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 My
family moved to a larger house when I was in fifth grade.
Oh, it wasn’t the most earth-shattering of events, we only went
from 21st Street to 17th Street
within the same tiny town, but it seemed like a big deal at the time.
I left behind an excellent partner in crime, you see, a kid who shared
my passion for tearing shit up. And
I feared I might have to switch elementary schools.
Gulp.
But my mother took care of the school problem (she insisted I be allowed
to finish my grade school career at good ol’ Dunbar Elementary, and my
mother doesn’t take no for an answer…), and almost instantly I was
getting into perma-trouble with a new and highly-inventive group of 17th
Street hooligans. It was another
of those deals where the dreading of an event turned out to be far worse
than reality.
So, we settled into our roomier digs with little problem.
And the best part? My
grandparents lived directly across the street.
I’m not sure, but I believe this was a simple coincidence.
I remember my Mom and Dad looking at plenty of houses during this
period, and the one they liked the most just happened to be located a
few yards from my mother’s parents. Therefore,
my brother and I had almost round-the-clock access to even
more great food and human kindness.
Yeah, it was a perfect situation, almost like Mayberry.
…Almost.
My grandmother’s best friend lived a few doors down, and she had a
whole passel of wild-ass kids, teenagers and young adults, who would
scream and fight and sometimes get whipped into such a frenzy they’d
throw every piece of living room furniture onto the front lawn, and beat
their chests like King Kong.
It was a full-on madhouse… I
remember being outside playing Wiffle Ball one day, when we heard a
piercing Friday the 13th
scream go up. That was followed
by a godawful explosion. And two
of the sons came crashing through the screen door, punching each other
and letting fly with the standard lineup of well-known cuss-words, as
well as a few I’d never heard before -- or since.
They beat the living crap out of each other on the front porch, cascaded
down the steps, and continued fighting in the yard.
I think the police finally came, and both brothers were covered
in blood at the end.
I was scared to death of those guys (I mean, seriously), but they never
gave me any trouble. Apparently
they just didn’t like each other? I
don’t know. But they were, as
they say, a very spirited
group.
Next to the madhouse was an old lady with short withered arms.
I don’t know the reason, but it looked like she had a sweet
potato peeking out of her sleeves. And she always wore
short sleeves.
She was friendly enough, but I just couldn’t get past those tiny tater
arms. Sometimes I’d see her on
her porch drinking iced tea, and it looked like there was a croissant
wrapped around the glass. But, at
least she didn’t have far to lift it...
It was probably some kind of birth defect, but my brother and I
constantly offered up theories about how she’d ended up that way.
I remember one of us wondering if she’d worked fast food years
ago, tripped, and plunged both arms into the deep fryer.
I also recall somebody making a joke about her doing a cartwheel.
My mother tried not to laugh, but wasn’t able to achieve her
goal. And that made us proud.
Yes, it was a colorful neighborhood. But
the most colorful character of all lived between my grandparents and the
woman with pastry hands. Her name
was Beulah, and she was what’s commonly known as “a freakin’
mental case.”
In the early days she lived with her husband Delbert, but he died a year
or so after we moved there. The
two of them would sit on their porch every evening, perched side by side
on a glider. And when I say every
evening, I mean every evening.
It didn’t matter about weather conditions, or anything of the
sort. If it was cold outside,
they’d just put on hats and gloves and as many coats as required.
They’d sit out there and stare straight ahead, rarely speaking to one
another. Sometimes Beulah would
fly off the handle and holler some sort of wild belligerence at a
passerby, but they generally just sat silently like twin Lincoln
Memorials of Crazy.
Delbert was probably in his mid-60s when we moved in, and Beulah was
slightly younger. He was heavily
into CB radio, and associated activities.
The garage, behind their house, had all manner of antennae on the
roof; there was aluminum going in every direction, and extending high
above the trees.
The sumbitch must’ve had a full-blown communications center in there.
But none of the neighbors had ever been inside, so it was just
pure speculation. I wouldn’t be
surprised to learn they were attempting to contact the mother ship.
One thing was certain, though. Their
CB “handles” were Cornflakes and Oatmeal.
This was a confirmed fact. I
think Beulah was Cornflakes, but it could've been the other way around.
I had visions of her sitting in that garage, inside a towering
valley of electronics, just spewing crackpot into a microphone during
the middle of the night. And some trucker on I-64 muttering, “The
fuck?”
During those early days she was often paranoid, and would sometimes call
the police, claiming men were under her house pumping poisonous gas into
their living room(!?). The cops
were there so frequently, it became a joke to them.
When they emerged from their cruiser, they’d give the other
neighbors a conspiratorial roll of the eyes, and we’d all chuckle
under our breath.
Beulah also got it into her head that my
grandmother, the sweetest, most innocent person who’s ever lived,
was a peeping tom. She repeatedly
accused her of spying on Delbert, watching him get dressed in the
morning, using the bathroom, and taking a shower.
My grandfather thought this was a riot, and made little joking comments
about it all the time. But my
grandmother saw no humor in it whatsoever.
I mean, what if the other neighbors believed it?
This went on for several months, until Beulah finally took matters into
her own hands. One afternoon she
painted every window that faced my grandparents’ place solid black:
one entire side of their house. Oh,
it was a sight to behold.
Before Delbert went to that big wacky shack in the sky, he and my
grandfather got into it about Delbert’s fence.
He had a chain link fence installed around his entire yard –
upside down, so the spiked bottom was at the top.
It was basically a house surrounded by a wall of Bowie knives.
My grandfather was afraid my brother or I, or some other kid in the
neighborhood, would be gutted by that ridiculousness, and he and Delbert
started going round and round about it.
After my grandfather checked with the local police department and
learned it wasn’t illegal, and once he realized Delbert had no
intention whatsoever of changing the fence, he dropped it.
But he never stopped grumbling about it, not really.
I have a feeling Delbert would’ve had machine gun turrets installed on
his roof, if he could’ve gotten away with it.
Oatmeal wasn’t half-steppin’.
Sometimes Beulah would ask us to leave our front door open, or pull back
the curtains in our living room, so she could see
through our house during one
of her porch-sitting marathons. She
said she liked to watch cars driving over the railroad crossing at 16th
Street (?!). This always irritated my
mother (see through our house?), and she refused to even acknowledge
such requests.
What had started out as mildly entertaining, was starting to become irritating...
After Delbert died, though, Beulah stopped imagining grand conspiracies
against her, and curbed a lot of her extreme behavior.
She mellowed a bit, and folks began describing her as simply
crazy, instead of the traditional batshit crazy.
During this period I learned that one of the local street people, a man
named Harry, was apparently Beulah’s adult son.
This news blew my mind, because everyone knew Harry; he was a
local legend. The dude rarely
spoke, was semi-menacing, and spent his days wandering up and down
alleys and digging through trash cans.
I was always somewhat afraid of Harry, because he seemed like one of
those guys who could snap at any minute, and start slashing throats.
But he always “performed” in an annual Thanksgiving parade,
riding atop a giant rolling toilet (long story), smiling and waving
plungers in the air. So, who the
hell knows?
When I got a little older I learned that Beulah was indeed Harry’s
mother, and his father was her brother. Pass
the beer nuts.
Following the death of Delbert, Beulah began asking the neighbors for
help, and taking taxis to the grocery store.
One day she roped my Dad into something or other, and he was
standing in her kitchen when she uttered a now-famous phrase.
He asked her how she was doing, and she reportedly answered, “Well,
not so good. I think my bladder
is falling out of my vagina.”
My Dad didn’t know how to respond to such a thing, and just said,
“Oh, that’s too bad.”
That conversation has taken on the aura of legend through the years, and
is still spoken about frequently, three decades later.
Beulah and her “drop-bladder,” as she later described it, has
withstood the test of time.
One day we saw a taxi pull up in front of her house, and Beulah climbed
into the backseat. Grocery
shopping, we assumed. But the cab
returned a short time later, much too quickly for a weekly shop to have
taken place.
Curious, we watched as the driver opened the trunk, removed a gigantic
50 lb sack of onions, and carried it into the house.
Nothing else, just lots and lots of onions.
WTF?? Where’d she get
such a thing, at a restaurant supply house?
And why?!
Nobody knows.
She always wanted me to mow her grass, but her yard was an overgrown
jungle, and she only paid two dollars. I
did my best to get out of it, of course, but my parents forced me into
it from time to time.
On the side of her house where the windows were painted black, there was
literally no access. It was just
a narrow strip of grass between her house and the homicidal fence, with
big ol’ bushes sealing off both ends.
I tried to act like it didn’t exist. But
Beulah came running out one day and began berating me for not doing the whole
yard, insinuating I was trying to cheat her out of two dollars.
But how in the hell was I going to mow a strip of grass I couldn’t get
to? I thought about telling her
to shove it up her crumbling pipe, but knew my Mom and Dad wouldn’t take
too kindly to such a thing. So I
contemplated my best course of action.
I looked at the area from Beulah’s porch, while standing beside the
iconic glider, and the grass was already far too high for a mower to
ever start while sitting in it. So,
what the hell?
Then I got an idea… Yeah, it
was dangerous, but it would probably work.
You know, if I didn’t die in the process, or end up with two
sweet potato arms.
I dragged the mower onto the porch, pushed it to the edge near the
inaccessible grass, and pulled the cord.
I had a running lawnmower on Beulah’s porch!
Then I carefully dropped it over the side, and onto the field of
nightmares.
And it worked. I somehow mowed a
length of lawn upon which no human had tread, probably since that
stabbing fence went up.
But was she appreciative? No, she
was not. After I climbed back
onto the porch, and struggled to pull the mower back up there as well,
Beulah came outside and asked if I was going to do the trimming now.
“No, I’m going home,” I said.
“Well, I’m not paying you!” Beulah hollered.
“I don’t care.”
“Your mother’s going to hear about this!”
Ha! I’d just dropped a
gas-powered machine with whirling machetes off a four foot wall, and
gone in after it, to please that crazy bitch.
She could just call her brother/ex-boyfriend to mow it next time.
I’d never do another thing for her, or her Kingdom
of Kookery.
A few months later, during the winter, an ambulance came screaming to a
halt in front of Beulah’s house.
We were having a big laugh watching the paramedics roll her out on a
stretcher, assuming it was just another of her patented false alarms.
I remember my brother, my Dad, and I made lots of comments about
the hilarious knit cap Beulah was wearing, some kind of towering deal
that would probably make the Pope himself jealous.
But, of course, she died. Just a
few days later, in some off-brand hospital somewhere.
I don’t remember what finally did her in, and I’m not sure I
ever knew.
My mother, of all people, was named the executor of Beulah’s
“estate.” I wanted to use the
opportunity to explore her house, knowing it must be full of comedy
gold. But my Mom and Dad limited
my access. Wotta rip-off.
The one day I was inside that shithole, I saw rooms piled high with
clutter, and only a foot-wide walking path cut through the great mounds
of garbage.
In the kitchen my Dad chuckled and
told me to check out a certain drawer. Suspicious
and a bit concerned, I pulled it open. Inside
was thousands, possibly millions, of bread ties.
It must’ve been fifty years’ worth!
What the?!
If this were a more thenthitive
and dishonest website, I’d tell you now that I learned a lot of
valuable life lessons from my exposure to Beulah, the free spirit and
misunderstood eccentric. But I
didn’t learn anything from her; the woman was nuts.
…I hope I haven’t let you down.
Do you have your own personal Beulah? I
have a feeling most people do. Use
the comments link to tell us about your most memorable crazy neighbor.
Can you top ol’ Cornflakes, and her window-painting,
onion-buying ways?
For the sake of comedy, I hope you can.
For
further research
The Gargoyle Letters
Macaroni and Beef at Ryan's Steakhouse
The
Rocky Stories
People
In Newspaper Ads Who Look Like They're Farting
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