2001-10-02 - 11:28 p.m.

Safe neighborhood? (2)

I really hate it when one bad story dovetails into another.

Yesterday, I told a story about my former landlord getting his head stowed in a few years ago, today we deal with some more up-to-the-minute scumbags.

On previous occasions I've talked about problems with the people across the street from me.

Let me explain again how the neighborhood around my house is laid out.

The Hamster Palace is on the corner of two streets. On the western side of the house is a fairly major thoroughfare that is one of the major arteries entering Frown Town from the north. Most of the houses across the street are businesses with apartments over them.

On the southern side of the house is a smaller, residential street. That's actually where the problems are.

It's kind of weird - on this block the houses on our side of the street (the north side) are all pretty nice and quiet, while all the houses on the other side (south) have problems.

Starting from the corner right across the street from me there is the half-burned out house, with the noisy downstairs people. Going down the street there are three nearly identical houses, all single-family. On the far corner is a large building that, 15 years ago, used to be a neighborhood drug store. In the 80s it was converted into apartments, and then, about a year and a half ago, all the people moved out. Not sure why, but I didn't miss them - they were noisy louts, too. The building stayed vacant, and then the neighborhood kids starting breaking the windows. The owners then boarded up all the windows, so the house looks like crap.

Contrast that to the house across the street from it, the one on the same side of the street as mine on the far corner. It is obviously well taken care of, with a nice little yard and some forsythia bushes. There's some nice ornate wrought-iron work around the porch, and the front doors are made of luminous, burnished pieces of beautiful oak. At night there are floodlights placed strategically to show the nice features of this house to best effect.

But I'm getting away from my intended subject here. The jerks who live in the houses across the street. They've been noisy and obnoxious, but it really hasn't been anything personal, at least up until now.

Frequently, as I go up the back stairs to my apartment, I'll see some people hanging out on one or more of the porches back there. The people lounging out there mainly seem to be young, and there seem to be different ones every time I look.

They don't appear to be too friendly. Generally they give me the beady-eyed "I'm so tough" stare. I'd be a lot more impressed if they were older than sixteen. Practicing for prison, guys?

A couple days ago as Lily was walking home from school, a bunch of these porch monkeys started harassing her, and one of them called her a bitch.

That's it, playtime's over. It's time to take these little turds seriously.

When Lily told me this, what I wanted to do was go over there and yell at them, which would have done less than no good. Not only would they probably only be amused, but there is a certain element of danger involved. I'm not just talking about the sort unexpected consequences that happened to my ex-landlord in yesterday's entry. I think some of these kids may be connected to the local drug trade.

I then asked Lily if we should call the police. She had mixed feelings on the subject. I actually did call the police, but the person I talked to on the phone said that he'd have to come over to our house first and get a complaint from us before he talked to the urchins. We both figured that the police visiting us and then visiting them would cause us no end of trouble farther down the road, so we didn't register a complaint.

The next day, while she was walking home from work, there was some more sniggering and name-calling from these jerks.

Lily is really pissed off about this, and I don't blame her. Getting hassled by toads in high school is one thing, but you sort of think that you're past it once your in your twenties. It also makes her feel unsafe walking around the neighborhood. Am I going to have to start driving her the five blocks to and from school every day?

My usual modus operandi in dealing with problems like this is: ignore them and they go away. These local brats have the attention span of a fruit fly, and they quickly forget about hassling you if you let them. The weather is turning colder, and soon it will be too chilly to sit out on the porch.

So maybe this will just be an isolated incident, and this is the end of it. Maybe.