The
following story involves amphetamines, guns, white supremacists living in
the hood, and chocolate cake.
One
of the moms at my kid's birthday party was a property sleuth, the person
developers like to hire in case that Craigslist deal turns out to be a
superfund site, and as we swapped stories aboutThe Worst Section 8 Houses
Ever she mentioned an address I recognized. Well, not so much an address as a
field filled with cars on blocks.
Ten
years ago we'd found three people living in that field, in tents or vans, so we
built some basic locking shelters for them and, over the past year, were able
to connect them to permanent supportive housing. A host of amiable old black
dudes hung out in the house beside it, a used car lot across the street, and
the prevailing attitude was that anyone could live in the field so long as they
machete the kudzu vines come summer to keep back rats.
It
never occurred to me to ask who owned the land. Or why the same cars were
still on block ten years in a row. Or why I never once saw someone working in
the used car lot. It was a smack dealer part of town hit hard by the 2007 foreclosure
storm, where code enforcement officers fear to tread, another piece of haunted real
estate.
This
is where Property Sleuth Mom comes in.
When
the home owner died a few months ago, the city offered his kids a deal and
the bulldozers couldn't come fast enough, offices for the public health
department sprouting on the bones of old Chevys.
Did
you know he was white? she asked. That he was 85, a card-carrying member of the
Sons of the Confederacy, and had a run-in with the cops for firing a gun at
someone?
In
my mind, I tried to justify why such a cliche would live in the hood, and not
just any hood but the #1 spot to be discovered missing your head and hands, and
assumed he'd inherited everything from the pre-white flight generation, too
poor to maintain the House of Usher but too proud to move into a nursing
home.
Oh
no, she said, he was crazy. And rich. And he tried hiding it as long as
possible.
There's
a saying: Want to keep your property value low? Dump all your trash on the
lawn. And that's exactly what he did, all over town, in multiple cities, he
would purchase land and cover it with abandoned cars so developers would
overlook it while he waited for gentrifiers to come along.
But
wait, I ask, Why was he shooting at folks? Why let the house fall apart if he
had money? Why live somewhere so lousy with drug dealers?
She
leaned in, He had Parkinsons.
Meds
like pramipexole and ropinirole can have nasty side effects (gambling addiction,
hyper-sexuality, OCD, etc.), but give Parkinsons patients that much needed
wind-up. The FDA published some pretty dire warnings, and when doctors
stopped writing prescriptions to our gun-slinging protagonist, he sought out
the next best thing.
The
meth didn't just make him paranoid, she said, He started to...well he had a
baby. His wife, she's up in Pennsylvania, she wasn't too happy about
that.
Is
every house you find this nuts?
Oh
yeah, she says, you wouldn't believe.
Kids
crowded around asking for cake and watermelon, and I arranged plates while
wondering which was worse, that rich crackers were purposely trashing black
neighborhoods to keep the rent down, or that the man had unwittingly engineered
his own downfall, sliding toward madness as surely as the hand-rail on a ski
lift?