First off, let me just state right out...I'm no freakin' expert with a degree in psychology but, that being said, I do believe I have a better than average awareness of how people tick. Since childhood I've been very sensitive and empathetic about my own experiences and the experiences of others. Prime example right here.
As an adult, I've fallen into career paths that align well with this innate sensibility, using my perception and skills of persuasion in directing persons with intellectual and mental challenges as well as management and sales via call-center customer service. These jobs require one to analyse a person, or a group of people, and deftly handle (perhaps even manipulate) them as needed in real time in order to achieve certain goals. Yes, that means getting in their heads. But that ability has consequences, especially with long-term use that, at least for me, somewhat explains my preference for being a loner.
In my experience, humans in general, and perhaps especially Americans because of the creedo hammered into our heads since grade school, really, REALLY, get antsy when restricted or confined. And two factors can make that antsy-ness get escalated up from irritability to heightened anxiety to outright panic really fast: increased restriction and duration.
Dealing with the massive volume of calls from confused and irate credit cardholders for a major US bank during the height of the 2008 recession as their accounts were force restricted and cancelled for any number of the many risk abatement tactics the bank I worked for instituted is one example. Another, in a totally different industry, is the increased tension and aberrant behavior among the resident population during a bedbug epidemic that quarantined the mental health facility I worked at a few years ago. Two very different situations, and very different populations...but, when you look closer...not really. Mandatory restrictions affecting a large proportion of the community. The first community was vastly larger but the second vastly more insular.
So what's all this have to do with Lucky's sprinkler and who the fuck is "Lucky" anyway?
I got a kinda heavy-fisted knock on my carport door yesterday afternoon. Not a "pounding" and not aggressive, but loud enough to be assertive.
At the door was a rosy-faced gentleman, I'd say in his sixties, wearing a dingy-looking t-shirt and workman jeans and shiny, yellow snakeskin boots. I definitely remember the boots. The toes of the boots were really pointy and reminded me of the boots the Salamanca cartel cousins wore. You know, the hitmen that shot up Hank's car in that parking lot in "Breaking Bad." Except no skulls, just highly-polished brass tips.
He introduced himself as Lucky and he lives at "25-something-something" in the trailer behind me. I'm not redacting the street number he gave, he mumbled through it and I frankly didn't give a fuck so I don't remember. We didn't shake hands, that's a no-no now, folks. Abundance of caution, you know. But he didn't seem the type that would have offered his puffy, liver-spotted mitt anyway.
He asked me if I had "borrowed" the sprinkler he had attached to a hose that ran off the water faucet between our houses. (There's about three or four hoses attached to that fucking thing. I noticed it when I moved in and thought nothing of it anymore but it is odd.) Lucky tried to soften the accusation by saying "I don't mind if you did. But it's not there now. Not sure if you were using it to water your tree or whatever." And as I was commencing a slow nod followed by a forthright denial he said "It may have been Regan, I guess I'll ask him." and started to move away from my door back to his trailer. I bid him a "good day" and added "Good to meet you." to which he said, "Same here."
Okay, first off, I don't deal with landscaping, including watering my lawn. I pay Regan ten bucks a month to do that. I looked back there and it does seem like there's a hose leading from the spigot to my "tree." (It's really an overgrown weed.) I don't ask what Regan does as we agreed his lawn care services to me would be very basic and this time of year, there's not a lot of landscaping to do as the grass isn't growing much yet. It and the weeds will, though, come summer, but not much now.
I can count on one finger (that's right, one finger, not one hand) how many of my neighbors have come over to talk with me in the past year since I moved in. Mary, a fellow hermit and soon-to-be coronavirus victim, with her nasty smoker's hack and loud TV, holed-up right next door. That's it. Well, not counting Regan and his wife Lisa who sold the house to me and still live two doors away, and now, Lucky.
This is how it begins, folks:
Social distancing leads into self-quarantine leads into bars being closed forcing Lucky to stock up on multiple bottles of Popov vodka from the package store before it too is closed.
Lack of preparation leads to being caught off-guard by supply shortages which then leads to Lucky needing to grab his sprinkler from the yard, bring it in his bathroom and use it like a make-shift bidet 'cause the Walmart and dollar stores done run plum out of toilet paper!
Once tensions build up enough, isolation leads into xenophobia. Xenophobia targeting clearly-defined "others" (Lucky calls them the "Coloreds" and the "Spanish") leads into targeting "likely others" like, them "Homo fellas." "Ya know," pipes in Lucky, "they started that AIDS shit in the '80s so I wouldn't put it passed them to be the real cause of this! Well, along with the Chinks. Heck, maybe even queer Chinks?"
One commodity that is never in short supply here in Highlands county (if not all of Florida): guns. Thank Jesus, Lucky can use his Social Security check and get himself a Glock like Regan. They can form a "Neyborhood Watch." And they spell it that way so's if you're a grammar queen they can add you to their "List."
As I type this, I think I see, out my bedroom window, the flickering glow of tiki torches being carried down the street by a grizzly bunch of holstered-up retirees.
One of them, sportin' a mean pair of gleaming yellow snakeskin boots, and a big brown stain on the ass of his jeans, hollers out for all the trailer park to hear, "Whichever one of you mother fuckers stole my fuckin' sprinkler is gonna get some tonight!"