He submitted his last story that morning, and then purchased a one-way plane ticket to Miami, online. Upon printing his receipt, oppression overcame him. The writer was now officially without assignment and occupation. He spent the remainder of that afternoon, until 4:00, lounging on his bed, staring at the ceiling.
This was his final week as correspondent for the newspaper that sustained him for the past four years. The very last issue of the country weekly would print today, and tomorrow it would appear on newsstands for the last time. On Friday, the paper's telephone and email would be discontinued, and after 30 years of faithful publication close its doors forever.
At 4:00 pm he decided to head out for his daily constitutional. Strapping a fanny pack around his wait, filled with pen, pad, wallet and cell phone the writer put on his helmet, mounted his bicycle and rolled out onto the road.
He noticed that the rear tire was low, probably due to the cooler weather of early September. His sister's house was along the way, and his brother-in-law Charlie would oblige with an air pump.
Just before pulling into his sister's driveway he saw the white pickup truck approaching from the opposite direction. It was his next-door neighbor, a drunken redneck troublemaker with a reputation for the usual redneck pastimes of drinking, poaching, and pot smoking. The writer was on his hit list. He knew this by such publicly announced epithets as, "I'm going to shoot you in the head," leaving little to interpretation.
The Drunk could be even more obnoxious, if such a thing could be imagined, after a few of those 12-ounce beers that come in the mass produced silver can.
Differences between them had grown irreconcilable in the four years the writer tried to make this town his home. On the very first night he moved back home, after losing a good situation in New York the writer unloaded his things from his truck. The Drunk emerged from the inky night into his garage, with silver beer can in hand.
"You're not under my radar, I've got my eye on you," he warned ominously.
"Great," the writer thought to himself, "so this is the welcoming committee."
He was only mildly annoying in the first couple of weeks. The Drunk would show up at his front door irregularly in the afternoons, and depending on how much he had to drink would span the horizon with a wave of his arms, proclaiming all that he surveyed was his.
"Are you with the forces of evil?" asked The Drunk cryptically, his eyes a solid milky glaze. His corneas had been continuously bloodshot for so many years that they were no longer red, but the putrescent brown of blood sausage. The writer remembered seeing the color once before, in the hollow stare of a cow's eyeball some farmer had carelessly discarded on the road.
The Drunk prattled on about his friends, "them's good people," he said, and other mundane subjects his turgid brain cells could contrive, on and on and on. It was this very kind of dull conversation that made the writer give up drinking some years before. He wished for the phone to ring, but it did not.
"I have no idea what you're talking about," the writer finally said on The Drunk's last visit. "Every afternoon you get toasted, you hunt me down and lecture me about how bad things are for you."
The Drunk "thanked" the writer for telling him the truth, but the truth was that by this time tomorrow afternoon he would be back, prattling his paranoid fantasies all over again. Unlike a man with cancer, an alcoholic can stay sick for a lifetime without intervention.
One night the writer tried to be a "normal guy" and hang out with The Drunk's friends. This was a mistake. He shared no identity with these people. Thereafter The Drunk's animosity was exacerbated by an unfounded fear that the writer might somehow steal his friends away from himself. The writer thought otherwise. This was the most boring group he ever had the misfortune to spend an evening with. He couldn't remember what they talked about into early morning, except that it had something to do with snowmobiles and chain saws, with occasional jokes an eighth grader could appreciate.
He determined never to get into a truck with The Drunk again, especially not on weekends. The Drunk was of the opinion that the most influential citizens gathered in his friend's motor shop on weekend evenings. The writer disagreed. He preferred the café in Shelburne, where the poets and writers gathered.
The writer's own sphere of influence began to widen. The Governor's race was heating up, and he scored two intimate interviews with the candidate who would eventually win the election. He interviewed a sports writer who was busy writing Henry Aaron's biography. He interviewed musicians and even got an assignment at the state Democratic Convention.
Such assignments never paid big, but they did give him a chance to surround himself with interesting people. It got him out of the house and away from the degenerates at home.
Meanwhile, relations with his neighbor progressively deteriorated. One morning, the writer awoke at 5:00 to the blast of a shotgun. It was The Drunk, cleaning the barrel of his gun before going out in the woods to shoot a deer.
In the springtime The Drunk stacked 15 tires on his brush pile. Before he could exercise what must be an unspoken prerogative of polluting the otherwise breathable mountain air and contaminating the groundwater with the kerosene he used to start his fires, the writer felt he had better preempt The Drunk's next move.
He found himself walking onto The Drunk's property, an act he was usually loath to do. The writer was compelled by the fact that he lived downwind of the yearly brush fire smoke. Instead of meeting him, The Drunk jumped into his pickup truck and sped away, perhaps having already been cowed by a mixture of marijuana and beer.
The writer next paid visit to another neighbor's house, an older man who was engaged in some midday carpentry work.
"I'd like you to mediate a dispute I'm having with our mutual neighbor," said the writer.
"What's going on?" asked the old man.
"He's going to burn his old tires in his backyard," answered the writer. "I went over there to talk to him, but he drove away," said the writer, pantomiming the gesture for beer drinking.
"I don't think he'll do that," said the old man disarmingly.
"Well, he already has them on his burn pile."
"Then he might burn them, at that. I'll talk to him. Burning tires is illegal, you know," said the old man dutifully.
The writer thanked the old man. He hoped the old man would feel useful, providing him with an indispensable function in this small community, like a Mafiosi Don.
The writer also knew that the old codger was every bit as bad as The Drunk when it came to polluting his land. In fact, The Drunk probably learned most of what he knew about burning garbage from the old man.
Once, when hiking through the forest the writer happened upon the gory carcass of a butchered cow heaped onto a brook, in a steep cleft between two hills where they were all but invisible until one was right on top of the mess. The head, hide and other unmentionables adding heir own special flavor to the pristine river several hundred feet below. This was the old man's doing, emblematic of the reigning philosophy of the people who lived at the end of the road, which was that normal rules of civil conduct did not apply to them. This was their land, and whatever they chose to do to it, no matter how irresponsible, was their own business and woe to the outsider who interfered.
The writer was, of course, the outsider.
The writer could have waited until the neighbor actually set the tires alight, and then called the EPA. But, getting people in trouble wasn't his style. He hoped all disputes could be resolved without involving the law.
Ultimately, the tires were removed from the brush pile and properly disposed, but at some expense to the writer's reputation. The good ol' boy establishment ran deep.
Later that same year, in September, things came to a head once again. One evening The Drunk stood in front of his house pounding down beers in the evening. When he was good and leavened by 10:00 pm he commenced splitting wood with a motorized wood splitter, in his driveway, 30 feet away from the writer's bedroom window.
The writer endured this for four days. On the fifth day he went out to talk to the neighbor, and ask why he happened to choose late evening to conduct his noisy business. A shouting match ensued.
"Go back to your plastic world!" shouted The Drunk. "This is real," he bellowed, pointing to a little pile of wood chunks. The Drunk, maniacal, was wearing his beer balls.
The Drunk flexed his middle finger repeatedly throughout his vituperations. The writer was unphased by such gestures, and was amused that The Drunk continued doing it. It was about as destructive as being whacked with a Styrofoam sword. He may as well have been swearing in Swahili.
Something else about the finger and profanities struck an odd note. One of the symptoms of drunkenness peculiar to the writer's neighbor was that he mimicked the mannerisms of the last person he spent the day with. If that was a fellow named Dave, The Drunk bragged about his sexual prowess.
"I like to drink, and I like to f***," that was Dave speaking.
If The Drunk was with his pot seller friend Victor, then his language resembled more what was on display tonight, including the middle finger. Victor's own daughter used this language to her mother and father in a routine manner in their own home.
The writer was reminded of a science fiction story about an alien species that took the form of whatever life form they had last interacted with.
It was said that The Drunk had a big heart. This was true to the extent that The Drunk gave away things to his drinking buddies, but was equally know for his stinginess to those not sharing an interest in his pastimes.
Discouraged that his finger and profanities failed to penetrate the writer's security, the Drunk resorted to threats, like calling the police if the writer stepped on his property.
"You cross this line and I'm calling the police," said The Drunk.
"Why don't I call them for you?" the writer responded.
His bluff called, The Drunk charged the writer with his arms extended outward, like an image of a stuffed grizzly bear.
"Arrrggghhhh!!!" he growled, marching industriously toward the writer, ignoring his own warning about trespassing property lines. "Get out of here!"
Too stupid and too drunk to actually connect, the writer simply stepped back and out of the way into the cover of night.
Someone heard the commotion and called 911. Later, the woman who called the number said she feared for the writer's safety. The writer thanked her the next time he ran into her.
"You did the right thing," he told her.
But for the remainder of that night and each morning and evening for the next week The Drunk went out of his way to torment the writer. He would start up his log splitter at 7:00 in the morning, shouting profanities and provocations toward the writer's house.
"Hey asshole, can I split my wood now? Hey asshole!" shouted The Drunk.
Then there was the sign. It was a large plywood sign roughly paraphrasing John Kennedy's famous "Ask not" speech, with conspicuous misspellings. The sign was angled against a tree on The Drunk's lawn, aimed at the house where the woman who called 911 lived. Other than being generally harassing it's specific meaning was ambiguous.
The Drunk propagated a rumor that it was the writer who called the police. In his telling, he conveniently left out how his own preliminary threats to involve the police.
Days went by, as days must, and the intensity of the occasion diluted. In spite of time, there was no interruption to the great rift dividing the neighbors. On the one hand you had Proust, the New York Times, contemporary art and the café. On the other, you had hunting, motorcycles and beer.
There was a time, when they were on speaking terms that The Drunk confided he did not read, and especially did not read newspapers.
"Too much knowledge makes people unhappy," he said, and added that he didn't want his children reading too much, either.
And here he was, almost exactly one year after the log splitting confrontation, about to make a left turn onto his sister's driveway, and there was The Drunk bearing down on him in a white company pickup truck.
From his bicycle the writer sensed trouble in the pit of his stomach. He bought the used bicycle a couple months ago at a police auction. Every afternoon, as weather permitted he rode it four miles up the hill, stretched at the summit, and coasted the four miles home. He was in superb physical condition as a result, and barely noticed his strength and confidence growing. He looked better, felt better and even thought better.
The problem was that sometimes The Drunk drove by in a truck, and intimidated the writer by swerving toward him and cursing. If The Drunk was on his motorcycle he kicked his leg out.
Now the situation was precarious. At his right was a thicket of knotweed and no shoulder space. If The Drunk tried something, an opportunity he didn't pass unless there were other witnesses on the road, the writer was in danger of being hit. He decided he must make a quick break to the left and cut across his sister's lawn before he could make it to her driveway.
As the writer turned left, the idiot in the white truck stepped on the gas. No sooner had the writer made it to the grassy sanctuary than The Drunk predictably veered toward the bicycle. Something was yelled, and the middle finger went up like a flag.
The only harm done to the writer was a lingering anxiety. He knocked on his sister's front door, and she greeted him.
"Is your husband home?" he asked politely, trying to conceal his nervousness.
"Hey," greeted his brother-in-law, "what can we do for you?"
"Well, you can start by giving my tire a pump," said the writer.
"Bring her ‘round back where we can have a look," said the brother-in-law.
Rolling the bicycle to the rear of the house, the writer quietly confided that The Drunk had just menaced him on the road, in front of this very house.
"That's brotherly love for you," said the brother-in-law. "Was he goofing on you?"
"I don't think so," the writer answered. "I think he meant to hit me. I cut across your lawn to get out of his way."
Friend as well as in-law, the writer confided his fears and sadness over four years of harassment, intimidation and threats. Only just know did he realize this was the first time he opened up about this. Until now nobody had shown a willingness to listen.
Thanking him for the air and his ear, the writer found new confidence and determined to put a stop to the harassment once and for all.
He should have continued his ride to the top. Instead, he coasted back toward his home. He stopped in front of The Drunk's driveway, set the kickstand of his bike, and produced the notepad and pen from his fanny pack. He no sooner had The Drunk's license plate written, than he heard the slam of a screen door, and The Drunk was on his front steps.
"Get the hell out of here you lowlife! You lowlife, everyone knows you're a lowlife! You're daughter thinks you're a lowlife, everyone says you're a lowlife!"
The writer did not yield, not one foot.
"How could you?" asked The Drunk's mother.
"Enter: Ma Barker," the writer thought. The Drunk could be a child molester and serial killer, but the mother would always side with him, protecting him from his own stupidity.
"How could I what?" asked the writer.
"You know what you did, you deliberately drove your bike toward my son."
"And how would you know this? You weren't there." Already, The Drunk had been preparing his alibi. His mother, his wife and his son were there, as The Drunk raved.
He strutted to and fro, back and forth, like a rooster, with his middle finger up in the air.
"They know about you at work! Everybody knows about you at work!" he said, as if realizing he had made a mistake a few minutes ago using the company truck as a weapon. For the first time in years, The Drunk was thinking ahead.
"You mean, they know what you tell them," said the writer.
The writer parked his bike, went into his house and got his camera. All the while The Drunk and his mother were cursing the writer.
When he came out again, he took pictures of the truck.
"Take a picture of this!" yelled The Drunk, continuing his strutting and fingering.
But, that was not enough for The Drunk. He charged toward the writer, who was standing on the edge of his lawn. His arms were stretched out, in mock crucifixion.
"Hit me! Hit me! Go ahead and hit me!" The Drunk roared maniacally.
Unrelenting, The Drunk got his face within eight inches of the writer, when something broke. It was the writer's patience, who hauled off with his right fist and punched The Drunk on the left side of his jaw.
He felt nothing, his hand did not hurt, and he wasn't sure he hit hard enough. Neither was he afraid of The Drunk striking back.
But, The Drunk staggered back and put his hand to his jaw. Then he laughed.
"Ha ha! I've got you now, asshole, I've got you now!" The Drunk repeated this four or five times on his way to his front door, where he disappeared inside his house.
The writer put his camera and writing pad and pen in his fanny pack, and rode back up the rode.
Once on the main highway the writer pulled into a rest area and began to write down the events as he remembered them, while they were still fresh. He wasn't half way through when two police cruisers, blue lights flashing pulled in on either side of him.
The arrest was easy, it was apparent to the cops there were no weapons or drugs. The handcuffs were tight, and there was less legroom in the back seat of the cruiser than in the coach section of a Greyhound bus.
Of course, everyone made a witness statement against him, The Drunk, the Wife of Drunk, and Mother of Drunk. What could he expect, after all? As he rode to the police station, he reflected on the event. Strangely, nowhere in his conscience could he find remorse for actually hitting the drunk. The worst part was the uncomfortable ride, and the irony of being the one arrested after having been menaced by a pickup truck while riding his bike.
But he was suitably circumspect, and took the long view, toward a day when he would greet Florida, and the Floridians would welcome him with open arms.
Freelance journalist Gregory G. Lewis was a regular contributor to the West County News of Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts. As a correspondent to several Franklin County towns Mr. Lewis was better known by his Arts & Entertainment contributions, especially On the Marquee, a review of the region's outstanding art, music and drama.
"My assignments took me to dinners and breakfasts with the Governor; and to the 2006 Massachusetts Democratic Convention where I met candidate Deval Patrick, US Senator John Kerry, and even Kitty Dukakis," said Mr. Lewis.
Since the West County News closed its doors in August, Mr. Lewis has pursued the night life and high life of South Florida, in the
Proustian tradition. He now carouses tropical climes and exotic personalities, capitalizing on years of experience thrusting himself in the public eye.
His many published and exclusive stories can be found on his website, The Newsketeer!
Thanks for the comment Sue. This was one of those brazen lamp sticks from my toy box that needed examining before I could move on to the next item. Respond to this comment
Was this article helpful to you? Leave a Public Comment or
Question:
Disclaimer: All information on this site is provided for informational purposes only! By no means is any
information presented herein intended to substitute for the advice provided to you by any health care or other professional
or organization.
