Her long hair hung down around her shoulders like chunks of brown seaweed all dry and tangled on the beach. Her dark tanned face had a distant look of youth to it. That tan had carried her face through a few decades of being past the prime age of twenty, but now it could no longer disguise the fact that she was pushing sixty.
“Hi, how are you?” she rattled off to me as we moved in opposite directions. There was an abnormal electricity in her eyes. The deep wrinkles around her eyes and the crevices running into her cheeks seemed to deepen under my gaze, in opposition to that electricity. Each wrinkle was a tattle-tale itching to tell its story. They were the deep wrinkles of someone that had really abused her body.
“Beautiful day,” I said upward to the blue sky, to look safely away from that squirrely electricity. She was too jittery—too friendly. Something was up.
I found out soon enough.
My jittery neighbor has been the queen of eccentric drunken episodes. There was the time she trashed her house, including her own belongings. There were the numerous arrests for driving offences, some of which became belligerent shows in her front yard. There were the impressive screaming matches that proved just how well sound can travel through walls and around trees, all the way to my porch. All of this coming out of the blue one day, after having lived next to her uneventfully for ten years.
Since having her license suspended, battling a failing marriage, and losing all her friends, her funds to purchase more alcohol have dried up. The solution she had come up with on that beautiful blue-sky day was to walk door-to-door asking for donations.
At first her requests were for a friend whose child had medical bills. Apparently that was not a very convincing lie, so she moved onto collecting for St. Jude’s, because who can decline to help a child with cancer? Apparently some of my fellow neighbors still smelled a rat, so the story changed again. Next, it was money for Alcoholics Anonymous. I suppose that one is fair—she wasn’t entirely lying. She was being semi-anonymous by only knocking on doors of neighbors she didn’t know, and she is an alcoholic, after all.
The Day Turned Less Beautiful
Rain had misted down so that everything was nice and damp—not wet, but damp. You could feel it in your lungs, and see it sprinkling daintily onto the windshield. It was frizzling my hair. Dampness, everywhere. I turned onto the four-lane divided highway, picking up speed; the speed limit was sixty-five. I slowed. On the opposite side of the road there was the stalled traffic of an accident having just happened, and no one had yet decided who was going to get out. Everyone was thinking Maybe that guy next to me will check it out, and I won’t have to?
Something had happened with some motorcycles. There was a woman sitting on her butt in the middle of the lane and looking shell-shocked but intact. My eyes followed the trail the other motorcycle had made through the grassy median, across the lane of traffic directly in front of me, and to the ditch on the other side. A man was standing next to his motorcycle, also looking shell-shocked but intact. He had somehow managed to careen across two lanes of traffic on a very busy highway at the exact perfect time when there was a short gap in traffic. If I had been a minute earlier he may have crashed into my vehicle—him dead; me traumatized.
After another minute of driving the sirens were zooming in their direction. The heroes of society with the worst jobs were zooming ahead to help, having no idea what scene may await them. A memory of my neighbor popped into my mind then. She had completely missed a turn in the neighborhood and instead cut across someone’s side yard, swerving blindly into the path of some kids on their bikes, and she hadn’t a clue they were there at all. If they too had been one minute earlier…
So many times she drove drunk while only thinking about herself. The contrast between the EMT driving the ambulance and the drunken neighbor was so stark—so disgustingly stark—that rage bubbled up to my surface for a moment. A quick burst of flame flared, then rapidly burned through its tender, and went out.
A Week Later
And the neighbor has been staying out of trouble. Her begging off the neighbors has stopped. There has been no recent police presence. I saw her walking, and there was a look of anguish on her face. She was dressed like that housewife persona that used to be hers, and her hair was brushed. She wore her pretty purse on her shoulder and tidy white tennis shoes like she was just stepping out of her minivan at Publix, instead of walking in the heat because her driver’s license is suspended and her car repossessed. The whole picture was just pure and plain sadness. She was sad. She was sad to look at.
“Maybe she has finally hit rock bottom,” my other neighbor said, hopefully.
I doubt it. She looks like this every other week: a normal week, followed by a shipwreck of seaweed hair and chaos chasing after her. She is a bottomless pit—a black hole that sucks in anything useable around it. I’ve learned from her that addiction is a strange mishmash of this is heartbreaking and get your shit together.
Addiction is a tangle of heartbreak and disgust. It’s that dried up seaweed tangling around your flip-flop. Sometimes it trips you, other times it is just an ugly sight to see until the angry ocean takes it back.