When I was growing up there where two eccentric’s if you will. One I have already written about in a previous post who was known as Smiley Jesus among the neighborhood kids. This post pertains to the second.
She was a woman in here mid to late fifties with long mostly white hair tied up in a loose bun. She wore a full length goose down style winter coat no matter what time of year it was. She was always sporting Jackie O. like sunglasses the ones with the huge circular frames. She also had applied so much rouge that it fully covered both of her cheeks in giant clown like circles. Her uncommon attire also included a Golf Visor, and lastly a pair of cheap white velcro sneakers. This may have well been her official uniform because it NEVER changed EVER.
Aside from her bizarre sense of fashion the other key aspect about Her was she never spoke. Not a single word. At most she might have flashed a quick smile as she walked by with her hands in her jacket pockets. Come to think of it I don’t think I ever saw her hands out of her jacket pockets.
Now we fast forward a bit and I’m now 16 or so and dating my first real Girlfriend/High School Sweetheart who lived in the neighborhood adjacent to mine. I asked her one day if she had seen this odd woman walking around in her neighborhood as well growing up. Not only did she yes she had, but she went on to tell me that the Woman in question actually lived somewhere in her neighborhood.
We tried half assed measure in lame attempts to locate the weird Woman’s house to no avail. We had all but lost interest when we got some additional information pertaining to the peculiar Woman’s back story.
The information came from my Girlfriend’s Mother. It turned out that her Mom grew up at the same time, in the same town, and went to the same school as the strange Woman. Apparently the Woman was not what you would call popular by any means. In fact she was bullied pretty brutally from the few stories we were told by my Girlfriend’s Mother, and she was as guilty as the rest when it came to relentlessly tormenting the Woman as a Girl.
The one story I remember was my Girlfriend’s Mother telling us she and her gang of friends from school lured the Woman then just a girl to some near by woods. They then tied her to a tree and berated the shit out of her non stop for over an hour. Once they got tired of teasing her to the point of tears they up and left her there tied to a tree. No one knows the exact details but obviously someone heard her crying for help or passed by and cut her free.
Needless to say as the story got darker the more I found myself fascinated by the morbidity of it all. A months or so after hearing the tortured tale of the Woman’s unhappy childhood (on no day in particular) my Girlfriend and I decided to go for a late day walk. It was the middle of July so we hid inside clinging to the Air Conditioning until dusk when it was cool enough to venture outside.
We had only gone about 5 or 6 blocks when all of a sudden we became aware of a extremely heated argument. This wasn’t surprising since being Summer many people left the front door open optimizing their screen doors to enjoy the cool Summer evenings.
The chaotic commotion was coming from a house to our right that stood atop a small hill. The front door was indeed wide open allowing anyone passing buy to hear the insanity inside, and I do mean insanity. We heard a lady screaming at the top of her lungs, and we knew that we had accidentally stumbled across the Weird Woman’s house. We both turned and stared at one another in shear shock and awe at first, and then we returned our attention back to the madness raging inside of this otherwise absolutely normal looking suburban home.
The sounds emulating from the front door where like none I had never heard before in my life, and have rarely heard since. The Woman was in the middle of what seemed to be an argument that was spiraling out of control. The Woman was intensely enraged and her blood curdling screams in were purely primal.
I couldn’t tell you what the fuck the argument was about, but that is more than likely because we only heard one side of the argument. This was due to the fact that whoever the Woman was yelling at so savagely DIDN’T EXIST. They weren’t imaginary either like a hallucination (though now that I’m mulling it over she could have been hallucinating, but not because of Drugs but due to Mental Illness of some sort.) Anyway for all intensive purposes it appeared that the Woman having a knock- down-drag- out fight with her Dead Husband.
We stood there for several minutes completely mesmerized by the madness we were witnessing. It was quite clear that this Woman was just an eccentric she was legitimately batshit crazy. Once the terrible trance wore off my Girlfriend and I hightailed the hell out of there, and didn’t even pause for a brief second to look back.
And ever since that fateful evening We have never passed by that house again even though the psychotic Woman passed away many, many years ago.
(*FUBAR stands for Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition)
Thanks for Reading,
Les Sober 