The process of elimination

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 catch him getting up, and chimed. I could see him bending down and tossing things off the porch into the grass. 

"Ronald is on our porch," I told my wife. 

"What!" she replied. In an instant, she was outside yelling at Ronald to get off the porch and out of our yard. Ronald backpedaled across the street with his hands raised in a penitent pose.

The next morning I discovered that what Ronald was pitching in the grass were turds that had fallen out of his pant legs.

When the club at the end of the street got busy last summer, I would from time to time catch people pissing on the sidewalk. I would go outside and yell at them. Sometimes they would use the alley next to the neighbors house, and I wouldn't see them. Other times they would piss up against the Portalet being used by the houses under construction next to us.

Habitat, who was building the houses, had their Portalet, and we had ours. Their Portalet was closer to the tent city, so the residents of tent city used it. Then one day I noticed someone using ours. I got closer, and could smell them smoking meth inside. 

"Are you smoking meth?"

"No."

The problem with drug users is they tend to mess up your Portalet; they leave clothes, lighters, makeshift pipes. They use or take the toilet paper. So we started locking up our Portalet. One night I forgot, and saw a man using it. I went outside.

"Please don't use my Portalet."

"I have nowhere else to go."

My heart sank. I didn't want to leave it open for the drug users, but who wouldn't sympathize with a man who has no place to shit?

"I'm going to lock it again in a few days."

The next night, my kids told me there was a man waving at me outside. I looked out my window and it was him. 

"What is it?"

"You're out of toilet paper."

I threw him a roll.

The next morning I locked it up. This started a war between us, the construction crew, and the guy. We would lock up our Portalet. He would either defeat our lock, or he would go to their Portalet and defeat it. We wrapped ours in chains. They wrapped theirs in chains. He worked the chains back and forth until they came down. We used a cable lock. They used a cable lock. He pried up the corner of the door just enough to slip in. We finally cable locked ours with the door facing the fence, and they locked theirs to a phone pole with some crazy bridle. 

Not long after that someone shit on the sidewalk.