2003-07-25 - 1:14 p.m. Living with Sam When I lived in Medford with Sam, we had a bonzer time. I mean that. We made up names for the people living around us. Our weird neighbors. We lived in a three floor house with three different families that lived in it. Sam and I were a family. Below us lived out landlord. She stood about 4�6� tall and didn�t speak a lick of English. She cooked magpie bread, and could have been a witch. She was actually Italian. She was home all day cooking and watching the Spanish channel. (Italian?) So if you don�t know what went into magpie break, let me tell you. Pretty much you shit on a plate, and then let it cook outside for two days. No really, the reason why they call it magpie break is because flies need to lay larva in it, to give it the right taste. I don�t know what that taste is, but I�d rather give you my tongue. We named her the Gremlin. A little beast that cooked brews and potions beneath us; the type of person who would hit the ceiling with a broom to tell us to be quiet. She would have done that but she was too short. One time (okay three times) we ran out of heat for not paying the bills (we were poor!!) and the Gremlin had to lead us to her lair in the basement. It was pretty much what I imagine a bad hobbits house to be. This was no Bag End. Nope. The ceilings were so low�(so low) that Sam and I could barley walk, but she cruised around that place at top speed. Well, she was 4�6� probably 200 lbs, so cruising was kinda out of the questions. How about this. She could scamper pretty fast. Anyway she would bring us to the heater, and then sam and I would stand there and try to communicate with her. She would walk away. Then Sam and I would stare at the machine that we wanted to see, flip a few switches, kick it, stare at it, and then call the repair man. She would eye our ladies as they came in, looking at them as sinners as they entered our brothel. Well, she would have if we had any ladies to bring around�.damn ladies. Upstairs from us like this married couple. They moved in after us, and were of some sort of decent that was unnamed. Before they moved in we knew that who ever lived upstairs from us would be a jackal and try to steal things from us (we had open minds). So we called him the jackal and the JW. (jackal�s wife) The JW was hot, but the jackal refused for us to talk to her. He would come (in our imagination) down the rear fire escape and root through our can�s and delicates. We started keeping trash on the fire escape to keep him away, and I think Sam pissed in there once to keep the jackals at bay. One day the jackal started �collecting� bikes. Everyday, there would be new bikes in the hallway and the basement. We though he was creating a empire of stolen bikes. Damn jackal. I deflated on of the tires once, so that he couldn�t make a quick getaway. Sam and I had so much fun in that apartment. Late at night we would get real drunk and go outside and hurl snowballs at neighbors and hide under cars. It was an old Italian neighborhood. Everyone was like 105 years old. Also every house on the street was nice, expect ours, and this awful one down the road that was worse than ours. I lorded it over that house. I hit that one with a few to many snowballs. Sam and I came up with this game where we would stand on the balcony and try to launch tennis balls into the neighbors trashcans. One guy had to be on the streets for retrievals. One of my favorite night was when it was snowing so hard that the lights of Boston reflected off the snow clouds and lit up the street like it was daytime. Sam and I also had parking spats with the old people on the street. They didn�t seem to realize that it was public parking. We got a lot of �I�ve been parking here for (fill in the blank) years and this is my house and my spot!!� Good lord they were old. And such bad neighbors. Then I realized today, that they were all probably normal people, and we were in fact the bad neighbors. Hehehe. That made me giggle and want to go throw snowballs at the windows at midnight, or climb the rails and hump the Gremlins lions. But I can�t cause I don�t live with Sam anymore, and I get sad when I think about it. | |||||||||||
