just words

My neighbor is in her late thirties. She’s got rust-colored hair in thick fat mats. Her skin is a tannish yellow and often very clammy. She's got scabs all over her arms, some open and bleeding. Her face is sort of smushed and toad-like. Her eyes dark and beady. The interior of her home is a trash labyrinth reeking of cat piss, vodka, and wet dog. Her voice reminds me of an old ashtray filled with forgotten half-smoked cigarettes. She's frumpty and unkempt in all respects. You could say she’s goblinesque. Sometimes, late a night, I hear her screaming about god knows what. The cops have been called to her home many times. She is a straight-up dope fiend. Her name is Erin. One time she tried to choke me out.

This is the story of that one time Erin tried to choke me out, and why I haven't talked to her in like four years.

I remember it well. It was Mother's Day night. I had just returned home from a family function where I drank way too much wine, which I was prone to do back then, so I was kind of fucked up, and I’m very social when I’m fucked up, loving to be around others just as fucked up as myself, so when I got out of the passenger seat of my car and saw Erin and her husband sitting on the ratty couch in their open garage, drinking out of red disposable party cups, I eagerly waved hello with the ulterior motive of perhaps being invited over so that I could continue being fucked up in what I inebriatedly believed would be good fucked-up company.

Of course, I was wrong, as we will soon discover.

When I entered the garage, smell of sticky icky wafting through my nostrils, I noticed Erin and her husband were watching Cops on the big flat screen, so I navigated to the ratty old couch, through a maze of lawn care equipment, cardboard boxes, and loose trash, sat down, and that's when Erin offered me a Dixie cup filled with some mysterious green liquid, which I happily started sipping on without a second thought, eager to continue my fucked-up escapades. It turned out to be Mountain Dew mixed with vodka, and it tasted quite good. Then, prompted by some scene in Cops where the boys in blue were brutally forcing some incoherent black man into the cop car, Erin started going off about our other neighbors, who happened to be cops, and she was saying something like,

“Can you believe those fuckers actually pressed charges on me, just for going over to their house. Their damn children, who are wild as hell, are always playing tag or some stupid shit in my yard, coming up to my patio, and I can see them on the damn Blink cameras, I’ve got several saved recordings of this happening, so I went over there, just wanting to talk to their parents, knocked on the door with my phone in hand, and started talking to the mom about her kids, showing her the footage and all that, and can you guess what she fucking told me, she fucking told me to get off her property, and I swear to god I was being civil as hell and nice as hell, I actually was, but she still told me to quote ‘get the fuck off my property,’ so I did, I got off the property, but when I got to the road, I yelled back, ‘IF I SEE THOSE KIDS ON MY PATIO AGAIN I’M CALLING THE COPS,’ and then I went home and that was it, until the next day when I get a visit from the police telling me that the woman filed a restraining order on me, even though I was being nice as fuck to her, and the police tell me I can’t come within 10 feet of their yard or else there will be serious consequences, so I say ‘whatever fine I won’t go into their yard,’ but then, not even a few hours later, can you fucking believe it, I bet you can, those fucking wild ass kids are back, playing tag or whatever, in my yard, up on my fucking patio, again, but I was feeling generous and didn’t want to like break the restraining order, so I didn’t call the cops or even go over there and talk to the parents, but what I did was, I wrote this note, this really nice, polite note, that said something like, ‘please tell your children not to play on my patio because my dogs are very skittish and they will start barking and my husband sleeps late and needs his sleep for his job,’ and I sign my name at the bottom of the fucking note, and then, later that night, I sneak into their yard and I pin this note on their fucking front door, just to relay the message, that’s it, just to relay the message, and then I go home, get some sleep, and can you fucking believe, can you fucking believe it, I wake up to the sound of cops banging on my door, and they’re saying I broke the restraining order, and they say they have proof, so I tell them to show me the fucking proof, so they hold up my note, can you believe it, my fucking note, with my name signed on it and everything, and they say that leaving the note broke the fucking restraining order, so I say ‘FUCK THAT’ and slam the door on their faces and next thing you know they’re forcing me into the back of their fucking cop car, and I mean really forcing me, like serious police brutality kind of shit, even though I was being cooperative and civil as hell, and they take me to the courthouse and, long story short, I’ve got to be in court in like three weeks to face charges, can you believe that, can you fucking believe that?”

And I’m just like nodding along, saying stuff like, “oh that sucks, wow, damn, ok,” while sipping my green liquid and chain smoking Marlboro Lights, kind of zoned out, words going in one ear and out the other, but her whole aura is kind of weirding me out, so I turn to her husband, who’s sitting there staring at the floor with a drink in hand, and he looks quite despondent and miserable, so I say something like, “Hey man, are you OK?” And he slowly lifts his head, looks me dead in the eye, and says, “Erin cheated on me last week.” And for some reason the sheer randomness of this, combined with the emotional gravity of the situation itself, makes me burst out laughing, incredulously almost, so I turn to Erin, so drunk that I’m likely oblivious to basic human social cues at this point, and I say to her in a chuckling tone, “That’s not very nice, why’d you do that?” And Erin, whose two eyes are sort of blinking at different times, off-sync, giving off serious goblin-queen vibes, says, “Because he’s always too drunk to fuck me,” and I’m like, “OK, well, that’s, uh, that’s something, maybe lay off the vodka Mountain Dew there,” and I’m saying this while chuckling a little bit, but Erin and her husband aren’t chuckling, they’re just staring off into the world of Cops in this thoughtful drunken awkwardness, but I don’t feel awkward at all, in fact I feel really good, sipping green liquid and chain smoking, and then Erin turns to me and says, “What about your wife? Do you guys fuck a lot?” And I’m like, “Uh, maybe like once a week, I guess, I don’t really keep count, you know.” And she stares at me with this dumbfounded look on her face before saying, “Really?” And I sort of shrug and focus my attention back on Cops, but Erin won’t let it go, she says, “I don’t believe you, call her and get her over here,” and I’m like, “OK, sure, the more the merrier,” so I text my wife, who had just put our daughter to bed, “Come over, we’re having a blast,” from my perspective, and she replies with something like, “I guess, give me a few minutes,” because she never liked Erin to begin with, thinking she was weird and dangerous even from the first time we met her, which she was, but I naively believed myself to have a good handle on dangerous people, thinking they were interesting in an at-least-I’m-not-like-that sort of way, so we sat around in the open garage, watching Cops, waiting for my wife to show up.

A few minutes turns into like ten minutes and Erin gets restless, she turns to me on the couch and says, “Where’s your wife? Did you really ask her to come?” And keep in mind she’s heavily slurring her words, which I’m not really capturing in the quoted dialogue here. And I respond with something like, “She’s slow sometimes but she’ll be here.” But Erin won’t let it go, “But it’s been like two hours.” I check my watch and say, “It’s been like ten minutes.” And Erin abruptly stands up and heads out of the garage, so I get up and follow her, just kind of going where the night takes me, heavily fucked up at this point but still forming memories and coherent. Then Erin says, “I’m going over to your house, I’m knocking on the door.” And, knowing my wife really doesn’t like Erin, I’m like, “Just wait, she’ll be here in a second.” But Erin keeps going, and I keep telling her to wait, until eventually I somehow convince her to wait, at which point Erin starts walking back into the open garage, and as she passes me, I joke, “Besides, if you go on my lawn, I’m gonna call the cops on you.” And that’s when Erin’s demeanor totally changed.

Suddenly, and in what I drunkenly perceive to be completely out of fucking nowhere, Erin activates goblin mode. She turns to me, glazed madness in her eyes, and says in the most raspy and serious voice I’ve ever heard, “What the fuck did you just say to me?” And me, cognizant of her goblinesque shift but too drunk to really understand the gravity of it or care, I repeat clearly, “I’m going to call the cops if you step on my lawn,” even though I had no intention of calling the cops, as I was merely joking, and I’m no narc. And that’s when Erin lunges at me, hands outstretched. She grips my neck with both hands and starts squeezing at my throat as hard as I imagine she possibly can. But I am unfazed, because she’s actually quite weak, totally unable to choke me, so I just look down at her, because she’s also quite short, and I say, “What are you trying to do?” At which point I can tell she’s intensifying her grip around my neck, but I still barely feel a thing, so I lift my hands to hers, grip them, and say, “Can you stop?” But she doesn’t stop. She just keeps trying to choke me out. I don’t remember exactly how long this lasted, but at some point I considered just pushing her off me, though I decided against that because, even though I was drunk as hell, I still had sense enough to know that Erin, being a total drama queen junkie, would likely spin my self-defense as some sort of assault against her and try to get me arrested or something, so I just stood there while she weakly attempted to kill me. Then my wife showed up and saw the whole thing happening in real time, so she yelled something at Erin, who let go of my neck, then my wife and I got the hell out of that goblin den as fast as humanly possible.

When we got home, my wife and I debated on calling the police, reporting the assault, but I convinced her otherwise, because I didn’t want to start any drama. We ended up just deciding to never associate with them again. But the next day, Erin, who had our phone numbers, texted my wife with this whole made-up story of how I was actually talking mad shit about my wife and she, Erin, was simply trying to protect my wife’s honor, which absolutely was not what happened, so needless to say, we ended up blocking her phone number and never speaking to her again, although my wife does covertly call the police every now and then when Erin’s out there in her driveway screaming her head off like a Goblin Queen at three in the morning for god knows what reason, even though I advise against it, the whole calling-the-police thing, because it’s already awkward enough having to avoid her all the time, and no matter how many times the police are called, it doesn't seem to change her goblin ways.

Because, to this day, late at night, if you listen closely, you can still hear the Goblin Queen’s heinous screeches echoing off the vinyl siding of the suburbs.