the new name the mail lady had written in black marker. I hadn’t heard it before, so I snooped some more, this time on Google. Sorry about that, what can I say? I spent too many years as a reporter.
Google returned nada. Thus was our mystery neighbor born.
Having a mystery neighbor is not especially exciting, at least not for us. We are working to keep our expectations in check. My wife and our friend Janie, two doors down, are praying that someone “normal” moves in. I endorse and concur with such prayers.
I’ve had abnormal neighbors before, most recently six years ago in west Houston, before we moved here. We lived in a nice older suburb, with well-kept homes with high, solid wood fences between the (for me) claustrophobic yards. On one side of me was a captain with the Houston Police Department whose wife was about to divorce him. He was a great neighbor.
Unfortunately, I had two others. One was a family of renters who moved in about a year after we’d been living there. They were Wiccan which, in this case anyway, meant the woman wore too much eye makeup and one night they built a little bonfire-alter in their back yard and started dancing around it in kind of a subdued way but without sacrificing anything to my knowledge.
They had a neglected and untrained female Great Pyrenees, which they kept in the tiny back yard all day while they went out looking for eyes of newts or whatever they did. The damn dog whined and barked all day until I finally started buying a dozen 25-cent frozen pot pies every time I went to the grocery. Finally the dog and I reached an understanding. It would only whine a little bit in the morning, and then I would unwrap a frozen pot pie and toss it in the yard. The dog would lick it for two or three hours and then eat it, I suppose.
One night one of the guys living over there had his bedroom window opened and was playing some Indian sitar music at high volume at about 3 a.m. The window was about eight feet from Nick’s bedroom window, who was a baby at the time.
I went out the front door, walked around to the little strip of grass between our houses, looked in and saw a guy in his mid-20s with long frizzy hair and glasses, sucking hard on a bong pipe. I waited until he had sucked all of the marijuana smoke and was just at the apex of his inhale.
“Hey! What the hell are you doing?” I hollered in my best army-sergeant voice through his screen window. “You know what time it is? My kid is right across from your window trying to sleep! Turn the damn music down!” While I was hollering, I was watching him cough his lungs out in fear, knocking his bong over and throwing some kind of cloth over it while hoping I didn’t see it or the bag of pot he pushed onto the floor. “Yes sir! Yes, sir!” he said in a panicked voice. It was like a scene out of Super Troopers.
But the Wiccans weren’t my bad neighbor. My bad neighbor was like a dumber alcoholic Al Bundy. Their house was behind our back fence, with their swimming pool in between. I never figured it out for sure, but believe they had two kids of around 10 or 11, either that or a grown child whose kids lived with the alcoholic Bundys.
They would have friends over for big drunken pool parties that lasted until 4 in the morning, and they’d make their poor little kids hang out with them and show their pool diving tricks for the drunks at least until 11 p.m. Then about a dozen alleged adults would pack themselves in the little pool and hoot, drunk as loons. I hated them, because they only held these parties on nights when I had to get in to work early the next morning, or when we had overnight company. These people were raging alcoholics, and there was no reasoning with them because they possessed no reason. Even the police captain left them alone.
One night when my oldest daughter was visiting, their party had died down around midnight and they went inside. But at 3:30, they were back outside. A bunch of drunks took their spots in the pool and began chanting. I went outside to see what the hell. Al Bundy had climbed onto his garage roof and was allowing himself to be coaxed to jump from the roof across a cement deck into the pool. They were shining flashlights on him as he swayed, hairy, pink and naked, up there on the roof. I swore at fate for not owning a BB gun at the time – so all I could do was pray hard that he’d slip and break his leg.
It didn’t happen. God broke my heart and allowed the guy to make the leap into the pool unscathed.
I planned many revenges for alcoholic Al Bundy after that night. But unfortunately we moved here before any of them could hatch, except for the brochures from the substance abuse clinics I filled out for him online and had mailed in his name.
This time around, I could probably handle another Wiccan neighbor if I really had to, since there’s a half acre and a lot of tall shrubbery between the houses. Even a Baptist. Just, please Lord, no tow-truck repair business.
→ B.Dunn, Aug 30, 2009, 04 40 am
I lived in Texas a long time ago and you have reminded me of the habit of not having zoning laws. Sort of an every man for himself kind of state. It has been a long, long, long time since I had bad neighbors…so glad that is in the past and I wish you the best of luck.
— Tabor Aug 30, 09:46 am #
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I’ll trade you three Wiccans for the doctor on the 6th floor who insists on singing some really bad karaoke on his balcony.
— BarbinDC Sep 1, 12:16 pm #
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Where I live we remember that zoning ordinances aren’t there to prevent you from using your property. They’re there to stop your next door neighbor from abusing his property. Of course, we don’t have nearly as many Homeowners Associations as y’alls do so we have to decide for ourselves when to paint the house, what color to paint the house, when to mow yard, etc.
— Elmo Sep 1, 02:17 pm #
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Elmo, If you saw my neighborhood, you would laugh out loud at the idea that it could be under control of a homeowners association.
Our neighborhood is where homeowners association board members go in their dreams on nights when they wake up with the cold sweats.
— Bob Sep 1, 02:43 pm #
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