Me and Boo Radley and the Heat Wave

This is my sister holding a monkey. She is hot. Are you a tall, skinny, 30something man who would like to date her? Email me.

I guess cuddling a howler monkey on your way to the beach is kind of like canoodling with a hermit while a neurotic dog howls at your feet.

My sister and her friend were in Costa Rica, and I was staying at her (and my old) house to watch the dog, Tornado. This was last Tuesday, and it was so, so hot. I’d already done my good deed for the week by taking a day off work and paying an exorbitant sum to have her air conditioning fixed, and it was with the AC in mind that I firmly closed the back door behind me as I stepped out into the yard.  Well, the AC and the dog’s neuroses, which only allowed him to pee if he could also see me.

So there we were in the backyard, me, the dog, my Kindle, and 10,000 vicious Asian tiger mosquitoes,  wilting in the ferocious furnace blast of a summer heat wave.  Thank god I fixed the AC, I thought. I was scheduled to take an online exam that night, and then I was looking forward to a night on the couch with my sister’s well curated DVR and a whole new universe of Foodler.com options.  This is how I party at age 36.

But when I went to turn the doorknob to get back into the house, nothing happened.

I sighed as a small rivulet of sweat trickled down my cheek.  Dammit. I headed toward the back gate; the neighbors two doors down had a key, so I’d just pop over there and get it.

But the back gate, always gappy, was fastened with a bicycle lock for which I did not have a key.

Asian tiger mosquitoes are taking over DC, and they are horrible.

I contemplated the waist-high chain link fence, and then my dress and flip flops, and then my crippling fear of heights (FORESHADOWING!).  I thought longingly of my phone, sitting inside on the counter. I sat down on the plastic storage bench and my bare legs were instantly speckled with starving mosquitoes drinking my blood.

But hark! A contractor drives down the alley in a truck.  I wave him down excitedly while Tornado lunges and snaps unbecomingly beside me. (He really is sweet, but 60 foaming pounds of snarling German Shepherd mix sends a different message, I know.)  I explain my predicament, and ask the nice man to please knock on the door at 641 and ask them to come out with their magic key and rescue me.  He agrees and departs, never to be seen again.

Tornado and I wait some more.  He lays on my feet, which is great because it’s 102 degrees and his fur is really a joy in that weather.  At least there’s a hose if we have to spend the night out here, I think as we creep up on the hour mark.  I drink from the hose, and it tastes just as rubbery and metallic and warm as it did during my childhood in Ohio.  I offer some to Tornado, but he scrabbles away from the menacing trickle, whining and cowering like the shelter puppy he once was.  He presses his whole incendiary body against me for comfort after I turn it off.

But then, a sign of life!

Three doors down from my sister’s place is a house that is falling into the earth.  It’s covered with creepy vines, the front porch is rotted off, and the windows are blocked by what appear to be teeming piles of newspapers.  The backyard–two lots wide–is a glinting scrapyard, full of mysterious parts and pieces that have no readily apparent use.  The owner of the house, Boo Radley, is man of few words and a many inches of grey ponytail.  Boo has lived in the H St. NE neighborhood since the 1960s, and he and his mother must have made as odd a spectacle in the all-African American NE neighborhood then as he does now.

“Boo!” I call, discerning faint movement behind the high privacy fence around his treasure heap.  ”Hello! Boo! Can you hear me?”

Boo takes his sweet time responding, and when he does, he is confusingly coming from the OTHER side of the alley, which means he somehow got out of his yard and all the way around the block in the opposite way while I stood there yoo-hooing.  I do not ponder this, as Boo is a man of mystery. Instead, I explain my situation and ask him to knock on the neighbors’ door.  Wordlessly, he departs, returning five minutes later with the bad news that the neighbors are not home and the sorriest vintage stepstool you ever saw at a yard sale in Appalachia and half a painter’s ladder.

Boo is going to bust me out.

A word about my fear of heights.  It is debilitating, and as I’ve gotten older it’s begun to manifest itself by causing my legs to stop working.  Sometimes my knees lock, sometimes they just turn entirely to jelly.  Heat and stress exacerbate these symptoms (I once had to crawl out of the nosebleed seats at the Verizon Center on my hands and knees.  It was summer, I was hungover, and when I looked down and saw the steep angle and dizzying altitude my legs were like, fuck you.  They moved us to the front row seats reserved, apparently, for lunatics. I don’t know what my sister said to convince them to do this, as I was sobbing hysterically with my face pressed into the wall “so no one could see me”.) In addition to fear of heights, ever since I cracked up well and truly under the twin strains of a broken ankle and a course of crazy-making Lariam in 2008, I have a pathological fear of falling.  Finally, as a person who is just generally me, I don’t usually ascend rickety Rube Goldberg contraptions while clinging to the sweaty neck of the neighborhood hermit and wearing a dress and flip flops.

But there we were, me and Boo and his wife-beater, drenched with sweat and covered with mosquitoes.  Tornado hates strangers and people who are carrying oddly shaped packages and everyone who is separated from him by a fence, so he was doing rage-fueled backflips as Boo propped the half ladder on my side of the fence and set the rusted tin stepstool on the other.  As an agoraphobic hoarder, I’m pretty sure he wanted my arm around his neck about as much as I wanted to put it there, but he proffered a freckled arm anyway, and I took it, willing my legs to obey as I stepped up and over.

Who, me, vicious?

Reader, I lived.

Did my dress get caught on the fence, allowing Boo to see my butt? Yes.  Were my neighbors with the key home? No. Did I eventually get into the house, after cadging water for the dog from a confused neighbor and two beers from the bar around the corner (the owners are good friends and also have house keys, but of course weren’t there)? Yes.  Did those two beers, gulped on an empty stomach, render me unable to take my final exam?  Indeed they did.

I was soused and sweaty and waiting on the front porch in the dark when the neighbors with the key came home.  I babbled out the story of my ordeal, waving a bottle of beer (I also got a third beer from the kids next door when I came back from the bar to check on the dog, did I mention that?) and he gave me the object of my desire, that beautiful key.

Inside, it was cool and beautiful and there was Diet Coke and my phone, blinking serenely and fully charged. I let the dog in and was washing my face at the sink when someone knocked at the front door.  It was the neighbor who’d just given me the key.

“Hey,” he said.  ”I feel like I should probably get that key back.  You know, just in case.”

I handed it over, somewhat sheepishly, and made a mental note to tell my sister to give Boo a copy.  He rescued her from the backyard once using an overturned barrel.  Also, we should probably bake that guy a cake.