Crazy Mary Update: 8/27

Our friend Heather has sent us a few requests. One of which is, she asks to be regularly informed of the activities of our neighbor, Mary (who, incidentally, is guano crazy). Many of you have no doubt heard the sordid details of our fractured relationship with our less-than-sane next door neighbor, but for those of you new to the crazy, I’ll give you a little rundown: Mary is a generously proportioned black female in her mid-forties from Detroit. She moved to Alabama as per her doctor's request, because you see, the cold weather in the north was doing her diabetes-ridden body no good (she’s on the cusp of losing her left leg because of it), so she decided to come live near family in the warm temperate Yella Hammer State. Mary has a cropped Sisqo-esque platinum hairdo, she has two large scars running horizontally on the right side of her face, and she frequently chooses to wear over-sized Tweety Bird t-shirts. She occasionally takes midnight trips to the emergency room to accommodate both her diabetic/crazy needs and the needs of her sickly mother (“She Ninety!”, so we’ve been told). Mary’s apartment features a ramshackled plywood handicap ramp (which has been the talk of the Old Cloverdale Committee since its construction) to cater to the hoards of wheelchair-bound miscreants she entertains. Mary has on more than one occasion asked me for a “cold beer” and has employed our other neighbor Luke to help her in a whole smorgasbord of household chores, including detonating bug-bombs and securing hard-to-reach light bulbs. She’s also very loud.

One morning this week, my car (the ever-disabling “Cheetah”) ran out of gas at the foot of my driveway, in the middle of College Street. It was my own damn fault, but that’s not the point. I locked the car, grabbed my iPod and started towards our local cut-throat gas station, dubbed “The Quik-Stab”. Seeing me, Mary runs out from her porch, clad only in sweatpants and an off-white sports bra. She yells “Where the ‘ell you goin’?” To the store, I tell her, to get some gas. “Oh shit, I’ll take ya!” No no, Mary, that’s quite alright. It’s only a block. I got it. “Boy, hang the fuck on! You gonna let me take you to the sto’. That’s what good neighbahs fo!” She ran inside, put on a Tweety Bird shirt, and came out with keys in hand. “Us olds peoples gots ta look out fo you youngah folks! If’n you cain’t help out the young peoples, what the ‘ell good are ya?” (Which, I must point out, I think she has that backwards: I should be helping her, because she’s old, but in my defense she’s old and crazy).

We get to the store. The details about her car are, it’s filthy. There’s a lot of rebar in the backseat. The radio is tuned to an early morning gospel station. The car is the same not-white color of her undershirt. I’m laughing at her thug-vernacular the entire 1 minute trip there.

Anyway, I get the gas can, I fill it up, I’m on the way back to the car, and I lean in and ask her if it’s okay to sit this in the backseat, because it may spill gasoline everywhere. Then, a rotten skeleton of a bum grabs me and says “Excuse me sir, is there a problem?” and leans in to ask Mary “Are you alright, Ma’am?” I tell the guy, I’m her neighbor man, it’s cool. Mary says “Yeah, yeah I’m aight. Get in the car, damnit!” I oblige.

Back within the safety of Mary’s car, she tells me “That dirty mothafuckah, who da fuck he thinks he is, tryin’ ah protect me and shit? He ‘bout got himselfah piece a hot lead in his belly! I don’t need no protection from shit!” Then she pulls out the .38 from her waistband. “You see this thang? It goes with me errywhere! If I get up and go the baffroom, you bettah believe this nigga-killa’s comin wif me!” She went on to tell me that the bum just wanted to get some money from me so he could score a blowjob off of one of his queer-crack buddies, and then how she has the utmost respect for karma: “That niggah’s life is Hell, ‘cause he don’t help nobody. I try ‘n help people, like you, and it always brings me good fortune. We neighbors, we gots ta stick together!”

In the end, I got my car running, and I thanked her. Now I probably owe Crazy Mary some sort of cosmic retribution for her kind acts, and my life got just a little bit weirder.

Next time she asks, I’ll just give her one of my cold beers.