Observations from the easy chair
Nothing serious here, just a bit of free time and as I watched one of the new neighbors moving in this came to mind. No underage kids or animals were injured during writing and if anybody recognizes themselves in it, well, now you know you're not unique after all.
I never liked the looks of him from the first time I laid eyes on him. Brice Lockwood is his name. What the hell kind of name is that? I suppose it was the looks that soured me on him; preppy, swaggering, over confident, roaming eyes. I had to give it to him. He was a handsome piece of shit, fit as a fiddle, almost like a young blond Sean Connery living right smack in the middle of our neighborhood.
The Richardson's had sold the house and cleared out to Arizona; he had retired from the local power company and she had put up with asthma for the last fifteen years. The hot oven air was supposed to be good for her so they packed up everything they wanted to keep in a U-Haul and hit the road. The next day Agent Blond strutted up the drive in his white tennis shorts, hairy tan muscular legs and $300 Ray-Bans.
Carole was watching him not knowing I was watching her and I'm pretty sure every other moist adventurous woman on the street was watching everybody else. Maybe it's a hormonal thing, a stud puppet alert gene or something. Within an hour of his arrival, the woman a couple doors down from us crossed over to his house with a warming gift in her hand.
"We need to do that, Charlie. We need to take the new neighbor something to welcome him to the street." She looked over at me with her natural puppy eyes expecting me to agree.
The gal a couple doors down had walked her gift inside and was still tugging the welcome wagon thirty minutes later. She came out with a big smile on her face and her little hands smoothing the bunched fabric of her sundress before she reached her own stoop. That was quick.
"You might want to wait until he recovers from his first welcome, Carole. He might not be up for it." I smiled inwardly.
You see, Brice Lockwood wasn't the first single hunk of meat to hit the neighborhood. There was Chad, Broderick and Wilson before him and I'm sure there would be others following at some point. Brice was just the first one straight across the street from me giving me a perpetual reason for wishing I had a tall hedge row along the front sidewalk.
Chad was a cad, an actual English scalawag from Southampton. He tried to impress us all with his elocution skills but he could never quite mask his working class dock worker brogue he was self-accursed with. It didn't matter. He had his looks and several youngish, middle aged housewives who just clung to every tall tale and word he spoke. Carole was right in there with them chewing on every word.
The Marshall's lived a few doors up the street from us. Frank was a millwright over at the paper mill; large gregarious fellow with the biggest damn feet I've ever seen on a human being. Mildred was a little thing, mousy is the word and as naïve as a woman can get but she was about the hottest looking thirty five year old this side of town. Some of us could never figure out how in hell Frank ever laid hands on her being as ape ugly as he was.
Chad picked right up on Mildred, soothed and stroked her with words and smiles until she was just like melted butter on a biscuit. The lady gossip mill, being what it was, soon revealed that Mildred was sneaking off to Chad's house when Frank was rotating nights at the mill. The thing about the lady gossip mill is that it's as leaky as a sieve; all of us men hear the same things cuz they just can't keep it to themselves, gossips that they are.
Well, it got back to Frank eventually and one night he and a couple pipefitters came off early on the night shift and rolled into the neighborhood on the quiet around midnight. Mildred wasn't in Frank's bed or anywhere else in the house There was only one other place Frank was interested in looking, Chad's little snake nest of a boudoir.
The story I heard from one of the pipefitters long after the incident might have been embellished a bit but I'm sure there was a lot of truth in it. The three of them crossed the street and snuck into the house.
When they found the two lovers, they were going at it hot and heavy with the miscreant sawing his English cad dick right into Frank's prize, balls deep and no rubber to boot. Accordingly it didn't look like Mildred was getting the better deal out of it because balls deep must have meant something different in Southampton than it did in our neck of the woods.
Mildred let out a little squeal and Chad bellowed a boisterous grunt before whatever monstrous size work boot Frank had on his left foot found its target and literally broke Chad's ass. Three sets of burley hands grabbed ahold of the high pitched man of the house until they stood him upright and started to wallop the bejesus out of him. When it was over, the former resident of our street dragged his formerly 6'2", now 5'11" self out the door and into his car before riding off to god knows where.
The little mousy wife never knew god before that night and now all she does is sing the praises of Jesus. Frank kept her around because the same god knows he'd never find anything as hot as what he had, even tainted as it was, with an ape mug like his. God owed it to him anyways for making him get in the ugly line twice.
Since men never tell gossip tales, the women folk never really knew what happened to good old Chad; Mildred breaks out into a gospel sweat at the mere mention of his name. That pipefitter never did tell me what happened to Mildred that night but he had a damn good smile on his face when he shook his head...
"Charlie, do you think our new neighbor would like one of my famous casseroles?" She was serious. Her casseroles are to die for and if she took even the smell of it across the street somebody was going to die.
"No, I wouldn't do that. Me and the fellah's, we're thinking meat."
"Oh that would be good. We could invite him over for a barbeque." Carole went prancing off to do what excited women do when Agent Blond moves into the neighborhood; call into the gossip line.
She took a casserole over to Broderick when he moved into the bungalow on the corner and the little sniffing hound nearly camped on my doorstep for second helpings. The Davenports, at least Wendy and her chronically unemployed and unambitious daughter Chloe were a little more creative.
Broderick Thompson was a Boston transplant trying to pass him off as a New England blueblood in our quaint southern town; blueblood was another term for carpetbagger in most of our circles, especially if they hailed from Boston. Wendy was a thrice divorced buckeye that latched onto one of the locals here who was suffering a bout of rebound fever after his first wife ran off with what passes for a milkman these days, a frozen meat truck salesman.
