Fightinville Journal

 Four shots rang out down the street while my wife and I were on the front porch, getting ready to walk to the dogs. I saw two young men running, one heading south two streets over and another coming toward us. The one coming toward us ran into the bar on the corner.  I called 911, and went to walk the dogs.  By the time we got around the block, we saw several cop cars and an ambulance. The young man we had seen had been shot in the side, and the bullet had exited his arm.  His mother and some other relatives were already on the scene, talking to the police.  I talked to some of the people gathered at the scene, and to the already fed-up neighbors, and then walked home. A homeless man named John passed by. "Fuck you, James," he said. I had taken a picture of a friend of his a few weeks prior, who was on the nod in front of the club. Being on the nod is being so high on something that you're on the verge of passing out completely, and are rendered more or less he...

 "Call me LGK." LGK had just been giving me a lengthy explanation of why the land behind a low hummock of piled up and overgrown trash and debris at the back of a lot belonged to him.  He had invoked the Pilgrims, the Catholic church, payments of $800 million daily ("I know it seems like a lot") and his career in the military. I had come down to tell whoever owned the tent that was pitched on the land that they had to move. There was an argument going on when I arrived, and about ten homeless people arguing or observing.  One of them asked me what I needed, and I mentioned the tent. As we were talking the rest of the crowd moved off, except for LGK who started to talk about property and the law, and V, who spends a lot of time staring at the sun. "You were in the military?" I asked him. "I was in the Army, twenty-six years." "What was your MOS, where were you? "Ansbach, Darmstadt...56 Mike. I was with a Patriot unit." I grew up in ...

 If you're reading this, by now you probably think that life down here is a never-ending stream of degradation, crime, and horror. You're right, but there are also moments of grace and even humor. One winter night I saw a man, clearly on something, lying on his back, headfirst halfway into the street.  "Are you okay," I asked. "No, I'm high," he said. "And I'm cold." I brought him a cardboard box to lie on, and a throw blanket.  "Can you stay and tell me a story?"  I had to decline, as my kids were waiting for me. Cardboard, in case you're ever in this situation, is spectacularly effective at insulating you from the ground. The ground acts like a heat sink, and will make you hypothermic quickly. On another occasion, the crew who was working on my house was standing around in the yard with me when a gentleman walked up. At the time, my inspection sticker was expired by almost a year. I just kept forgetting to get a new one. A t...

 When I tell people about the homelessness I see down here, many apply what they know or what they think they know about it. Some say they're lazy, of course, and others say they're addicted to drugs or have incapacitating mental health issues.  While drug and alcohol abuse and mental health issues are common, for many of the homeless I have interacted with the issue is more that they don't like their options, and can't get from where they are to some setting where they have better options. In short, they don't like being told what to do, to the point where they can't hold a job. I was working on a brick walkway to the front of my house. It was a hot summer day, and I had a stack of bricks piled about 80 or 100 feet away. I was carrying the bricks six at a time to the walkway and setting them in place.  A man came up and said I had promised him work some time in the past, and he really needed ten dollars. Did I have work for him? I had already reached the point ...

I hadn't seen King in a long time. He and his wife lived in a house down the street which was owned by a nonprofit. They had worked out a deal to buy it, but the nonprofit raised the price at the last minute and they moved. I was catching him up on recent events in the neighborhood when one of the homeless guys we know walked by.  "Hey, I have to apologize for that outburst the other day," King told him. "Yeah, I've never seen you like that,"  Titus replied. After Titus left, King told me the story: While he himself was not a religious man, he would attend church to please his wife. One of the preachers at his church invited his wife to lunch, but didn't tell King. Apparently the preacher had been doing this with several women in the church. King had previously noticed the preacher eyeing his wife from the pulpit, and had checked to see if he wasn't just imagining it by changing where they sat. So the Sunday after the lunch invitation King went down ...

Today I got into an argument with someone on the street which could possibly turn into a drive-by shooting.  The tent city was broken up and dispersed last week, but some of the homeless and the kids who were doing the shooting are still hanging out on the lots next to the shelter.  I told a bunch of them they had to move on the other day.  My neighbor told me the next evening that they were back. I messaged the property owner and told my neighbor to call the cops.  Today at lunch I rode home from work and saw the same faces riding bikes outside the bar on the corner. I decided to go see for myself.  I rode down, and the group appeared to be leaving in separate directions. One of them shouted something about a white guy, so I turned around in case one had something to say to me.  Coming the other way was a guy on a bicycle, looking over his shoulder and heading at me. "Watch where you're going," I said.  "Watch where YOU'RE going," he replied, and we w...

 Last summer, the club at the end of the street was going wild. When we moved to the neighborhood, it had been a sleepy little place, with an older crowd who had been coming to the bar since back when it was one of many on the block. Now they were hiring a DJ, a food truck started showing up, and people started bringing barbecue pits and hanging out by their cars. Along with that came piles of trash and bottles on Saturday and Sunday morning, and late nights of thumping bass. Also, people pissing. Before I get to that, let me say when all this started, we went to the club owners. They declined to take responsibility for anything that was happening outside their doors. So I started off asking people to turn their music down. Before long there were too many people to deal with, and I just started calling the cops.  One night I had just finished asking a guy sitting in his car not to throw his trash on the street, when another guy pulled up, got out of his truck, walked to the fr...

 The teenagers who come down to the tent city got into a shootout yesterday, which sounded like a small battle. About ten shots were fired. Come to find out later, one of the teenagers was supposedly carrying a baby while shooting. These were the same teens who had thrown their guns in my garden and had fired blindly down Lafayette street a few weeks before. I had been feeling like  In any case, the people running tent city had enough and called several people that night to let them know tent city would be dispersed the next day. I walked down there in the morning, and the staff were unusually tight-lipped, but the news was there, multiple police cars, and I had just missed the police chief.  Tent city was being broken up. Where were they going to go, I asked. Nobody had an answer.  Had the kids been caught? No answers there, either.

 We were the first house people came to, walking between the shelter and downtown. So we'd get hit up a lot for sandwiches, water, cash, or work. People would come by offering to sell obviously stolen stuff.  One time a guy offered us a fifth of Bacardi for fifteen bucks. I declined, but three homeless guys at the end of the street did not. By the time I realized it, one was slumped up against a pole and the other two looked like they weren't breathing. Like most people, we quit giving the homeless cash pretty quickly, and tried to stick to giving out sandwiches and water. We dialed that back too, though, once we learned the diner attached to the shelter gave out three meals a day. Work was another story. Most people who stopped to ask for work said they had some qualifications. True or not, it didn't make much difference to us at that point, because we were still using contractors who were extremely sketchy. A guy who we hired to work on the roof said he had to go to the s...

My neighbor texted me yesterday afternoon.    "Hey do you know what's going on around my house. I just saw on my cameras the cops chasing someone in my yard." I had no idea, I was in the house, in meetings. I went outside and the street was empty. Whatever it was, it was already over.  She shared the video. Some guy wearing only shorts sprinted inside the fence up the side of her house to the corner, and across her front yard, pursued very slowly by a police officer.  Then he tripped on something in the yard and was tackled by another officer running from the other direction.  Later that day, as I was about to go into a Teams meeting, someone fired a bunch of shots outside.  I've learned which guns make what noise, so I knew immediately it was those kids again with their .380 ACP, which was confirmed the minute I came out.  One of the homeless rode by on his bike.  "Hurry, they're running that way," he pointed. "It's those guys, the young guy...

There are a lot of people in this city who are one paycheck away from being on the streets.  I think we all know this intuitively, but I get to see it play out in real time on my block. Every month or so, newly homeless people arrive. Usually I see their stuff on the sidewalk in boxes or under bushes on a lot down the street. People appear reluctant to part with things when they become homeless. I see a lot of clothes, shoes, bills. Once a box full of VHS tapes.  Becoming homeless appears to be a brutal process. One good rain turns their clothes and papers into trash. I have cleaned up many piles of moldy clothes.  Also, the other, more experienced homeless frequently rob the newly homeless of anything of value. Phones, cash, cards. One evening we saw Ernie walking down the street. Ernie does odd jobs and stays busy. He also likes to drink, and is sometimes hard for me to understand.  "There's a naked woman down there," he said. "Where?" "There. They robbed...

I think the first person I saw shitting on our block was Ronald. Ronald was an older gentleman who used to do backward somersaults, shout at the traffic, and drink pints of T.W Samuels whiskey.  Anyway, I'm pretty sure it was him who took a great puddly dump by our back stairs while we were still working on the place.  I think so because about a year later, he walked out into the field next to our house on a sunny Sunday afternoon and let loose again, in view of anyone who cared to look. He triggered our cameras. We saw him on camera again one night when he squatted down and shit in front of the truck of someone who was partying at the club at the end of the street. Finally, Ronald triggered our doorbell camera late one night as he sat up from taking a nap on our porch. The Ring brand doorbell camera has a very sharp picture and convenient user interface, but it often misses motion. It missed Ronald coming through our gate, up our stairs, and lying down on our porch. It did ca...

The dogs woke me up. They had been barking at something long enough to get my attention. Not the rapid, intense barking they made when a guy was breaking in house two houses away, but they're not happy.  I look at the camera facing the street. A younger woman I've seen at the tent city is pushing a piled up shopping cart past the old club across the street.  She looks like she may be about to set up camp there, so I decide to go out and see what's up. She's probably leaving tent city for a reason, but camping there is not going to work. As I walk up, she busies herself with her stuff, doesn't look at me. Another homeless guy has already arrived, and I look at him questioningly. He replies with a mystified gesture.  I just want to move my things in the same peace as anyone else is entitled to, she says. She already knows I'm about to say she can't stay where she's at, and lets me know she's moving on. I reply that I'm not looking to give anyone a ...