Hearts and Clubs

 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 front and started pissing on the sidewalk.

I started yelling at him not to piss on the sidewalk. The man from the car, who had by now gotten out with his girlfriend, paused to weigh in with his opinion that I should go back in my house. 

This led to a brief but pointed exchange where I offered my position that I lived here, not they, and that I did not come to their neighborhoods to piss in front of their houses, so they could likewise refrain.

This viewpoint grew increasingly unpopular over the summer, and we began to seek allies in our neighbors to fight what was going on.

This culminated at a neighborhood meeting, where some of us got up to speak our piece. 

Let's not wait until someone gets shot down here before we do something to put a stop to it, I said. The people living here deserve to be able to live in their homes without worrying that a bullet is going to come through their walls and kill someone.

The owner of the club was there, but he didn't speak. A man I didn't recognize did. This is a historical club, he said, and you knew it was there before you moved here. 

There's a lot to be said about the historical nature of the club, but I knew one thing: the people who had lived here for decades were dead against it. One of them would come down to mow the lot where his mother's house had once stood. There had been a spate of arson over a few years in the Nineties, and his mother's house had burned along with several others. We would talk when I would see him. He would point at various spots on my street and say a woman was shot there, three guys playing cards were shot in there, another guy got shot over there...nobody who had lived here through the years of hustling clubs and the years of decay and drug deals that followed missed it one bit.

It turned out the man who spoke was the DJ at the club and the reason they were drawing a much larger crowd than before.

We eventually learned that if enough people called the police enough times, they would send several squad cars and shut the place down for the night. 

There things remained for the next year.