Puppet Head

Before I moved from Havana, FL to Horse and Lightning Country, FL, I had a number of delightful experiences. I lived in a little 4-apartment building (quadraplex) in the midst of a residential neighborhood. Oh, and such good neighbors they were. Even though I was in America, there was only one other American for miles around. And he was the only other one that spoke English for miles around. Of course, he was also drunk half the time, so a lot of times, even the English he spoke was hard to understand. I couldn’t blame him for being drunk so often, because, after all, when you’re a foreigner in your own country, it gets depressing.

It was hard to sleep at night. Not because of sleep apnea or anything like that, but because of the extremely loud parties that were always going on, that sounded like they were only 30 feet from your bed that you were lying down in. In fact, they were only 30 feet away. The houses were very close together (and I don’t mean the other apartments, which only shared thin walls butted up against each other. I’m talking about the houses in the neighborhood.), and my apartment had all jalousy windows, which were not made to keep out sound. And not only the loud parties that went on after midnight, but also the gunshots. And the cats outside fighting and making noise. Not my cats, mind you. I didn’t have any cats. I mean my neighbors’ 65 cats. Also, the roosters who stood just outside my window, only 5 feet from my bed, would crow all day and all night. I thought roosters only crowed at sunrise. I was wrong. These roosters crowed at 2 AM, then again at 4 AM, then again at 7 AM. Then they would walk across the street where they lived so that the owner could sacrifice one of them in his nightly animal sacrifice ritual of getting drunk, waving a rooster around his head in circles while chanting in Spanish, and then cutting off the rooster’s head and throwing him onto the railroad tracks, as if anybody would actually believe that a rooster got run over by the train every night in the same area.

Oh, yes. The railroad tracks. Another reason I could not sleep at night. The railroad track was about 40 feet from my apartment. I thought trains came once a day at most. Not this train. It came 3 times a day, mostly late at night, or around 3 AM while I was trying to sleep. And I thought trains were supposed to keep their whistles silent when going through a residential neighborhood. Not this train. It waited till it came right up on us, and then it let out a whistle blow that could break the eardrums of any normal person.

After getting up in the morning and getting a good hour or two of sleep, I would open the door of my little one-bedroom apartment to walk the 25-foot walk along the asphalt walkway to where my car was parked. Most mornings I had to wade through the 45 chickens and roosters who had run away from their house across the street, probably out of fear, since one of them had been sacrificed in a Santeria ceremony the night before. And, with so many chickens and roosters gathered together in one little area, I had to tip-toe through a landmine of chicken poop. This was a challenge indeed, because there was only a “poopless” area every 2 or 3 feet or so. If they had been true land mines, I would have been dead long ago.

Don’t get me wrong. I lived on a farm for 4 months, which had chickens and goats, so I was used to chickens. But I was used to them being out in the barn, several hundred or more feet away from the house. Not a few feet away from my bed, just outside a thin wall with jalousy windows that provided zero sound proofing. And the roosters on that farm did indeed seem to only crow at sunrise. But these hordes of chickens and roosters that lived across the street from me apparently knew that they existed only to be decapitated in a satanic ritual, so I suppose their crowing at all hours of the day and night were because they were terrified of their destined fate.

And, with there being so many cats around, every time I walked to my car, it smelled like the entire area was one giant litterbox. And that’s because it was. I never knew cats could leave such a sickening smell. And people say cats are clean…yeah, right.

Years ago, I took a date with me to Key Biscayne. Ah, the beach. And the water. And the rats. Rats?? Oh, yes, rats. My date and I got there around midnight, and before we had even parked, the headlights revealed a scene from the movie “Willard.” Hundreds of rats. Actually, there weren’t really hundreds. There were thousands. All along the beach. One for every square foot on the beach. I am not kidding. I had never before seen anything like it in all my life. It really looked like some uncanny scene straight out of a horror movie. In fact, if I had a camera with me then and had filmed it, I could have easily used that as footage for a horror movie.

I guess the rats were there because of all the garbage people would throw on the ground. All the city streets were littered with garbage alongside the roads, where people would toss it out of their car window. Coming from a Communist third-world country, I guess they’re too angry against their dictator to care about keeping the streets clean. And, sneaking across the ocean in tiny boats to escape their homeland, I guess they bring that same lack of regard for the environment with them. That’s probably why, when I visited a canal I used to walk by when I was younger, I found that the garbage that was tossed in the canal, had actually piled up so high, that it was now above the water level! I could not believe what I was seeing. I had never seen a canal with so much garbage in it, that the garbage came up above the water level. And this was a deep canal.

When I was young, I used to take my dogs to Key Biscayne and throw the ball out in the water for them to retrieve it. Such fun times. I used to take the second and younger dog, Jock, by himself, when the older dog, Jasper, got too old. Jock had such fun times at the beach. One time, I threw a tennis ball out in the water for him to retrieve, and he came back with a lobster buoy….still connected to the lobster trap. Now, its illegal to take people’s lobster traps, and you can get shot for doing that. So, I wasn’t too happy with Jock for trying to get me shot. Another time, Jock came back with a swollen mouth instead of the ball. He had grabbed a jellyfish instead of the ball. I guess he liked getting swelled lips and a swelled-up face, because another time, he had caught a bee in his mouth, which stung him and made his face look like it was a balloon. He sure looked funny with a swollen face.

Well, there were many more fun adventures, but that’s all we have time for today. Tune in next time for another adventure. Same Bat time, same Bat channel!

This is the third time I’m trying to write this article, and I’m about ready to take a baseball bat to this computer. The first time, the computer suddenly shut off during a thunderstorm, and I lost what I was writing. Grrr! The second time, my firewall gave an alert message that my browser was trying to use Microsoft Word to connect to the Internet. I thought that was odd, so I clicked on the button labeled “Deny,” which was a terrible mistake, because when I clicked the button to Publish this article, it would not Publish it, and it would not allow me to go back to retrieve what I had already written. GRRRRRRR!!!!

In addition to that, the thunderstorm turned off my clocks, so I had to re-set them. Actually, I only had to re-set 3 of them, because, after many frequent ordeals of having to re-set all my clocks because of the fact that the electricity goes off all the time (mostly due to thunderstorms), I have now replaced most of my clocks with battery-operated ones. And I have never learned how to change the time on my oven clock, so whenever the electricity goes off, it re-sets to 12:00, waiting to be activated, so I have to wait until its actually 12:00 (either noon or midnight) to activate it.

It has been raining every day here, which has caused my grass…um, I mean, my WEEDS…to grow at an accelerated rate. They are now above knee-level. My lawnmower is broken, and I don’t know if I can afford to pay another $50-$75 to have someone come and mow my lawn one time. Maybe I’ll check around to see if anyone has a goat that needs babysitting. That way, he can eat my grass and weeds, and I can get paid for watching him.

The thunder and lightning scared a spider out of his hiding place, and he was crawling up the inside of my window, so I hit him with a fly swatter. No effect. He must have used some blocking technique formerly known only to ancient Chinese Shaolin spiders, handed down from generation to generation, secretly guarded, and never taught to foreign spiders. I got a paper towel and folded it a couple times to grab him with it and crush him. He dodged my attack. I tried again to grab him in the paper towel and crush him. Again, he evaded my attack. His Kung Fu was good. I tried a third time. Clearly he had superior fighting skills, because once again, he out-maneuvered me. Ah, but I had a secret weapon of my own, handed down from generation to generation, known only to those select few who have lived in spider-infested houses. Yes, you guessed it…..I brought out the secret, deadly “Spider Spray.” With one accurately placed spray of my deadly weapon, my worthy opponent was finally defeated.

My mom’s friend was not so lucky. She walked into a spider’s web while going out to her car. Even though she is in her 60’s, she was able to fight through the webbing. As she got into her car, she was still pulling spider webs out of her hair. Once on the road, she forgot all about it. Until she looked in the rear-view mirror. There, sitting on her shoulder, was a spider the size of your open hand. No joke. Swerving through traffic like a mad woman, almost hitting 3 pedestrians and 5 cars, she finally pulled over, flung the door open, jumped out, and began flailing about and swinging her arms like some wild, primitive, tribal dancer, slapping at her shoulder in an attempt to knock the monster spider off her shoulder. Finally, drenched with sweat and breathing heavily, with the spider nowhere to be seen, she got back into her car, shaking like a leaf. Even today, she is overcome with fear and dread every time she re-tells her ghastly account. For years afterward, she would have horrible nightmares about the incident, only to awake suddenly in the night, drenched with sweat, thinking that a spider was on her, attacking her.

OK, actually, it only happened last week. Still, when she called my mom and told her about it, she said she was still shaking.

So, the next time you get in your car, you might want to take a quick glance in the rear-view mirror and make sure there are no huge spiders sitting on your shoulder.