Dead Man's Honda

For the first ten years of my life I felt very much like an exhibit in Ripley’s Believe It Or Not.

This isn’t because I did things like walk around the playground slamming my arm into metal pipes hoping my arm would break so that I could get a brightly-colored cast for all my friends to sign. No. This was because I have a large family—which for some reason fascinated everyone.

“Are you all brothers and sisters?” Yes, we would say. “Do you have the same parents?” Yes, we would say again. “Are they married?”



Uh. No, they just get together now and then to produce another offspring.

“Are you Mormon?” No.

“Are you Catholic?” No.

“Are you part of a cult that has lots and lots of children?” Hmmm….not that we know of, but let us ask our mom.

What I knew as a child and what I still know, is that I was far more fortunate than any other child on earth because I had five best friends built in. Five best friends, I presumed, who would be there for life.

“Ok, Linds,” I would say “This is the deal. When we get older, we’ll want kids like our dolls, but we don’t want to be married so we’ll get married and have kids and then promise we’ll kill our husbands and live in a cottage in the woods with the kids, ok? Promise.” Lindsey would stare at me with her large, blue eyes and nod silently as she often did to whatever insanity I presented to her like, “hey eat this," when handing her some unidentified object.

Fortunately she didn’t always obey me.

“What about the other kids?” she would ask. Certainly we needed everyone else. So I told her: Landon would be our protector like he always was. He would also be in charge of games, which he also always did. Delissa, as the oldest, would cook for us and probably do some cleaning like she always had to do. “You can help her,” I would say to Lindsey. Desiree would make us do school which I would escape (like I always did) and Liam and I would do the hunting.

One holiday season the three youngest of us (Lindsey, Liam and me) decided we would make a beautiful gingerbread house for Desiree when she arrived home from Seattle where she was dancing. Delissa and Landon were gone, our parents were too. We set to work.

Our first mistake was using a recipe that was printed on the holiday table cloth. Then, after cutting out the sides of gingerbread that were now about 12” by 18” we realized we didn’t have enough gingerbread for four sides and the roof. We had enough for three sides and one slab of roof.

“I have an idea,” Liam suggested “Let’s use cardboard. It looks like gingerbread and we’ll just cover it in frosting anyway.”

“Great idea Liam,” I said to him and set to work. I’m sure Lindsey was shaking her prudent little head but Liam and I never listened to her anyway.

The pieces were so huge, though, that we couldn’t get them to stick and stay without sliding into a clump in the middle of the table. Mixing more and more frosting we plastered the sloped building until we thought it would finally stick.

It wouldn’t.

Three hours, several nails, glue mixed with the frosting and duct tape rolls later, Landon and Delissa arrived home.

We had frosting everywhere—including the ceiling and all over our entire bodies. The gingerbread house looked like a renovated dumpster had bred with a cream-bearing cow.

“Oh. My. Gosh.” They said and started laughing. “You guys are dead meat,” they added. “Is that….duct tape?”

Normally they rescued us but this time they didn’t. We were left to clean up the disaster ourselves and to give Desiree the ugliest, not-edible gingerbread house any human beings had ever seen.

We look much more innocent in the above picture than we ever actually were. Landon isn’t in the picture unfortunately. Or maybe he was just cleaning up one of our messes.

Our apartment has…problems.

I don’t mean of the usual nature—noisy neighbors, an obnoxious landlord, or unsupervised children, though we have all of those. I mean larger, more hazardous problems.

Two and half years ago when I moved in with my sisters they warned me they lived in a bad neighborhood. I didn’t believe them partly because the apartment didn’t seem that offensive on the surface, and partly because the neighborhood didn’t look very decrepit either. I was unaware that the high, nicely clipped hedges didn’t provide privacy for little families, but rather hid drug dens and other illicit businesses.

My second night living there a very intoxicated individual decided to try to beat down our door and windows for no real reason. Rather than chasing him off, a fellow apartment complex dweller tried to HELP him bust through the window.

Two days after that a man tried to break into my car.

While I was still in it.

This type of thing happened alot. So we mentioned the intruders to the little kids who lived in the neighborhood and frequented our apartment. They weren’t surprised at all.

“Well yeah,” said a rounded little boy “Where’as your baseball bat, then?”

“What?” I asked.

“Didn’t you have your baseball bat by the front door? That’s what we all do, y’all gotta get yourselves a baseball bat and stick it right there. My momma beat the shit outta this guy….” He went on to say while my mouth hung open at the candid, colorful-mouthed, eight year old.

“Girls,” I said, “We need a baseball bat.”

“Oh, don’t worry about it,” Desiree offered, “I’ve got this:”

She stored a white plastic, eight-inch flashlight in the bookshelf by the door.

“That?!” I exclaimed.

“Yeah….” She said “This is to protect us…”

Yes, I thought, hold on robber, I’m going to blind you to death with my… flashlight….you back up now.

Shortly after that we discovered an old man was living in the garage. He belonged to the family in the unit next to us who chained their dog to a pole and smoked marijuana with their kids all day long. They were finally evicted when the “family” expanded to about eleven people in the one bedroom apartment. Then a single woman moved in. She’s a prostitute who cleans the house next to our complex where she is also provided narcotics.

Once the neighborhood stopped threatening our lives (they accept our presence now) the building itself started to.

Not only is the thing not “up to code”, it’s hazardous in part because our landlord thinks he’s a carpenter/plumber/jack-of-all-trades when in fact he is jack of none.

One afternoon when Lindsey walked through the front door our television was smoking. Another television after that shorted out completely, as did the microwave (it blew up too—smoke filled the kitchen and the beeper went off for a few hours before the thing officially gave up its pathetic life and died). Our computers have smoked. A blender blew up. A fan died. So did a heater. Hair dryers—gone. Our new microwave is so powerful the bad wiring couldn’t blow it up so it blew out the wiring and the entire complex went dark.

The artists who live next door requested that Henry, our landlord, install an air conditioner during the summer when it was so hot outside I slept on the floor (instead of my top bunk) and covered myself in frozen vegetable packets. We also requested that he install airconditioning.

Henry delivered to us a wall unit air conditioner he said he got from someone who died. I’m wondering if he’s killing people off just to take their stuff. He left it on our kitchen table for a few months until we tried to install it, broke a window, and threw it away.

Our neighbors were a bit luckier. Henry took a saw and cut a hole in the side of their apartment and just shoved a wall unit into the hole and left it there.

Problem solved.

And like I said before, the man who died on his carpet in the front unit? His carpet is still in there and last night I saw our new neighbors who moved into that unit.

Welcome to the neighborhood people, I thought, welcome to the neighborhood.