From a letter to a friend:

Date: Thu, 1 Apr 2004 17:42:56 -0500 (EST)

{...} I could, but I don't tell stories well at the best of times. You had been talking about people wanting to live with passion. Maybe passion isn't really the word for this kind of behavior but I'd say she was living with some intensity, anyway.

She moved in across the street at the old place in spring, a couple of months before we left. She was a heavy black woman with a matching voice. The only time I ever saw her she was wearing a spaghetti-strap pumpkin-orange spandex dress that stopped just before the tops of her thighs.

She had a younger, well-built boyfriend and some nights they would have shouting matches. Well, this woman was loud, maybe even louder than David. I don't know if you've ever heard David yell but he can make the windows and walls rattle. Her voice was only slightly higher than his, too.

One night she and her boyfriend were having what started as a routine 2 a.m. fight, yelling at each other on the porch and sidewalk and in the street. It had gone on even longer than usual and I never have much patience with human noise anyway.

I could have screamed out the window myself and I may have tried to but I don't have much of a voice. So I got out of bed and went to get David from the other room to get him to yell at the window that they should either kill each other already or shut the fuck up. He didn't have his hearing aids in and he insisted that he had to go get those before he could hear what I was saying, and while he did that I looked out the window and I saw the boyfriend yelling into the pay phone in front of my window and holding a shirt all balled up against his chest. I don't know if the crazy lady had cut him or if just wanted to hold the shirt that way.

David finally came into my bedroom with his hearing aids, listened to the commotion outside a moment, and then while I was telling him what I wanted him to do we saw the red and blue flashing lights. Either the boyfriend or the other neighbors had called the cops, so David and I thought he probably wouldn't be needed to yell.

The crazy lady screamed all kinds of shit at the cops. First she screamed and bellowed about her boyfriend, while the cops were standing and talking to him. Around then I tried to go back to bed, thinking that nothing much would happen from that point.

But the yelling went on and on, and then I heard her yell "Get your hands off me, you damn redneck!" at the cops, so I went back and looked out the window again. An ambulance had joined the police cars and the cops and were trying to get her to go in either the ambulance or a police car, and she was resisting.

She kept yelling and carrying on at the cops, and then she snapped (I thought she already had but apparently I was wrong) and started yelling to the cops and the paramedics and the little crowd on the sidewalk "LICK MY PUSSY!" over and over. Every now and then she'd add "AND IT FEELS GOOD!" The cops and paramedics and bystanders were doubled over laughing on the sidewalk while they got her strapped onto the stretcher and carried her into the ambulance (and she yelled that the whole time, even after she was down and restrained).

And there was relative quiet across the street for a couple of weeks, until the night before I finally packed and dragged myself and the rest of my shit to the new apartment.

forward or backward or the list of posts