Idle essays

Sometimes it’s hard to believe how fast time flies. The older you get, too, the faster it seems to fly.

Neighbors catty-corner across the street are getting ready to move. Their Realtor has stuck a “For Sale” sign in the front yard with a “Coming Soon” addendum. This seems to be the newest style: sticking up a sign before the house is actually listed.

Out of curiosity, though, I looked it up on Zillow, mostly to see if the out-of-state landlord who used to own it still did own it and had gotten lucky with the tenants.

Apparently not. Looks like the folks who live there probably own the place. They (or someone) bought it in 2010.

The previous owner had purchased it in 2004, right at the run-up to the Bubble. That, by coincidence, is when I moved in here: twelve years ago!

Can you imagine? I can’t… TWELVE YEARS!

The neighborhood has really changed since I moved over to this street.

The New York landlord rented that house to Queer John and the Boys, a funny but off-the-wall bunch who, not having any ownership interest in the shack, never did anything to fix it up. Queer John was a sweet sort of down-at-the-heels guy, assertively gay and friendly on his good days. Not all his days were good, alas: he suffered from bipolar disorder, so his ups were stratospheric and his downs were subterranean. In a manic phase, he went out and bought two identical SUVs and shortly was pursued into the ‘hood, driving a vehicle that had something caught on the rear bumper, by three squad cars, a paddy wagon, and a couple of motorcycle cops.

{sigh}

One evening Queer John and one of his roommates had a home invasion. They claimed three guys and a woman had broken in, the men by forcing their way in the front door at the same time the woman and the third guy climbed in an unlocked back window. One of the men chased him up and down the street waving a pistol, until Dave (proprietor of Dave’s Used Car Lot, Marina, and Weed Arboretum) came outside and scared the perp off.

They called the cops, who, seeing QJ’s flaming queerness (he really could be pretty flamboyant), refused to pursue it. They said QJ and roommate must have hired the woman and gotten rolled by her pimps.

We think not.

Another day, the Psychotic Son-in-Law, spouse to Other Daughter (the Cat Lady), went fully ballistic when Queer John told Pretty Daughter’s girl and boy child (at that time, yea verily 10 years ago, they were still children; they lived next door to the rental) that they could swim in the house’s pool, as long as their mom or another relative was present. Son-in-Law jumped to the conclusion that Queer John intended to molest the children and charged over there threatening to kill QJ and anyone else who got in the way. It took some doing to call him off and stuff some meds down his throat.

So on the Night of the Swarming Cops, poor old QJ was hauled off, never to be heard from again. The New Yorker rented the house to a pair of slobs. The woman worked for Bobby McGee’s, a local fixture-type restaurant. Apparently she used to bring the garbage home, because she’d show up in my alley with the trunk of her big old Buick-like tank of a car chuckblock full of stuffed trash bags, which she would jam into the garbage bin shared by me and Sally. It used to enrage Sally. I just thought it was weird. They were weird. WT in the most classic sense. They made Queer John and the Boys look genteel.

Eventually the New Yorker sold the house, at a significant loss (the crash having crashed by then), and these quiet people moved in. They haven’t done anything to make the house look any better, but at least they keep the yard tidy and their behavior is plain-vanilla.

In those days, Carlos the Knife would chase his 80-year-wife Inez and his daughters around, brandishing the kitchen cutlery. And he thought it was funny to let his daughter Maria’s batshit crazy mutt out. The dog chased Pretty Daughter’s girl child up a mailbox column; I shouted the dog down and chased it off long enough for the girl to get back inside her house with her little dog.

Carlos and Inez have since passed away. Maria lost the house, and a lively couple with four cute kids bought it. They just finished painting the house a pretty color. The kids are the center of everyone’s attention down in this corner of the ‘hood. We love them.

Son-in-Law succumbed to his schizophrenia and moved out from Other Daughter’s care. That was probably good for OD, but not so great for SiL, because she did take care of him. At one point the cops swarmed into Terri’s yard so as to jump her fence into OD and SiL’s yard, because they thought he had killed her.

He had not.

It’s mighty quiet down there now, except for the stray cats.

Dave, proprietor of the used car lot, marina, & weed arboretum, also lost his house. He’s living in a condo not too far away. A bottom-feeder picked up the deed off the courthouse steps. His crew cleared out the toxic waste, and he sold the place to a woman fix-and-flipper, who came in, painted, put in a new kitchen, renovated the pool and the yard, and sold the place to a pair of accountants with a teenage son. Son is now in college, the house is weed-free and tidy, and no junk is parked in front.

Sally moved to an old-folkerie some months ago, selling her house to a young couple who plan to have four children. Last month they produced their first. They updated the interior a little but have done nothing to the outside, which could use a new coat of paint…but it’s not too bad.

Pretty Daughter’s kids are grown. The boy has gone off to school in Flagstaff. The girl, alas, fell in with bad company and dropped out of high school. Two young men are living over there now, allegedly the girl’s cousins. Haven’t seen the girl for awhile, but (admittedly) haven’t looked. The guys are a hoot, though.

A whole lot of young people have moved into the ’hood, and they’re doing great things to the place. Most of the houses are hugely improved, with new paint jobs and freshened up yards. Some people have gone so far as to bulldoze the gravel “landscaping” and replace it with actual lawns — that’s nice! Presumably this bunch is paid well enough to afford the water bills. 🙂

The lightrail is now running. The city pulled out a row of houses facing Conduit of Blight Boulevard so as to lay tracks and new utility lines. This looked like a disaster at the outset, but the new young residents, who have the energy to fight city hall and some of whom must have some clout (if for no other reason than that they’ve organized a very active neighborhood association), managed to wrangle the city into building a wall between us and Conduit of Blight and even got them to landscape it!

So our part of the train route looks a lot better than it did. It’s annoying to hear the train honk every few minutes…I’m so glad I moved away from there. If I’d stayed in my first house, I would’ve been about four lots away from that thing, which would have made the war-zone traffic and cop noise just that much worse. One of several reasons I moved was the prospect of two years of train construction, to begin with the demolition of houses on my street and to end with a boondoggle train blatting its way along from five in the morning till midnight…make that 3 a.m. on Saturdays.

The new young residents call the cops on the hookers, which of course keeps the cops busy. But I haven’t seen any of the girls flagging anybody down on our side of Conduit of Blight recently. There’s a linear red-light district about a half-mile to the west of Conduit of Blight, conveniently passing behind a school. Must be nice for the ladies…they can drop the kids off on their way to work. The City keeps promising to clean it up. We’ll believe that when we see it.

The whole neighborhood is looking a lot better, all spruced up the way it’s getting thanks to the young urbanites.

The house that’s about to go up for sale is now valued at about $378,000, which is insane. I bought my house for $235,000, and it’s been renovated. That place, I think, has not — or if it has, the wear and tear has done worn and torn it.

Well, it may be crazy, but if it sells for anything even in that ball park, it won’t be turned back into a rental. With any luck, that house, too, will get a paint job and a fix-up.

That’s the news from lovely uptown Phoenix, where mediocrity is a virtue and all our children are below average.