By BOB ZIMORINO
The next few blogs are from my time in Phoenix and are more often than not stories, some heartbreaking and some hysterical but all of them true. I couldn’t make up the stuff that happened while I worked there any more than I could make up the cast of characters involved. I will be using first names or nicknames to protect both the innocent and the guilty.
I left Colorado, headed toward Phoenix, with my neighbor Suzy Creamcheese late in the afternoon of the 27th of December. Because she figures into this story rather prominently, I will give you some background on her. I lived in this grouping of cabins in Lyons, Colorado called Cook’s Court. When I moved to Colorado I stayed with a couple of friends Les and Robin in Boulder.
Boulder is a nice city but much bigger than I wanted to deal with or live in. I immediately met up with a bunch of guys that I knew in college from New York City. They had other friends from New York City living there, that were nice guys but they reminded me a lot of people that I knew from back there in their speech and mannerisms. They didn’t seem overly interested in changing to meet the environment they lived in but felt as though the environment should change to accommodate them.
I moved 16 miles north to Lyons. I was more interested in living as a westerner than as an easterner. After all I was living in the west. When I needed a New York fix all I had to do was go to Boulder.
About a week after I moved in this cute blond moved in next door. I generally didn’t date neighbors but she was pretty cute, so I sat out in front of my cabin playing guitar and drinking a beer.
The bait worked because a few minutes later she stepped into my trap. She came out and sat on the plastic bucket that I had positioned upside down a few feet from where I was playing.
It was all a part of my lure. Over the next fifteen minutes she blasted me with pellets of information at a speed normally reserved for automatic weapons.
She told me everything about herself. More than I wanted to know and then kept going until all I wanted was to get away from her. I couldn’t leave. It was my house. I felt like I was caught in her web from which there was no escape. The hunter became the hunted. I made some cheap excuse and then left.
That was my first meeting with Suzy Creamcheese. What did I get from that introduction? Well I learned that my neighbor was a Jewish girl from Lun Geyelind (which in English is Long Island) New York. Apparently if you live on Long Island you don’t have a particular town, it is just Lun Geyelind. She moved west to get away from New Yorkers and wanted something smaller than Boulder. I could relate to that.
The next time we met she was a little sheepish and apologized for “running me off.” I assured her I really had needed to get going. She said her parents got really angry over her decision to move to Colorado and were actually paralyzed with fear that she moved to a small town which only increased her resolve to make a go of small town life.
She worked for Celestial Seasonings in Boulder packaging tea. For someone wanting to get away from Boulder it wasn’t long before she had a pack of dirtbag hippies from Boulder hanging out at her new abode. I say dirtbag hippies because I was also pretty much of a hippie and so were most of my friends. The difference was that we all had jobs and paid our own way. These guys and gals were parasites and she was the carcass from which they fed.
They would drink her beer, eat her food, smoke her pot and borrow her car only to return it on empty. They never had any of their own stuff to contribute to anything. She was so desperate to fit in that she let them take advantage of her. The good thing for me was, that once they ran through all of her stuff they would leave to go find another victim to mooch off of.
She would come and visit periodically and whine about them but wasn’t ready to do anything about getting rid of them. Then one night she was sexually assaulted by one of them, a guy that she had previously told me scared her.
As I was walking home from work and was just coming into my yard I heard her scream.
I busted in through her door in time to stop the assault before he had gotten too far. I pulled him off of her and after giving him a good beating ran him off. My roommate “Bones” and I decided to take matters into our own hands and ran off the rest of them off saying her house and belongings were off limits; that the free ride was over from then on. We must have been wizards because they magically disappeared off to prey on some other unsuspecting soul.
She was so fed up that she felt a need to make changes. She quit the tea business and got a job working at the same restaurant I worked at. We worked with a Zappa freak that named her Suzy Creamcheese and it stuck. Still changing jobs wasn’t going to be enough. She wanted something else. So when she suggested I go with her to Phoenix at just about the right time in my life to make a move, I said yes. Oh, to be young and mobile.
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Bio: Bob Zimorino is a full-time real estate agent with Lambros/ERA Real Estate, a retired Certified Executive Chef, a Musician with the popular local band Hellgate Rodeo, a dad, and a grandpa. He shares the experiences from his life that helped shape his careers and hobbies. His weekly “Taste It” blog is his take on the evolution of food in his lifetime.