I thought that I would take time out from talking about dog supplies, vet trips, broken bones, and other things dog related--I'll admit that I have had a one-track mind the past few days--to bring you another exciting antidote from National Lampoon's The Neighborhood. Once again this tale revolves around the neighbors two doors down, the ones that I referred to as Boxer Boy and the Booty Shorts Girls in a previous post.Friday night around 3 a.m. the smoke detector in the hall outside my bedroom started beeping. For some reason, despite the fact that the smoke detector is hard-wired to my home's electricity system, it still uses up a significant amount of the backup battery's power. Of course, it can never drain the last few drops of power during the day when I'm fully awake. No, it has to wait until I'm severely sleep deprived and nearing the REM stage of sleep to go off.
I got up and started wandering around the house, trying to find the package of 9 volt batteries that I knew I had somewhere. When I got to the garage, I heard voices coming from outside. A guy was yelling, "Don't you *@#!ing push me, *&%@#!" Another voice yelled something that I couldn't fully understand, but it sounded a lot like, "I'm going to beat your butt," only a lot more...um...colorful.
"Great. Here we go again," I mumbled, as I went back inside. Standing next to my front door, I could still hear the yelling, only this time the yelling involved more than two voices. I wanted to know what was going on, but I didn't want to be so obvious as to open the downstairs' blinds so I went upstairs to look.
My mom, who had driven up that night to take a load or two of my junk back home with her Sunday and to take my grandmother to a funeral, was now up as well. "What's going on?" she asked after I came back upstairs.
"I don't know. It sounds like Boxer Boy again."
"What did she do, kick him out?"
"I don't know. I just heard a lot of cussing and something about not pushing him."
"You know, I saw her drinking on the front porch when we got back from Walmart. I could already hear her yelling into her cell phone then."
"No, Mom, I didn't know that," I thought. "If I had, I would have put in my ear plugs." I then asked, "Have you looked out the window yet?"
"No."
"I'll look then." I went to my bedroom and peeked between two slats. Boxer Boy looked like he was getting into his or someone else's truck. "He's leaving," I declared.
"Is he in his underwear again?" my mother asked in turn, as she tried to peek through the same opening.
"No, he's fully dressed this time."
"Then I'm going back to bed." No sooner than my mom had walked to the other bedroom we heard the sound of squelching tires. This time my mother took the initiative and peeked out the blinds. "There's another car out there now."
"So?" I pondered from my bedroom, as I tried to climb between two grouchy dogs that had once again managed to scoot into my spot in my absence.
"So, there is a third one as well. I think they're blocking him in."
Sighing, I stopped trying to ease my way into the five inches of bed that the dogs had left me and got back up. "Okay, okay, I'm looking," I said resolutely. I then looked through the blinds and saw that she was right; one car had become three. Within minutes, several other cars joined them, completely blocking both ends of the street.
"I think they're getting ready to fight," my mother hypothesized.
"Great. We'll probably end up getting shot by a stray bullet."
"Maybe we should get away from the windows then."
My mom had a point so we did leave the window, but only for a few minutes. My mom and I are both crime show junkies. There was no way we were going to miss a real, live version of Cops, especially if that version eventually turned into a suburban CSI or Criminal Minds. We get it from my grandfather (my mom's father). He used to carry a police scanner around the house with him. He would even fall asleep listening to it, despite the fact that he had never been a cop himself. As close as he ever got to working in law enforcement was chasing down shoplifters in the grocery store that he used to manage.
We never saw an actual fight, but we did see a police car show up. At one point, the officer shined a huge light on the street in front of the cars, as if he was looking for something on the street itself. My mom asked me if he was looking at a body. I told her that I didn't think so, as I couldn't see one, and then I started laughing.
"What's so funny?" she asked.
"I just thought that maybe a body was what was in that cooler in the back of the Cattle Exchange truck that came by again today. Maybe Booty Shorts Betty and Boxer Boy exchanged a human body for a cow one. It would bring a whole new meaning to the term 'mystery meat.'"
"You watch too much TV."
"And you don't?"
Unfortunately for us but fortunately for Boxer Boy and Booty Shorts Betty, nothing much happened after that. The officer didn't pin Boxer Boy to the ground and cuff him. Crime scene investigators didn't fingerprint the sidewalks or spray luminol on the flower bushes. A T-shirt clad, Derrick Morgan wannabe didn't chase anyone down the street. Everyone just eventually went away.
I wonder if I will miss all the drama when I ever manage to get out of here? Probably not. There is something to be said for a good night's sleep. Besides, if I ever want that kind of middle-of-the-night drama, all I have to do is put boxer shorts on my dogs, give only one of them a bone, and then let them chase each other around the house. It's about the same thing.
