Meet Debbie

I love my apartment. It's tiny, but really, how much room do two single girls need? (Actually, the answer to that question varies, but that's another story entirely.) The only thing I don't like about it (well, other than the too-small kitchen and the lack of a washer/dryer) is my crazy Russian spy neighbor Debbie.

Debbie lives across the alley. Our back porch, my favorite part of the apartment, faces her front door. This makes uninterrupted reading time hard to come by. Debbie spends about 75% of her time standing outside with her dog Baby Girl, watching every move her fellow apartment-dwellers make. 10% is spent gossiping about what she sees with everyone she comes across. The other 15%... well, I don't really want to know- my suspicions are bad enough.

Debbie is, literally, a former crack whore who lived on the streets for several years. She is clearly mentally disturbed; I don't know if it's from years of drug use or from birth. She is now living on government assistance, and her brother manages her finances for her. He pays her rent, utilities, and buys her groceries with it (no phone or cable) and gives her $30 a month. The rest he apparently pockets; I don't know if that's because he's a slimy scumbag or because he thinks she'll buy drugs if she has extra money.

Debbie has a severe speech problem that makes her hard to understand, even on the rare occasions that she pronounces things correctly. Our favorite terms from the Debbie Dictionary:
Moth: a street drug she heard about on the news. [meth] ;
See-Eye See-Eye's: her favorite pizza place [CiCi's];
Picadilly: a small furry dog [Pomeranian]

Let's see. She's always trying to get me to buy her clothes from her, no matter how many times I've told her we don't wear the same size. Somebody gave her a new bed, and she stole my sheets out of the dryer in the laundry room, and when they didn't fit she put them back. (She made the mistake of telling us she was having trouble finding sheets to fit when we asked her if she saw who took them. She didn't admit to it, but she might as well have.) She was also caught stealing money from my friend Leanna's change jar when Leanna invited her to dinner.

But here's the part that really disturbs me.

Debbie is very racist. When she found out that Roomiekins and I have [gasp] black friends, and actually let them into our apartment... well, we've never heard the end of it. Yet last night, as Roomie and I were playing Scrabble on our back porch, a large black man came and knocked on her door. She opened it a crack, looked both ways, and let him in. He exited 20 minutes later, giving us the impression that either her drug days or her prostitution days (or maybe both) may not be as over as she says they are. I shudder to think that that could be going on mere yards away from where I sleep.

These are the days...