I‘ve never had much use for neighbors. You can’t live with them. You can’t smother them with chloroform and feed them through a wood-chipper when you tire of them.
If you could, I would’ve done so to the stringy-haired druggies I lived next to as a tyke. My parents called them “The Hippies,” though it was well past the hippie era. They weren’t of the peace-loving, Wavy-Gravy variety, either. The Hippies rode motorcycles through their living room, and egged the house of a nearby Holocaust survivor. Once, when my frisbee sailed into their yard, I jumped the fence, only to find them waiting in ambush. “Get him, Max!” they cackled, unleashing their attack-dog German shepherd. With my jungle-cat reflexes, I made it back whole. But my psyche was compromised. The nerve-rattling jolt had caused me to spot my Toughskins.
Subsequently, I vowed that no neighbor would ever again prompt me to wet myself. Some years later, that resolve was tested. My military family had been stationed in Germany, where I had it good — wide open spaces, tasty strudel, lots of nudity on German television. There was just one problem: Budo the Teutonic Brute. Several years my senior, Budo commandeered our playground for smoke breaks while hitting on our sisters. We were not about to lose our women, so I led a strike force of military brats to occupy Budo’s secret love shack in the woods.
Things went swimmingly, until Ricky, my first sergeant, grew overzealous and vandalized the shack. When Budo found out, he stomped the Sarge like a junebug. The rest of our platoon spent the next several weeks playing indoors.
After an uneventful early adulthood, I thought I had the neighbor problem licked. Then we got a new dog, and new next-door neighbors. Our dog is a lab named Levi, and we call him the Yellow Bastard (he’s yellow, and acts like a bastard). Our neighbors are the Dingleberrys (names have been changed), and what we call them is unprintable. We started off cordial. We took over a welcome-to-the-neighborhood brownies plate. They bought my newborn son effeminate mittens. Like many neighbors, we pretended to be interested in each other’s lives.
Tensions, however, quickly escalated. It’s not that I minded their yappy mutt, Dakota, breaking loose and mauling our other neighbor’s Chihuahuas. Nor did I mind their loud pool parties, where mother Madge entertained in a festive floral one-piece. What riled me was that they’d moved to Calvert County, Maryland, a bucolic stretch of rolling pastures and tobacco barns where everybody besides the Dingleberrys appreciates the long-established don’t-fence-me-in ethos.
I’ve always felt that a generally well-behaved dog should be allowed to roam, though, strictly speaking, “well-behaved” might not apply to Levi. A sculpted, athletic specimen, Levi stays toned by swimming, formerly in the Dingleberrys’ pool. He didn’t always do laps. Sometimes he just rested half-immersed on the pool steps, alone with his thoughts. The neighbors weren’t happy. Neither were they pleased with Levi’s hunting, as the quarry he stalked included everything from gardening tools to UPS packages to pool noodles to children’s shoes.
We ended up containing Levi, letting him out only for occasional runs. But that wasn’t good enough. A few months ago, we received a visit from an Animal Control officer with a nasty bearing and a prison-warden perm. She said there’d been an anonymous complaint about our barking dog, and that if we didn’t get it under control, we’d end up in court. I was livid. The Dingleberrys could complain that Levi used their pool cover for a slip’n’slide. But Levi barks less than Madge, whose honking voice has the timbre of a broken foghorn.
Immediately, I plotted revenge. Perhaps I’d loosen a lug-nut on their daughter’s Razor scooter. Or maybe drop Levi’s food in her Halloween bucket, getting the last laugh when she showed up for school with strong teeth and a lustrous coat. I thought about slugging it out in their driveway, but figured after I drilled Madge with a few overhand rights, she’d likely run off and tell her husband. Instead, I settled on the Happy Homeowner’s neutron bomb: not waving.
The Dingleberrys still wave, nervously, as if I don’t know of their betrayal. They obviously feel guilty. They won’t for long.
The other day, I heard terrible yelping coming from their yard. I rushed over, to find a new black lab puppy. I returned home brimming with joy. For the next eight hours, it sounded off like a squeaky fan belt, but I wasn’t going to ask the Dingleberrys to buy an anti-bark collar or to keep their puppy indoors. Instead, I addressed my one request to Directory Assistance: “May I have the number for Animal Control?”
MATT LABASH
