Life in Arizona: Pooches, Drivers, Wackshit Neighbors

Pooches: Cassie the Corgi is having a much better than usual day. She’s been running at about 80 to 90 percent since she rolled out of the sack at 6:30. This is not to say she’s magically cured. Far from it: she still has this little problem with breathing… But it’s a somewhat improved problem. She slept all night, far as I could tell, and today has been alert and highly barkifarious.

Do I think she’ll recover? No. Not a chance. She still needs another round of antibiotics for the UTI, which has returned. And the vet is unhappy with me for having taken her off the doxycycline just because it made her royally sick. So how exactly that is going to happen escapes me. And she certainly isn’t over the lung thing, which yes, certainly could be lung cancer. I guess I’m going to have to take her to yet another vet to see if anything more can be done, but just now she and I are both so exhausted it seems like the best and kindest course of action may be to let nature take its course.

If nature has a course in mind…

My wackshit neighbor, Tony the Romanian Landlord, who may or may not own the house across the road, is up to no good. Tony is the guy who moved into the ‘Hood about 15 or 20 years ago, before the run-up to the Bubble, and bought up a half-dozen houses by fast-talking the elderly owners out of the places’ real value and lying to mortgage lenders about what he intended to do with the properties. He turned them all into rentals, which didn’t do the neighborhood any good. To put it mildly.

During this period, he bought two houses, one across the street from my present abode and one two houses down from me. He installed his two daughters in these. Both women have lived there without incident, pretty much. The one he calls his “Pretty Daughter,” across the street, has led a fairly normal life and now her kids are grown and out of the house. Other Daughter, who herself has mental problems but who is quite a sweet person, was married for a long time to a paranoid schizophrenic — he’s the one that Anna the German Shepherd went after when he tried to break into my yard. Poor Alan…fortunately, he survived unscathed. Physically, anyway…. 😉

So, of late Pretty Daughter seems to have drifted away. Various relatives come and go at that house, but it’s unclear whether she or either of the kids lives there. At one point, a year or two after he bought the place, she had quite the little conflict with her dad. He had told her he’d put the house in her name. But after she’d been in there for awhile, she learned — apparently by accident — that he had not done so but that it in fact was fully deeded to him.

She had a flying shitfit and, we are told, he was pretty much forced to sign it over to her.

This story, however, is neighborhood folklore. In fact, we do not know whether he or whether Pretty Daughter owns the place. But…

Over the past three days, Tony has been over at Pretty Daughter’s with a crew of itinerant workers, who have taken a chainsaw to the big tree on the front yard. They’ve buzzed and buzzed and buzzed for hours, and hacked the big old shade tree down. They dumped the waste in the yard and now have gone off and left it. A-L-L-L over the yard and driveway!

Today they’ve dragged the debris off the driveway. Yesterday you couldn’t even have gotten into the house: all ingress was blocked. Tonight there are no lights on in the place, suggesting it’s vacant.

That leads me to suspect that Tony has reacquired the house (or never really forked it over to his daughter) and is planning to turn it into yet another flicking rental.

Tony hates trees. Every time he bought a house in the neighborhood (he sold all except the two occupied by his daughters at the very height of the bubble, literally just a few weeks before the crash), he went in and chopped down all the trees on the property.

One of his rentals became known locally as “the boob house.” He felled two gorgeous Aleppo pines in the front yard and then, puzzled about what to do with the large stumps, finally decided to cover them with mounds of the same gravel used to xeriscape the property. And yeah: the result did look like a pair of boobs sticking up out of the ground.

😀

Well, it wasn’t funny for what the rentals did to our property values. But still…it was pretty stupid.

Tony pretty much got out of the rental bidness, to the best of my knowledge. Instead he built and operated a nursing home, which he only recently sold. Exactly how he pulled this off remains unexplained. The bastard bought a nice house in Lower Richistan that needed remodeling. But instead of fixing and flipping, he tore it down and turned it into a commercial property: a nursing home. (Turns out Romanians are big in the nursing home business…). I cannot even imagine how he managed to force rezoning of a residential property in the middle of a residential neighborhood…but he did. So now there’s this two-story monstrosity in the middle of the nicer part of our neighborhood, set up as a settlement house for the elderly.

That’s Tony.

Well, if Tony is wanting to convert Pretty Daughter’s house to a rental, you may be sure it is specifically to do a number on me. He hates me even more than he hates trees. And that’s a lot.

When Sally (directly behind me) put her house on the market, Tony showed up at the door the instant the sign went up. Fortunately, she had listed with a cousin who’s a realtor, and she had told him, expressly — even before said sign went up — that she would not sell the house to him. So the guy, being a relative and not giving a damn about any anti-discrimination laws (Romanians are, après tout, decidedly white), told him no. Tony threw a gigantic shit-fit. He apparently threatened the guy, who told him to take a flying eff at the moon.

So. If he turns that place across the street into a rental, as I think he’s about to do, he will rent it to the grossest, most obnoxious sh!theads he can find. The place will soon be a mess, probably occupied by Harley-Davidson aficionados who own large barking pit bulls and blast the neighborhood with ear-splitting “music.” His aim will be to drive me out of my home.

And he may win. I frankly do not feel much inclination to hold my ground against whatever sh!theads he finds to put in there. (And trust me: he does rent to sh!theads. The place he bought behind SDXB was occupied by child abusers; the neighbors across the street expressly said they were moving because the kids’ screaming and crying was terrifying their own children).

You understand: the people who owned this house before me moved out because they were afraid of Tony. Owning a German shepherd and certain armaments (and not feeling hesitant to engage either), I am not afraid of much. But…I tire of bullshit. And I’m not much in the mood to put up with any more sh!theads.

There aren’t many choices of places to move. Conduit of Blight, which runs just to the west of the ’Hood, holds property values down here — that’s why so many young couples with kids are moving in. It’s the last centrally located neighborhood that’s middle-class and also reasonably affordable. Because of the downward pressure on prices from the Blightrail and the drug-addled slums to the west of us, there’s no way I can afford a similar house — or even one several hundred square feet smaller — for what I can get for this house. One that’s centrally located, that is.

That leaves as my possibilities….

• Sun City, where the houses are a similar vintage and construction
• Fountain Hills, where the houses are a decade or two newer and proportionately more ticky-tacky in construction (more stick-and-stucco, fewer block houses)
• Far north Phoenix, up around Deer Valley Road or Carefree highway: elbow-to-elbow cookie-cutter styrofoam shacks that define ticky-tacky

Every one of those represents the end of my social life.

This is because my social life is centered around the church and the choir, and there’s no way in hell I’m driving in to North central from the boondocks two or three times a week. Not on your life! And especially not at night.

I might be able to afford a house in my son’s area. But that neighborhood is close to even worse blight than we have up here; the highest rate of violent crime in the city occurs around an intersection within walking distance of his house. Plus those houses were built in the early fifties. In 1951, when my son’s place was built, there as no air-conditioning. The only cooling available was swamp cooling. No one ever heard of insulation. Consequently, trying to make one of those houses livable in the summertime is prohibitively expensive — his AC bills on 1300 square feet are now pushing $400, and he leaves the AC off or jacked up around 90 degrees during the summer, struggling to make the place more or less livable with heavy-duty fans in every room. For comparison: mine runs around $225 to air-condition 1868 square feet to around 80 degrees — 78 at night.

Why, you might reasonably ask, would I abandon friends, family and activities just because I moved to the far side of the galaxy?

Because that’s exactly what it is: the Phoenix metropolitan area is larger than Los Angeles County! And that, my friends, is vast.

And…driving in this place is a species of Hell. I simply hate driving in the city of Phoenix. Don’t mind driving on the open road — in fact, rather enjoy it. But do passionately loathe despise and hate driving around this place. People here go batsh!t crazy when they get behind a steering wheel.

Today, for example, I had occasion to drive first up to Home Depot and then, shortly thereafter, down to the nearest Costco. Streets were relatively empty: a lot of the locals have left town to visit relatives over Thanksgiving. Nevertheless, the remaining drivers were no less off-the-wall than usual. I amused myself by writing down their antics:

• A guy shoots out of a side street and streaks across five lanes of traffic moving at 50 miles an hour.
• A pick-up tailgates me down Cave Creek Road — also at 50 mph, with plenty of room in adjacent lanes for him to get around if 10 mph over the speed limit was just. too. slow for the poor guy.
• I drive through mile after mile of dreary, creepy slum — to say the ambience of Sunnyslope and the lesser parts of Paradise Valley is “creepy” is to understate. Am amused by a guy with hair dyed cherry red wearing a blanket like an Indian robe. He’s walking toward a bus stop, where he probably plans to take a nap.
• A bus pulls over into the bicycle lane along said 50 mph road, where he’s stopped. He isn’t blocking traffic, but the nitwit behind him sure is: this clown stops in the center of the outside lane and…just stands there, causing drivers behind him to dodge and swerve around him. At 50 mph.
• A fucking school bus is on the road at 11 in the morning. Why? State law requires all traffic in both directions to STOP every time a damn school bus stops. And they will get on a main drag and stop at every. single. corner.
• Beside me, I see a driver apparently smoking dope. I don’t think he was vaping. I have a friend who vapes, and her devices look nothing like the gadget this guy was using to inhale delectable fumes…at 45 mph in a crowded commercial district.
• A yard guy backs his pickup out onto 7th Avenue (45 to 50 mph, on average) from a blind driveway.
• Two lanes of Bethany Home Road, a major thoroughfare, are shut down.
• I count 10 bums’ carts along the north side of the park across the road from the Costco.
• Get trapped in the parking lot by a Controller…you know the type. Moron!
• The signal at 15th Avenue and Montebello, which you have to navigate to get north and west when you leave the Costco, has an interminable red light. The only sanity-preserving way to go north there (assuming you don’t spend your idle driving moments sniffing interesting fumes) is to turn south, then dodge east into the neighborhood, then make your way north to Bethany home, then turn east (or west, depending on which way you’re going), then turn north on 7th, 15th, or 19th. Total. Crazy. MAKING.

This, amazingly enough, represents an uneventful ride through Phoenix traffic, about 20 or 30 minutes on the road, all told. It’s just effing typical. And that, my dears, is why there is no way in Hell I’m driving in to the central city twice a week from Sun City or Fountain Hills. Or Cave Creek.

So. We’ll see what the SOB does over there. If he turns it into a nuisance property, I may change my mind about moving. It’ll mean some major changes in my life. But then…change is what life is about, eh?

One of the houses next door to that place is occupied by a military man, a guy who commutes out to Luke AFB. And his wife, and his two kids. Chances are, he’s not going to put up with a lot of sh!t from Tony. The other next-door neighbors are elderly, possibly even original owners. They will have neither the strength nor the inclination to fight Tony or complain much about obnoxious renters. They may just give up and move to Sun City themselves.