Long, long ago in a galaxy far away …
Uh. No. That was something else. What I meant was:
When I was still living with my parents (this has been a good long while,) we had a really screwy neighbor move in next door.
It was this guy and his daughter. I don’t remember if the guy’s girlfriend or wife lived with them. Never saw anybody but the guy and his daughter anyway.
This guy is a drunk. He gets loaded every day. Mostly this is not a problem - he gets drunk and passes out and we don’t see him at all. Late one evening, though, he wakes up from his stupor, chugs some more, and recalls from the deepest pits of his besotten mind that he owns a 22 caliber rifle - and shells. He staggers around the house, collecting rifle and shells, and loads the rifle. He then goes out to his back yard and starts shooting. At a target? No. At squirrels, cats, or dogs? No. At the windows of his house or his pickup? No. This loony aims the rifle straight up (or at least as straight up as he can get it in his state of inebriation) and fires off every shot in the loading tube. I guess he was shooting 22 short rounds, because this went on for the longest time before he ran out. After the first shot, my Dad is on the phone and calls the sheriff’s office (small town, no city police.) The deputy comes and arrests the guy and confiscates the rifle. The dweeb does his time, pays his fine, and comes home. He hasn’t been out of the poky for a week, and we hear it again “pow, pow, pow.” Loony is out in his back yard trying to shoot down the stars with a 22 rifle again. I guess he had two. Call the deputy again, arrest ,etc. The guy gets out of jail again, and I guess he gets bored because he doesn’t have anything to shoot anymore so he decides to finally mow the lawn. Sort of.
They had moved in in the spring, and it is now late summer. Neither the guy nor his daughter has done any yard work, so the back yard has grass four feet high growing in it. So, drunk guy decides to do something about the tall grass (or else the city gave him hell about it.) Problem is, he doesn’t have a lawn mower - not that it would have done him much good. He doesn’t have a brush-hog either, and sure as hell isn’t going to pay anyone to do it. Besides, like I said, he is drunk and bored. He drives his pickup into the back yard, and scrounges a couple of chains and what looks like a piece of railroad track from somewhere. He chains the track piece behind the truck so that it will drag a path about as wide as the truck through the grass. Now he gets his daughter, and they pile into the truck and start doing donuts around the yard. They do this for like ten or fifteen minutes, raising a god awful amount of dust and tearing donut tracks all over the place. Somehow, they manage not to hit all of the grass - they are just repeating the same tracks over and over. I guess he noticed, and tried to change his path to get more of the grass. Did I mention the tree? There is this one huge tree near the house, and the idiot has managed to avoid it for fifteen minutes. Now, with all of the dust flying and him trying to use his brain, the inevitable happens. WhaaHooom. The idiot slams into the tree at full tilt - dead on. Smashes in the whole front end of the pickup. Steam comes out of the radiator, water, oil, and other anonymous fluids leak onto the ground. Idiot gets out, looks at the damage, blinks like a hoot owl a couple of times, and staggers off to pass out in the house. His daughter ducks her head in shame and goes inside, too.
The truck stayed there, stuck to the tree, for a couple of months. School starts, and one afternoon I come home and the truck is gone. Never did find out what he did with it. A couple of months later, they moved out. Now my parents have a relatively normal neighbor. He just has a thing about his lawn being perfect and is always out working on it with lawn mower, trimmer, edger, etc. My parents never complain about the noise, though. They know:
It could be MUCH worse.
Oh, by the way. His daughter was weird, too. I don’t remember all of the events leading up to it, but at some point her nick-name in the neighborhood was Abby. As in “Abby-normal.” Anybody remember the Frankenstein parody with Gene Wilder? Right. The monster’s brain.