It’s 3 a.m. Do you know where your squidbillies are?

I live in ghetto-light. I don’t know how it happened. I had been living in a fine, upstanding, respectable neighborhood. The sort filled with young professionals. The sort where every woman walking down the street was either pregnant or pushing a baby carriage. Young couples who have just bought their first homes are out walking their dogs. They might stop at the local community market for fresh vegetables, a quart of eight-dollar milk, and a carton of four-dollar eggs, all of which are local and organic. (In fact, we imagine that a man down the street harvested those eggs from his back yard chicken coop just that morning—at least, that was what I was always imagining.)

My neighbors all drove responsible cars. And if they didn’t, we frowned at them. They didn’t belong. Give us Birkenstocks and Honda Civic Hybrids or give us death! We mowed our lawns with push mowers. We built flowerboxes in the middle of pitifully small, often shared backyards. We rallied together as a unit to curse the impatient jerk who dared to honk his horn at the UPS man stopped on the narrow street, rushing to make his deliveries. “This is OUR impossibly narrow street, bub. If you don’t know how to be courteous when someone is blocking your way for a reason, then take your gasoline hog and shove it up your—!” Well, you get the picture.

But, I had to move. The landlord wanted more money, and since on a scale of one to ten, his investment in the property was approximately negative twenty-five, I hardly felt it was worth it. His ideas about fixing things differed quite a bit from my own. Take the screen door (well, in fact, he did take it). I showed him how it was coming off its hinge—more specifically, that it was missing its hinge. His solution?

Who needs a screen door anyway?

And that’s how it was that I came to be in ghetto-light. Try looking for housing in a college town, in a down market, during peak rental season, on a tight budget, and see how well YOU do. I suppose I’m lucky I didn’t end up in ghetto-heavy, which is where all the shooting takes place. You can, however, get a lot of house for your money out there. Providing you don’t mind the chalk outline on the floor (which the owner swears he will have removed by the time you move in).

There was one thing about this block that I noticed right away. That would be the house that looked condemned. The one with sheets for curtains in the windows. The one with a moldering couch on the front lawn, its tufted insides spilling out and turning soupy on the sidewalk. The one with a large screen TV, sans screen, sitting out on the sidewalk. The one with “Whoop, whoop!” spraypainted on the boards beneath the porch. Yes, that house.

“What’s up with the house across the street?” I asked the owner during the open house.

“Oh. Well. They’re an interesting family.”

I lifted an eyebrow. It was a duplex, but he spoke in the singular.

“All one family lives there?”

He nodded. “There’s an older man on one side, and then his family on the other.”

I suspected I wasn’t getting the entire story. But I learned it later. Later, of course, being after I’d signed a lease.

Enter the squidbillies.

For those of you who don’t know, The Squidbillies is a cartoon on Adult Swim. This would be after Robot Chicken and Aqua Teen Hunger Force. It’s just what it sounds like: a cartoon about an impoverished family of anthropomorphic hillbilly squids.

It turns out, Grandpa lives on one side. He seems nice enough. One of those types who’ll watch the neighborhood. He knows what’s going on, you betcha. Except for, evidently, next door, where the rest of his family resides. (I bet he lives in the other side for a reason.) I imagine he’s having some hearing difficulties, given the volume at which he watches The Price is Right. (They are down the street and across, but I can hear the cheering of the crowd when Bob Barker says, “Come on down!”)

The possibly defunct hearing would also explain why he doesn’t appear to intervene when the other side of his porch fills up with his progeny, screaming their heads off, after midnight, on a Sunday—or Wednesday. Hey, it doesn’t matter what day.

“Come out here. Come out here and fight me, nigga’! Nigga’, get out here!”

(By the way, they are all most definitely Caucasian.)

And again, at 2 a.m.

And 3 a.m.

And 4 a.m.

I half-hoped that the person at whom such comments were being directed would indeed emerge, and then they could beat each other to a pulp, and the rest of us could bloody well get some sleep.

I admit, that wasn’t a very neighborly thought.

The question, I wondered the most, as I lie awake, thinking about the beautiful, lovely, peaceful, SANE quiet of my old neighborhood, was, “Why is no one calling the police?”

Evidently, this must be standard fare. Much like the Treasure Hunters, who drag shopping carts up and down the street in search of choice bits of garbage to claim (and or hand to the little girl sitting in the front of the cart. Times are tough, but please, lady! At least wash it off!). The squidbilly house is a good (and regular) stopping point for such unclaimed treasures. The aforementioned empty TV cabinet was carted off that way. (Have you ever watched two men with pants practically falling to their ankles try to bungee cord a giant empty TV cabinet to a shopping cart?) Ah, and to think, I might have missed out on all this!

As for the desire for some sort of official, authoritative intervention in all this madness, personally, I reserve my calls to the “po-po” for the Robot Chicken girls across the street. But that is a story for another time. Until then,

“Whoop, whoop!”

Posted by Isabell'a-muse | 1 comments