The cruelest month, part II: My criminal neighbor
Upon looking at the building I live in my sister, who has been known to smell of patchoulli, said that the place has bad feng shui."It's facing down a perpendicular street," she said.
"And the hill at the end of that street contains a graveyard," I pointed out.
"See?" she said.
"And there was a stabbing murder in the apartment downstairs before I moved in," I said.
"See?" she said.
"And the mailman can't seem to put the mail in the right box," I said.
"See?" she said.
"And my neighbor across the hall is a criminal," I said.
"See?" she said.
"And the whole neighborhood smells of cologne on old men who couldn't park their cars if the Turks were coming back to finish the job," I said.
I never thought seriously about owning a home while I lived in Massachusetts. I think that is because I had great landlords. I have yet to have a good landlord in the four places I've lived in California and that has made me wish to be a property owner myself.
My neighbors across the hall are a husband and wife in their mid-20's with a seven-year-old boy and a year-old girl. The dad is complex; he straddles several hard-to-reach demographics. He is a brain-damaged Laotian gang member/drug dealer tattoo artist who goes by the name of Solo.
"You got a white wife?" he asked me when I was moving in.
"Yes indeedy," I said.
"I do, too," he said. "So that's cool."
I'd have short conversations like this with Solo all the time because I realized he couldn't have long conversations. He would call me "neighbor" because he couldn't remember my name.
His wife is named Vanessa and she is one of those sullen, sweatpants-wearing heavy people that are popular these days. I realize that I am prejudiced against the sullen. Vanessa has never looked me in the eye.
Coming home late from an event with my camera around my neck, I would often see Solo smoking on his balcony. "You're like the Night Stalker, man," he once said.
We would often hear shouting in the house, and the son would throw tantrums evvery morning in the driveway. Solo seemed to be the face of the family but it was clear that Vanessa took care of the bills. When I would work late at night I would hear peeople coming and going every few minutes. I didn't stand by the door, but I was confident that the Solo family wasn't selling Girl Scout cookies.
If so, I would have bought some.
It was my downstairs neighbor, Ian, whose apartment is haunted, who had an issue with Solo. One night the Solo family was having a party and playing the music loud. Ian went upstairs, banged on the door (which was the only way he cpould have been heard from inside) and said, "We're not living in a dorm."
This was the wrong thing to say to Solo, because he took advantage of the opportunity to make the issue about class structure rather than him playing Hip Hop Hits from Today and Back in the Day so loudly that corpses were shook loose down the street.
I joined the gentlemen on the landing as Solo was saying, "well, maybe you think you're better than me because I didn't go to college, but - "
He turned his music down in a face-saving gesture that he was being oppressed.
About a week later, his brother came to stay with the family. His brother I will call Unreconstructed Solo because he never introduced himself.
Solo's brother made Solo look upstanding. With no wife or children to modify his behavior, Unreconstructed Solo made our four-unit complex seeem a little like the junior high smoking area for a few weeks. It was like some retarded people were expertly made up to look like the Eastside Crips.
The story we tell ourselves now, because we will never know for sure, goes like this: a couple of weeks ago Vanessa got fed up with her husband and his brother and took the kids back to her mother's house. Solo and Unreconstructed Solo took this opportunity to go on a several-days'-long meth binge. I saw Solo in the morning during this period, looking as if the Sun was somehow assaulting him.
On Friday night, April 7 (two days after I bought a new car and five days after my computer died), TAARG was at a theater function and I had just put ACI to bed. I turned on the projector, got my notebook, and started watching a DVD of questionable legitimacy to review it. The DVD was called No Morals.
A few minutes in, the phone rang. It was Ian.
"Martin, are you OK?" he asked. I wondered for a second if he was judging me.
"Yes," I said.
"Have you noticed the seven police cars parked outside of our house?" he asked.
"As a matter of fact, I haven't," I said. I stood up and went to the window. Indeed there were several police cars outside, and now some policemen were looking up at me!
"Mind if I come up?" he asked.
"I'll get some drinks ready," I said.
Ian arrived and told me that he'd heard yelling from the balcony of my floor, along the lines of "There's nobody here!" That had been Solo and I had been putting my daughter to bed so I hadn't heard it.
I called the non-emergency number of the police and asked the friendly dispatcher if I should be concerned that there were police surrounding my house.
"No," he said. "There was an incident down the street from you."
The bad feng shui street.
This turned out to be both true and false, because attention was clearly being paid to my house. We heard our other neighbors being questioned by the police if their children had ever had any trouble with the law.
I still had to work, so I turned the movie on, taking notes as the police talked to eacch other via radio on the street and an LAPD helicopter circled overhead.
"When people back home ask me how Billerica is different from L.A.," Ian said, "I can point to watching a porn movie while cops surround the house and a police helicopteer shines a light in my window.
"I'm going out there," he said.
"Not a good idea," I said. "But have a good time."
I an walked outside and was immediately told to raise his hands by the police. He joined several other neighbors staring at our house from the street, and none of whom were allowed to go back in.
TAARG arrived back in the neighborhood around this time, but was not allowed to enter the house. We communicated by cellphone.
She and Ian were able to ascertain that someone fitting the description of Solo's brother emerged from our building earlier that evening, ran across the street, and assaulted an elderly neighbor, who dropped his wallet but also managed to knock down Unreconstructed Solo, who took the money and fled.
After yelling "There's nobody here," Solo, too, fled, through his apartment, out the back door, and probably over a low wall into a cul-de-sac area from which he could escape to some side streets. This was before cops with guns started crouching behind the house, too.
But the police still thought the culprit was on the premises, so they sent up a team with a battering ram and a dog. ACI slept through them knocking the door in, checking the attic, and standing around loudly discussing what to do next.Ian and TAARG were let back in the building after a few hours. The police alerted our property owners of the charges, the unfortunate knocking down of the door, and of a threatening message Solo left on Ian's machinee later ("I'm having a party tonight with loud music, hookers, drugs, and guns," Solo said on the recording, which the police got a copy of. "I dare you to come." Classy), but the property owners never returned any of our calls.
Things seem back to normal. In fact, the rent has gone up. A new coat of paint has been splashed on the house, palm trees, flowers, and turf have been laid out around the perimeter. The pipes still don't work all the time, but that is something that can't be seen from outside.
posted
by Marty Barrett at Thursday, April 27, 2006
4 Comments:
Is Solo's ex-apartment up for rent?
Will this be on the next episode of "COPS"?
Actually,ir reminds me of the good old days at Jerry's place in Lowell, where we would swill down whiskey, play chess, and operate the meth lab for the hookers outside. : )
Wow! What a thing that was: The arrest and your excellent reportage. I'm floored. I need to read internet websites more often. Rock on!
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