Just last week, Bonnie and I were talking about how there are three types of men in this city we live in. There’s the old guy with long grey hair, long grey beard, and a great big fat diabetic belly. There’s his 20 – 40-year-old younger counterpart with a dark beard, and who knows what’s going on on top of his head because he’s always got a hat on and the beginnings of a diabetic belly. And then, there’s the slightly more affluent old guy with a shaved head and a grey goatee. A Tommy Bahama shirt is usually covering his big fat diabetic belly, and he can possibly be found sucking on a cigar and fantasizing that it’s a big hard cock.

These guys are so ubiquitous that they could be carved into a rock in one of the hills that surround the city. I think that’s why I noticed this guy. Well, I noticed him because he and his wife crossed the street so that they could walk in front of me. I think I’ve mentioned in this blog how much I hate that, but if I didn’t, let me tell you, I fucking hate it when people cross the street just so they can walk in front of me. At least this pair could walk at a decent clip. They weren’t walking faster than me, but they were walking as fast as me, so I wasn’t gaining on them and creating that awkward moment where I’m walking too closely behind them but not fast enough to pass them.

So, while I was walking behind them, I noticed how skinny the man’s legs were. The wife wasn’t fat, but compared to his legs, she looked like she was walking around on ham hocks. You don’t often see such skinny men, at least not in my city, and not white. There’s a skinny older guy who lives down my street named Bernie. He’s a skeleton. Other than him, I can’t think of another skinny man that I know.

When I was a kid, we had a neighbor about four doors down who was very skinny. His name was Doug. He was a strange cat, and I knew that even when I was a kid and hadn’t yet figured out that everyone was weird. In the 90s, he still wore head-to-toe polyester with butterfly collars and bell bottoms. My dad said that he was the only person he had ever met in his life who could spend 8 hours working on a car in white pants and a white shirt and not get a drop of grease on himself.

I used to knock on his door whenever I was selling candy for school fundraisers. Doug would always turn me down in the same way. “We don’t eat candy in this house.” That’s not really the point, I would always think to myself. He kept a padlock on his refrigerator to prevent his son, Kurt, from helping himself to food. Kurt had Down syndrome. He was four or five years older than me, and he was an asshole.

He was a big fan of The Incredible Hulk TV series. If you made him mad, he would hulk out, and because he had that super-human retard strength, he was actually quite dangerous when he did. Once, when I was three or four, Kurt threw me over the hood of a car. Fortunately, I have no memory of the incident.

Kurt would also go around the neighborhood and steal shit out of everyone’s garages. Then, a few times a year, his dad would go around to each house and return the stolen items. Sometimes, he would have more than just what he was returning to our house and ask if we knew who it belonged to.

Doug had an older son, too. I think his name was Kevin. He was an asshole, too. He was an alcoholic and was always causing trouble. While driving drunk one night, he took out the tree in front of our house. Our house sat at the apex of a bend in the street, so drunk drivers would crash into our yard a lot in the 80s. They took out so many mailboxes that my dad had enough. He buried a bunch of telephone poles in 5′ of concrete and stuck the mailbox on top of one of them. Strangely, no one ever crashed into our yard again.

Doug sold his house sometime in the early 90s and moved away. I never knew where. Then, one day in 1999, he showed up at my door in a white polyester shirt and light blue slacks, with a posthole digger that he said he had borrowed from my dad about 15 years earlier. He may have been a shit dad, but you can’t say the man didn’t have as much character as the character that he was.