Suzy Says

I was bitten by a parrot yesterday.

This doesn’t happen very often to a city girl like me. I have never once been molested by the wild parrots, whom I often see flying overhead with a clatter of green wings glinting in the sun, calling out with their distinctive, rough voices, “You’ll never get us in a cage!” They are the descendants of a pet parrot who escaped many years ago, according to local legend, and I find them one of the many delightful details of living in San Francisco.

Yesterday, I stopped off at Petco on the way home to get some cat-related supplies. While paying for my purchases, one of the tame parrots who belongs to the owner perched on my hand, happily saying his name. Everything seemed to be going OK, but suddenly, he decided that my hand was a chew toy, and started biting me really hard. If you’ve never been bitten by a parrot, I can tell you: they bite very hard and their beaks are as much like rock as possible without actually being rocks. As John pointed out to me later, they crack nuts with their beaks.

I think I should be commended for keeping my hand still until the parrot could be removed, because it hurt like hell. My hand today is covered with parrot marks. The parrot also has a keen sense of humor, besides being sneaky. He laughed his ass off after being removed from my (bleeding) hand, and the apologetic owner said he always laughs when he’s done something naughty. Who says animals aren’t sentient beings? That bird has a better sense of humor than many people I know.

So I arrived home with my parrot-injured hand to find that our upstairs neighbor is having her bathroom re-re-done. So not only considerable construction noise directly overhead, but the water was brown and not warm enough to have a bath. In fact, it reminded me of the plumbing in Russia, where the water was always brown (I brushed my teeth in mineral water while there) and not very hot, besides smelling quite odd. Also, they don’t seem to understand that the goal of flushing a toilet is to make the contents actually go away, rather than making more farewell appearances than Barbra Streisand. Fortunately, though, it was only the bath water that was Russian-style and nothing else.

However, I have to wonder about the other inhabitants of our small apartment building. There are 6 apartments, all the same size and configuration, two to a floor. The Same Names across the hall paid nearly half a million dollars for their place, and appear to barely be 30 years old. Rich parents? Dot commers who got out in time? Who knows? But the real mystery is Miss Upstairs. She is dumb enough to be a member of the Bush family, with their trademark inability to put a sentence together, yet she paid considerably more for her apartment than we did, and is single. She has also renovated said apartment 3 times in the 7 years we have lived there, which begs the question: how does someone who is so stupid have so much money? Our two favorite theories are porn star and heartless divorc?e who took her very wealthy husband to the cleaners, but we’ll never know for sure. Any other theories?

So that pretty much makes us the white trash of the building, since we aren’t rich and don’t drive a BMW or Land Rover and don’t give a crap, either.