I want to write about this, but it probably won’t be seen for a little while for fear of inspiring fear in any loving relatives that might end up reading it. Pretty soon it should be perfectly fine to read, and I’ll post it publicly then.
My neighbors, who are Jehovah’s witnesses, quite loud, Italian, and sort of nuts (not necessarily in that order), had a problem yesterday. The family is comprised of a woman in her 70s, mother of all; her daughter who is somewhere in her thirties and mentally disabled; and several other kids who are in their forties (one of them was living there when we moved it—the apron strings just didn’t get cut early enough I guess).
One of the “kids” that I’ve never met has some drug problems I guess. Someone that he owes money to, allegedly, came collecting last night. With a baseball bat. He was screaming at the mother, who was pretending not to be home, and trying to smash their door down with the bat. They have a big, metal door, so they were pretty safe, but it still scared the shit out of them and everyone else in our neighborhood who heard the whole thing. He screamed that they’d be back later or tomorrow or something, and that they’d better leave the check outside or else. Then he jumped in his huge camper and sped away.
However we might sometimes have differences of opinion, this sort of thing certainly brings us all together. I’m not sure how many of us called 911 while this was happening, but the police were there in a couple minutes, and all of us were out in the street trying to sort things out shortly thereafter.
We saw a camper parked down the street. No way were these guys that dumb, but the cops cruised over to check it out. They cuffed a guy and drove him back over to us. Wrong camper. Wrong guy. A thousand apologies later (from us, I don’t know about the police), they release him so he can return to his trailer.
We have new neighbors in the house behind us now, who are in the process of moving in. They missed this whole ordeal between trips retrieving stuff from their old place. Welcome to the neighborhood!
Mr. Screaming Bat returned today to talk it over a bit more civily I guess. Apparently the disagreement is related to misdirected social security checks, and not, as far as we know, drug money. That’s a margin of hope, as is the fact that no one has yet come by tonight for a repeat performance. Of course, why this guy’s social security checks are going to my neighbor’s house is another issue altogether, but one that should be resolvable.
It’s times like these that make one wonder if the city life is the best thing in the world to be doing. It’s hard to feel safe anywhere these days, and certainly events like this don’t help things.