Next-Door Neighbors

Spotted on MetaFilter: Smith Magazine ("Everyone has a story") "takes a bunch of renowned artists and writers from the world of Indie Comics and asks them to tell stories about memorable Next-Door Neighbor experiences.

Well, you know me--I just happen to have a couple of my own.

(1) Throughout the 'Eighties I worked for the University of Virginia and lived in a crappy little 10-unit apartment building* populated mostly by students:


One day I came home to find the cutest, blondest, perkiest, petite-est, friendliest little 1st year female student you could possibly imagine lugging boxes into the apartment next to mine, and so I'm thinking, "Wowsers and yowzers! Let the twitterpation begin!" Unfortunately, it turned out she wasn't the one who was going to be living there; she was merely helping her boyfriend of long standing move in, after which she was heading back to the Independent Duchy of Northern Virginia** to do...whatever.

The Boyfriend seemed nice enough at first, maybe a little fratboyesque, but it wasn't long before his place became Drunken Party Central--booze, dudes, babes, and bad music all weekend, most every weekend, which would have been fine if there'd been any soundproofing between his unit and mine, but there wasn't and I spent many a Saturday night being relentlessly pounded by whatever godawful MTV-derived '80s music was climbing the charts at the time*** and being amazed at how quickly and seamlessly he shifted allegiance to (spectacularly slutty-looking and rather, uh, vocal, if you know what I mean... and I think you do) Girlfriend 2.0.

A couple of months passed and then early one evening I heard a soft, almost plaintive, knock at my door. I opened it and, lo and behold, who should be standing there but Girlfriend 1.0 with an elaborately decorated birthday cake:

"Have you seen (The Boyfriend)? It's his birthday and I wanted to surprise him!"

Uh-oh.

Since she didn't know the town and had no place else to go I invited her inside to wait... and wait we did. Three hours. Three loooong hours punctuated with foot-tapping, clock-checking, and uncomfortable silences. Eventually, The Boyfriend did return and she dashed out to meet him... only to return thirty minutes later, a tad crestfallen, to say thanks and goodbye.

She drove away and I wound up with the birthday cake.

(2) A year or so after I moved to Richmond I acquired a Golden Retriever named Casey and some new neighbors, a gay couple, whose primary source of entertainment seemed to be arguing LOUDLY with one another, arguments often accompanied by the sound of breaking plates and hurled cutlery. They also had this hideous-looking little dog named Gizmo who soon became Casey's best friend.

As the neighbors' fights became more frequent and increasingly vituperative, Gizmo took to hanging out in my apartment****, lounging on my threadbare sofa with Casey and, eventually, the three of us sleeping together in the bedroom.

Since the neighbors weren't feeding him and he rarely went home, I finally got Gizmo his own food and water bowls figuring well, now I have two dogs (and wondered if I could sue for puppy support)... until I came home from work one evening and found Gizmo missing--the neighbors had broken up and Gizmo's owner had moved out.

I was sad, but Casey was devastated. For the next two months he wandered the apartment and the back yard on a regular basis looking for his buddy; he'd hang out for what seemed like hours at the neighbors' back door then come home, lie down beside Gizmo's food bowl, and... wait.

We never saw Gizmo again.


*110 Carrollton Terrace, Apt. 6. The building itself was atop a hill and my apartment, which you can barely see at the farthest end of this photo, was thirty feet above some active railroad tracks. Noisiest place I've ever lived and that includes Boston and New Orleans.

**Virginians do not consider Northern Virginia to be an actual part of the Commonwealth; this is probably because people from Northern Virginia believe the geography beneath them is also...beneath them. They insist that the land due south of Prince William Co. is Deliverance country, full of banjo music, hookworms, inbreeding, and sodomy.

***Thereby interfering with my ongoing and intensive study of the deconstructionist thematics in Beany and Cecil.

****An easy task since I kept the back door open at all times. Dogs are great, but they're always on the wrong side of the door.

"What, No Flux Capacitor?"

Sparked by this MetaFilter entry.

The headline in the LA Times read "For the DeLorean, It's Back to the Present."

"The iconic gull-winged sports car is once again hot, and there are plans afoot to place it back in production."

And I had a sudden and completely random synaptic discharge.

Back in the 'Eighties I was living in Charlottesville and working as a "Laboratory Specialist B" for the University of Virginia, killing rats, cutting up their brains, labeling the slices with antibodies, and preparing the results for light and electron microscopy.

It wasn't as glamorous as it sounds (insert loud "guffaw" here). In fact, it was downright tedious, requiring painstaking, near-obsessive attention to detail under rigid time constraints imposed by people who, though very bright within their particular fields of study, were, nonetheless, complete and total dumbasses as far as how things worked in the Real World (pat. pend.). They often forgot that I was not a graduate student nor a Ph. D. researcher, that I did this to pay the bills and have a life, and were annoyed that I wasn't willing to spend 18-20 hours a day on their particular projects.

I dealt with this, uh, inappropriately.

To make a long story short, I wound up with a little problem and started attending what I affectionately (if not cryptically) refer to as Super-Secret Support Groups.

Now, for those of you unfamiliar with S-SSGs, there's as much, if not more, recovery work occurring before and after scheduled meetings as there is during, usually in coffee shops, greasy spoon All-Nite diners, fast food places, pizza joints, people's living rooms and apartments, even while driving aimlessly through town and countryside.

My friend Tom C. and I did a lot of driving in those early days, usually in my 1984 Honda Prelude since Tom's car couldn't be trusted to back out of a driveway. I had massive insomnia, Tom was unemployed, and neither of us ever felt like hanging out at Shoney's or Howard Johnson's, so we took to the road, seeing parts of Charlottesville most people didn't realize existed (well, excepting the locals, but the University Community believed nothing existed beyond their borders until you hit D. C. and points north). We often wound up cruising through some pretty sketchy parts of town, including this really scary-looking run-down public housing project, a bizarre enclave of gangsta chic and white trash culture.

And it was there, one cold, still, fall night, that we saw... it. Partially covered by a rotting tarp, surrounded by trash, a little beaten-up, sans tires, its rims on cinder blocks, I swear to you we saw it.

A De Lorean.

Shining in the moonlight.

What do you say? What do you do? How do you react to (what would now be) a $60,000 plus car in the most unlikely of places?

We stared in wonder and drove home in silence.