My brother, a cousin and I were sitting on the porch listening to the young twenty-something couple arguing next door. This was nothing new. Whenever the boyfriend drank, the girlfriend complained, and they argued. One night, the girlfriend kicked the boyfriend out. He left, and she threw all his clothes out. Our houses were at the top of a steep hill, so his clothes were covering the hillside iceplants and ivy. We began sipping some Brew 102 36 ouncers till about midnight. The girlfriend invited her cousin and her cousin's boyfriend over as she was worried about her own boyfriend not returning home. I guess she wanted him to see his clothes all over the hillside, or maybe she was actually concerned about his whereabouts. We continued to drink our cheap beer when the boyfriend returned--drunk and ornery. Ornery turned to rage when he saw his clothes. We laughed. He cursed at us and told us to shut up or he wouldn't buy us any more beer. We shut up. He climbed the steps that looked like the staircase from The Music Box with Laurel and Hardy. He tried to open the door but kept dropping his keys. So he knocked. The cousin's boyfriend answered. The drunk boyfriend looked puzzled, as if he were at the wrong house. "Who are you?" he asked the stranger at his door, trying to confirm that it was in fact his door. From inside the house, the girlfriend of the drunk yelled, "It's my new boyfriend." We laughed at the shock on the drunk's face. In an instant, there was a knife that looked like a mini-scythe in his hand. As drunk as he was, he was fast. He slashed the cousin's boyfriend across his face. The drunk lost his balance from the swing of his arm. The slashed boyfriend stood there, paralyzed with fear. His eyelid was hanging off his face by the flimsiest piece of skin; his eyeball was completely exposed. We laughed with a combination of horror and absurdity. The cousin came out, saw her boyfriend, and started screaming. The drunk boyfriend fled, fell down the long flight of steps, gathered himself and rushed himself away from the scene of the crime. By this time, the girlfriend had joined her cousin in the screamfest. My brother, the level-headed one, called for the police and an ambulance. The paramedics noted aloud at the lack of blood and giggled about it. The cop in charge shot them a dirty look. They shut up. The boyfriend served a few months in the County Can. Never heard from or saw the cousin or her boyfriend again. When the boyfriend got out of the Can, he got back with the girlfriend. As long as we lived next to them, they still argued. And they brokeup several more times, each time another great story, filled with pathos and bathos.
AC
P.S. This is the darker side of life as I saw it. But I bet there are some third world country folk that can top that story. It's all relative.