It's Neighbor-Day Weekend!

Hello. This is the increasingly mighty Weekend Gene Pool where I entertain you in exchange for your questions / complaints / observations on a specific subject, for use in next week’s Gene Pools. Today’s subject is: Funny, outrageous, compelling or otherwise interesting experiences you have had with neighbors. The idea was occasioned by your responses to the Gene Pool Gene Poll on Thursday, which showed, among other things, that in the realm of hate-the-next-door-neighbors, politics matters a lot. (Surprise! The Gene Pool is based in Washington, D.C.")

I am going to reprint here a column I once wrote about a neighbor. It is in my secret, unpublished list of my 10 favorite columns of all time. It is ironic, but not funny. Do not let it be a guide to the sort of thing you should write — for one thing, you’ll probably never get a bizarre set of circumstances to compare with it. But I AM looking for compelling, as well as funny. So this sort of thing is on the table, too.

I’m reprinting the column here, in full. It was written in September 2020, at the height of the pandemic.

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A neighbor asked for a tomato. This is where the story gets weird.

I was on my laptop in the dining room of my row house in downtown Washington, D.C., when someone rapped at the window. There was a man there, in my backyard. This is a good neighborhood, but a gritty one. Cautiously, I cracked the door.

The man was maskless, but as soon as he saw me, he stepped back a few feet, creating a social distance, a move that seemed friendly. He was in his early 30s, powerfully built. I opened the door fully.

“My name is Seth,” he said. “I’m a neighbor, and I see you walking your big brown dog, and sometimes a cat is with you.” All true. He had established his bona fides. “My mother just died, and she loved cooking green tomatoes.” He nodded toward my small tomato garden. “Could I take a tomato, in her honor?”He seemed winningly earnest. “You can’t take a tomato,” I said, “but you can take five or six. Just help yourself.”

He looked at me, and then back at the garden. “Can I take a whole plant?” he asked. He sensed my suspicion: It would give him pleasure to watch the tomatoes grow, he explained, cooking them up when they were large and green enough, the way his ma did.

My garden isn’t a garden so much as 17 big plastic pots with a plant in each. There isn’t much dirt in the inner city, so I’d imported my own. His request was a little ... odd, but you know. His ma. I invited him to choose a plant, and he did, and waddled off with it. They’re pretty heavy.

A couple of days later I met him in the street. He was still maskless, but this time was also shirtless. He reminded me who he was and wanted to thank me again for the tomato plants.

Plants?

“I came back at night and took another one.”

Silence. He indignantly asked me to thank him for thanking me for the plants.

“You stole a plant,” I said.

At this point he launched into a high-pitched, high-decibel condemnation of me. It was personal and nasty. He also informed me that he owned five houses and that I should be compassionate and make allowances because his mother had died. I began backing away into my house. He asked me if I had anything to tell him — he really, really wanted that thank you — and I responded that what I most wanted to tell him was to wear a mask.

The next day, there were firetrucks in front of my house. A firefighter told me that there had been an altercation involving a neighbor and a firefighter was injured. The other end of the block was all police cars. One of the cops told me that a man had been selling scrounged goods illegally from a nearby parking lot, and that when he was confronted, he became violent and smashed the window of a firetruck. I looked at the assemblage of scrounged goods. Among the items — a door, some clothes hangers, a broken kids’ bike — there was at least one big plastic flower pot; no plants inside.

The officer said the man was being taken into custody. He nodded toward a police van. From inside I heard someone screaming, “Let me go! My mother died! My mother died!”

Ah.

The next day I stopped at a neighborhood convenience store near where Seth had been apprehended. The proprietor, whom I know well, told me Seth had been a nice man, a good customer, until recently, when he began to act erratically. I asked him if Seth had been released from jail yet. That’s usually what happens with relatively minor crimes.

He looked at me like I was nuts.

“He won’t be released,” he said.

Why?

“He’s been charged with murder. He strangled his mother.”

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So, um, horrific is fair game. But mostly try for funny, unusual, touching, weird. Must be true, like my story is.

Here’s one that’s also true: I once lived in a very small row-house apartment in Brooklyn, N.Y. How small was it? There were two full-sized rooms — a bedroom and a living room — and between them was a narrow, galley kitchen. How narrow? If the oven door was open, you could not walk from the living room to the bedroom. The worst part was that at the time, NYC landlords were allowed to cut off the heat at 10 p.m and then not turn it on again until 7 a.m. In the dead of the horrible winter of 1979 (average daily low, 14 degrees), the overnight apartment temperature would sometimes plummet to freezing.

I could not get our landlord — he lived right across the street — to make an exception for us. My wife had a full-time job and was in law school, so she would often have to be awake, studying, at 5 a.m, in a chair, under a blanket, teeth chattering, breathing out smoke. When we left (to live in Miami!) I gave the landlord a final payment — $8 or so, to cover some extraneous incidental. It was in cash, encased in ice.

So that’s what I am asking for — neighbor stories. But I’m also open to more of last week’s offerings — song lyrics that blow you away, from any artist, any era. Send both here, to this handsome orange button, along with any other questions or observations. Nothing is out of bounds:

This bears repeating: The button is handsome. It is for you to send in neighbor stories and song lyrics and other stuff. The one below is the selfsame button, and goes to the same place, only it is lower on the page, for shorter people:

And lastly:

The Gene Pool is a success. We have many thousands of subscribers in 49 states and 70-plus countries who read it for free, and many hundreds of subscribers who have chosen to donate a small amount ($4.15 a month) to assure our survival. If you enjoy reading us, we’d be grateful if you would consider graciously leaping from the first group to the second. You do that by using an even handsomer orange button, right here: