Neighbors from Hell

                                   1^st November 2021

Hay Folks,

 

So you want a story about neighbors? Well, I got one for you. I was ten, my parents where divorced, my mother had just died. I was living in my mother’s house with my two older siblings. My sister was twelve, and my mentally ill brother was fourteen. From Friday night to Monday morning I had a parent, but on Monday my father would leave for work and spend the week with his wife.

 

With the head of the neighborhood watch living across the street no one called the police. This went on until I grew out of it. I’m forty one now and still live in the same house.

 

Now, the folks next door gave a lot of trouble to my mentally ill brother. He is very susceptible to sound, and they would thump their music all the time and have these late night parties with kids drinking. They would leave beer bottles all over my lawn. One time, around one thirty in the morning, my brother lost it and ran into their house and smashed their record player.

 

In a form of retaliation they shot one of my cats in the eye with a pellet gun. Then I had my other neighbor across the street who very likely killed at least four of my cats and my two dogs. He was connected with law enforcement so he got off with it, but you would think he, having ignored the child abuse I suffered, would have been falling all over himself to make it up to me.

 

Yeah, I got the neighbors from hell. There are days even I have trouble believing what kind of people they are. Then again, I’m an educated man. If you know much about history you would know that people can be evil, so why should the folks on my street be any different?

 

Best,

 

 

Richard Leland Neal

 

A Sad Voice

1^st June 2012

Dear Cassi,

There are times in the doing of my job that voices come from the darkness. Each voice has a story to tell and none are happy tales of wonder. All too often when I lift the receiver to my desk phone the voice on the other side needs to tell me the horrors of their life.

       

Such was the case not too long ago when a woman called apologizing for not having money to donate to the homeless. This is a funny thing about working with the homeless; those who hold a tender part in their hearts for the folks I look after are often odd folks themselves. 

       

On the phone this woman with such a deep pain within her that she had to lance the wound and let it drain into strange fabric of the night wile she spoke. She was an aging hippy with the withered sound that the hard party lifestyle in her voice.

       

She told me of how she had been kicked out of her family home the night of her high school graduation by a mother calming to be protecting her. She was given a fifty dollar bill, that was a lot of money at the time, and told to make her way before her father took her life. This was back in the seventies before I was born and it was a different kind of world.

       

Unable to find work she had turned to friends who viewed her as an accessory to the lush accommodations of the era. She kept her place by satisfying carnal appetites. To live with herself she took drugs and lived in her ugly dream for an undisclosed time.

       

This had left her body ravaged and her womb broken. The injuries to her body left a hole in her heart where should have lived a child that she could never mother in biology or household. Those, the unfortunate, had become her children, and I shepherd to that brood. She had no idea if it was staff on that phone or client and said “if your homeless, god bless you”.

Live with who you are, little sister,

Richard Leland Neal

Kitty Saves Family

 

Heater Rat

13^th November 2011

Dear Cassi,

   

I gave you the run down on my crazy bills. Well just as crazy as the bills was the story of my heater. I think it must have been on the frits for two years but most of the time I was at work so it made little difference. However, with the new developments I felt it was time to get the thing repaired.

   

First I called a company that sent me something in the mail. They said they would come in five days and it would cost me a hundred dollars for them just to look. They said it would be a fifty dollar fee if I canceled in less than 48 hours.

   

Smelling a rat, I pulled out the old paperwork from when the heater was installed in 92 and called the company that had installed it in the first place. They said it would be sixty nine dollars, and they would be here within the day. Getting warmer, but still not great.

   

Then my neighbor came across the street and told me that he was getting his air unit worked on, and the repair man would come over and look at my heater for free. That was the first bit of good luck I’ve had in a long time. This fellow came over and looked at my heater and said it was the fan exactly what I had thought. He said he had to check on part availability and that he would call me in a few hours.

   

I called the second company back and told them that I had already found the problem. I gave them the whole story. They asked if I wanted a second opinion. ‘I wouldn’t mind one,’ I said, ‘but I’m not paying sixty nine dollars for it.’

   

You have to figure that they would have been better off taking down what information they could have over the phone and giving me a price, but if they want to be stubborn they can lose business.

Stay safe, Cassi,

Richard Leland Neal