who's on judge mathis today? #293
an idiotic recap of the greatest syndicated courtroom show of all time
plaintiff: mattie from harvey, illinois. you know with a name like mattie exactly what this church lady looks like: old, black, bespectacled, awkward shin-length hemline, definitely carrying a worn king james bible in her handbag, wearing the kind of old black lady bra that is so stiff and angular you could make out its exact silhouette beneath nine layers of winter clothing. those pendulous breasts are TRUSSED and they will NOT be moving, praise the lord.
defendant: elaine from harvey, illinois. elaine strides into the courtroom in astonishingly accurate jackée henry cosplay: elegant red businesslady blazer, fitted black skirt, clickety high heels, tons of gold jewelry, fancy mullet. i mean, this is what the fuck people are supposed to LOOK LIKE. i want everyone i see to look like they just stepped off the roller rink in an extremely 1986 anita baker music video. i hate the future, it’s scary here. gimme a time machine so elaine and i can take our fingerless gloves back to the era when halle berry had this haircut.
the complaint: mattie has lived in her house since 1979 and says that elaine, her neighbor, damaged her fence so she is suing her for that!
what does she want: $3134
how it went down: just so we’re clear from the outset that i’m not hating, my mother was these women. i, too, would be exactly this kind of calcified witch if computers and grunge music had not been invented. i have their swollen ankles and shuffling gait, but i also know every cranberries song and can work an ipad. mattie says that she moved to illinois in 1975; she worked hard, bought her dream home in which she lives alone, and her life was going along swell until she put a fence between her and elaine’s houses. the judge asks her why she felt the need to put up a fence and she says because she got a dog and wants to limit him to her property, and i’m sorry but how in the fuck could the neighbor possibly have a problem with any of this???
mattie says, “that’s my joy in life: my dog, my eight cats, my money, my house.” goddamn, i love that and i love her. also what a dream of a neighbor. i couldn’t pick any of my neighbors out of a lineup and you know why? because i don’t talk to them! you know what most neighbors do? notice shit about you that irritates them. a couple weeks ago i was home when the woman across the street knocked on my front door. ordinarily, i would keep it moving as if i hadn’t heard anything but i thought she might’ve seen me in the kitchen and i opened the door. “cindy” introduced herself (we have lived here for 2+ years, that is information i never needed to know) and said she’d gotten a package delivery notification that had included a picture of my house. no problem, happy to help! her package was sitting on the shoe rack right next to the door where i’d placed it after realizing it wasn’t a present for me, and as i bent down to retrieve it for her she said, both unprompted and in a disapproving tone, “i know you get a lot of packages over here.”
why does she know this? how does she know this?? it’s not like she has a porch or some rickety rocking chairs posted up on the front lawn, is she just sitting in her house looking disgustedly out her front window every time the UPS truck idles too long at the curb??? i am cripplingly paranoid about the idea that someone might be paying attention to anything i’m doing as i move about the planet (especially if i can’t see/feel them paying attention to me) and the way i usually talk myself out of an impending spiral is to tell myself “no one’s watching you, you loser,” BUT: now i have proof that i am not nuts, there is at least one person paying rapt attention to how much bougie incense i’m trying to fill the yawning gap inside myself with.
not only would it be a dream for either of my neighbors to erect a fence between our homes, i could go for something like a cover that’s just dropped over the house so i can do my scuttling around without any human eyes on me. like how you put a blanket over a bird cage so it’ll shut the fuck up and go to sleep. mattie says that elaine has said she “smells like [her] animals” and that is rude. the judge asks elaine if she indeed said that and elaine says her “friend at the senior center” said it. first of all, if there’s a senior center near me i obviously need to start hanging out there. second, i 100% believe this to be true, as all old black ladies talk about are other old black ladies. i had to call my sister (aged 65) the other day and here’s how that conversation went:
-samantha “hi, i’m returning your call about [some dumb thing].”
-sister “hi girl, [dumb thing details]! hey, by any chance do you remember that woman tracy i worked with in 1987? the one who dated charles’s cousin’s best friend and her mom lived two houses down from where we lived with gram on elmwood?”
do i “remember” this woman my sister worked with when i was in the second fucking grade? this woman who maybe had a relationship with a man’s cousin’s man and whose mom possibly knew our grandmother??? no, i’m sorry babe, i absolutely do not! why would she even fucking ask me that? here’s why: because it sounds better than “wanna hear some milquetoast gossip about boring people you’ve never met before and will never meet, no matter how long you live?” it doesn’t matter whether or not i know who they are, if i don’t cut my sister off before she starts deconstructing her entire family tree i will undoubtedly be subjected to the last thirty years of this woman’s life history and speculation on her future, solely because my sister just happened to run into her down at food 4 less. long story long: if you know an old black lady, right now she is either 1 animatedly talking shit about your ass or 2 casually recounting intimate details of your life to a person you have never met who is looking at the most unflattering picture she has of you on her phone.
elaine says, in her defense?, that she also heard from the bus driver (please!) that mattie is not allowed to sit near him when she rides because he is allergic to cats. this feels like cat person slander and i will not be having it. the judge instructs bailiff doyle to go sniff (!!!!!) mattie, and in turn she sniffs him back??? this show is absurd, and i love it. (they both smell good, thank goodness.) the judge asks mattie how long she and elaine have been neighbors and she says, “i don’t know, i have business of my own.” EXCUSE ME? this might be my new mother! wait, no, this is my actual mother but mattie could most certainly be an estranged aunt!!!!
after some light pressure from judge mathis mattie says that she became aware of elaine in “the late 70s” because her house kept getting burglarized and elaine was always sniffing around. “and you say that to say what, that she had something to do with it?” greg asks and mattie shouts, “BINGO!” she then says that one of the burglaries happened in the winter of 1998 and she found a pair of footprints leading to elaine’s house, but the police chose not to investigate, and they have been subtly antagonizing each other since. this is an actual nightmare. years and years of arguing back and forth with the lady next door about absolutely nothing??? i’m sorry but you have to kill me.
elaine says mattie’s real problem is that she just doesn’t like her. “she don’t like nobody. she don’t associate with nobody, and nobody associates with her. nobody goes on her porch except the postman. she’s got a son, you never see him. something is wrong!” are people just addicted to being pieces of shit? because this is the ideal neighbor!!! everybody in the courtroom is laughing but i would love to see how each of them reacts to an unexpected knock on their front door from a neighbor who doesn’t like their unsightly garden gnomes and wants to yell at them about it.
mattie says that her problem is that she put up a nice fence between their houses and elaine has defaced her side of it. now, i’m waiting for her to reveal i don’t even know what, tags? no, mattie says that elaine disrespected her fence by putting up a decoration of “somebody spreading their booty cheeks.” wait…………….that’s hilarious. should we all move to their block?? the judge (flummoxed, of course, i mean how could he not be) asks her to clarify and she pulls out a thick stack of kodak prints fresh from walgreens. instead of what i wanted to see (A-S-S) the photo mattie produces is of a fence with a yard sign that is kind of like this but not sexy. it’s a cartoon man butt in sensible khakis posed as if he’s peeping through the fence, which you can only see from elaine’s side of it. up to now the cat lady in me was seeing the cat lady in mattie, but even i’m not this fucking grumpy. greg, choking back laughter, asks mattie how much she would like for this so-called damage to her property and, with a straight face, she calmly replies, “three thousand dollars.”
the ruling: I JUST FELL OFF MY CHAIR. that’s the damage? a yard sign you can’t even see unless you walk by her house??? shit, if i knew you could take your neighbors to court over the stupid signs they put in their shitty, overgrown country-ass yards i would’ve spent the entire fall in litigation but let’s not talk about that, let’s talk instead about how mattie is also offended that elaine keeps her garbage can near the fence as well. at first i thought she might be the kind of kindred spirit who also closes the garage door really fast when she sees a child with a clipboard approaching her property, but this woman is deranged. if i ever get like this one of you has to put me down like a dog.
speaking of, mattie produces a couple more pictures: first, what looks like a row of bricks under the fence and second, an aluminum (????) cylinder (?????) in place of the bricks under the fence. i’m not a landscape architect but it looks like the kind of thing you would put up to deter an animal from creeping under, and elaine says that, in fact, she put those things there, on her side of mattie’s fence, because every time she’s working in the garden mattie’s bad little dog starts digging at her from the other side. as the owner of a bad little dog who must be leashed to a basketball hoop in the driveway if he’s outside for more than thirty seconds because he is a menace, i get it.
so mattie wants three grand for “property damage” and the rest of the money is for “pain and suffering” and come on gals, let’s wrap this up and head to church for tuesday night bible study. mattie is absolutely not getting a single dollar to dry her tears over those cartoon haunches, as she shouldn’t, and i hope elaine uses the money she’s saving to upgrade her hideous yard decor to this.
did uncle greg say anything fucked up to anyone: “your friend likes to sniff up behind her behind??? eww!”
*bangs gavel*