Drama on Philip Street--one more time, for the old times

I’ve hinted that MP is a shameless womanizer, and he is also sometimes an arrogant hipper-than-thou jerk who I want to slap. But he’s a genius at being a good, responsible neighbor.

I accept the broken-window theory, that small signs of neglect, chaos or apathy tell would-be criminals and miscreants that nobody cares about a place and that bad deeds are likely to go unpunished, maybe even unnoticed—they’ll just fade into the general disorder. But fixing the broken windows and such things helps prevent crime.

MP picks up the trash and keeps the gutters clear. Our neighborhood is racially divided, but he spans the divide. He knows everyone on the surrounding blocks. When he walks his dogs, he’ll stop and talk to anyone who’s out. He takes the kids out for ice cream and pays them to clean up the sidewalks. Later, when they get older and starting experimenting with delinquency, he calls them on it and they respect him. He’s bought up the vacant lots and laid claim to the abandoned real estate—which in the end is going to make him a fortune, but he’s earned it. He’s like the mayor of our block. And even though lots of bad things have happened in the neighborhood in the last five years, our block has mostly been a pretty peaceful, friendly, pleasant place to live.

When I went out to take Hank for a walk last night, MP was out there and asked if he could walk with me for a minute because he wanted to talk to me about a brewing problem.

I live in a second-story apartment in the front of my building. I share a balcony with my next-door neighbor. There’s a divider that separates his half of the balcony from mine—enough to keep Hank on the right side, but not enough to keep out a person. My apartment has two tall floor-to-ceiling windows in front that function as doors to the balcony.

Unless the weather is really bad, I leave one of the windows open wide enough for Hank and the cat to get out onto the balcony and back in. Even when I close it, I’m not in the habit of locking it. The windows lock with metal pins that slide into holes that line up at the top of the bottom window and the bottom of the top window. There was originally a pin for each side of the window, for a total of four pins, but when I moved in there were only two. I didn’t worry about it because, although there are many thieves in the area, they’re lazy thieves and I couldn’t see them bothering to climb up my balcony to break in. Plus, the bad element types are pretty universally scared of Hank. Plus, I don’t have much worth stealing. And none of my balcony-sharing neighbors have been the breaking-and-entering type.

This winter a new guy moved in, R. He’s nice and easygoing, it would be hard not to like him. He’s gay, black, older than he looks, and just moved into town to work at the swankest of the swank downtown hotel. At first my only complaint about him was the constant throbbing house music, but I got him to keep it down. But then his social life hit its stride. He turns out to be quite a tramp, and his taste in men is for thugs on the DL. There are guys in and out (er) of there all the time, some I recognize as regulars. Many of them are scared of Hank and lurk outside the gate waiting for R to come down.

So, back to MP. There’s a formerly abandoned house a few blocks deeper into the ghetto that he bought for the price of the back taxes a couple of years ago, restored and now rents out. He had a problem crackhead tenant that stopped paying the rent, trashed the house, got arrested for stealing from one of the neighbors, and also stole from another construction site MP is working on. MP evicted him, and the guy threatened to kill him. MP said he’s been lurking around the block, and now he’s moved in with R, my neighbor! He’s the light-skinned black guy with all the tattoos, with the yin/yang symbol on the back of his neck, who I’ve been encountering on the stairs. Who might have noticed by now that Hank is not really all that ferocious. (He is the very definition of a lover not a fighter). MP said he talked to R, but R defended him. He talked to my landlord, who said he was afraid to get into it with black people! Which is un-fucking-believable, frankly. Grow a pair, please. If you can’t, well, I was gonna say you have no business owning property anywhere but the most upscale lily-white suburb you can find, but really you have no business owning property at all or doing anything where you might actually have to contront someone now and then.

I told MP I will be moving out in a couple of months, but he thinks things are going to go down in a matter of days or weeks.

Do I need this shit? No, I do not.

Last night I locked my windows for the first time in years. Except I could only find one of the pins. I “locked” the other window with a fancy metal chopstick.

I have lived on Philip Street for longer than I’ve lived anywhere but the house in Pennsylvania where I grew up. I’ll look back on it with fond memories, but I’m really ready to get the hell out of here.

Bonus fun fact about my neighborhood: according to S, that commercial bakery on First Street near Tchoupitoulas is the nation’s leading supplier of melba toast.