Fightinville Journal

 I came home for lunch to find some young men milling around in front of my house.  "I lost my vape," one of them told me. "That's why we're looking in your flowers." "Okay, great, I'll help you look for it. What color was it?"  "Orange." While I was talking to him, I was also trying to talk to Fabian, my contractor, who was talking to his wife through the driver's window of their car.  Right about then I noticed a police car driving past, and another down the street.  "What's going on?" I asked. Nobody answered. The passing policeman looked at me through his tinted windows. As soon as the police left, one of the other young men asked me "Can I get my gun back?" "What," I asked. When they had seen the police, one had tossed their gun in the bushes in front of my house and the other into my yard. "Where is it?" I asked. He pointed. "It's a BB gun," he said. I picked it up, e...

 We got a kid arrested today. We spent the morning cleaning the lot behind us. The lot used to hold a club called the Jazz Club, which had gone out of business some years before we came around.  I offered to buy it in the early days after we got here. "I'll never sell," the owner told me over the phone. Derrick Celestine knew him, and we called from where Derrick was working on his trucks at the old horse farm his aunt owned up on Willow and North St Antoine.  Then one day I came back from doing Reserve duty and the club was gone, except for some rubble and a bare concrete slab.  Homeless people had been breaking into the club, and I guess the city had enough and decided to bulldoze it. We applied to get it through a process called adjudication. The city stuck the previous owner with a $20,000 bill for the demolition, which he wasn't interested in paying. When we sold the land where the Star Theater used to be to Habitat for Humanity so they could build houses, they ...