TEAM LAST CALL

At first glance, it appeared that we were finally going to end up with a relatively normal set of neighbors, by which I mean people who won’t wake us up with loud porno movies at 3 a.m.

No Nazi flags in their windows, no pentagrams on their foreheads, no NRA stickers on their giant SUVs – there was nothing overtly evil, at least. My wife and I didn’t want to get ahead of ourselves, but we couldn’t help but hope that maybe, just maybe, these neighbors wouldn’t be the devil.

Yes, it was looking good. That is, until we were introduced to the new neighbors’ pets. They were those nasty little animals, those smelly and ugly ones with pointy little teeth and beady little eyes. What do you call them again? Oh yeah. Kids.

We watched in horror as they ran around our yard, drooling on their clothes, chasing our cats up the trees, and relieving themselves in our garden. There were hundreds of them. Short ones, tall ones, skinny ones, fat ones, all clumped together in a dark mass of dirty fingernails, skinned knees, and Cheerios breath. And they were multiplying by the minute.

In a matter of days, the children had worked their way into our lives like sand in your swimsuit. Look out your window in the morning – there’s a grubby little kid making a blowfish on the glass. Walk outside to get the newspaper – there’s some kid, vomiting up a nasty albeit colorful pile of Mike & Ikes right onto the sports section. Pour some cereal into your bowl – a kid comes tumbling out of the box, his cheeks stuffed with all of the orange stars, yellow moons, and green clovers.

You can’t even walk out to your car in the morning without seeing some dirty little kid with his finger up his nose peeking out from behind the front tire. Then you blink, and instantly three more children appear where the first one was, all three of them with a finger buried two knuckles deep into their nostril.

Blink – there’s five more, hanging upside down like possums from your exhaust pipe. Blink – there’s a dozen more, square-dancing on your hood.

Blink, blink – now they’re inside the car, giving you the middle finger and pressing their butt cheeks against the glass.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m all for children, provided that they’ve had their shots and are properly leashed. But had I known our neighbors would be so, uh, prolific, I would have invested in some more solid fencing.

The most challenging part of dealing with our neighbors’ several hundred children is the fact that I’m expected to act like a mature adult regardless of the situation. As my monthly columns attest, I have difficulty acting like an adult under normal circumstances, let alone when, say, a pair of snot-nosed 7-year-olds are trying to pee on my dog through the fence.

“Hey, guys” I say, trying my hardest not to pee back on them. “Waddya say you stop trying to pee on my dog? Huh? Wouldn’t that be nice? To not pee on my dog?”

“Arf, arf, arf!” says one of the children, subtly shifting his line of fire closer to my shoe.

"I have a penis!" yells the other, and sticks his tongue out at me.

“Yes, yes, I can see that,” I say. “How about not using it to pee on my dog?”

“Your belly’s fat, but your legs are skinny,” observes the first boy.

“I have a pee-ee-eenis!” yells the second boy.

"Oh yeah? Well, I have two!" I yell back. “Now get out of here before I call the police and they arrest you and break your toys and never let you see your parents again!”

The boys stare at me in disbelief for a moment before running into their house. I take a few seconds to enjoy my triumph before realizing that there’s just no way I could sound cool bragging to my friends that I totally scared the crap out of two 7-year-olds. Then I start thinking about the phone call I’ll be receiving from the police later that night. “You told them you had two what?”

Sure, maybe I was able to solve the problem of those two particular boys trying to pee on my particular dog, but what about the other few hundred kids? Lord only knows what they’ll try to pee on when I’m not looking.

I tried launching a counter-offensive. I hid just inside my door, armed with a secret weapon. I threw the cat outside as collateral damage and waited until the children gathered around it, holding knives and forks in their dirty little fists, their red eyes rolling around in their heads like marbles. That’s when I unleashed the dog. He plowed through the mass, tossing their little bodies in every direction. They scrambled out of the yard, but not before our brave little Jack Russel debriefed at least half a dozen of them. Tiny underoos were scattered across the lawn.

But it was, and remains, a losing battle. Even as I lie in bed at night thinking of ways to take the kids out, I can hear them scampering across my roof like fat squirrels with a sugar buzz. But I look at it this way: at least they’re not old enough to watch porn in the middle of the night.