- Neighbors.
Debbie O'Doyle hated me.
She couldn't help it.
The dreadlocked white boys who'd rented
the house before me, spend their tuition money,
turning the basement into a psychedelic farm
and retirees with plastic deer lawn ornaments
rarely enjoy being woken up at 3:00 AM,
by flower crown sorority girls riding their plastic fawn
to the center of a previously respectable street.
After to three years of pressing binoculars to her window,
writing down the license plate numbers
of every Jeep Wrangler with an aim
of fungi bumper sticker,
Debbie finally convinced the cops to bust the door down
and harvest the fungus, which was bountiful for me,
only because the lock wasn't properly fixed
and the landlord was forced
to knock $100 off my first month's rent
and Debbie O'Doyle didn't see me as an upgrade
to the neighborhood.
I suspect because I had nothing
to show for myself on moving day,
except a box of tattered books, an old bicycle
and a couch I'd found on the curb, a block away,
which she'd see me roll on two skateboards
to the front door, tattooed and shoeless,
singing a folk song with the F-word in the chorus.
"Here's another one come to grow mushrooms
and a turd pile under the house," she must have thought.
Having no way of knowing,
I wouldn't dream of growing psychedelics in my home.
I do what everyone else does
and buy them from a friend who grows them in his home.
And I certainly wouldn't stoop to eating the god buttons
and the concrete hell of the city,
when there were real live deer waiting for me
to ride them in the forest, just two miles away.
For an entire year,
Debbie O'Doyle watched me like a detective Hawk,
screeching as if I were the one with the claws
and she were the one with the puncture wounds
and the ever bleeding skull of her solitude, "Andrea,
that BBQ of yours better be over by 9:00 PM sharp.
Andrea, your dandelions aren't going to weed themselves.
Andrea, if you try to pretend that roof is a party deck,
one more time...
Andrea!
Andrea!"
I had no idea how she knew my name.
Introductions don't happen from opposite sides of a street
and Debbie refused to cross the road,
spent the entirety of her days,
pacing the end of her driveway,
begging me to take one step out of the house,
so she could belt, "Andrea,
your theater friends stole my ornamental toad."
The only thing I ever remember speaking
to Debbie O'Doyle was, "They aren't my theater friends.
They are poet friends,
and they would never in a million years
steal your plastic lawn toad."
But I knew they stole her toad of course
and this is where our relationship was
and where I knew it would remain
when I woke up that September morning
to my landline ringing like a siren,
my friend to the wire crying, "Turn on the TV!
Turn on the TV."
It was 2001.
Not only did I not have a TV, I didn't have the internet,
a cell phone or a car.
So, shoeless and still in my pajamas,
I did the unthinkable and ran across the street
to pound on Debbie's door.
She was so unsurprised to see me.
I knew the world had changed.
We sat on opposite ends of her sofa,
as a cloud of black smoke screamed
from the top of the north tower.
I wanted to turn my eyes from the screen,
but knew what I couldn't see was worse.
The people on the floors, above the ones on fire,
calling home and getting a machine,
and then what it is for a mother to stare down a plane,
nose to nose.
The news caster spotted something that stole his capacity
to speak and Debbie and I moved closer on the couch.
Was it right then,
that she understood the neighbors before me
and their desperation to grow another world?
Was it right then, that I asked her her name?
(Andrea clears throat) (audience clapping)