My Nextdoor Neighbor

So . . . his name is Darrin. The first day I met him, he was sitting on his front porch, drinking a beer with his “buddy” and using a telescope to examine the menus at a nearby Sonic. Darrin is what I would call a “good ol’ boy.” He hast a country accent, wears tattered Budweiser shirts, keeps his red frizzled hair in a pony tail, and loves a cold beer after a day of grueling manual labor.

Almost everyday without question, I come home and find him on his porch, having a beer. Every time he finishes a brew, he crushes the can in one hand, and lazily tosses it out onto his front lawn. He has another one opened before the previous hits the grass.

One day when my lawn had become a little overgrown, he came over and said, “Hey, man – if you mow your lawn, I’ll pick up all the beer cans in my yard.” I told him it was a deal and immediately had my yard mowed.

Anyway, about two months ago a group of shady blacks moved into the house next door to Darrin. Their arrival has turned Darrin’s life upside down. It all started when a group of them walked through his yard one night. Their trespassing on his property bothered him so much that he attached a “NO TRESPASSING SIGN” to the front of his house.

When I came home from work one evening, Darrin hopped off his porch – beer in hand – and immediately clarified the story behind the sign.

“Hey, man,” said Darrin, stepping off his porch. “I don’t want you to think I’m an asshole or nothing – you can come in my yard all you damn well please – I just put this sign up here to keep these fucking niggers outta my yard . . . I caught ‘em creeping around here last night at three in the morning . . . I’ll tell you what – they ain’t nothing but a bunch of drug dealers and I just want some peace and quiet.”

There have been several incidents where Darrin has verbally attacked our black neighbors. He’ll scream things like, “My buddy’s a police officer – one phone call is all it’ll take! One phone call!”

It’s hard to tell if the new neighbors actually have something against Darrin, or if Darrin just has something against them.

Apparently his war with our black neighbors has been escalating over the last several weeks. It got to the point where Darrin suspected that one of them had siphoned gas from his truck in the middle of the night.

Well, this, of course, only made things worse. Eventually, after a week of sleepless nights, Darrin actually caught one of these men siphoning gasoline from his pick-up at 2 AM. Darrin proceeded to chase the man into the house next door, where he met about 20 of the man’s friends . . . waiting and ready to kick his ass. Needless to say, Darrin received a severe beating.

Several days after the incident, I came home from work, and as usual, Darrin greeted me. He looked horrible. He spoke with a lisp . . . something I’d never noticed before. He struggled to recount the situation, stopping often and swallowing hard. He showed me bruises that covered his arms, face, and ribs. Then, after a hard swallow, he asked, “Reid . . . do you have a strong stomach?”

I hesitantly answered, “Yes.”

Darrin put his beer in his left hand as he used his right to pull-up his upper lip. I was expecting his front teeth to be missing . . . but it was far worse than that. Darrin’s front teeth has been jammed back into the roof of his mouth, yet were somehow still connected to his gums, which had somehow been pulled forward. Everything was black and purple.

Darrin explained that once he was in the neighboring house, one of the men thwacked him in the mouth with the butt of an unopened beer bottle. Needless to say, Darrin had been living on applesauce, soup, and beer for the past several days.

He told me that he was going into the hospital for surgery soon and that he was extremely nervous. The last time he went in for surgery, the anesthetic stopped his heart and he almost died. Darrin asked me to keep an eye on his car for him and to call the police if I saw any of our neighbors siphoning his gas.

Darrin went in the hospital almost 10 days ago. I haven’t heard anything from him. His porch remains empty in the afternoons. Who knows . . . he might be dead.