When you can't escape them, join them

Editor's note: In a lapse of poor self-editing, in my last post I neglected to inform my readers that while the people and the stories are real, the names have been changed to protect the innocent. 

A Bengal Cat, but not the one mentioned in this post. I'm even protecting the cat's identity, in case it is in witness protection. 

The Yikes’s are growing on me. Maybe because I got them back for killing my cat by taking down their Internet access for a day, but I think it’s more than that. It seems they aren’t trying so hard; so hard to impress me, so hard to get me to stay on as a tenant, so hard to get me in bed.

Although, take note: Mr. Yikes did not miss the opportunity to mention porn sites that may or may not be on his laptop while we were trying to solve the Internet debacle.  He has dialed the sex talk back a bit.  Or maybe I have just become immune.

To clarify, the Yikes’s didn’t kill my cat. At least there isn’t enough compelling evidence to stand up in court. They were taking care of my cat –a simple feeding, once a day, for two days---when I returned home and found the poor thing crumpled in a heap on the floor, yowling his big, fuzzy head off. Honest to God my first thought was--and I may have even said it out VERY loud-- “What have they done to you?”  

But after several hundred dollars in vet bills, it became apparent that the cat had been sick for a long time, and his body just decided to give out on that Sunday afternoon. Mrs. Yikes, however, was not blind to the implications, and so distraught, she cried for two days, and sent Mr. Yikes over to check on me until she could pull herself together.  I now tease her about killing my cat. Oh, yes, I do.

Similarly, the computer issue yesterday really wasn’t my fault, but because I was trying to help the Yikes’s maintain some semblance of dignity, I took the fall for it.  I have four more weeks living under their noses, and I prefer to keep it that way-the living, that is. The Internet access we share has always been a bit unreliable – I am functioning off a wifi extender and just figured that was the problem.  But it got so bad I couldn’t get two clicks in - bad DNS settings, the warning read, easily fixed by shutting down the router and modem and restarting. I’ve done this a ton of times in various locations where I have had wifi, so I confidently strode over to the Yikes’s and asked them if I could shut down the router and restart it to get better wifi reception. 

A little nervous around things he doesn’t understand, Mr. Yikes  grilled me before hesitantly saying yes. “What’s a router? I got one of those? You’ve done this before?”

“Hundreds of times.”

“You sure it’s okay to do? I’m not going to lose anything, right? Nothing could go wrong?”

 “Oh, no, trust me. It’s fine, done it a hundred times.  It’s easy.”

Okay, he says, and follows me downstairs to the modem/router in the guest room/office. I disconnect the power and the battery to the modem, wait a minute, and reconnect.

Bad Move #1.

A few minutes later, Mr. Yikes goes to log on, and he can’t find the Internet. I was like, you have got to be kidding. I am sure he just has made a wrong click or something. I go back to the guest room. Mrs. Yikes follows. They both sit on the bed next to me, watching my every move. After about 10 minutes of trying everything I knew, I say, cringing, “Maybe you should call the company, because I can’t fix it.”

That's when Mr. Yikes starts talking out of both sides of his mouth. “I’m not blaming you, doll, believe me, but you must have done something, because it was working before you unplugged it. I was on it all morning and it was just fine. What could be wrong? How could this happen?”

Oh, for the love of God, why is this happening to me? Note to self: never touch anyone’s computer equipment again ever.  Feeling like they are not computer savvy enough, Mr. and Mrs. Yikes defer to me to make the call to the cable company.  I agree.  Bad Move #2.

I wait on hold for 30 minutes.  I get connected to a live person, and he and I go through the dance of redundancy and ridiculousness that cable companies put you through, and then he says, “Oh…I see the problem now.” And by the tone of his voice, I know exactly what’s coming. 

“The account was shut off due to nonpayment. There was a payment made this morning, but it takes awhile for admin to get the account back up – wait a couple hours and try again.”  

Awk-ward. 

I can hear the Yikes’s breathing behind me. “What’d he say?” Mrs. Yikes asks. I swing around in the computer chair and face them. I am knee to knee with both of them, they are sitting so close. “He says that we have Internet access, but it may take a couple hours for it to come on.”

 “What?  That’s bullshit. That doesn’t make any sense. Why is it going to take two hours?” Mr. Yikes says. “Blah, blah, blah, more raving, blah, blah, blah.”

And here comes Bad Move #3, chugging down the track: 

“I don’t know,” I shrug. “Let’s just wait and see what happens, and I’ll call them back in a couple hours if it doesn’t come back on.”

All afternoon I pray to the cable Gods to please just turn it back on so I don’t have to face this.

At 4 pm, Mr. Yikes calls. He wants me to come over, have a cocktail, and get his Internet fixed. I mix my own drink, and brace for what could be a very uncomfortable situation. 

As the luck of the Yikes would have it, just as I was about to cross the small yard to their back door, Mrs. Yikes comes bursting out of it, yelling for her cat, Jaguar. It’s usually Mr. Yikes’s fault that the beautiful Bengal cat gets loose—every time giving Mrs. Yikes the opportunity to retell the long suffering tale of when, several years ago, Mr. Yikes let her beloved cat out and it got killed by a coyote – no, a wolverine – no, a fisher cat – whatever. To make up for it, he bought her a $2,000 Bengal – well, it would be worth $2,000 if they had the papers, but they don’t because they’ve never gotten her fixed…blah, blah, blah, Mrs. Yikes telling a story.  Blah, blah, blah. 

So Jaguar is loose, Mrs. Yikes is frantic, Bentley the Yorkie is relentlessly barking and bouncing inside his crate, and by the smell of the guest room, Mr. Yikes just smoked himself a big old doobie. And I’m on hold with the cable company, again.  Mayhem holds no candle to the likes of the Yikes. 

“Jag Wah! Jag Wah! Come home, Jag Wah!”

From her loud state of despair, Mrs. Yikes draws a crowd in the front yard, which includes a couple walking by with their dog, a fisherman leaving the pier, and the local police. The nice female officer gets out of her cruiser and even helps search for the cat, all the while getting the run down on Mrs. Yikes's life, where they are from, what color they are planning to paint the house, inquiries regarding if the officer knew of anyone who might want to rent a nice cottage on the water, even the wolverine ate her cat story. As it turns out, the dog walking couple are house painters and they are coming back with an estimate to paint the house. All in a days work for Mrs. Yikes. 

Mr. Yikes stands in the back yard, ostensibly looking for the cat, smoking a cigar in case the lady cop gets too friendly and comes close enough to smell Mr. Doobie. I'm still on hold. The dog is still barking. 

An hour later, peace – or as peaceful as it gets at the Yikes’s—is restored. The cop is gone, the cat is back home, the dog has stopped barking, the Internet is fixed, and the Yikes’s are into the wine, trying to calm their frazzled nerves from their tumultuous afternoon.

They invite me to stay for dinner, and I do.

No. She. Didn’t.

No. She. Didn’t.

“Oh, yes she did,” I replied emphatically and with my best Monte Durham intonation. Ten minutes into a daylong shopping excursion, Mrs. Yikes dropped the bombshell that she was married to a mobster. I was relaying this fact --one of many in a rapid series of Yikes stories-- to my sister, who lives 1,100 miles away.  “I don’t even know what to say to that,” she said.

If there is one thing the Yikes’s can do and do well, it is rendering one speechless. Over sharing, bombshell dropping, and otherwise catching you off guard is their specialty. Like the day, seemingly apropos to nothing, Mr. Yikes asked if I was gay or straight. Scrambling to figure out how we went from talking about the weather to my sexual orientation, I resorted to the truth.  And then stood silently waiting for an explanation. None came.  “Now, back to the weather.”

The Yikes’s are the owners of the riverside cottage I inhabit  – 600 sq ft of a tired and decrepit edifice clinging to an exquisite location. I am paying way too much for it, but only for three months. And after yesterday’s announcement, am I gonna complain? Hell no. (Monte, with a flourish of the index finger)

I hesitate to call them landlords, because that term usually indicates some sort of control or responsibility over a property. I can’t really call them slumlords, because they are quite visibly present on the property, as in 30 feet behind me in the main house.  I’m trapped between them, and the river. They are not mean, nor malicious, but there is an air of instability about them that is unsettling. Crazy, whacky, so many words to describe them, yet none quite fit. Except--yikes.

The first time I met them, in the dark, in their driveway, they did a brain dump on me like I was the first person they had seen in days.  Both speaking at once, I learned of the 17 hour drive, Mrs. Yike’s bad knee, the fact she was on Vicidan, that Mr. Yikes was on anti-depressants and just couldn’t wait to get here so he drove all night, even though she said not to, with both a cat and a dog and one hell of a load of stuff in a wagon Mercedes. They had just been at a football party at friends they had in the area, wait til you meet them, you'll like them, but they were so tired from the drive they had to come home early, how did I like the cottage, and…when I turned and walked away from that five-minute chance encounter, head reeling, I said to myself, “Yikes.”

Despite their craziness, the daylong – and I do mean eight full hours here people –- shopping spree was actually quite fun. Aging mobster wife or not, this chick knows how to shop. Not sure I’d add shopping tastefully to her skill set, but she can squirrel out a bargain in a warehouse full of junk. We went to six thrift stores – three under one roof --- 42,000 sq ft of other people’s cast offs—and a lawn sale, a froyo shop, a discount store, and a farmer’s market.  It was truly educational in many ways, and I scored a great computer chair for $17, and some delicious fresh arugula at the farmer's market, so I was very happy.

Over the course of the day, Mrs. Yikes told me I should buy all wicker furniture for my new place (I hate wicker); I should add more highlights to my hair (I pride myself on NOT adding much color to my hair); the flowered print love seat I liked was too busy (I love flower print sofas) and outside an antique store, she shoved free plastic flowers in my hands because they were “FREE! and they are good for adding a spot of color to a room.” (I hate plastic flowers).

Needless to say, perhaps, but my cottage living room is now sporting a festive bouquet of white plastic hyacinths and is filled with wicker furniture (that she bought).

But, you know, the Yikes’s are growing on me. Do I think Mr. Yikes is really a mobster? No. A businessman who operates just outside the law? Absolutely.  Do I really believe that they met when she was 13 and he was 16 and have been together for 48 years? Maybe. Since Mr. Yikes told me that he thought she was about 20 because she had “boobs out to here” when he asked her out, it’s possible that she snuck out her bedroom window as they claim and that their relationship started way back then.  Do I think he really went to MIT, dropped out and attended Wentworth instead, was president of the college Playboy Bunny club and has a degree in engineering? I don’t know.

What I do know is that having them as landlords is unnerving, but exciting and hilarious and interesting at the same time. As a kid, I used to love looking through my red plastic View-Master at film reels featuring foreign lands. The Yikes’s are my present day View-Master into a world I would never have encountered without them.  Maybe on HBO, but not in real life.

Oh, and yesterday, on our "American Pickers meets  I Married the Mob" adventure, Mrs. Yikes’s exact words were: “My parents were strict Baptists and they wanted me to marry a minister, and instead I married a mob guy – they weren’t too happy with me.”

I bet not, Mrs. Yikes. I bet not.