Next door old Mrs. Fazzino had just stepped out of her house. She was not aging gracefully by any means and her bones seemed to be turning against the rest of her body as arthritis attacked her at every visible joint. Even if you peeled away the layers of life, I imagine she’d still be a homely woman no matter what her age. Her nose was big, her lips were small, and her eyes had a slight cross to them that made you wonder if any man had ever thrown her a bone and shook her out of her virginity. I’d have a hard time biting that bullet, and I’m not exactly known for my standards.
Mrs. Fazzino crept slowly down the steps of her porch and began a daily activity that, while crazy, I always found endearing. Just like yesterday and each day before, the soup-can shaped woman took time out of her less-than-mundane schedule to vacuum her lawn. Despite the arthritis turning her fingers into jagged lightning bolts, she handled the Hoover like it was a toothpick, making quick strides through the thick grass. If not for the limitations of the extension cord she could have covered more ground, but the frownturned-upside-down on her face was proof that she was quite content on the fringes of the walkway.
When she turned the crackling machine off, I picked myself up and marched towards her, leaning over the fence that separated our yards.
“Good evening Mrs. Fazzino,” I said sincerely. “How is the dirt tonight?”
“It’s all in the bag,” she said as she squinted toward my unbuttoned shirt sleeve, which I was oblivious to until then.
The thing that I found most interesting about Mrs. Fazzino was that she always had a way of making me see the negative details in myself and the world around me. She never looked me in the eye unless there was something wrong with it. She always focused her attention on a bruise, a wart, or some other almost unnoticeable imperfection. Once, I tested this theory and put ketchup on the tip of my sneaker and lo and behold her tomato-seeking eyes locked on to my right foot for the entire conversation.
With her eyes still focused on my shirtsleeve, Mrs. Fazzino made her way to the fence and positioned her small oval face inches from my hand. She cleared her throat and then whispered toward the empty button hole, “The other night I heard growling coming from next door.”
She raised her arm slowly and pointed to Jimmy’s house with one of her twisted fingers.
“He was growling like a lion,” she said.
“A lion? I’m not calling you a liar, Mrs. Fazzino, but that seems a bit out of character for Jimmy. Now if you said a tiger, I might agree with you, but a lion just seems sort of out in left field. You sure it was him?”
“I saw him in the window,” she said, squinting. “He was growling.”
“Maybe so, but he couldn’t have been growling like a lion, Mrs. Fazzino. I’m a big nature buff and I’m pretty confident that lions don’t growl. You know, it’s one of those urban legends or something like that.”
Mrs. Fazzino paid no attention to the words that flowed from my mouth and instead turned her faded, flowery apron toward the furthest side of her house and fixed her gaze on Jimmy’s place.
“The Virgin will teach him a lesson,” she said confidently.
Once again I could thank Mrs. Fazzino for showing me the little details in life that I often overlooked. Positioned only a foot away from where the old woman was standing was her precious ceramic statue of the Virgin Mary, which normally faced the street, but was now facing Jimmy’s bedroom window. She’d even propped it up from underneath using what appeared to be an attachment from her vacuum. She may have been insane, but she was as crafty as MacGyver.
“Mrs. Fazzino, do you really want to subject the Holy Mother to the goings-on in Jimmy’s bedroom?”
“She knows who he is. We know all about him and his growling.”
“Jimmy’s harmless—growling or not. I really don’t think there’s anything to worry about.”
Her crossed eyes darted back to my shirtsleeve, though her attention was still elsewhere.
“Look, do you see the wrapper over there?” she asked.
“What wrapper?”
“The one that blew over from Jimmy’s house.”
“But, there’s a fence there Mrs. Fazzino. How can things blow over from Jimmy’s yard when you have a fence to keep them out?”
“The wrapper came in through the holes. He sends everything through the holes.”
While a part of me felt bad for the old woman, I couldn’t help but find humor in our conversations—good or bad. And even though she made me laugh on the inside without ever trying, I was sincere with her when we spoke and treated her respectfully. I can’t speak for what happened inside her home when I wasn’t around, but from what I could tell, I was the only person she had any direct contact with and so, I tried to humor her.
Mrs. Fazzino’s shriveled face rippled in the breeze like an old sail and her nose blocked the setting sun from sprinkling its UV rays into my eyes. “They always try to hide but I find them,” she nodded. “He growls and his wrappers purr, but they’re not quiet enough to hide from me. I may be old, but I’m not crazy.”
“Nobody said you were crazy, Mrs. Fazzino.”
She continued to nod as she collected the vacuum cleaner and slowly crept back up the steps and into her house. I knew Mrs. Fazzino would return again at dusk the following day for there would be renewed dirt, and even if it were immaculate, the dirt would still be there, just like the dragon will return to the child tonight, no matter how many swords and weapons he brings to bed.
I pulled my cell phone out of my pocket and dialed up Jimmy. I had only known him for a few days, but we connected like guys do, sharing a few beers and burping them up as quickly and as easily as they went down. We exchanged numbers, agreeing that it was easier to call than walk the twenty or thirty feet down the street to knock on each other’s doors. Jimmy was a machinist by trade and he had lost all of his incisors in a work-related accident that Mikey described as something you’d see in a big-budget Hollywood horror movie. He had falsies to fill his mouth, but he only wore them when he ate or when he needed to bite the top off of a beer bottle, which meant the majority of the time he was left looking like the oldest young guy I had ever seen. On top of his toothless smile, he had the quintessential retarded laugh, a combination of yelps and snorts, which along with his fully-visible gums, made him come off like the dumbest hillbilly in all of Arkansas. Luckily for Jimmy, he didn’t live in Arkansas and he was actually pretty bright, a fact you discovered once you got past his appearance.
He answered in three rings.
“Jimmy! Yeah, it’s your friendly neighborhood neighbor man. I know it’s not my place, but what’s up with the statue staring up at your window? The whole neighborhood is talking about it!”
He huffed and informed me that he hadn’t slept in two days because of it.
“Why don’t you just pull your shade down?” I asked.
Raised by a single and extremely religious mother, Jimmy had Catholic guilt instilled in him from a very early age, and although he was now an adult in his late twenties, the prying eyes of the Virgin Mary had been affecting his day-to-day activities. Apparently he felt it was like having God in his bedroom twenty-four hours a day.
“Have you tried asking Mrs. Fazzino to reposition the Virgin?” I suggested.
Reasoning with her was not an option in his opinion, mostly because he was convinced that her level of nuttiness was the kind that did things just to drive sane people as crazy as her. He felt that if she knew the statue was upsetting him, it would be firmly planted in its current position until Mrs. Fazzino dropped dead, and although I didn’t say it out loud, I agreed.
“Why don’t you just try to get on her good side?” I continued.
Jimmy claimed to have tried years ago, even going the extra mile and getting his yard professionally landscaped in hopes of connecting with the woman, but it didn’t seem to get any reaction at the time. He even pointed out that my yard was an absolute shithole, yet she didn’t seem to care. He had a point, but I wasn’t going to retire the speech I had already begun crafting in my head because he called me a slob.
“Listen, I think I’ve got the answer to your problem, but it’s going to require a leap of faith on your part. Mrs. Fazzino respects madness. I think if you do something crazy, I could go to her and reason with her, and in the long run, buy you some mental calm.”
He was suspicious, but the more I talked, the more it made sense.
“Maybe if you do something like—I don’t know—clean your dishes with the garden hose.”
At first he refused to stoop that low, but I assured him that if he wanted peace from the Virgin, he’d have to offer her a sacrifice, and that sacrifice might just be a tiny piece of his sanity and a tad of his dignity, which is a small price to pay in the grand scheme of things.
I hung up the phone and returned it to my pocket. I stretched my arms towards the now-darkening sky and released a ferocious yawn that I was convinced Mrs. Fazzino would mistake for a growling Jimmy. After settling myself back onto my front porch, I found myself mesmerized by a melodic whistling that appeared to be getting closer and closer as it performed in unison with the chimes that hung above me.
To my surprise the lips responsible for such beautiful mouth music belonged to the stereotypical girl-next-door Jennifer, a cute brunette in her mid-twenties who constantly wore her hair in a ponytail using the same blue elastic. She was about five feet four and weighed around one hundred and ten pounds. She wore no jewelry or makeup. Her small features gave her an almost schoolgirlish look. She had a small chin and cheeks, a button nose, and light brown freckles peppered her smooth, fair skin. She lived with her aunt a few houses down from me and from what I knew at the time based on word of mouth, she could bore the stripes off a zebra. I had yet to talk with her since I moved to the neighborhood, and while I normally would have let her walk by without second-guessing myself, I found the need to compliment her whistling.
“Good job with that ditty,” I told her. “You’ve got rhythm.”
“Thanks,” she said, continuing past me to her house.
I watched as she sat on her aunt’s porch, burying her head inside a journal of some kind. I decided to continue our conversation and walked down the street to where she was sitting and scribbling away inside her spiral-bound book. When I stepped in front of the house, she looked up at me for a nanosecond and then went back to her writing. She had a complexion of dazzling freshness and her face was serene and relaxed. I could tell immediately that she was the spiritual, dreamy type and I was intrigued by her concentration on whatever it was she was jotting down with her number two pencil.
“Hi,” I called out from the fence in front of her house.
After going over a few scenarios in my mind on the best way to initiate a formal meet and greet, I settled on the straightforward approach.
“I’m Drago. I’m a new neighbor that lives just down the street. I’ve seen you around a few times, but haven’t had a chance to formally introduce myself, so here I am looking to make amends on that.”
“Nice to meet you,” she said to me in a welcoming voice. “I’m Jennifer.”
“You live here long?” I asked.
“Most of my life actually.”
“Nice neighborhood from what I’ve seen.”
She looked at me, but didn’t say a word. It seemed to me that there was another conversation going on in her head and I wasn’t invited to participate.
“I mean, there are a lot of nice people that live around here anyway,” I said, hoping to save face.
“Very nice,” she agreed politely.
I couldn’t stop noticing her luminous green eyes, which seemed to swirl in the limited light like a capful of oil poured into a rain puddle. She had an old-soul look to her, the kind of aura that had been around the cosmic block a few times.
“You writing the next great American novel?” I asked.
“No,” she smiled.
“If you are writing about this neighborhood, it’s going to be an encyclopedia.”
“That’s true, but I’m not writing about that.”
“How about a hint?” I asked, leaning on the fence.
“I’m writing about the sky.”
I looked up into the evening sky, hoping to find a clue to her motivation. As I searched above, I was shot back down to earth by the sharp metal coils of the fence that were digging into my hands. I raised my stigmata hands toward Jennifer.
“Next time I go see a palm reader, I’m going to be told I have multiple personalities.”
Jennifer smiled and invited me to sit along side of her on the porch. When I got closer, I could see that her eyes were not only green, but a radiant green, and her look, deep and intense. I wanted to collect them like undiscovered gems.
“I forgot what it was like to sit on real steps,” I said. “These are nice and smooth.”
“I’ve seen your porch. It does need some work.”
Suddenly for the first time I felt embarrassed about my current living conditions. I told her I was planning a renovation and when she looked at me incredulously I said that I was going to have the house nuked and rebuilt once the radiation settled.
Every time Jennifer smiled I was taken in by her dreamy disposition. She seemed so content in her skin and I envied her that rarity. In my experience, people tend to pretend they’re someone else while they continuously search to be that person. With Jennifer it was different. She liked being Jennifer and it showed.
“Where does one go to have some fun around here?” I asked her.
“I wouldn’t know,” she said, lowering her head. “I’m not much of a party girl.”
“You don’t have to be a party girl to have fun.”
“No, but my idea of fun is different than most people’s idea of fun. I can assure you that.”
Jennifer suddenly looked at me with a penetrating stare and in a serious tone asked why I would want to move to the neighborhood. Her question caught me totally off guard and the only answer I could think of was the honest one.
“Truthfully, I was unhappy where I was,” I told her. “I needed a change in my life.”
“So you came here of all places?”
“It was a spontaneous decision. I guess I figured if I went to a place I’ve never been, I could look at my life from afar and figure things out. I know it sounds crazy, but somehow it made sense at the time.”
For a moment Jennifer was silent and thoughtful. I could tell she wanted to say something but was holding back.
“Do you like living here?” I asked.
“It’s my world,” she said quietly. “It’s all I know.”
It was hard to decipher Jennifer’s answer as a solid yes or no, but I decided it was best to lighten the mood because things were not necessarily going along with the planned scenario I had mapped out in my mind.
“Okay,” I said. “So your idea of fun is different than other peeps. I get that, but what I don’t get is what your idea of fun is. When you leave your porch, what kinds of things do you like to do?”
“I like parks and quiet places. Sometimes I’ll take a bus to the ocean. You know, the kinds of things that most people think I’m crazy for enjoying.”
“I don’t think you’re crazy at all. Those sound like nice things. I’ve got a log home on a mountain in western Pennsylvania. To me, it’s the most peaceful place in the world.”
“How often do you go?”
“Actually, I haven’t gone there in many years. I’ve been meaning to get back.”
“Why don’t you?” Jennifer asked with genuine eyes.
Once again, I was caught off guard by Jennifer’s questioning and the only answer I could think of was the honest one.
“I get an overwhelming feeling of emptiness when I’m there by myself and there is no one beside me to share the beauty with.”
Although I was being entirely sincere, I could tell Jennifer wasn’t sure whether she was being thrown a line. What I had said clearly made her uncomfortable and she ended our discussion.
“Well, I’d love to chat more, but I really have to get going. My aunt is expecting me for dinner. It’s my night to cook.”
“Okay. Well it was nice talking with you.”
“You too,” she told me as she stood to enter the house. “Thanks for stopping by.”
“See you around.”
I’m not sure what it was, but something fascinated and intrigued me about Jennifer and I decided at that moment that I would make it a personal goal to discover more about her world.
As I walked the same path home that I took to Jennifer’s house, I couldn’t help but contemplate dinner. Both my stomach and I agreed on corn as a main course and I slipped inside to heat up a can, only to return a few minutes later with a fork and a bowl of buttered kernels. I ate quickly, leaving myself no time to actually taste the golden nuggets swimming around in a tiny pool of churned, cholesterol-ridden liquid. There was more shoveling than actual chewing, and before I knew it, the bowl was empty and my stomach was full. I took a swig of beer to facilitate the digestive process only to be interrupted by the neighborhood pit bull, or pit bully as we in the neighborhood called the bloodthirsty creature. The dog belonged to Getman and when the mood struck, it would bark until it was blue in its furry face. This was one of those moments that the dog’s vocal chords looked forward to all day long and without warning, it exploded into a vicious bark-fest, though from where I was sitting, there was no specific target in the dog’s mind as it just spun in circles hollering at anything that looked at it funny—alive or not. Frustrated, I barked back, but it only seemed to agitate the animal even more, which in turn, frustrated me even more. Before I knew it, I was in a full-fledged barking contest with the dog, each of us upping the ante every round in an attempt at sounding more threatening as time went on. The pit bull’s nerves were wearing thin and the canine monster started trying to break free from the chain that bound him, no doubt hoping to sink his teeth into my jugular.
Apparently the dog had never been challenged in the past because my loud, deep, threatening barks were driving him mad. Sensing a change in his pet, Getman stepped out of his house to investigate. He was a Nazi douchebag who favored camouflage pants and shit-kicking boots, all part of the racist uniform that he and the rest of his bald-headed friends wore proudly. He used his bloodthirsty dinosaur of a dog to instill fear in everything and everyone that came within fifty feet of his house and needless to say, he was not happy that I was agitating his dog. He glared at me, cursing profanities at me with his eyes. I glared as well, not wanting to back down, especially after standing up to his mutt. In comparison, he was a thumb-sucking child. However, he was also the only true ugliness I had experienced since moving to the ‘hood.
Aside from Getman, I felt very comfortable in my new neighborhood. Most people were extremely warm and friendly once I got acquainted and spent time with them. And although the inner city didn’t exactly feel like home, there was no place in my life that had since childhood. Each apartment, condo, and town was just another pit stop on the way to an unknown destination.
I watched a silent ambulance pass by. I listened to the happy voices of the neighborhood children playing, and I remembered a time when I too was a child, wondering about the world beyond my street, beyond the playground and beyond the schoolyard. It seemed at the time that there was a world full of adventure just beyond my grasp and I was forever dreaming about glorious deeds. In those days I wanted to be some kind of hero and had you asked me then, I would have told you that I had zero intention of becoming a normal adult, at least by what I thought the definition of one was. In fact, adults scared the hell out of me, and in a way, they still do. Their eyes always seemed so distant and they were difficult to read. The stuff that was going on inside of them was unimaginable to me, and now when I look into a mirror, I see in myself that which I once feared.
Strange, I had become that person that I was so horrified of when things in my life were simpler and more innocent. I now belonged to that unimaginable world that I once thought was so alien, only to yearn for that animated one I left behind. Yet all is not lost, for the paint of adulthood has not dried by any means. The old memories are still warm and continue to maintain their temperature despite the cold storage of middle-age life. And although I had just turned forty years old, age to me was only a number, and if accounting had taught me anything, it’s that numbers can be fudged.
I found myself getting antsy as the sun dipped further into the western horizon. I decided to chase the orange ball of light and warmth for a few miles, choosing to walk a few blocks in an attempt at familiarizing myself with my new surroundings. Dusk had created the perfect weather for a city hike, and with little else to do as the day crept into the evening, I made my way down the rickety porch steps and off into the heart of my new home.
I started at a slow pace, but decided to pick up my speed upon hearing the memory-inducing jingle, “Pop Goes the Weasel,” which seemed to be traveling towards me at a stop and go click. I hadn’t heard the chimes of the song since childhood and found myself suddenly craving a sweet, creamy treat. The generic instrumental was the calling card of a chain of long-running urban ice cream trucks called Mr. Pops, and they had successfully branded themselves with the “Weasel,” making it a fan favorite among neighborhood kids throughout the city.
I stood in line behind a pack of hungry toddlers all eager to get their hands on a sugary, frozen snack shaped like their favorite cartoon character. I had simpler tastes and when it was my turn to order, I went with a creamsicle, an old staple of ice cream men everywhere. The eighteen-year-old driving the truck was a stoner whose tie-dyed t-shirt matched the trippy colors of the treats he sold. We talked for a bit about the jingle that poured from the square truck’s bullhorn and I convinced him to sell me the spare copy of the song he had burned to a CD in case of an emergency. I had always been an impulse buyer and the recent reminiscing about my childhood had prompted me to purchase a small piece of it for my own personal nostalgia.
I ate the orange ice cream bar as quickly as possible as my olfactory canal was under attack from the sulfurous air. Trash day loomed in this section of the neighborhood and unlike those parts of society that I used to call home, here trash bins were foreign and garbage was left to rot on sidewalks and stoops. Litter seemed more common than grass here and it was a familiar occurrence to see any number of fast food and drink containers defiantly hurled from cars as they sped by at speeds far greater than what the spray-painted speed limit signs called for.
The interesting thing about litter in the inner city is that it often gets recycled. Rats and pigeons scurry and swoop as they feast on spoiled remains of what was once called food and even the homeless have a hand in keeping the street clean. I watched as one man in particular scooped up a sidewalk-flavored burger and without hesitation, proceeded to engulf the sure-to-be-foul beef patty as if it were filet mignon. Choosing to not go without carbs, he then fought with a pack of wild dogs for what could only have been a half-dozen french fries that were once part of the super-sized creation he was now calling supper. I couldn’t help but smile at his tenacity and even more so at his ingenuity when he finished his meal with an after dinner smoke that he made by mixing and matching the tobacco from a handful of discarded and previously puffed-on cigarettes. He then poured the Frankenstein creation into the burger’s wrapper, lit it, and enjoyed a cigarette fit for a king.
I left the homeless man to his smoke and continued my walk, which proved to be more difficult the further I went. Apparently defecating dogs were a common occurrence in the ‘hood and without anybody regulating the squatting madness, owners had no motivation to scoop the poop, leaving me to hopscotch my way through fertilized pathway after fertilized pathway. That being said, I preferred dealing with their feces over the dogs themselves, because in this neck of the woods, canine ownership was a status symbol and the more ferocious the dog, the more respected you were on the block. Some of the dogs wandering around these parts were dragons, and although I’m no expert on the subject of man-eating man’s best friends, I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that the Getman had the nastiest of all domesticated hounds. Hercules himself didn’t stand a chance against that beast.
Colors were muted everywhere I went. Grays and blacks and shades of dirt brown filled every inch of the neighborhood and the only green to be found anywhere was in the hanging plants behind store windows. Red was another common color here, but not in the landscapes. I walked past endless people with bloodshot, boardedup eyes, all of whom made it their daily mission to rest against a wall or stoop, finding little motivation in acting, but instead, choosing to live in reaction to what came their way. For those people in motion, there was an odd heightened state of alert with them all, as if they were expecting trouble at any moment. Each individual had tapped into an internal IV of adrenalin and it poured into their bloodstreams like city sewage into the harbor. The excrement of rage smeared their hardened faces, fortifying their penetrating stares and filling their clenched fists with a bottomless cup of disgust and bitterness. Anger was in everybody and everything. Even my ears caught a bit of contempt in a set of baritone chimes that hung from and banged against the doorway of a convenient store.
The teenagers were all masquerading as gangsters, and I’m sure a few of them actually were gangsters. Black clothing was the latest trend in urban fashion, whether it was in their bandanas, t-shirts, or the jeans they wore snugly just below their ass lines. On the sidewalks, it looked like a pedestrian funeral procession in constant motion. And while the summer air was just humid enough to cause me to sweat, I found the only warmth at ground zero to be the hot steam that rose from the sewer grates.
I stopped next to a utility pole in the heart of the urban jungle and I found myself at the starting point of a revelation. People—the homo sapiens of the world—truly are exactly like our distant cousins. We are walking primates. To me, everybody looked like they were chimping.
Suddenly I no longer saw each person that passed me as a human being, but instead as part of the monkey family that we for so long thought ourselves better than because evolution graced us with its presence. What a crock of collective denial. Everywhere I looked there was a variety of apes and chimps going about their daily routines, only those knuckle-draggers wore clothes and spoke a unified language. Whether white, black or tan-skinned, it made no difference. There were fierce apes with their hands swaying from side to side as they bolted down the street, and there were scared monkeys with their heads darting about in an attempt to locate danger before it arrived. On a street corner I watched a woman picking invisible lint off a man, seemingly reducing his agitation. On a stoop I witnessed two younger spider monkeys climbing up and down and all around a porch as if they were hopped up on primate sugar. Everything appeared as a vivid expression of the basic instincts we are all born with. It was a living course in anthropology and it was playing out before my eyes. This was a human zoo and all of the animals were uncaged.