DAY #3

He just won’t shut up.

I’ve been pistol-whipping the living shit out of him for the past ten minutes and he still won’t stop.

“Come on, Tom! Why don’t you give a guy a break and just let me fuck her a little? I’d probably only last a coupla seconds-”

I don’t let him finish the thought and take out his front teeth. The pistol I’m using is a Sig Sauer P238 two tone. When I bought the tiny 9MM I had no idea the particular model of gun I’d chosen was considered a “chick” gun. I only bought the damn thing because my boss at the time was a gun nut and I made the mistake of opening my mouth and saying how much I liked guns, too. The guys I went shooting with laughed their asses off-my boss at the time included-when I pulled the piece out. I fired it once and was then told to put it away, amid a chorus of donkey brays and wet snorts, so I could see what it was like to fire a real gun.

I hadn’t touched the gun since that day. It just sat in my top drawer under a stack of boxer briefs. Six hundred dollars worth of ass kissing buried underneath my multicolored ball huggers gathering dust and constantly reminding me what a weak willed brown I am.

And until fifteen minutes ago, I thought it would stay there until I either sold it or threw it away. But after two days of no sleep, I tore through my top drawer, scattering all of my underwear on the carpet and rushed out to the next door neighbor’s back yard.

The P238 may be a “chick” gun, but you sure can beat the hell out of someone with it, and I’m sure the five bullets loaded in the clip will do as much of damage to a skull as a .357 will.

I knew I wasn’t going to like the new neighbors.

When they moved in four months ago, they rolled into the subdivision like a roaming block party. Their moving van pulled into our shared driveway blaring some god awful 80’s hair band and was followed by six mini vans that all played the same track at the same volume. Even when they shut down their vehicles, they kept the music going as they hauled furniture inside. I’m not the type of neighbor who complains about noise or anything else, but it was Sunday-my only day off-Tara was at work, and I was beyond hungover and these fuckers were ruining my plans of sleeping until noon.

I tried being a good guy for the first half hour. I figured the new neighbors would turn it down, so I stuffed my head under a clutch of pillows.

The music didn’t stop, it got louder.

I threw open the bedroom window-which is right over the shared drive-and gave my new neighbors an earful of shut the fuck UP!

I expected to have a gaggle of mullet wearing trailer trash staring back at me. What I got instead was a group of impossibly All American faces straight out of the pages of Abercrombie & Fitch.

They were the type of people I aspired to be, that is if genetics and upbringing were on my side.

They all stared back at me like I like I just taken a shit in their refrigerator. Long seconds dragged until a guy lugging one half of a sectional sofa carefully set it down and stepped over to the U-haul and shut down the music.

“Sorry,” he said, giving me a half wave and dazzling me with ten thousand dollars of veneers. “We’ll keep it down.”

I slammed the window shut and went back to bed.

The new neighbors kept to themselves for the first couple of months, which was the way I liked it. Don’t get me wrong, I liked our old neighbors well enough, but the Patterson’s could be a little much at times. They were born and raised in upstate New York and came from one of those towns where there weren’t any fences dividing up property lines and everybody knew everything about everyone right down to the length of your Johnson. Plus, in the last six months they lived there, I’m pretty sure Jay Patterson got himself hooked on meth after he lost his job, or maybe that was the reason he lost it?

Whatever?

But the new neighbors made the rounds with all the houses in the neighborhood sporting plates of cookies and welcome baskets stuffed with what looked like hand made soap and designer candles. I’d watch from my living room widow as they knocked on the front doors of people I’d lived around for five years but whose names I didn’t know and observed their reactions.

Most were defensive.

Arms crossed, annoyance creasing their brows at the smiling couple. But after a few minutes, their faces would shift, become just as open and smiling and suddenly they’d be invited inside, nodding and grateful for their company.

They visited every house on the block, except for ours.

Was I jealous?

Yes.

Yes, I was.

I know this is going to sound weak, but I crave acceptance like a crackhead and I’ll do whatever it takes to fit in.

I’m that guy.

I’m the quarterback’s toady, the overzealous fratboy, the cube farm ass kiss.

And I’m okay with this, I accept it.

I know people hate me for it, but I’m not trying to please most people, I’m only trying to get them to notice how awesome I am because I’m in tight with the cool kids.

And since the entire neighborhood was treating the new family like the cool kids, I wanted to be their BFF.

The one thing holding me back from getting in tight with the new family-other than my little outburst the day they moved in-was the dog.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I don’t like dogs, they’re just too much time and responsibility for our lifestyle. And I don’t mind them all that much as long as their owners are considerate with them, which was not the case with the neighbor’s dog.

The problem was it never shut the fuck up. Middle of the day, middle of the night, whenever it was outside-which was all the time-it never stopped. After a couple of days of barking, I zoned the dog out, but the noise it was making was grinding Tara’s nerves to powder.
My Tara isn’t exactly the most patient woman on the planet and she’s extremely sensitive to noise. A couple of years ago when we first moved into the house, a cricket got in and Tara spent the whole night pulling out furniture trying to track the little noise maker down. She finally cornered it behind the refrigerator at three in the morning. She was so proud she woke me up to display the squished inch long green body pinched between her fingers. She looked demented with a huge smoker yellow smile cracking her face, her hair frizzed into a giant halo.
You can probably guess how she feels about the dog?
“I swear I’m going to kill that fucking thing. If it wakes me up one more time, I’m going to jump the wall with a knife and slit its fucking throat!”

I had to deal with this every day, but I zoned it out like I did with the dog.

I ran into the husband every morning getting into our cars. And even though I pre-judged him, I didn’t want to be a bad guy.

So on the first morning, I politely nodded when he did.

On the second morning, he smiled and said hello.

Ditto from my end.

Third morning, a rigid handshake and an introduction:

“I’m Paul. Paul Hampton.” He said, trying his best to avoid eye contact.

You could tell he was waiting for me to complain about the dog.

I didn’t say anything and had no plans on it, at least until Tara shook me awake at 5:30 Saturday morning.

I normally work overtime on Saturdays.

I’ll head out at four am, make it to the office at five, hit the phones for a few hours and then head home around nine. By the time I make it back, Tara’s already taken off and I have the house to myself until the evening.

But I’d decided to take this last Saturday off and sleep in.

Tara wasn’t having it.

She woke me up screaming.

The dog had been out in the backyard all night and Tara hadn’t slept a wink. She’d gone so far as to even call in sick to work, which for her was the equivalent of bitch slapping a newborn or molesting her senile grandmother.

“You get your fucking ass over there, Tom!”

I grumbled and tried pulling the covers up over my head.

Mistake.

Tara went apey and whipped the blanket off and started smacking me around, hard.

“Don’t you fucking ignore me! Don’t you fucking ignore me you fucking asshole!”

I backed her down some, at least enough to get a t-shirt and sweat pants on and head over to the Hamptons.

I wasn’t shy when I made it over. I pounded on it like the cops getting ready to kick in a crack house door. Paul was going to catch just as much shit as I did, or worse because his mutt had ruined my first free Saturday in nearly five months.

He came to door looking like he was coming down from 3 day meth binge-skin pale, circles wringing his baby blues, his normally perfect hair sprouting from his head in eight different directions.

He hadn’t slept either.

“Hey, Tom. How’s it going?” His voice was like he’d spent the night chaining smoking and gargling bourbon.

“Not so good, man.”

“About the same.”  He knuckled his blistered eyes and ran a hand through his hair trying to flatten it. “You’re here because of Albert?”

“Is that the dog’s name, Albert?”

“Come on in for a second.”

Paul moved aside and let me into the living room.

The entire area was trashed.

Cardboard boxes shredded, knick-knacks and clothing pouring from the tops (Obviously they hadn’t had time to fully unpack since moving in). A long brown leather couch had been pushed over onto its side and the remains of what looked like a dark cherry wood or teak coffee table was nothing more then scattered sticks.

“Jesus.”

“Things were bad last night. He only gets like this with the full moon and we ran out of his meds a couple of days ago. With the move and all we just haven’t had the chance get them refilled.”

“Yeah, well, you should probably think about doing that soon, man. That fucking dog kept the wife up all night long. She woke me up wanting me to come over here and shoot him.”

“I hear you. And trust me, I entertained the same thing a time or two. But you just can’t do that to family.” Obviously Paul was one of those guys who assigned human traits to animals. My folks were the same way. They even went so far as to call a mutt I grew up with my “brother”.

Paul started shuffling around the ruined piles of crap when the dog started in again.

Big mucousy roars.

I pictured good old Albert as a mastiff or rottie, some huge friendly breed that sounded like a freight train, but slobbered all over you until you had to kick them off.

“Goddamn it,” Paul said, scratching at his matted scalp. “Why don’t you come out to the patio with me for a second? Sometimes new people can calm him down.”

We headed out the sliding glass door and expecting to be slobbered on.

What I got instead was 300 lbs of ass naked human being.

“Fuck, he got out of his diaper again.”

Paul rushed over to the enormous man who was positioned on his hands and knees, wagging and trembling just as you expected a dog might. Two long strips of what appeared to be his old diaper hung from his mouth.

Paul grabbed a diaper that could’ve been used as a parachute from a plastic bin and started trying to strap it around the man’s bulging waist. Paul’s face was burning red, his jaw grinding, trying to come up with some explanation of why he had a naked fat man living in his back yard.

“This is Uncle Albert,” he said as he struggled to fasten the diapers. “Katie’s Uncle Albert.”

“Katie’s your wife?” My voice sounded like it was coming from a different body.

“Yeah….yeah Katie’s my wife. Uncle Albert was her Dad’s younger brother. My in-laws used to take care of him until last year. They got into a car accident and Katie’s an only child, so we just kind of inherited him.”

“Shouldn’t he… I don’t know, be locked up or something. I mean, he thinks he’s a dog.”

Uncle Albert tried taking a quick chunk out of Paul’s hand, but he was obviously used to Albert’s aggressiveness and pulled away before he could clamp down. He swatted Uncle Albert across the nose with the flat of his hand. It caused the over weight dog/man to shuffle back a few paces and start howling like he’d just been shot in the ass.

“Albert! Quiet!” Paul yelled, his entire body a mass of quivering nerves, ready to kick the shit out of Albert. Luckily Albert got the message and broke into a quiet whine and then tried burying his face in his own crotch.

Paul explained the situation while Uncle Albert was otherwise preoccupied.

“Look, they’re in a really bad spot.”  I explained to Tara after coming home from the Hamptons. “Paul just started a new job and they don’t have insurance, so the uncle acts up when he doesn’t have his meds.”

She stared down at her hands, shredding a paper towel into long thin strips. It was a habit she’d picked since she quit smoking a couple of years ago. Some days I wished she would just take it up again-she goes through $30 in paper towels a week, not counting the bar napkins at her job.

“I want to call the police,” Tara said.

“No!”

“Why not! They’ve got a crazy person living in their backyard!”

She knew damn well why I didn’t want her to call the cops-I had something over one of the cool kids in the neighborhood. I was going to make him like me because of this knowledge.

“It’s none of our business what goes on over there! Just let them handle it!”

Good cover, she totally bought it.

“Fine, fine…But if I hear one more peep out of that thing, I swear I’ll call them.”

“Okay…I’ll tell Paul that. There shouldn’t be anymore problems.”

“And I don’t want us to have anything to do with them, understand? Nothing!”

“Alright. Alright.”

#

Like most things Tara says, it went in one ear and out the other.

Over the next couple of weeks, Paul and I got chummier. Every morning, instead of simply nodding and waving to one another, we’d chat for 15 or 20 minutes. Mostly day-to-day crap, but the conversations started growing heavier. Paul told me about his time as a Mormon missionary in Brazil, his parents back in Utah. I gabbed up my folks in California, my sordid courtship with Tara-she was dating some schmuck when we met and eventually we ended up getting into a fight over her. The douche bag even went so far as to pull a gun on me, but ballsy ass Tara snatched it out of his hands and broke his nose with the gun butt. I pretty much knew I was going to spend the rest of my life with her after that-and our frustration in not being able to start a family.

Paul and I were forming a real friendship.

He, of course, wanted to take things a step further and have our two families bond the same way we were.

“How about you and Tara come over on Sunday afternoon for a barbecue?” He asked.

“That would be great. I sure Tara will love it!”

“No, Tom, absolutely not.”

“Why not?” I asked, a teary whine working its way into my voice.

“Why? Give me a break, you know why? I don’t want anything to do with those people! I don’t want anything to do with what’s going on over there!”

“There’s nothing going on over there! They’re just another family trying to do the best they can! They’re good people!”

“The answer’s NO! End of fucking story!”

I worked over Tara for 3 days.

I brought it up in every conversation.

She came close to ripping my head off a few times.

By Thursday I had her, she even decided to make potato salad.

Tara ended up having good time at the Hamptons.

She and Paul’s wife, Sarah, seemed to hit it off right away. Paul and Sarah’s kids were great: polite, friendly little buggers and to my relief, Uncle Albert was not in attendance.

At first.

After the steaks had been eaten, Sarah asked us if it would be all right if they let Albert out of the spare bedroom so he could stretch a little bit. Tara tensed but we both smiled our polite politician smiles.

Uncle Albert charged downstairs like an out of control semi

He burst on out onto the patio and Tara’s resolve finally snapped and she let out the tiniest squeal. But who could blame her? You try keeping your cool the first time you encounter 300 pounds of diapered fat man covered in dank body hair.

Uncle Albert set his sights on Tara right away, ramming his face into her crotch and then trying to jump in her lap; he managed to wrap his weight around Tara’s legs and as with most large dogs and legs, he started pumping away, the wicker chair Tara was sitting in groaning underneath their combined weight.

Sarah was the first to react when she saw what here uncle was doing and planted a hard, swift kick to the backside of Uncle Albert’s balls.

The humping incident didn’t make what the Hamptons had to ask us any easier.

“It would only be for three days. Three days to pick up the rest of our stuff. You won’t even know were gone.” Paul looked like he could use a beer, but with him being Mormon and all, he just sucked up the embarrassment and asked. “He wouldn’t even have to stay in your yard. You could just come over when it was feeding time, let him out for twenty minutes and then lock him back up.”

I nodded, smiled, wordlessly agreeing with everything that came out of Paul’s mouth. Tara stared bullets at me-enormous .357 size eye bullets. It was a look that said, ‘If you agree to this, we’re getting a divorce.’

I ignored it and agreed whole-heartedly.

It was a chilly week around the house before the Hampton’s headed back home.

Tara moved her stuff into the spare bedroom and didn’t say a single word to me. We drifted around each other like ghosts.

In that week, my girl may have hated me, but I knew she wasn’t going anywhere. We lived paycheck-to-paycheck, our 6 credit cards were maxed out, and we were shouldering a five hundred thousand dollar mortgage. Even if she wanted to leave, where would she go? Go crash on a work friend’s couch like she was 21-year-old on a bender? That wasn’t Tara’s style. She cared too much what people thought of her, just like me.

I’ll tell you what, though, that week was one of the most relaxing I’d had in years.

It’s amazing what a little silence can do for a person.

DAY #1

The only sign that the Hampton’s left was a small note tucked under my windshield wiper. The note read:

THANKS!

I crumpled the note and tossed it onto the passenger seat and drove to work.

I hit happy hour on the way home, not giving a second thought that I needed to let Uncle Albert out so he could take a crap or to give him his medication. Tara reminded me as soon as I staggered through the front door and I headed over cursing under my breath.

I walked through the Hampton’s door thinking I would be stumbling around in the dark wrecking the place until I found a light switch. But I walked in with all the lights on and the television blaring.

Had the Hampton’s already made it home? Or were they in such a rush that morning that they had forgotten to turn off all the lights?

Neither.

Uncle Albert was sitting on the sectional sofa watching Dancing with the Stars.

I stared at him as he scratched at his enormous belly, transfixed by the television screen.

He was supposed to be locked in one of the spare bedrooms, he was supposed to be barking at me and swinging around his huge ass like he had a tail.

“Are you going to stand there staring at me all night or are you going to sit down and watch a little TV?” Albert asked.

His voice was soft, slightly nasal. I did what he said and sat down, watched some overweight C-lister get swung around by her ankles-at least for a couple of seconds and then I started staring at Uncle Albert again.

I found my voice and asked, “You can talk?”

“Of course I can talk,” he said, without looking away from the television. “The dog thing is for Sarah. Let me tell you, she may be one hot piece of ass, but she’s dumb as a brick. Same with her folks. They were the type of people who thought if you could string together a sentence and walk around on your own two feet that you had to be perfectly sane. So I started in with the dog act ten or twelve years ago so I could get some professional help and meds instead being taken to some church counselor and told to pray more. Fucking Mormons…”

“So you don’t think you’re a dog?”

“Well…sometimes. You know how it is, when you do something for so long enough, you start to buy into it. Sometimes I picture I’m a Doberman, especially if the kids have been really fucking with me, and I give ‘em a little nip, nothing serious. But for the most part, I’m just a guy who gets a little sad, ya know?”

“I guess…”

“But with you, Tom, I could tell right away you were a little smarter than the average bear. That maybe I could just play it straight with you while the kids were away? Can I play it straight with you, Tom?” Albert turned toward me for the first time since I’d walked into the room. His eyes were an unshifting grey and more than a little creepy when he looked right at you.

I shuttered a bit.

“Yeah, of course you can.”

“And you won’t tell Sarah and that dumbfuck husband of hers?”

“No, I won’t tell ‘em.”

“Good! Glad we’re on the same page.” Albert turned his attention back to the television and another overweight celebrity hoping to revive their career. I felt 100% more at ease now that he wasn’t looking at me.

“So I guess I should give you your Meds and go turn in?” I asked.

“I wouldn’t worry about the Meds, Tom.”

“Are you sure about that? Did you take them yourself?”

“No, I flushed ‘em down the toilet.”

“What?”

“I said don’t worry. They were starting to fuck with me in the manhood department, so I decided to take a break. I’ll be fine.”

“You’re sure?”

“Sure I’m sure. I’ve done it before, I’ll be fine.”

File under famous last words.

DAY #2

I took the day off from work, which is a rarity for me. With my job, it’s all a numbers game and if you’re out of the office too much, your numbers take a shit. I’d been a top performer at my job for five years and it was mostly due to the fact that I never took a day off, ever. But with me baby sitting a crazy person, I thought it would be a good idea to take some time off. I mean, the guy seemed harmless enough, but still, the last thing I wanted was to come home and walk into the Hampton’s house and find him hanging from a ceiling fan.

That morning I slept in, startled when I woke and realized it was nine o’clock and I was still in bed. I had to remind myself 15 or 20 times that I’d taken a sick day until I finally settled down.

I went downstairs, grabbed a coffee, flipped on the tube. I had to admit, I could understand why the guys I worked with took so many sick days. Doing nothing but sitting around in your undies watching daytime talk shows was very fucking appealing.

But then the phone calls started.

“Hello.”

“Hey, Tom.”

“Uummm, Uncle Albert?”

“Yes, sir, the one and only.”

“Where did you get my number?” I asked.

“Sarah has it right here on the fridge listed under ‘Emergency numbers’, so I thought I’d give you a call to see what you were up to?”

“You know how to use a phone?”

“What did I say last night, Tom? I only act like a dog.”

“Right.” The entire conversation seemed like a hallucination or something I imagined while I was drunk. “I forgot.”

“That’s okay,” Albert said. “What’re you up to?”

“Drinking coffee, trying to wake up. How about you?”

“I’m good. Just stroked one out to some internet porn and getting ready to pop one of Sarah’s lessie flicks into the DVD player.”

“What?”

“You didn’t know about that, huh? Yeah, my niece likes women. She’s a good Mormon girl, though. Represses, pretends she loves her husband and kids, but day dreams about getting fisted by some diesel dyke. It’s a fucking shame, because I’d be balls deep into her, niece or not.”

“Uuuuhhh…”

“Yeah, listen, Tom, I had a quick question for you? What’s the deal with your wife? I got a real good look at her today and I got to tell you she’s pretty smoking.”

“Thanks, I guess?”

“You’re a lucky, motherfucker, my man. Seriously, you’re hideous compared to her. Are you getting much of that shit?”

“What?”

“Pussy, shitheel? Are you getting much pussy from her? Because if I was you, I’d keep that shit tied to the bed, you know what I’m saying?’

“I….”

“So what I wanted to ask was there any chance you could bring her by tonight? Maybe let me hump on her a little. You know, she doesn’t need to know I can talk.”

“NO!”

I hung up, but ten seconds later he was back on the line and I hung up on him again.

And ten seconds later,and again until I finally just pulled the plug from the wall.

I don’t know how many times he kept dialing our number, but he ended up leaving 57 voicemails, all of them more or less about how he’d like to fuck Tara. After the 20^th one I decided to erase them all.

And even as I was erasing, he was leaving more messages.

Tara got home from the bar at 11 and she was furious. She’d been trying to get in contact with me all day, had even left a couple of messages. I started to explain the situation to her when Uncle Albert began yelling:

“I can smell her, Tom! I can smell that pussy all the way over here!”

DAY #3

You know what the biggest problem with living in a bedroom community? The fact that no one pays any attention to what’s going on outside their own front door. Everyone’s afraid to rock the boat and get mixed up in other people’s problems. Even if you have some crazy guy standing right outside your window screaming at the top of his lungs at 3 in the morning, people still don’t do shit. They hide, they wait for the trouble to pass over, or hope someone else handles the situation. Hope someone else finally calls the cops. And I can’t say I’m not guilty of this kind of behavior. I watched Jerry Patterson take a belt to his wife a couple of months before they moved. It was in broad daylight on a Saturday. The leather raised welts, cut skin. Karen Patterson was screaming bloody murder and all of us did nothing but close our blinds and turn up our televisions.

You pray that this kind of situation never happens to you, and all of a sudden, it’s staring you in the face.

Uncle Albert screamed his throat out until 2 AM. We thought for sure someone would call the cops or that maybe we would call the cops? And we came close-like having already dialed the 9 and 1 close. But just before we took the final plunge and called in the riot squad, Uncle Albert knocked off his shit and went to bed or passed out from exhaustion. We spent the rest of the night trying to figure out what to do when he woke up.

Our solution: Get Tara out of the house and I’d wait until the Hampton’s got home and blow the whistle on Uncle Albert’s whole scam.

Tara left at six in the morning, heading over to her job to sack out in her office a few hours before she opened the doors at 11. I tried falling asleep on the couch, but kept getting up, pacing  the floor, thinking about drinking a beer to take the edge off the night. I dozed off around ten and Albert woke me up twenty minutes later. I lasted all of five minutes through Uncle Albert’s newest tirade and I did all the things you already know about:

Stormed upstairs.

Grabbed my chick gun.

Neatly folded underwear scattered on the floor.

Me standing in the Hampton’s backyard pistol-whipping the life out of Uncle Albert.

Now we are at that point where I have the gun pressed hard against Albert’s forehead, my thumb cocking the hammer back, mentally flipping a coin:

Walk away-beat up on him some more, sure-but walk away.

Or

Forced anal sex for the rest of my natural born life.

I flip and hope my fellow prisoners use soap for lube in the showers.

“That’s right, Tom! Fucking do it!” Uncle Albert’s on his hands knees, wriggling his tongue through where his front teeth used to be. “Put me out of my fucking misery! Take me away from this shithole!”

And I do.

The gun barely kicks and the shot is so soft it sounds like a car backfiring.

I back away from the body, thinking this whole thing should be far more dramatic than it is. Shouldn’t the wound be smoking? Shouldn’t I be covered in brains and skull?

“Tom?”

The voice behind me is near hysterical. I turn and look at the Hampton’s faces. Each of them trembles, tears glistening down their cheeks, smiles edging the corners of their mouths. They surround me, arms outstretched, folding me into their embrace and I feel like I’m home.