.
I never say anything on here anymore. Is there anything real worth saying. Something that is 85% true ought to suffice.
I like to think that my first one was a teacher. In another life I was a spy, and I somehow managed to finagle those skills into this lifetime. From my front door, which to thieves was a heavenly sliding glass door, I could see all the mail boxes. Posted not five feet from my overstated peephole was a crudely painted post with 8 black and dirty mailboxes. I was 1, she was 5. My spying, from my past, my nosiness, definitely from my mother. The highlight of my day came with the mail, and not specifically my mail. Staying at home, during my “bed rest” or house rest as I called it, I knew every tenants schedule. Honestly, I knew them before my house rest, but I wasn’t planning on mentioning that.
She would get magazines and catalogues for grades K-5. That was my first suspicion that she was a schoolteacher. Minus being marmy. She also had a subscription to People magazine, which further fed my need to know everything going on around me. Thanks mom for you flippy hair, and your nosiness. Not really thinking of it as a crime, on Fridays when the mail came, usually before noon, I would steal the new copy of People magazine. Oh, I was well fulfilled with the latest of celebrity gossip and the personal stories of floods and losing 100 pounds. I stuck with the idea that she was a school teacher, since it coincided with the fact that she usually didn’t get home until 4:30 or 5. I would often imagine myself as her, being this schoolteacher so devoted to her class, that she stays after school to get the next days activates and crafts and stories set up. She’s not one of those homework Nazis, no. She was young. She was as normal looking as the girl next door that you never notice, not even during puberty, because all the pretty seemed to get handed out to the sex kittens down the street. Maybe she was just like me, lonely, feeding off the need to know the latest gossip. Or, maybe she was in it for the personal stories. I root for team gossip. Either way, I made sure that it was back in her mail box well before she would come home in her Taurus or Honda, or whatever neutral color car she drove, that millions of other Americans drove, that I never took the time to learn the name of.
From my apartment I could hear her upstairs. Stomping around like a 500 pound elephant, which is a tiny elephant, but a big schoolteacher. More like a gym teacher. In all actuality though, she was tiny. And I mean that as, I was 9 months pregnant. Everything was tiny. My ankles were probably the same girth as her waist. She didn’t really do much upstairs, that much I could tell. Walk from the bedroom to the kitchen, where I figure she gets a bottled water, something tiny people do, continue to the living room to read the latest rag. That was her life. Occasionally I would see her head towards the park across the street with her Ipod. I would lose interest in that. Exercise is boring. If I wanted to watch something go round in circles, I would embrace my redneck Texan tendencies and watch NASCAR. Not wear deodorant. Pick my teeth. Unbutton my pants when I have had too much beans and cornbread. Thanks dad, but for now, I will delightfully pass. So, back to nothing.
She wasn’t the only one I did this with. The man across the way from us, 2, was very swarthy. Like a short and fat Rhett. He would have amazingly beautiful women leave his place, and you know it was because he knew how to talk. We would occasionally make small talk when we awkwardly bumped into each other about how I was going to pop soon. It depressed me that I was not the woman leaving his apartment. Something I share with the schoolteacher are my girl next door looks. Nothing special. I had dingy brown hair and freckles. I have Scarlett green cat eyes, but I wear glasses, so you never got to see them in their beauty. I would however overcompensate for my lack of facial beauty by wearing very low cut tops. I was pregnant. I had tits that porn stars dream of before counting back from 10. Looking up at the bright light over them and faces in masks hovering, I imagine they think “If I had tits like Hannah’s, I would be happy.” My tits didn’t impress Rhett though. Probably because he was good friends with my boyfriend, and would have him over sometimes to smoke pot. This of course, while I was asleep, since when I wasn’t spying or daydreaming I was sleeping. When he would tell me of his evening across the way, I would bombard him with questions, to see if he really was the swarthy pirate of a man I thought he was. My questions were never answered as I would wish them to be, but life goes on.
Rhett didn’t have mail delivered to his box. He must have had a PO box. I would imagine it was because he got loot, and secret missions delivered to it, and knew that I had prying eyes. That was probably the only reason to have my boyfriend over, to befriend him and hopefully end my spying. The only thing it accomplished was adding fuel to the fire. It eventually came to the point where I thought he was in the mob, from the Kansas City syndicate. You always hear about that one in the movies, but where is the Goodfellas from the MO-KS? I imagined that he was some peon that did hits, and got all of his information about the who, what, when through his PO box. Something Tony Soprano should have tried. Maybe then he would still be on the air.
I also imagined that my mobster neighbor ate man flesh sandwiches. Instead of saying “He swims with the fishes,” I imagined he said “He swims in the toilet.” My boyfriend found this annoyingly funny, so every time we brought up our neighbor, along came the man flesh sandwich bit. I’m sure if he had known that we thought that about him, we would be covered with mayo and relish and have a one way ticket to the pooper.
Sometimes in the evenings, my boyfriend and I would go for walks. Probably hoping the baby would just go ahead and have its birthday. She didn’t though. We would walk, and I would spy on people. If I saw blinds open, and curtain pulled back, hell, the whole window open for the entire city to see, I would look. I think this annoyed my boyfriend, because I would get distracted and try to imagine myself in that room. In the owners body. To see if I could figure out why they put up that tacky rock poster, or why they chose that god-awful paint color. I would imagine their jobs, accountant here, fast food worker there, artist of nothing on the third floor. Wherever we went…whether by car or foot, I was looking.
We moved shortly after I had our daughter. Did the whole wedding bells bit. Found an apartment with a dishwasher. At our new place, the mailboxes are under lock and key, much to my demise. Mail men probably have the coolest job. You get to be nosy, and you are not breaking the law. I imagine that if I were a mailwoman, my routes would rarely get done because I would want to read every magazine with the gossip, and try to figure out who each person is according to their mail. I bet he thinks that I have awful penmanship or just make things up, since just about every piece of mail I get has some variation of my real name, only terribly misspelled. Hannah, not hard? I am a racecar. I am an evil olive. Same as I am backwards and forwards. But so many things can come from a simple 6 letter name with only 3 different letters.
Since the mailboxes are under lock and key, I have no way to know my neighbors. I have to resort to looking out the peephole and the blinds. And we actually have a door this time, so I can stand in front of it naked and breathe really heavily, like I imagine real peeping toms do (and I quote, I am not a real peeping Tom), and no one knows. The man across the way now looks like Howard K. Stern. He isn’t dating anyone as beautiful as Anna Nicole though. Some basic looking Asian girl who drive an Audi. He drives a really crappy red Monte Carlo. He slept with “Michelle” and they broke up for awhile. He isn’t as much fun as my Rhett, I think this guy is boring, probably has a legit job, and doesn’t know how to woo the ladies with words. And I doubt he ate man flesh sandwiches. He was probably a vegan, so stayed away from anything -flesh sandwiches. He moved, and I was glad.
My upstairs neighbor is a nurse or medical aide, or something that requires wearing those cutesy scrubs. She has a baby about a few months younger than mine. Once again, I can hear her stomping around upstairs, but she is not tiny. She is fat. Fat as in, probably the same weight as me, but I probably have 5 inches on her, so she actually looks fat. I wonder how is it that a 120 pound woman and a 200 pound woman can sound the same from the floor below. Maybe they both just like to stomp. I don’t know. The physics behind this quandary is over my head. For the first month or two in the new apartment, I thought it was just her and the baby. I didn’t hear anything else. No footsteps that made me think otherwise. Then one night, my husband and I wake to what sounds like a train coming through the walls.
THUNK-A-THUNK-A-THUNK-A-THUNK-A-THUNK-A-THUNK
This is accompanied by squeaking and intermittent moans of excitement, still not proof positive that they were authentic though. She was making cupcakes with someone. I hadn’t heard this before, so I came to the conclusion that the schoolteacher never had sex, probably because she taught K-5, and boys haven’t hit puberty by then. Maybe if she was a freshman English teacher, she could have wooed one of her students home and helped him navigate the choppy and frightening courses known as woman. It sounded like the woman upstairs was having that kind of inexperienced sex, where you go, then stop, then go, then stop, never really getting much closer to anything, except a friction burn and boredom. Thus, why I am questioning the authenticity of those moans. This went of for about an hour. I felt like I should have gone up there to direct the sex. Apparently there are people who do that as their life calling. Tell people how to have fuck. I heard about it on Oprah. I was inspired at the moment, but decided against it, and instead banged on the ceiling with a broom.
Shortly after this, I noticed the different black men that would come to and from her apartment. Only sporadically did we hear any springs bouncing and headboard slapping the walls, so what could she be doing up there? I decided to watch her every move, at least all that I could watch when she happened to be going to and from work. She looked like a black man lover. You know how some women have that look, and lo and behold, they only date and fornicate with are black men. You know, the fat girls who don’t look so sure of themselves with bad hair, either bleached into oblivion, or with roots that scream “DYE ME”, and about a whole can of mouse or hairspray in their hair. This was her. Which, if an untrained eye looks at me, I probably fit most of this criteria. I am fat. I think I am pretty sure of myself though. I have bad hair, not badly dyed hair though, I usually keep that up to par, but I have stringy thick hair that flips out and no amount of mouse or gel or hairspray or super glue will keep it in place. Once again, thanks mom. I am not a black man lover though. Which, there is nothing wrong with loving black men strictly, or intermittently, whatever floats your boat honey. My first love, however, was with a black man. Granted, he was only a quarter black, and as white as myself in looks and dorkiness. He had unruly coarse hair and a broad nose which complimented his full, beautiful lips. I didn’t think that he looked black. If he brought up that his mother was half black, no one white would believe him. But it was amazing that anywhere we went, black people would come up to him and ask him if he was black. I don’t know if maybe he had something on his forehead that my overtly white girl eyes couldn’t see, or maybe they were like whales and had their own secret language that they all understood. Either way, it baffled me, because being white, I feel that us honkies have to be very careful with anything race related, or we will look like the new generation of the KKK. Which I am not. Redneck…probably. Ignorant white supremacist, no. Thanks dad for instilling the least amount of redneck in me as possible.
I think that if my ex lived here, I would try to hook him up with the lady upstairs. He’s technically black. He likes sex. And he is a good guy. So far, she is the only neighbor that I don’t fantasize about living her life. True, I imagine what she does and thinks, but I don’t place myself in her shoes for daydreams sake. I wouldn’t want to. There is nothing in her life that I couldn’t probably figure out by watching some super sad, oh woe to me movie. She is a single mom, with men who come in and out of her house. I wonder if maybe she is part of a prostitution ring, or a call girl, but if she was, wouldn’t I hear more mattress music? Maybe she caters to a specific crowd that have moved past the nurse in a white dress fantasy to one that wears scrubs. So much more practical. Maybe she is into drugs, and sells them out of her apartment, and has her dealer boyfriend live with her until she finds out that he is sleeping with some other woman.
I can tell by her face that she is a sad woman. I think that I just want an excuse to make her out to be a star of a Lifetime movie, just so I can save the day. Sometimes I think that we should be friends, since we have kids. That would probably be our only common point though, I don’t have much experience with drug lords, scrub-wearing prostitution, or really long awful sex. I mean, I could at least share some of my expertise in that area.
I like to think that my first one was a teacher. In another life I was a spy, and I somehow managed to finagle those skills into this lifetime. From my front door, which to thieves was a heavenly sliding glass door, I could see all the mail boxes. Posted not five feet from my overstated peephole was a crudely painted post with 8 black and dirty mailboxes. I was 1, she was 5. My spying, from my past, my nosiness, definitely from my mother. The highlight of my day came with the mail, and not specifically my mail. Staying at home, during my “bed rest” or house rest as I called it, I knew every tenants schedule. Honestly, I knew them before my house rest, but I wasn’t planning on mentioning that.
She would get magazines and catalogues for grades K-5. That was my first suspicion that she was a schoolteacher. Minus being marmy. She also had a subscription to People magazine, which further fed my need to know everything going on around me. Thanks mom for you flippy hair, and your nosiness. Not really thinking of it as a crime, on Fridays when the mail came, usually before noon, I would steal the new copy of People magazine. Oh, I was well fulfilled with the latest of celebrity gossip and the personal stories of floods and losing 100 pounds. I stuck with the idea that she was a school teacher, since it coincided with the fact that she usually didn’t get home until 4:30 or 5. I would often imagine myself as her, being this schoolteacher so devoted to her class, that she stays after school to get the next days activates and crafts and stories set up. She’s not one of those homework Nazis, no. She was young. She was as normal looking as the girl next door that you never notice, not even during puberty, because all the pretty seemed to get handed out to the sex kittens down the street. Maybe she was just like me, lonely, feeding off the need to know the latest gossip. Or, maybe she was in it for the personal stories. I root for team gossip. Either way, I made sure that it was back in her mail box well before she would come home in her Taurus or Honda, or whatever neutral color car she drove, that millions of other Americans drove, that I never took the time to learn the name of.
From my apartment I could hear her upstairs. Stomping around like a 500 pound elephant, which is a tiny elephant, but a big schoolteacher. More like a gym teacher. In all actuality though, she was tiny. And I mean that as, I was 9 months pregnant. Everything was tiny. My ankles were probably the same girth as her waist. She didn’t really do much upstairs, that much I could tell. Walk from the bedroom to the kitchen, where I figure she gets a bottled water, something tiny people do, continue to the living room to read the latest rag. That was her life. Occasionally I would see her head towards the park across the street with her Ipod. I would lose interest in that. Exercise is boring. If I wanted to watch something go round in circles, I would embrace my redneck Texan tendencies and watch NASCAR. Not wear deodorant. Pick my teeth. Unbutton my pants when I have had too much beans and cornbread. Thanks dad, but for now, I will delightfully pass. So, back to nothing.
She wasn’t the only one I did this with. The man across the way from us, 2, was very swarthy. Like a short and fat Rhett. He would have amazingly beautiful women leave his place, and you know it was because he knew how to talk. We would occasionally make small talk when we awkwardly bumped into each other about how I was going to pop soon. It depressed me that I was not the woman leaving his apartment. Something I share with the schoolteacher are my girl next door looks. Nothing special. I had dingy brown hair and freckles. I have Scarlett green cat eyes, but I wear glasses, so you never got to see them in their beauty. I would however overcompensate for my lack of facial beauty by wearing very low cut tops. I was pregnant. I had tits that porn stars dream of before counting back from 10. Looking up at the bright light over them and faces in masks hovering, I imagine they think “If I had tits like Hannah’s, I would be happy.” My tits didn’t impress Rhett though. Probably because he was good friends with my boyfriend, and would have him over sometimes to smoke pot. This of course, while I was asleep, since when I wasn’t spying or daydreaming I was sleeping. When he would tell me of his evening across the way, I would bombard him with questions, to see if he really was the swarthy pirate of a man I thought he was. My questions were never answered as I would wish them to be, but life goes on.
Rhett didn’t have mail delivered to his box. He must have had a PO box. I would imagine it was because he got loot, and secret missions delivered to it, and knew that I had prying eyes. That was probably the only reason to have my boyfriend over, to befriend him and hopefully end my spying. The only thing it accomplished was adding fuel to the fire. It eventually came to the point where I thought he was in the mob, from the Kansas City syndicate. You always hear about that one in the movies, but where is the Goodfellas from the MO-KS? I imagined that he was some peon that did hits, and got all of his information about the who, what, when through his PO box. Something Tony Soprano should have tried. Maybe then he would still be on the air.
I also imagined that my mobster neighbor ate man flesh sandwiches. Instead of saying “He swims with the fishes,” I imagined he said “He swims in the toilet.” My boyfriend found this annoyingly funny, so every time we brought up our neighbor, along came the man flesh sandwich bit. I’m sure if he had known that we thought that about him, we would be covered with mayo and relish and have a one way ticket to the pooper.
Sometimes in the evenings, my boyfriend and I would go for walks. Probably hoping the baby would just go ahead and have its birthday. She didn’t though. We would walk, and I would spy on people. If I saw blinds open, and curtain pulled back, hell, the whole window open for the entire city to see, I would look. I think this annoyed my boyfriend, because I would get distracted and try to imagine myself in that room. In the owners body. To see if I could figure out why they put up that tacky rock poster, or why they chose that god-awful paint color. I would imagine their jobs, accountant here, fast food worker there, artist of nothing on the third floor. Wherever we went…whether by car or foot, I was looking.
We moved shortly after I had our daughter. Did the whole wedding bells bit. Found an apartment with a dishwasher. At our new place, the mailboxes are under lock and key, much to my demise. Mail men probably have the coolest job. You get to be nosy, and you are not breaking the law. I imagine that if I were a mailwoman, my routes would rarely get done because I would want to read every magazine with the gossip, and try to figure out who each person is according to their mail. I bet he thinks that I have awful penmanship or just make things up, since just about every piece of mail I get has some variation of my real name, only terribly misspelled. Hannah, not hard? I am a racecar. I am an evil olive. Same as I am backwards and forwards. But so many things can come from a simple 6 letter name with only 3 different letters.
Since the mailboxes are under lock and key, I have no way to know my neighbors. I have to resort to looking out the peephole and the blinds. And we actually have a door this time, so I can stand in front of it naked and breathe really heavily, like I imagine real peeping toms do (and I quote, I am not a real peeping Tom), and no one knows. The man across the way now looks like Howard K. Stern. He isn’t dating anyone as beautiful as Anna Nicole though. Some basic looking Asian girl who drive an Audi. He drives a really crappy red Monte Carlo. He slept with “Michelle” and they broke up for awhile. He isn’t as much fun as my Rhett, I think this guy is boring, probably has a legit job, and doesn’t know how to woo the ladies with words. And I doubt he ate man flesh sandwiches. He was probably a vegan, so stayed away from anything -flesh sandwiches. He moved, and I was glad.
My upstairs neighbor is a nurse or medical aide, or something that requires wearing those cutesy scrubs. She has a baby about a few months younger than mine. Once again, I can hear her stomping around upstairs, but she is not tiny. She is fat. Fat as in, probably the same weight as me, but I probably have 5 inches on her, so she actually looks fat. I wonder how is it that a 120 pound woman and a 200 pound woman can sound the same from the floor below. Maybe they both just like to stomp. I don’t know. The physics behind this quandary is over my head. For the first month or two in the new apartment, I thought it was just her and the baby. I didn’t hear anything else. No footsteps that made me think otherwise. Then one night, my husband and I wake to what sounds like a train coming through the walls.
THUNK-A-THUNK-A-THUNK-A-THUNK-A-THUNK-A-THUNK
This is accompanied by squeaking and intermittent moans of excitement, still not proof positive that they were authentic though. She was making cupcakes with someone. I hadn’t heard this before, so I came to the conclusion that the schoolteacher never had sex, probably because she taught K-5, and boys haven’t hit puberty by then. Maybe if she was a freshman English teacher, she could have wooed one of her students home and helped him navigate the choppy and frightening courses known as woman. It sounded like the woman upstairs was having that kind of inexperienced sex, where you go, then stop, then go, then stop, never really getting much closer to anything, except a friction burn and boredom. Thus, why I am questioning the authenticity of those moans. This went of for about an hour. I felt like I should have gone up there to direct the sex. Apparently there are people who do that as their life calling. Tell people how to have fuck. I heard about it on Oprah. I was inspired at the moment, but decided against it, and instead banged on the ceiling with a broom.
Shortly after this, I noticed the different black men that would come to and from her apartment. Only sporadically did we hear any springs bouncing and headboard slapping the walls, so what could she be doing up there? I decided to watch her every move, at least all that I could watch when she happened to be going to and from work. She looked like a black man lover. You know how some women have that look, and lo and behold, they only date and fornicate with are black men. You know, the fat girls who don’t look so sure of themselves with bad hair, either bleached into oblivion, or with roots that scream “DYE ME”, and about a whole can of mouse or hairspray in their hair. This was her. Which, if an untrained eye looks at me, I probably fit most of this criteria. I am fat. I think I am pretty sure of myself though. I have bad hair, not badly dyed hair though, I usually keep that up to par, but I have stringy thick hair that flips out and no amount of mouse or gel or hairspray or super glue will keep it in place. Once again, thanks mom. I am not a black man lover though. Which, there is nothing wrong with loving black men strictly, or intermittently, whatever floats your boat honey. My first love, however, was with a black man. Granted, he was only a quarter black, and as white as myself in looks and dorkiness. He had unruly coarse hair and a broad nose which complimented his full, beautiful lips. I didn’t think that he looked black. If he brought up that his mother was half black, no one white would believe him. But it was amazing that anywhere we went, black people would come up to him and ask him if he was black. I don’t know if maybe he had something on his forehead that my overtly white girl eyes couldn’t see, or maybe they were like whales and had their own secret language that they all understood. Either way, it baffled me, because being white, I feel that us honkies have to be very careful with anything race related, or we will look like the new generation of the KKK. Which I am not. Redneck…probably. Ignorant white supremacist, no. Thanks dad for instilling the least amount of redneck in me as possible.
I think that if my ex lived here, I would try to hook him up with the lady upstairs. He’s technically black. He likes sex. And he is a good guy. So far, she is the only neighbor that I don’t fantasize about living her life. True, I imagine what she does and thinks, but I don’t place myself in her shoes for daydreams sake. I wouldn’t want to. There is nothing in her life that I couldn’t probably figure out by watching some super sad, oh woe to me movie. She is a single mom, with men who come in and out of her house. I wonder if maybe she is part of a prostitution ring, or a call girl, but if she was, wouldn’t I hear more mattress music? Maybe she caters to a specific crowd that have moved past the nurse in a white dress fantasy to one that wears scrubs. So much more practical. Maybe she is into drugs, and sells them out of her apartment, and has her dealer boyfriend live with her until she finds out that he is sleeping with some other woman.
I can tell by her face that she is a sad woman. I think that I just want an excuse to make her out to be a star of a Lifetime movie, just so I can save the day. Sometimes I think that we should be friends, since we have kids. That would probably be our only common point though, I don’t have much experience with drug lords, scrub-wearing prostitution, or really long awful sex. I mean, I could at least share some of my expertise in that area.