Fifty-Boy 5 Suburban Eunuch

Fifty-Boy

5

Suburban Eunuch

A Petite And Voluptous Lady

I had to excuse myself from my melancholy reverie and go stir the sauce on the stove. I wanted to have my exercises done, dinner on the table, and a nice salad in tupperware for her lunch tomorrow by the time she got home from the gym.

I'd bore your ass with a description of the house if I thought you didn't know what the typical Philly suburb on the Jersey side of the Delaware looked like. We lived on a tree-lined loop street. The house was two stories with a detached garage. I'm convinced the previous owners of this cracker-box had either been circus clowns or carnies. It was a miasma of high-gloss pink with blue aluminum siding.

I spent weeks scraping off contact-paper daises and stick-on brick. I painted every room in the house, twice. Upstairs, were her bath, and three bedrooms, one was a computer-room now that the kids were gone. I slept in the other vacated kids room with the reggage posters, Cancun souvenir sombreros, my espionage novels, and strings of Mardi Gras beads looped around the bedpost. She slept in the big bed, in our room, alone.

Downstairs Eathan Allen owned most of our living room. Our back porch was by Sears, courtesy of my mother-in-law. The dining-room/library housed her serial-killer collection of friends, Charles Manson, Lizzie Borden, the Boston Strangler, and Jack the Ripper.

I used to hear her down there laughting with the crew, yucking it up after midnight, watching Frenzy or my personal favorite, Fatal Attraction. To the outward eye, my Moll was a petite and voluptuous lady, but the girl had a taste for gore like Lucrezi Borgia. I can't believe I used to sleep with my bedroom door unlocked.

An oversized desk where I laid my unopened paycheck for twenty-seven years and an unused knitting machine piled with the rest of her murder mystery videos took up the other downstairs room. Then there was my domain, where I could do what I wanted, sort of, the basement, as in, "Put your shit in the basement.," where the idiot do-it-yourselfer who lived here before had installed a bilco-door from the yard and now we had a waterfall every time it rained.

And the downstairs-bath by the cellar door, the one with the trick toilet, I was king of that too. You had to hold the handle down and stand there and count to a hundred to get it to flush all the way. The utility-he-doesn't-give-a-shit bathroom, as in "Were you trimming your grizzled-ass beard in my new bathroom?  The "No, it's not blood, its dye bathroom. Yes, I dyed my hair in your bathroom, you don't care, besides, you don't think I'm doing it up in mine, do you? And don't spit in my sink!"

And the kitchen, where she'd abdicated, now that the kids were gone, that was my territory too, with the wood-simulated Styrofoam ceiling beams and the gourd yellow counter tops, as in, "The kitchen? Not in these shoes. Not any more. I just did my nails."

  

And of course, I had dominion over the garage,

with the cans of dried up paint, and windshield washer,

shellac, and jelly jars full of nails that crumpled and screws

that couldn't hold a screwdriver, containers of old motor oil, and saws with bent teeth, and some old-ass wooden-handled gadgets even the old guys on the block didn't rember how to use.

Apparently it was against some federal ordinance to put this drek out on the curb. I said to the trash guy, "And I'm saving this for... what?" He looked at me and laughed and got back in his truck. The old bat who lived next door told me, "Ever hear of a rainy day, bub?"

I did eventually clean out the garage. I moved it all down the bilco-doors to the basement for Molly's car and the lawnmower. Now there's another suburban joy, lawns. Talk about a waste, can't eat 'em, can't smoke 'em, not allowed to walk on 'em... One after another down a block where nobody knew nobody. I swear it was a plot to take up weekends, sex-drive, and manure... Cement the damn things over and paint 'em all green. And try growing tomatoes on your lawn. The township of Camden does not appreciate individual agricultural expression. "Yeah, but its a victory garden."

         

"Victory, my ass. Here's your summons."                           

No, they prefer block after block of anonymous banality. How many times I pulled into the neighbor's driveway at night, I can't even count. I'd smell the roast beef and onions; goodness the old bat could cook. I'm thinking, this has gotta' be the wrong driveway, the only thing domestic about Molly is she lives in a house. I'd back out, the old lady spying from behind the blinds in her housecoat and slippers, curlers in a knot, teeth in the freezer, like I was a drunken horny rapist home from the sea.

I see the dumb-ass pulled into the wrong driveway again. He must be drunk. He's only lived here three years now. He knows I'm a widow; a lonely widow, the grizzled pervert, just looking for an excuse."

An excuse? Get me a lawnmower, I'll mow myself over and paint myself green. Talk about a nightmare? She hated me ever since I tried to be neighborly and shovel her walk.

"My son's coming to do it."

Or mow her damn lawn.

"My son's coming to do it."

Well, shit lady, let Super-Shemp come and do it. Preferably some Saturday morning like the rest of the emasculated flannel-wearing eunuchs. See if you can arrange it so he comes when I'm trying to get some extra sleep and make sure he uses the leaf-blower for a couple of hours, my favorite suburban noise to sleep by.

Naturally, my lawn looked like my head since my wife decided to put on her tight little shorts and spot burn it with chemical fertilizer.

"You didn't measure it?"

"Measure?"

The only ones who benefited from these outside displays were Shemp's brothers across the street who told their wives they were going to the basement and ran for their binoculars every time Molly went out to bend over and pick up her UPS Victoria's Secret package.                                                 

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