Shots fired

 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 helpless. Word got back to her, and she turned up in front of my house, pissed off. I apologized, but infringements on someone's dignity in the street are not easily forgiven or forgotten. 

I explained to John that I had apologized to his friend, which seemed to address that particular issue, but he was shortly on to another one: That I did not respect the heritage of The Block.

The Block is what the area we live in is called, or was called. It's a subsection of Fightinville, where at one time there were several bars, clubs, restaurants, taxi stands, a small motel, and other entertainment enterprises. All were closed, and had been closed, for more than a decade, except for the last. Most had been torn down years before. 

When we had bought the land where our house now stands, the oldest and most renowned of the clubs, The Clock, had been there. The Clock had been a dance hall, pool hall, and bar and grill all in one. It had closed many years before, and then had burned in 2008. We looked at it for a while to see if something could be done with it, but it was too far gone. In the pool hall, one lone pool table had stood, folded in half under the weight of a decade of rain that had poured through the caved-in ceiling above it.

What replaced the clubs and bars was the drug trade, until that was finally broken up by the police. By the time we came along, The Block was empty. Nonetheless, our tearing down The Clock and moving our house onto the lot caused some resentment among people who remembered happier times on The Block. 

John's statement that I disrespected The Block's heritage was an argument someone else had made a few years earlier, but its primary proponents currently were the owner and manager of the club, because we had been warring with them for a few years. Their patrons, as I've outlined before, were coming down and pissing on our sidewalks, blasting music, leaving trash, and generally unsettling the families who had moved in. 

I understood their point, which was that they were here first. True, to a certain degree. Still, the neighborhood was changing with or without us. The homeowners who had lived in the area during the time when the clubs were open emphatically did not miss it. This viewpoint was pretty universal: heritage or no, people who actually lived here were completely against the clubs. They had brought extreme amounts of violence. One man who had grown up there once casually recited a dozen murders he could point to from in front of my house.

Then someone let me know a man had been turned away from the club for being too drunk, and had said he was coming back with a gun. I figured it was only a matter of time before someone took a shot at someone else down here, without any real regard for where those bullets might end up.

We began to push back in public meetings, and complain to the police and city government. The club was forced to cool it briefly.

When we had first moved in, someone with the city had told us they had a historical marker for The Block that had been sitting in a warehouse for years, because there was nobody down here who could or would take it. 

We said we'd put it up. We had a nice ceremony, with some of the local residents speaking about The Block and what it had meant to them. We also offered to create some kind of additional display if anyone had any pictures of those days, but nobody did. 

A few weeks later, someone tore down the sign and threw it down in the grassy strip between the sidewalk and the street. We caught who it was on our cameras, but didn't know the guy. We put the sign back up, and a couple of weeks later, he did it again. This time when we showed the video to the cops, they knew who it was, and arrested him. We rebuilt the sign, this time with a frame of trailer hitch steel. He tried one more time, but it was tougher than him. During all this, he had let us know he thought we weren't the proper custodians of the history of The Block. He looked a little young for the club era. I looked him up. He had been on The Block during the drug years. His arrest record made it look like he'd been arrested for everything he'd ever tried.

So the argument we didn't respect the heritage wasn't a new one, and I didn't agree, but I wasn't going to get into it. 

After John walked on, another homeless guy stopped and told me that everyone knew who had fired the shots. Why can't they do something about these guys, he asked.

The next morning I saw my neighbor looking at something in the street. When I looked, I saw a large man with two bicycles lying in the street. My neighbor and I converged on the scene. The man declined our assistance, but did accept a bottle of water. Did you see the violence yesterday, I asked him. 

You know, none of that makes any sense, he said. Those boys aren't even from around here. That's not what I understood, but he had more experience here. The earlier shooting, he said, was between some boy and a guy called Magoo. Magoo had been a defender of the weaker homeless, and had been driven off the tent city lot when the more predatory homeless had circulated a petition to have him evicted.

Magoo's group had set up a smaller tent city on a lot owned by the man lying in the street's father. 

The man's father was known as Puddin, and he necessarily was Pie. 

I introduced myself to Pie as he picked himself up and took his bicycle. 

"Oh, I know all about you," he said.