BACKGROUND: My now ex-wife had just come home from the Salem Horror Fest 2019. I’d been doing drugs all weekend, now that she was back, I realized (to my horror) that I couldn’t smoke crack in the house, so I offered to go to the grocery store to get stuff. I also stopped off in our neighbour’s backyard to snort some heroin & smoke some crack off a roll of paper towels. And when I looked up from my sordid endeavours there was a girl standing there who I’ll call Mrs. Lovejoy. A girl anywhere from 26-36, but I’d guess much closer to 36, judging from the weight-of-the-world tiredness she projected.
Like she was responsible for great and important things. We all like to pretend we’re important. She prolly answered phones for a fuckin living. Anyway, we had an encounter. She asked me what I was doing. We’d had a run-in earlier that summer.
You couldn’t get into our backyard from the basement we lived in. You had to go to the side street Nassau and jump a few fences, one of which was hers.
Now, “The Godzilla debacle” was that earlier that year, there had been some kinda party going on…which was usually fine but by 3AM I was tired & getting sick of what sounded like somebody stomping right above our trying-to-sleep-heads so I hopped a few fences and asked the party goers, party doers, to “keep it down a bit,” sounding about as cool and authoritative as Seth Rogen telling Zac Efron in Neighbors (and I assume Neighbors 2, didn’t watch that one)
Jumping the 3 fences required on my way back, I ran into this Mrs. Lovejoy. Who was standing in the middle of her backyard at 3AM.
“What are you doing?” she asked, with palpable disgust in her voice.
I pointed my thumb over my shoulder. “I was asking them to quiet down.”
She stared at me.
I sighed. “There’s no way to get into that backyard from the basement of that house and I live in the basement of that house. So I climbed these fences to ask them to quiet down a bit.”
“Oh-kay?” She looked disgusted, like an invisible bag of shit was being held directly beneath her nose. I had an English teacher with a similar expression in high school. We called her Sourface Shitbag.
With that name already taken, I decided this neighbour was Mrs. Lovejoy.
She clearly didn’t believe me. And her whole vibe just smacked of her being just-on-the-verge-of-screaming “OHHHH! WON’T SOMEBODY PLEASE THINK OF THE CHILDREN!”
Seems a fair & natural nickname to me.
She was one of those people who, you can just tell, they think everything has to do with them. Like the entire world is a movie starring them. Everyone else is a character actor. It’s like Truman Show Delusion without the paranoia but with a lot more entitlement. Such a boring, non-dangerous reason for my 3AM presence in her backyard, shirtless and wearing my Toronto Maple Leafs pajamas, now that just couldn’t be possible. She glared suspiciously at me as I hopped her fence and went back home and went to bed. After that, I didn’t see her until the October encounter which is described below in the handwritten pages. I don’t feel like transcribing what look to me to be totally legible pages, so…go for it.
If you can’t read ‘em, email me @ essayelf at google mail dot com and I’ll put the 4 hours in. I promise.
I apologize for the graphic descriptions of nose picking, but when you snort as much coke as I was, and you don’t use Dristan, there’s a lot of blood and flaking snot the next day. There just is. Sorry. Never said I was an attractive person or what I do is attractive.
It wasn’t specific to the person. I did not target my ex. In fact I ghosted her for 7 months once so I wouldn’t have to subject her to this kind of bullshit. It never is. It’s like a diabetic without insulin. They’ll do whatever it takes.
I’m sorry I turned out this way. I wish I could say “I have a disease” but I don’t believe that. Somewhere along the way I made a choice to keep going, despite knowing I was getting physically, mentally, spiritually, and emotionally addicted to opiates (you wouldn’t believe the fucking depression you go through coming off this stuff. You just. Would. Not. Believe It. Unless it happened to you.) So please reserve a BIT of judgement.
I know a girl who deliberately got addicted to heroin to show her boyfriend how easy it is to quit. She’s still using. He’s dead.
Anyway…this is what my life was like on Oct 13 2019, as an active crack, coke & heroin user:
If you can’t catch the top, it’s “the subway today.”
the missing text is: (I’m assuming here…never had one). I’m high…
The missing text here is: & commence smoking more crack now…
The missing text here is: “realized she had been waiting there the entire time.”
“A stare of such hostility & suspicion…”
“Presently her expression…”