Ixta Spitola (A Love Story) by Pandel Collaros

Ixta Spitola (A Love Story) by Pandel Collaros

Ixta Spitola is the crazy lady who lives three houses down from me. I should say three doors—because as far as I can tell, there aren’t any houses in my neighborhood. Oh sure, there are houses, but they really aren’t individual houses. They’re four-family houses and the like. And they sure aren’t anything like the house I grew up in. In the Midwest, we had property, which meant a front yard, a back yard, and side yards. And a clean blue sky over your head (except for the silicon, soot, acid rain, and perfume from the steel mill and coke plant). And a nice, neat basement in which no meth or coca paste was ever processed. And a seventy-five-foot driveway at a twenty-degree angle, especially when it was snowing, if you know what I mean. Well, if people on my block in Queens want to say they live in a house, let them, if it makes them feel any better. They need to feel better. Believe me, by God, they deserve to feel better. The poor mugs.

If you don’t live in New York, you may not be aware that the mailman does not pick up outgoing mail from your own mailbox—at least not in the neighborhood where I live. You have to deposit it in a public mailbox. It finally sunk in one sopping wet Saturday morning when I walked downstairs to get my mail. At first glance I thought there was a hell of a lot of mail. But no, there were all the letters and bill payments that I put out the night before, stuck to the bottom of the incoming junk mail. Pulp. I asked a guy from New Jersey (whom I worked with) about this phenomenon. He informed me that indeed this was the case in the Metropolitan area. Had he ever heard of anything so ridiculous as a mailman picking up outgoing mail from a private box? He said, “Yeah. I saw it in an old movie once.” What does all this have to do with Ixta Spitola? Atmosphere.

I didn’t suspect that Ixta was crazy until about three years or so after I moved into the neighborhood, when I started to notice her, amazed that I hadn’t noticed her before. In the summer, she sits on her stoop, a grinning gargoyle in Bermuda shorts. I don’t think that makes her crazy. I rather think that makes her normal, contextually. She sports a pretty good moustache—actually she has a pretty good beard too. It’s probably the envy of every thirteen-year old boy on the block. Yes, hirsute is one of many words which describes her. Ixta isn’t very small either. Her hair (that on her head) is dark and coifed in the typical bun-on-your-head chic; and there’s a mole or wart or some kind of beauty mark.

Another feature which characterizes Ixta is her immutable leer. I figure

it’s the physical manifestation of a defiant self—confidence coupled with a steady diet of something I wouldn’t put in my hand let alone in my mouth. And then there is her voice. After the first time I heard it, I remember thinking how grateful I was for not having heard it before. I couldn’t be sure whether she was speaking the Queen’s English (no pun intended, and I guess it’s the King’s English now anyway), an ethnic hybrid like Spanglish, or some other New Yorkian mutilation. She delivers each syllable in the sort of fast, clipped squawk you’d expect from a parrot, Martin Scorsese, or an irate bag lady—sort of mannish. Strangely enough, the sound itself does not appear to be localized. I mean you really can’t be sure where it’s coming from, except that it sounds so near—sort of popping off inside your head. The reason I know it belongs to Ixta is because I’ve seen her lips moving in close synchronization with the sound.

My first real conversation with Ixta occurred one evening after I had just parked my van in front of her “house.” I do that quite often. One seldom parks one’s vehicle in front of one’s own place in Queens, or anywhere else in New York for that matter. Even if you could, that is no guarantee that it will still be there the next morning, but some of it might. I found a piece of the chain that connected my hood to the grill of my first van one morning—but no van. I had to look on the bright side—never again would I have to move it for alternate-side-of-the-street parking regulations. You may ask, “alternate-side-of-the-street parking?” That’s a little joke that the mayor and his minions play on those who have the audacity to own (or owe on) a vehicle, and who are too poor to house it off the street. The rule implies that on particular days, roughly alternating, and depending on where you park, your vehicle must be on a certain side of the street between certain hours except for certain holidays. I say “implies” because the rule is never cited as clearly as in the above. However, one catches on quickly after a few unfortunate incidents. The “brownies” leave little motivational messages, learning reinforcement prizes, I suppose. Well anyway, after parking on this particular occasion, I said hello to Ixta after she had said something to me which I couldn’t quite make out. That was our first time.

The second conversation went a little bit better. I really wanted to make a good impression, because it’s just swell when one finally gets to know one’s neighbors after three and some years. As it happened, I was wheeling my cart of groceries home one fine Saturday afternoon when I spotted Ixta walking her poodle. She really wasn’t walking the dog; she was just sort of standing there in the middle of the sidewalk, holding on to the leash. If the dog felt like running circles around her, Ixta would have been tied up for an undetermined period of time, a sort of statue or human fire hydrant, as the circumstances might warrant. She was silent and motionless, like an immense beast of prey, frozen in time by my alien midwestern gaze. I had a peculiar feeling right then and there.

First of all, I do not like dogs because they bark, bite, and evacuate their bowels where I happen to walk. Big ones slobber. Little ones have bad breath. (There goes half of my audience. What happens to the other half when I say I don’t like cats either?) Second of all, I hate it when people stand in the middle of a sidewalk anywhere—let alone in New York City. When that happens, my strategy is to plow straight on through to the best of my ability without actually tackling the offending party.

I plowed straight on through alright, but there’s something one must understand about shopping carts—we’re taIking about New York privately owned shopping carts, not the sturdy fim and firm industrial-strength Trader Joe’s or rusted-out Waldbaum’s variety (remember Waldbaum’s?). As you pull one along, it sticks out to the side. You see, it would be pretty hard to pull one directly behind you for three reasons: 1) you would not be able to watch your eggs fall out of the top as they are strategically placed there to do, 2) you would be forced to bend your arm into a very uncomfortable position similar to having one wrist handcuffed behind your back, and 3) the heels of your feet would kick up against the wheels of your cart possibly causing you to run yourself over with your own conveyance. One may ask why I don’t just drive to the grocery store instead of dragging a cart back and forth. Obviously, one has not spent much time driving and parking in the Big Not-Always-So-Delectable Apple.

So, with rickshaw in tow, I plowed straight on through and missed Ixta by a mile. But my cart ran over her damn dog. The dog was fine but it barked like mad. Like any decent New Yorker, I looked back, which was the least I could do and I really did want to do the least. Ixta grinned at me and squawked, “Goin’ shoppin’? ” It was kind of surreal, but a cloud had lifted. The sun peeked through. I got kind of warm and queasy. She spoke to me. I smiled wanly and answered in my best American, “Yeah.” Never mind that it was obvious I had already gone shopping. My neighbor had reached out to me, and I had reached back a little. That was our second time.

Another neighbor, who snorted cocaine every day, informed me that Ixta was a crazy lady. I didn’t even know Ixta’s name at the time. In my mind she was “Baba Yaga,” an incarnation of archetypal memory or something. My coked-up neighbor actually witnessed my third conversation with Ixta, which went something like this. Having gotten off early one Friday, I was walking my regular mile from the subway to my “house.” In the process, I passed my strung-out friend whose hair was soaking wet in the middle of winter and who was wearing shorts and slippers to boot. She was dragging her monster-child over to her neighbor’s house to play. (I don’t know what her neighbor had ever done to her, but after watching my friend’s kid “play,” I realized that he had ingested a few too many frosted flakes in his day). We exchanged cordialities as we walked together, rapidly approaching Ixta’ s abode.

As we drew near, Ixta appeared, standing midway between her stoop and the sidewalk, in a scruffy little patch of dirt which New Yorkers might call a front yard. Apparently, she was efficiently and determinedly doing nothing. Having just greeted my other neighbor, I was properly primed and eager to address Ixta as well. so with a wink and a nod, I looked over and smiled, “How ya doin’?”

“Hmpph!” I think she said.

“That’ s what I thought!” I replied. (My quick retorts are not always one hundred percent charmingly apropos.)

“What did you say?” she squawked. I was taken aback. What a rebuff! The leer remained unflinching. The little black eyes burned holes into my forehead. I couldn’t look up to meet her gaze and finally lumbered on towards home, leaving my companion sniffing and wide-eyed in wonder, her progeny stamping and screaming idiot-child rhetoric.

It was the only real confrontation that I ever had with Ixta. Of course, time finally healed the wounds of that spiritual collision; and now I truly realize that all our encounters ultimately have brought us closer together. In those first few connections, a whole gamut of emotions expressed themselves, whose range and depth bred a familiarity that stripped all barriers between us. And now, a bewildering universe of potentiality lies gaping before us, sort of like Flushing Meadows in 1939.

Ixta isn’t so crazy. She lives on the same block, on the same side of the street, in the same city, in the same country as me; and I don’t see any difference in our experience here. I am no better off than she, and I really don’t think she’s better off than I am. We both have psyches which are enough in common to live for so long in this great big maelstrom of a town. I wonder if she’ s married. Maybe she’ll tell me in another three years or so. If she is, I just may have to realize that it’s all over and move back to Ohio—and go back to school, I guess.

* * * * THE END * * * *
Copyright Pandel Collaros 2025

Image Courtesy: piercarloabate from Pixabay