So, more on my neighbors. My friends and I used to joke and call them “crystal meth house” because they have all their windows hung with curtains 24/7 and they’re either skinny like skeletons or hung over. And they sleep really late, even though they’ve got a 1-year old and 4-year old. Suspicious, no?
The only times I used to see the wife was when she would emerge to smoke cigarettes on the porch, pale and skinny, blinking in the sunlight like some kind of cave rat, before disappearing back into her blackout home. They always gave off a weird vibe. Even before I got into conflict with them. Fertile ground for all sorts of unfair speculations.
It turns out the owner of the house used to be both a crystal meth addict *and* a cocaine addict. His wife as well. Not only that, his brother is serving three years in prison for selling meth to eight different towns in a 200 mile loop of Western Colorado. I feel so vindicated in my stereotypes.
How do I know this? Because after the whole pit-bull jumping on me and my kid thing, the owner of the house decided he needed to make nice and apologize, so he came over to talk, and he shared. How often do you meet someone, who, within five minutes of starting the conversation, allows it to veer to his various addictions and how hard it is to stay clean when he’s trying to make a positive and responsible impression?
I suppose the fact that he claims that he and his wife are clean now, means that when his wife was smoking and drinking her way through her second pregnancy (I watched her out on her porch, yes, I know, I clearly don’t have enough to do) that she was actually doing her fetus a favor. She was showing honest-to-god restraint.
Thank goodness for family values.