My neighborhood is very nice, to begin with.
Sure, there’s a definite weirdness factor, but for the most part, the houses are well-kept, and the people are friendly and welcoming. There’s a guy about my age across the street taking care of his chronically ill mom, there’s the constantly late couple who always stop to make sure I don’t need a ride to the train station, imperiling their own chances of making it on time, and there’s my little kindergarten-aged friend who grants me random gifts, usually hastily selected at the last possible moment from her own yard. Oh, and several friendly dogs.
It’s important that you understand this, or nothing that follows will seem wondrous.
My sister, future brother-in-law, and I spent Labor Day weekend at Disney World (we all know that’s NOT the astonishing part) and I’d had an insanely busy week, during which I’d pretty much only been home to sleep. Fortunately, the office closed early Friday, so when I got home I had exactly two hours and fifteen minutes to finish packing, run to Walgreen’s for last-minute items, do something about my lawn before it became designated an official state prairie, and shower so that I wasn’t boarding a plane smelling as though I’d just done yardwork.
I needed every minute of that two hours and fifteen minutes. I had just barely taken out the garbage, turned off the air conditioner, and stacked my luggage by the door when my phone started buzzing—my sister was calling. I guessed that my ride was here.
“Hey,” I answered, gently pulling back the curtain on my front window and glancing left at my driveway, fully expecting to see her car there, and slightly surprised that it wasn’t.
“Hey! We’re gassing up at the gas station on your corner.”
Ah, that made sense. As she chattered excitedly to me about our upcoming trip, I carefully pulled the curtain back in place to cover the—wait a sec.
Glancing RIGHT out the window revealed an unexpected…lump, for lack of a better word, on my lawn. It definitely hadn’t been there when I mowed the spot half an hour before.
It was shaped like a person.
It WAS a person. It looked like a scrawny, lanky teenager curled up on my lawn. If you’re familiar with the ‘rabbit’ yoga pose, that’s roughly what this guy was doing. He was prone on the ground, with his knees curled up under his stomach and his arms limply at his side. His face was, for all intents and purposes, smushed into my freshly cut grass.
“There’s a kid on my lawn,” I informed my sister.
“What?”
“I think I’ve gotta go…deal with that.”
I hung up the phone and cautiously opened my front door.I figured the noise would illicit some reaction from the guy, but no, he didn’t stir.
Perplexed, I started to bring out my luggage and stacking it on the front stoop, making a point of banging it around a bit and making lots of noise. The guy was mere steps away—less than 10 feet. I was hoping the noise would kind of alert him to the fact that, ya know, someone was home, and it was super weird that he was just lying there.
I closed and locked the door securely behind me. The guy had been motionless on my lawn for quite some time at this point.
I glanced around quickly to see if I was imagining things. The blessing and curse of my neighborhood is that someone is always watching—which is a disadvantage in some cases, but in this case proved a blessing. The street was not otherwise deserted; to the right, a couple of the guys from the auto body shop across the street were standing around idly outside their bay doors. To the left, my next-door neighbor Kate was standing on her front stoop.
You guys know Kate.
This is Kate.
If there was one person in the neighborhood I desperately wanted on my side in a confrontation, it was Kate.
We made eye contact. She gestured meaningfully toward the puddle of human and mouthed something I couldn’t quite make out.
I stared at the guy for a moment, weighing my options. This guy hadn’t moved at all. He might be having a genuine medical emergency. I cautiously circled him, desperately trying to come up with other viable possibilities. Maybe he was playing hide and seek and quietly counting to a million. Maybe…he just really liked the smell of cut grass.
I don’t have time for this, I realized. My ride would be here any second. We had exactly two hours until our flight left, and the airport was a half hour drive. I was NOT gonna miss my flight because some random picked my lawn to pass out on.
“Hey kid,” I said, slowly and cautiously. “Are you okay? …Would you mind telling me what you’re doing on my lawn?”
The guy didn’t stir a single muscle as I spoke, and I began to fear that he really had just dropped dead in a pile in my yard. Finally though, as I uttered the word ‘yard’, a small flutter of life appeared. Slowly and unstably, he unfolded and rose to his feet, wobbling a little. He lurched a step or two unsteadily toward me, and I backed up a little, then circled a ways as though I was Inigo Montoya prepping for a duel. Bits of grass clippings were stuck to his face. His nose was streaked with chlorophyll green. When he was lying face down, I’d thought he was a teenager because of his build, but I was wrong—now that I could see his face, he was clearly an adult. As he swayed in a wind that didn’t exist, I thought briefly that this was potentially dangerous situation, but it quickly became apparent that I could take this guy out with a decently powerful sneeze.
“I don’t know what happened,” he said, listing back and forth like a stack of single Jenga blocks. He spoke slowly, every syllable stretched, as though they were somehow being pulled like taffy before they left his mouth. “I think it was all the jogging…”
He continued to murmur his astonishment at his current predicament for a few moments, at the pace of someone speaking Whale. I glanced over to see if Kate was still outside and noticed something out of place: a smallish, black nylon bundle, nestled in the weeds growing out of the cracks in my driveway (don’t judge).
“Oh, uh, yeah,” he slurred, and began to stagger unsteadily in that general direction, looking every bit like a zombie from a horror movie as he loped through the grass. He eventually noticed my pile of luggage on the front stoop, and it gave him pause. “Uh…I don’t…”
“That stuff’s mine,” I quickly cut him off. “Yours is over there.”
I watched his progress as he eventually, successfully, located the black drawstring bag and picked it up. Beyond him, I could see Kate, watching carefully.
With the weirdo thus distracted, I took up a defensive position near my luggage at the front door, my mind whirling. He’d said something about jogging…I’d seen the kind of disorientation that extreme dehydration can cause. Had this guy just way overexercised?
…No. The more I thought about it…if he was just dehydrated, he would also be pretty sick, and apart from his little nap on my lawn, he seemed fine.
This guy was just really, really high.
Having successfully fulfilled the basic human function of retrieving his own discarded items, the guy lurched back toward me for some more conversation. “I don’t know what happened,” he repeated over and over again, struggling to articulate each word. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what happened.”
My brain was working rapidly. I felt like I should call…someone. The police? The paramedics, to check this guy out? But filling in the official responders would delay us from leaving for the airport. I glanced over to the gas station—I could actually see my sister and her fiancé gassing up over there. Even if some of the village’s finest showed up to handle it, and I gave them the limited information I had and let them take it from there…I didn’t feel like I could comfortably leave until this guy was far, far away from my house.
“It’s fine,” I told the guy. “Could you just…leave my property?”
I watched the words filter through the layers of haze to his brain. “Oh. Yeah. Do you, uh, want my name or something, in case anything’s…”
“No, that’s okay. Please just leave.” It was a surprisingly thoughtful gesture on this guy’s part, given the sheer magnitude of drugs that had to be coursing through his system at this very moment, but all he appeared to have harmed were several blades of grass. Besides, given the speed at which he was doing everything, writing down and/or spelling his name for me would have taken him years.
Finally, he was loping off toward the corner. I watched him for a few steps, then turned toward Kate, who was already coming toward me.
“You should have seen him before you came out,” she said. “He was really loopy—muttering to himself. Then he chucked that bag of his halfway across your lawn.”
“Then,” she added, gesturing to the fat, ancient elm in the middle of my parkway, “he tried to push over that tree.”
I stared at it for a moment, trying to picture that. No wonder he was so exhausted.
“Kate,” I said, panic starting to rise, “I’m leaving for the airport, like…now. What do I do?”
At that moment, a convenient police car turned the corner onto my street.
Kate and I watched it for a few moments. “Oh,” she said. “Also, I called the police.”
I really don’t know how the police car knew, but they didn’t even stop to speak to us. They saw us talking, Kate waved to them, I took a few tentative steps toward them with half a mind to flag them down, and they simply rolled into the nearest driveway, did a three-point turn, and went back the way they came.
As the police turned the corner, I ran back toward it to see what they did. They’d caught up to the guy at the next corner, right at the intersection with the busy street. Two policemen got out and stopped him to talk.
I glanced across the street. All work had ceased at the auto body shop, and all the mechanics were now standing on the sidewalk in a cluster, not even trying to disguise the fact that they were watching the drama play out. When they noticed me looking at them, a couple of them crossed the street and approached me. I’d never so much as made eye contact with them before, but now they were shaking my hand. “I’m Doug. This is Johnny.”
“Laura,” I introduced myself.
“We’ve seen that guy come past here a lot—he’s always strung out on something, acting crazy,” Doug said. “It was pretty ballsy of you to walk right up to him like that.”
I shrugged, overwhelmed. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see my sister and her fiancé pulling up to my driveway and—they deserve an award for this—starting to load my luggage in the trunk, no questions asked. I was feeling slightly giddy, and an extremely localized headache was forming behind my eyes. I privately decided that I would be requiring an adult beverage on my flight.
“Listen,” Doug said, “you need anything, we’re right over there, any time, okay? We’ll always keep an eye out for you.”
“Also,” Johnny added, “you need a better lawnmower.”
I nodded and mumbled some words of thanks. The last thing I needed at the moment was constructive feedback on the state of my lawn. I was well aware that in its current state, there was a fair chance that at any given moment Robin Williams could come crashing through the underbrush in my side yard and ask us what year it was.
The mechanics went on their way, and after glancing back to ascertain that the police were still talking to my stoned trespasser, I made my way back over to Kate, standing at the foot of the driveway, as my sister and her fiancé closed the trunk of their car, everything loaded, and looked at me questioningly. “Listen,” she said. “Let me give you my cell number. I’ll handle talking to the police, and I’ll let you know if anything weird happens while you’re gone. You just go on your trip and have fun.”
Kate is my hero.
As we made our way toward Midway, I was still feeling slightly shaken by the experience. Why me? What was I thinking, just walking up to an apparently unconscious dude without knowing the situation? And was that really the best time for anyone to criticize my lawn?
I decided to call my mother and let her know we were on our way to the airport.
“Hi, honey!” she said completely cheerfully.
“Hi,” I said, my voice breaking on the word.
“…Why do you sound stressed at the start of your vacation?” She asked, her tone gently scolding.
I chuckled darkly. “Have I got a story to tell you…”
Laura Writes 