What’s Up with My Neighborhood or Hey! I Know a Guy Who Can Get Ya A Deal…

Once again, the weekend looms; and in my misguided and spitting-at-the-moon-three-times sort of way, I approach the iPod, harbinger of tunes yet unsung, in the belief that my morning’s commute playlist has a premonition for the weekend.

Shut Up and Let Me Go by The Ting Tings
Had A Dad by Jane’s Addiction
Sledgehammer by Peter Gabriel
Mongoloid by Devo
I Feel for You by Chaka Khan
Straight to Hell by The Clash
I Wanna Be Adored by Stone Roses

Hmm. This all fits nicely with my flirtation with chest pain as it relates to anxiety. I foresee double the yoga.

Now where were we?

Ah, yes. Last Friday we had just started a little serial posting, an every-Friday diversion regarding the Jefferson Hillbillies.

When last we spoke, the New Kids on the Block had just moved a dozen mattresses, several large-screen TVs and an ottoman into the duplex, gone on to set up a ping-pong table on the sidewalk, and had settled in for a solid evening of hootin’ and hollerin’.

The cans littering the boulevard in the morning bespoke their affinity for Ice House, a lower-cost, higher-alcohol-content beer known for its ability to cause fist fights and impregnate at 50 paces.

After the christening of the new place, things were quiet until the following weekend, when to my amusement and disbelief I watched the oldest of the boys running down the middle of Jefferson.

As a quick aside, I’d like to interject that following their move-in, I never again saw the parents, but I did see the children, ad nauseam. All boys in that family, all with abnormally large, square heads. I would like to say that I report this for effect only, but unfortunately, it’s not an exaggeration. Those boys had big, square heads, particularly noticeable over the brows – which wasn’t so much a forehead as it was a fivehead.

Ba dum bum.

So there I was, as the old saying goes, minding my own business, when I see Head Number One – we’ll call him Boris – come running down the street carrying two large wooden stereo speakers. He is panting. Clearly he has been running for quite some time.

He looks back, is satisfied with what he sees – or does not see – and continues to run at a somewhat slower pace.

He runs past our parked car, abruptly stops and backs up.

“Hey!” he yells.

I turn to him, my hands full of the flowers I am moving from one location to another.

“You wanna buy some speakers?”

“What?”

“You wanna buy some speakers?” he repeats. “I’ll give ‘em both to you real cheap. Fifty bucks for both.”

“No, thanks,” I say, turning.

“Thirty bucks!”

I shake my head.

He may be speaking to me, but he is staring down the street from whence he came as he does so.

“Twenty bucks, and this is my last – oh! Shit!”

A Lincoln Continental comes tearing down the street, and Boris loses his grip on reality and the speakers and one of them crashes to the tar, wooden splinters everywhere. He juggles and manages to hold on to the remaining speaker. Dodging the speeding car, he cuts through our neighbor’s front yard and into the alley, where he yells his parting offer:

“Ten bucks! Ten bucks for the one speaker!”

I return to my flowers.