It should come as no surprise that there’s no way in hell that I fit in where I live. I’m surrounded by a gaggle of yentas between thea ages of 50 and 103. I am one big ass sore thumb in an otherwise homogeneous neighborhood made up of happy people who wave to each other and gossip–at great length–while out walking the dog. Even their trash is homogeneous; its made up of boxes that contained mail-order possessive happiness, you know, the ‘comfort food’ of bored suburbanites: LL Bean dog beds mixed with Crate and Barrel candle kits mixed with whatever the hell comes from Pottery Barn that costs $10 more than it should.
My neighborhood is one big contrast–me versus the rest of the community: Their recyclables are silent: Mine are filled to the brim with Tecate bottles that ring and chink, sounding out my free-thinking, ‘enlightened’, jaded bachelorhood whenever the Mexicans dump them on my silent street at 4 a.m. The Mexicans have to think that I’m one of them–I’m supporting their economy to some degree, because if it’s not Tecate, it’s Dos Equis or maybe even Corona depending on the pay cycle and my own ‘comfort food’ impulsiveness. The Mexicans sure can brew beer better than that vapid scion of Adolph Coors. It typecasts me so early in the morning. I’m that single divorcee dude with a cute kid; I run a lot AND I drink a lot of beer. The former is spooky; the latter is, well, expected, so they suppose.
But I’m really not quite what the yentas expect. I’m close, but I’ve still got that running problem. I’m not where I’m supposed to be. There needs to be someone else more predictable in my place. The very fact that I can’t be figured out, pegged, stereotyped and sorted into a neat $55 Crate or Barrel of ’single divorcee loser’ has really got the yentas a’cacklin’. I mean I am the talk of McWorld; I am that guy who is single-handedly driving the property values down.
I don’t plant petunias in the front section of my ‘yard’ that serves as the object of an instant yenta diatribe if it’s not up to standard (these beds are the bragging rights of McWorld and mine is nothing but weeds and three year-old oxidized mulch); I don’t have those hanging bird feeders. (I have the bird feeder hanger from the previous owner, but nothing hangs from it except a dizzy spider and her little web that I like to leave alone.) I do have some magic ceramic frog that was left here. I don’t know what it means and so it just stays frozen like Lot’s wife, looking back at a dilapidated house that has been destroyed because its inhabitant has drifted from the mandates of THE Association Book Chapter Five, verses 3-9 (front lawn upkeep).
I don’t have a back deck that looks like something from Key West. My awning doesn’t jingle with fancy wind chimes. The birds don’t come to feed: They come to shit. I don’t have a swing and tiki torches where I am to contemplate what the Republicans will have to do to keep the Senate; I have two plastic ‘Adirondack-style’ chairs made in China and bought at K-Mart when times were really rough. I sit out there sans shirt with a beer and watch people with 50000x my income hit little white balls with $300 clubs while zooming around on plastic cars. I sometimes read out there. I’m not reading The Kite Runner crying because the National Geographic Afghan girl just stepped on a landmine; I’ve got Fear and Loating in Las Vegas in my hand laughing because the gonzo journalist high on a concoction of acid, pot, and amyl nitrate just ordered 5000 bars of soap, three hookers, a goat, and an ape up to his room. (And room service is going to try and pull it off!) Steaks don’t cook on my stainless-steel grill; hot dogs get re-warmed and re-rusted on my ramshackle BBQ with the leakly propane hose.
I don’ t decorate for X-mas or Halloween. I don’t have a blowup Santa riding a Harley that comes with a limited edition red/green lightbulb and its own air compressor. I don’t attend the association meetings; I haven’t the slightest idea what kind of power plays and Machiavellian intrigue are unfolding inside the walls of the association’s meeting house. I’m oblivious to the fact that a cabal has formed within the pool subcommittee with the intent of usurping power from Mr. Wiggins’*, its president and autocratic dictator. I wasn’t aware that the landscaping committee has planned to uproot all the sycamores along X Lane because they are ‘messy trees.’ I am barely a part of this place. I only enter with my work things and exit with my dog or my running shoes. I choose to be invisible and I don’t want to run for office or appear in the local gazette backslapping the overachieving Lion’s club scholarship semifinalist while sporting a shit-eating grin. Leave me alone. Thank you.
I don’t begrudge people for being themselves. Neighborhoods can be wonderful places and to each his or her own, really. If they want the santas and the fake ‘olden days lights’, it’s their house for Pete’s sake.
It’s the yenta factor that bothers me; it’s the women that peer through their shades at my comings and goings as if I’m one of the people from the movie ‘The Burbs.’ Anything done out of the ordinary is questioned during my mandatory small talk crucifixion when I am pinned between the neighbor’s petunia bed and the sidewalk with a sack of dogshit in hand. Yes I am single. No I don’t know who dropped that box off. Yes I date. Yes. No, not really. Yes. Maybe. Yes, that is Tecate. No it wasn’t a party; it was Friday. Good day.
I get pinned going to work and, worst of all, I get pinned–severely dehydrated and emaciated–with nothing but my shorts on after a 15-mile single on a 75-degree dew point day.
Yes, it was a run. It was threee miles. Yes that is far.
Good bye.
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I tried running on the golf course/private country club that is ten feet from my door for the first time yesterday. I hopped the fence like a criminal. Some cart far away started hauling ass towards me like that one part of GTA-Vice City where you have to knock over the bad guy in his cart and I so got spooked. I ran a strider and chickened out back across the fence. I’ll sneak back on there when the leaves fall and the Rush Limbaughs draped in those sleeveless sweater things wearing their Greg Norman fedoras are off doing their cold weather gentrified hobbies like fox hunting or indoor skeet shooting.
Tee-to-greens will happen, soon. Fall is on its way.
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*I am not making this up. I am told that this Mr.Wiggins (this is not his real name) is a control freak. The word on the street, according to the yentas, is that he’s being plotted against. From what I can tell of him, this is good for McWorld and good for society in general. Going to the pool is like going into Idi Amin’s Uganda. Every possible rule is enforced. Kids are yelled at for the slightest infraction. Adults get called over and browbeaten by an omnipresent Mr. Wiggins who’s there–wearing Teva sandals on his feet and a beach towel slung over his shoulder exposing chlorine-faded lines looking like a Roman senator’s Toga praetexta–to remind the plebians of their complete ignorance of the pool’s statutes. Us plebians can never keep up with Mr. Wiggins. He’s always one step ahead of us. Dont fuck with his pool. Tread lightly and for God’s sakes don’t run!
I side with the yentas here. I partake in this kind of gossip. When things are really bad, and I’m hemmed in good in the middle of dog walking no-man’s land being grilled about the goings on at my place, I change the subject to Mr.Wiggins. The yentas always pounce on him–discussing the courageous blue-haired cabal and its Julius Caesar-esque plot to take him down and restore order, to allow all of us the freedom to break those token rules at the pool. And so, before I know it, I’m released back to the sanctity of my insulated, unkempt fortress. It works every time.
You may think that I’m done discussing Mr. Wiggins but I’m not. He lives down the street and when he’s not at the pool disproving the titularity of the Pool Subcommittee Chairman position, he walks in the back of the townhouses –draped still in his Toga praetexta, flopping about in his Walmart brand knockoff Tevas–ensuring that our shared ‘greenways’ contain no wayward dogshit. He carries a clipboard and catalogs in fastidious detail all ‘back deck’ infractions. Those in turn get reported up the Imperial chain of command to the Empress who either issues a warning or a fine. The former goes to those with the petunia beds, the latter goes to the guy with the ceramic frog and the weeds. If you drive down property values and don’t actively partake in the yenta games or the decorating games….if you drink and run wedging the square peg of divorced bachelorhood into the round hole that is Pleasantville’s godnapplepie facade, you will be fined–hot damn, you will.
Mr. Wiggins also plays tennis with some miscreant guy, some sidekick guy with long, greasy hair and fanged teeth who comes and visits Mr.Wiggins from time-to-time. The miscreant guy, who I will call ‘Jake’, snickers all the time. He’s a real piece of work. I mean I have no idea where Wiggins dug this guy up. He looks like someone you’d see leaning on a counter of bowling alley at 3am arguing with the night shift manager for a refund on the Galaga machine. Jake wears black 1980s ‘Heavy Metal’ concert tee shirts (Whitesnake mostly) and black wrist sweatbands–he has a bit of sickly Kirk Hammett look to him, but he’s all bark and no bite. I mean he can’t even return most of Mr.Wiggins’ pathetic serves and when he does, by chance, make contact with the ball, he sends it so high up that Wiggins puffs out his bulbous chest (he’s a lumpy lardball) and slams the ball back down into Jake’s face. Of course Wiggins the dominant tennis player fits hand in glove with Wiggins the Imperial pool suzerain. By the way, Wiggins is a short man and so I’ll let you play Freud and connect those dots into a short conclusion.
The tennis courts are a perfect place for these guys to hang out because Mr.Wiggins gets to practice his serve there and observe the compliance of the pool’s rules at the same time. I forgot to mention that Mr.Wiggins is a fat male pig which means he gawks for uncomfortable periods of time at the bikini-clad lifeguard and her teenage friends who come to visit her. All these paragraphs should get you to understand why I avoid the pool, why I don’t play tennis and why I wait like an eager Plutarch to record his fall from power.