Bright Lights, Big Ass: A Self-Indulgent, Surly, Ex-Sorority Girl's Guide to Why It Often Sucks in the City, or Who Are These Idiots and Why Do They All Live Next Door to Me? (36 page)

To:
angie_at_home, carol_at_home, wendy_at_home, jen_at_work

From:
[email protected]

Subject:
i suppose a salad would be far too pedestrian

Ladies,

Brace yourselves.

For I have horrible news.

Fletch has taken it upon himself
to start cooking again.

By using multiple burners and the oven, he raised the temperature in here from a manageable seventy-six to an unpleasant eighty-six last night. (We have central AC, but it’s no match for hundred-degree temperatures
and
Fletch’s cooking.)

So, what did he prepare that was worth ten degrees and a portion of my sanity?

BLT pasta.

Mmm-hmm, that’s right.

Bacon, lettuce, and tomato
pasta.

And what’s better on a scorching day than a big bowl of hot lettuce and sweaty tomatoes coated in a thin sheen of bacon grease? While discussing our dinner plans for tonight, he mentioned he might use the leftover lettuce to whip up some soup…which neatly answers the question whether there’s anything
less
appealing than hot lettuce pasta on a sweltering summer day.

Send help.

Or pizza.

Jen

To:
angie_at_home, carol_at_home, wendy_at_home, jen_at_work

From:
[email protected]

Subject:
gladys kravitz rides again

’S up, girls?

With my recent no-tree-left-behind pogrom, it’s abundantly clear I’m a yard Nazi. Every year I treat my planting like I’m participating in the Sheffield Garden Walk. Gardening for me is less of a Zen activity and more of a way to thrash my neighbors in a competition they didn’t know they’d entered.

That being said, there’s no way anyone’s yard will be up to my satisfaction. I know this. I accept this. This is my cross to bear. The fact the old, weird hippies next door refuse to do anything so patrician as fix their windows with glass instead of garbage bags or mow their “grass” is essentially none of my business. (BTW, I used to feel sorry for them because I thought they were poor. I’ve since learned they feed their dogs the $40/bag
vegan
kibble from Whole Foods. Shit, I can’t afford
people
kibble at Whole Foods.) If they choose to be slovenly, it’s their privilege to do so. And if I don’t like it, I have a fence to hide their three-foot-tall weed patch.

However, when my hose sprays under their fence and the water causes the entire community of mice nesting in their unmown yard to
surge at me in a sea of wet gray fur
, I have a legitimate gripe.

(Yes, I did have to go upstairs and lie down after all the screaming.)

Once my voice recovered, I called the city and used as few four-letter words as possible under the circumstances to lodge a complaint. I calmly explained that if my dogs eat one of the rabid mice living so comfortably in the neighbors’ overgrown backyard, we’re going to have a real problem after I beat the old hippies with my shovel. The city said something about poisoning the alley again and having Streets and Sanitation talk to the folks next door, but they couldn’t really force my neighbors to do anything, and if they actively chose to harbor mice, so be it.

And then I may or may not have started yelling and spouting shovel-wielding threats.

Anyway, you’d think that would have ended the issue.

Enter today.

I woke up really early and decided to get a running start on the day. After vacuuming, mopping, polishing, scrubbing, and washing any fabric that comes in contact with pets, it wasn’t even eleven a.m. yet. So, I decided I’d prune my plants and give them a healthy dose of Miracle-Gro. The dogs hung out in the yard with me until they’d had their fill of hose water. After putting them inside so they could immediately start making things smell like wet dog again, I headed back down my stairs to hit my terra-cotta planters.

I was in the process of deadheading my geraniums when I saw a big gray butt skulk under the stairs. My first thought was,
Damn it, how did my cat Jordan get out here?
She’s always trying to let herself out, and I’m always extra-vigilant about not letting her. I walked over to the stairs and called to her.

What came out the other side was not Jordan.

It was a rat
the size of
Jordan.

Instead of screaming myself hoarse like when the mice washed into the yard, I completely froze. The rat looked at me, took a bite of delicious ivy, chewed it, and looked at me again, as if to say,
“Yeah, you know what? Fuck you,”
before leisurely slipping through a hole in the fence the size of a quarter. (Apparently the dogs, hose, and I had been disturbing him.)

So, not only have our repeated attempts to poison and drown the rats been unsuccessful, they’ve found a way to feed on our weakness and have morphed into some super-breed with the strength of ten rats and the attitude of a fourteen-year-old boy.

So now I’m obsessing about my neighbors, their decayed and infested yard, and the damage I could inflict with said spade.

For now the war is
on.

Like
Donkey Kong.

(Shut up, it almost rhymes.)

Off to polish my shovel,

Jen

from the desk of Miss Jennifer A. Lancaster

Dear Alderman,

Today I received your campaign literature asking me for my vote in your bid to become a District Congressman in the State of Illinois.

Here’s why you won’t receive it.

According to your own brochure, you’re the person who “wrote and passed the City Council ordinance calling for an end to the war.” The first time I heard about this, I thought it was an
Onion
headline or Leno monologue. This leads me to wonder—if Chicago can call for the end of a war, would the reverse be true? Could
we
also declare war? If so, we should totally go kick Saint Louis’s ass just because they’ve been asking for it, sitting down there all smug for so long. We’ll paint the Arch yellow and claim it in the name of McDonald’s!

Seriously, though, whether or not I support the war is not the issue. (And actually, I admire the principle that drove you to make such a declaration.) However, the issue here is that I’d greatly prefer the City Council to concentrate on issues confined to, you know,
the actual city.
Once you guys resolve the problems we have with drugs, gangs, poverty, homelessness, and internal governmental corruption, then sure, feel free to branch out—you’ll have earned that right. Until then, let’s try to concentrate on Cook County, okey-dokey? In regard to issues currently within your control, I’ve been calling your office for six months about getting a new city-issued garbage can. You’ve yet to resolve this. How exactly are you going to broker a lasting peace agreement in the Middle East like your brochure says when you can’t even procure me another plastic receptacle? Also, you
are
going to have a war on your hands in your own district if the weird family next door shoots me one more dirty look. (I do thank you for responding to my four hundred requests to cut down the tree in their front yard, though. Now my living room is even sunnier!)

If you’re as “tough on terror” as you are on the neighborhood rat situation, then we have a
big problem
. What started out as a “pack” of rats in my alley became a “hoard” and is now verging on “swarm.” And I’m going to be one pissed-off resident if I catch bubonic plague in my own backyard.

Also, do you honestly believe including a photo of a SpaghettiO-covered baby with the caption
Who’s going to clean up George Bush’s mess?
to be the best way to persuade me about the horrors of war? If so, I urge you to fire your campaign manager, like, immediately. I have two words about effective campaign imagery for you, pal—“Daisy Girl.” Please consult Lyndon B. Johnson’s play-book if you’re confused. You’ll note his marked lack of SpaghettiOs usage. (You should probably avoid any “Hang in There, Kitty” imagery as well.)

Finally, can you please tell the rest of the aldermen to stop voting to ban pit bulls and foie gras within city limits? This is the kind of ridiculous shit that makes me want to pack up and live in a militia compound in the middle of Wyoming, which would suck because I’m sure there’s no Trader Joe’s or Target anywhere near there.

By the way, if I move, I’m leaving the rats here.

Best,

Jen Lancaster

P.S. You included a lot of photos of yourself in your brochure and all I can say is, a mustache
and
leather suspenders? No.