Friday, June 18, 2010

remembrance of psychos past

Not long ago we invited some of our neighbors over for a barbecue. After we'd had several rounds of drinks and plenty of food, somehow the conversation turned to the the new ultra-modern house on the block, its owner, and the highly annoying contractor who built it last year. The man who bought this highly priced, glass modern monstrosity is a bit of an enigma in the neighborhood. I've exchanged waves with him but that's been it. The Sober Husband claims to have spoken to him once, but no one else seems to have managed to meet him.

"He's straight", my next-door neighbor (who like virtually everyone on this block is himself gay)said, for no apparent reason, about the new neighbor.

"No way!" I said. "That is such a gay house. I can't believe that guy is straight."

"He is!" insisted my neighbor. "I think he even had a girlfriend at one point. And he has cats."

Soon we ran out of material on this new neighbor, whose name no one could remember, and we went on to reminisce about the contractor who built that house. (My conflicts with that hot-tempered builder were well-chronicled here). "I thought he was going to attack me," I said. "He tried to sabotage my car, the little psycho, and my husband didn't believe me."

"I believe you," said my across-the-street neighbor, who'd had some unpleasant run-ins with the contractor. "I believe you."

But both my next door neighbor and my across-the-street neighbor took issue with my description of the contractor as "a little psycho."

"He was short!" I insisted.

"He was six feet tall," argued my next-door neighbor.

"No way!" I tried to muster up some drunken evidence to back my contention that the horrible man in question was diminutive. "All the time it was going on, I wrote about him on my blog, and I wrote he was short."

"I'm five ten, and he was taller than me. He was at least six feet," my neighbor said firmly. My across-the-street neighbor concurred.

"I really thought he was short. He didn't seem any taller than me, and I'm five six and a half."

3 comments:

hughman said...

HAHAHA!! from your writing, i'd pictured a danny devito type guy. obviously you'd squelched him in your mind.

also, why would a straight single man move into that neighborhood? i know the neighborhood is nice and all (since i once lived blocks from there myself) but there are other more sociably amiable areas for a straight single man in SF that are just as nice (like pacific heights).

the Drunken Housewife said...

Yeah, if I were a single straight guy, I'd buy over by North Beach if I had that much money. The cliche is that straight singles live in the Marina until they mate, at which point they move to Noe Valley.

Ironically the former owner of that lot, the one whose overly ambitious plans I signed off on because he told me & the SH that he was fixing that property up for his old age AND because he was a friend of my ex-cat's, Bob Marley's, moved to the Marina so he could have better luck picking up chicks, and he then sold the property with the approval to rip out the house to the little psycho (whom I refuse to believe is 6 ft tall).

J9 said...

So, you either were diminishing his size in relation to your opinion of him, OR you were going through a lucite stripper shoe phase...