The thing about living in a “transitional” neighborhood is that you can rely on encountering plenty of “characters.” These are the people that everyone in the area knows by sight, if not by name. When you live in a transitional urban neighborhood you often get to regale your suburban friends with amazing tales of city life featuring these characters who they will come to “know” over time.
One character on my street officially ran for Mayor of Atlanta as one of three candidates. He was on the ballot and everything. His campaign consisted of putting a sheet of looseleaf paper on his fence that said “vote for me for mayor.” He also approached me at a neighborhood function and told me that he was running. He didn’t talk to anyone else there. I believe that his vote count was in the single digits.
Another character on our street hangs signs on her fence that contain incoherent screeds about taxes, the C.I.A., terrorists, and the evils of gentrification. She is clearly insane. I’ve been meaning to make off with one of her signs and scan it for a blog post, but she scares me.
Then there are the shadier characters. Last Thursday, Mrs. Cayenne and L’il Cayenne were home during the day when they heard a knock at the front door. As she went to answer the door, my wife could see a face pressed up against the glass on the door looking into our house. That’s when the dogs started going crazy, and the shadowy figure began fleeing our porch.
When she got to the door, Mrs. Cayenne could see a lady crossing the street with a package under her arm. She yelled out to the woman asking if that was our package. Then she did the math and realized that the lady was taking our package. So Mrs. Cayenne started yelling at the woman to come back with our package and that she was calling the police. The woman yelled back that she was just carrying some paper and disappeared between two houses across the street.
As it turns out, the woman is not unknown to us. She is someone that comes and goes up and down the street who we refer to as “Cracky” - not to be confused with “Cracky on a bike,” who is a man. On a bike.
I guess she realized the gig was up, but our thief gave it a valiant effort. She came back across the street holding sheets of paper to show Mrs. Cayenne that was all that she was holding all along. Mrs. Cayenne was having none of it and demanded the package, reiterating that the cops were on their way. In the end, Cracky left and returned with the package.
The cops came, took a statement, went looking for Cracky, etc. I tell you all of this (and it is all 100% true), because of what was in the package. Our friends from Harper Collins Canada had sent us two copies of The Raw Shark Texts with the very cool and stylish cover below. You may not be able to tell from the picture below, but the cover does not have a dust jacket, and that shark is cut into the boards exposing the text below. It is very, very sweet.
When I e-mailed our HC-CA contact about the attempted theft, she was incredulous but noted that it was all “very First Eric Sanderson.” She assures me that will make sense after I read the book. So in keeping with that theme: a contest. Tell us your stories in the comments of brushes with ill-conceived crime, the characters in your neighborhood, or your other urban adventures. L’il Cayenne will draw a name out of a hat next Monday. A FREE copy of The Raw Shark Texts will be mailed to our winner.
April 16th, 2007 at 8:33 am
I can’t win, nor should I (given that I’ve already devoured, ha ha punny mcpunerson is me, a copy of Raw Sharky Shark), but let me just say this is an *awesome* contest idea.
Infinitely better, say, than the one I can up for Thursday night at the Carter library: disprove any of Einstein’s theories, win a book!
(the Isaacson book is like a 35 dollar hardback, it deserves a tough contest.)
April 16th, 2007 at 9:09 am
I’m not sure how many times I’m allowed to enter (since you’re not an advertising lawyer, Mr. DJ, you must not have known the importance of posting Official Rules with all of those details), so I’ll just throw this one out there. Back in the day, Mrs. Shaft and I lived on a very nice street/boulevard here in Atlanta’s own Morningside/Va. Highlands area. Not a transitional neighborhood, but geographically near what I would consider a “transition point” — that infamous street named after a famous Spanish (?) explorer.
Anyway, we put our house on the market because we had put an offer in on another house in the same neighborhood (a slightly bigger house, in anticipation of little Shafts and Shaftettes running around). We went through all of the pain and contortions associated with trying to sell a house while under pressure, and managed to get an acceptable offer. One thing that we “fought” about with the buyer, though, was ownership of the awesome gargoyles that we had “installed” on our front porch. We ended up caving in and agreeing to sell them with the house.
Fast forward to two days before closing. Shaft is watching his beloved Indians on tv (Fall of 1997, right before they would blow it in the ninth inning of Game 7 of the World Series against the Marlins) and is therefore consuming beverages to lighten his mood and relax his nerves. Which leads to him passing out on the sofa in the living room, literally four feet from the front door/front porch/gargoyles. Which leads to him not being able to hear the ruckus that took place later that night when some hooligans decided to come up the house and smash the beloved gargolyes to bits with baseball bats.
Needless to say, Shaft had some splainin’ to do the next morning as to how the gargoyles had been destroyed right under his nose, and he had to dip into his special stash to come up with the money to replace them.
April 16th, 2007 at 10:01 am
Russ: Say, where is the link to this Einstein contest?
Shaft: Are you certain that in a stupor you didn’t wander out and smash the gargoyles in an Indians- induced rage? How certain?
April 16th, 2007 at 10:14 am
Mrs. Cayenne could trump any story we tell with about ten of her own (five of which would involve Halloween). She should win the book.
April 16th, 2007 at 10:28 am
This ain’t all that great, but should qualify me for the drawing. My youngest son had a large, plastic, pedal-propelled reproduction of a John Deere tractor (complete with working front-end loader), and when we moved to Kirkwood — the prototypical neighborhood in transition — in 2002, the tractor was relegated to the (fenced-in and gated) back yard. About a year later, I was in my car and making my way out of our neighborhood when I spied, in the road ahead, a kid of about 13 making his way down the street on my kid’s tractor. So of course I squealed to a stop, jumped out and gave this kid an earful, and when I asked him where he lived, he pointed to an adjacent house, where a woman I presumed to be his mother was standing on the porch. So I gave her an earful, too, including threats to call the cops if I so much as saw her kid within a block of my house. Whereupon I picked up the tractor, hoisted it on top of my 4Runner, and drove it back home, where it sits to this day. And I don’t think my son ever touched it again, because he had outgrown the damned thing by then. But that wasn’t the point.
April 16th, 2007 at 11:15 am
I’ll be putting this entry in on behalf of both Sally Rogers and myself.
A few years back, we were living in Providence, RI, in a neighborhood that had been in transition for some years. Unfortunately, the transition was being made in the other direction, and the neighborhood was degentrifying. We lived on the top floor of a three-story tenement, the first floor being occupied by an emaciated, chronically ailing man who survived on disability checks and whatever income was brought in by his mentally challenged girlfriend.
The occupants of the second floor were a family of Puerto Ricans, none of whom seemed to hold a job. The head of the family, a fellow named Jose, had been carted off to the state prison a couple of months earlier (we found this out when the state police banged on our door at 6:00 a.m. one morning; they searched our apartment and the rest of the building looking for him), and the apartment on the second floor had turned into a kind of run-down commune in his absence and loud parties and all kinds of antics ensued.
The story in question, though, began early one Saturday morning when we were awakened by the persistant beeping of a car horn. Now, in that neighborhood, car alarms went off with the regularity of commercials on afternoon TV, so I didn’t think about it at first. However, after a couple of minutes, it seemed to be persisting longer than was typical, so I got up and started going around the apartment in an effort to determine where the noise was coming from. First, I looked out the front windows, but the beeping wasn’t coming from that direction. Next I looked out the side, but it didn’t seem to be coming from that direction either. Finally, I went into the kitchen to look out the back. Not only was the noise originating from that direction, I could tell that it was coming from the parking spot directly below the kitchen window. That’s where I had parked our car the night before.
With hardly a thought, I pulled on some kind of clothing and footware and raced down the back steps. I got outside and rounded the corner and could see that one of the neighbor from the second floor, a young deaf man named Alex, was sitting in the front seat of my car fiddling with something. As I walked up behind him, I could see that he had taken apart the steering column and that he wasdoing something with the wires. A four-inch Bowie knife lay on the bench seat next to him.
I got closer until I was standing just behind the door. I could see him repeatedly touching one wire to another. Since he was deaf and, I later found out, drunk, he didn’t realize that he was blowing the horn each time instead of hotwiring the car.
I hit the glass on the car door as hard as I could with my flat palm in order to get his attention. Startled, he jumped and got out of the car apologizing profusely. He and I then tried to discuss the situation, and since his deafness was proving an impediment, I went upstairs and got a pen and a piece of paper. (We still have the paper as evidence that this really happened.)
It developed that he was trying to get to his girlfriend’s house and thought that taking our car was his best option. He offered to take car of the damage, and I told him that I would have to call the police. He staggered and weaved down the driveway, and I went back upstairs to call 911.
Within the hour, a Providence patrolman appeared at the door. He looked like a meatier version of the young Bob Hope, and the whole thing was made worth the trouble by the dumbfounded expression he got on his face when I offered him a cup of coffee. He went down to the second floor and tried to rouse someone. (Some of the other inhabitants were deaf, too.) After a few minutes, he returned to advise us that Alex was not down there. He also suggested we find someplace else to live. We told him that we thought they were selling drugs down there, and he said, “That’s the least of your problems.” Apparently, they had been putting out their cigarette butts on the floor and just generally living in ways guaranteed to one day cause a fire.
He thought it unlikely that anything would come of it, but that they would be in touch if something came up. He left and we started preparing ourselves for the day.
Not more than an hour later, though, the phone rang. It was someone from the Providence Police advising me that there was an officer waiting outside and would I be so kind as to go down and meet him. I agreed and was on my way.
Downstairs I found the Officer demi-Hope standing in the street next to his squad car. Alex was in the back seat. It turned out that he had walked to his girlfriend’s house, which was only about three blocks away, and caused enough of a disturbance that the girl’s father had called the cops on him. As soon as Officer demi-Hope realized who he was, he brought him back for identification.
I identified Alex, and the officer told me that if he took Alex in that he’d be out by the end of the day and that it was probably easier to take a different approach to the whole matter. He had me rouse someone from the second floor in the hopes that they could communicate with the deaf boy.
Alex’s sister came down and stood on the front porch while I rejoined the officer next to the car. He shouted a conversation with her and finally, as he rubbed the tips of his fingers together in the popular gesture for “money,” shouted at her, “You tell him he had to pay!”
The young woman looked at the back of the squad car and rubbed the tips of her fingers together. “You have to pay!” she shouted at her brother.
I agreed to hold off pressing charges, and Officer demi-Hope took Alex away.
But the kicker is this: Late that afternoon, as I stood in the bathroom, I overheard a conversation in the bathroom below. (The two functioned better than short-wave radio.) A young woman said to a young man, “Did you hear about Alex?”
A few minutes later, there was a knock on our back door. A young Puerto Rican man stood there with a young lady. He identified himself as Alex’s cousin and told me that Alex’s grandmother was prepared to give me some cash, but that they wouldn’t have it until the next day. I okayed the deal and, as he got ready to leave, he said, “You know, I’m a thief, too, but I never steal from my neighbors.”
April 16th, 2007 at 11:16 am
Mrs. Cayenne is always telling me that her ‘hood could kick my ‘hood’s you-know-what, but here’s a classic:
I dragged Mr. Journo-friend to the ‘burbs one Sunday afternoon to buy a rug from — wait for it — Pottery Barn.
We got it home, dragged it up the many steps and into the front door, and, just as we were about to close the door, our block’s version of Cracky came flailing up the sidewalk, carrying a huge rug over her head, a cloud of dust from said rug trailing behind.
Cigarette dangling from her lips, and with marbles in her mouth, she said (we think), “Don’t y’all want to buy this rug instead?”
At which point, the cigarette dropped to the floor of our front porch and scorched it.
April 16th, 2007 at 11:20 am
Mr. Cayenne, Have you noticed a theme here? We seem to be the only ones still living in such neighborhoods….
April 16th, 2007 at 11:34 am
Wow — Herman played the deaf card, the race card, and the New Englander card. I don’t think I can top that. Other than to say that I totally suspect that at least one of the hoodlums who smashed my gargoyles was a blind, dyslexic, 75 year-old divorced gay Hungarian immigrant in a wheelchair who has a terrible lisp, and who was out on parole. Oh — and he cut off one of his fingers in a terrible accident when he was nine.
April 16th, 2007 at 11:39 am
Shaft:
I can’t take credit for all of it. You know, it’s the old three rules about real estate: Location, location, location!
April 16th, 2007 at 11:43 am
(Wicked contest even if I am not allowed to enter, ahem, being from Canada and all).
April 16th, 2007 at 1:05 pm
I had just moved into my duplex in Virginia-Highland (in the mid-1980s, pre-yuppification). A noise woke me in the middle of the night. Someone was walking around my screened front porch! I panicked and (in a whisper, because you can’t let the perp know you’re inside) called 911. The City of Atlanta police cruiser pulled up in less than five minutes. They checked out the front porch, then carefully covered each inch of the front and back yard. Nobody. Must have scared them off. The police left, and I went back to bed. As I drifted off, I heard the perp again on the screen porch. I laid in bed, petrified and still as a statue, listening to the scuffling and … scratching? Oh, God, had some demon from hell come up through the floorboards? And then I realized … the perp was a squirrel.
April 16th, 2007 at 1:16 pm
My entry is a combo living in the hood/living chi-chi suburbia
I live in dee-luxe Fairfield County, CT which is one of the wealthiest counties in America but I happen to live in the city of Stamford which is pretty much the hub of diversity within a 20 mile radius. My neighborhood straddles the “bad” side of town so behind me are $2M homes and in front of me are the projects.
Now that the stage is set - about 7 years ago shortly after we moved into our house, I’m awake at about 4 am with a crying baby. I happen to look out my son’s window and see a hulking figure dragging my trashcans down the driveway, opening the lids, doing something in the trashcans and then driving away in a 1970’s Chevy. I’m totally freaked out, wake my husband and have him call the police. All I kept thinking was that this “criminal” put either a dead body, a gun or drugs in our trashcans.
About 10 minutes later, the police show up and I’m tearfully giving them a description of what went down. The one cop starts laughing and says to me “was he driving like a 1970’s chevy” to which I said “yes.” The cop then says “oh - that’s just Jimmy.” And I’m like “who the hell is Jimmy.” And the cops proceed to explain that the city pays mentally challenged people to pull the trashcans down the driveway to the street so that the garbage men don’t have to walk up the driveways to get the cans.
I look at the cop and say “I would be embarassed but this is the stupidest thing that I’ve ever heard. Why don’t they just make the residents pull the trashcans to the curb??” Only in Fairfield county would the residents be too rich and too lazy that this is how they want their tax dollars spent!
April 16th, 2007 at 3:24 pm
As I live in Scotland, I probably don’t qualify for the contest, but I just had to tell you about a quite ingenious theft which occurred in my neighbourhood about 6 months ago. I was woken up one morning by the doorbell, and, when I had finally made it to the door, I was greeted by a policeman enquiring as to the whereabouts of my car. I told him that my husband had driven it to work already. He breathed a sigh of relief, and then told me that there had been a spate of car thefts during the night, and he was going door to door to find out whose cars were missing. By the time he got to our house 6 were reported stolen. He told me that the thieves had untwisted a wire coathanger, threaded it through the letterbox in the front door (as we don’t have separate mailboxes as they do in the US), and snagged the car keys out of folks’ houses. Then they simply drove off in the cars, never to be see again.
So, for those of you who do have a letterbox, make sure you place your keys far away from the front door!
April 16th, 2007 at 10:47 pm
A few notes:
It says a lot about the nature of the shady character “micro-climates.” Ms. Journo-friend lives four blocks away from me and one street over, and she has a completely different set of characters.
If the police arrive in
April 17th, 2007 at 11:45 am
[...] CBC has a nice article about the marketing behind The Raw Shark Texts. Post-modernism and The Simpsons are featured in the story. Speaking of CBC and Raw Sharks, you can win a FREE copy of the book by entering our contest here. (High five to Ragdoll for the link.) [...]
April 20th, 2007 at 7:52 am
[...] In other, unrelated news: Don’t forget to enter our FREE Raw Shark Texts giveaway extravaganza. You gotta play to win. L’il Cayenne will draw a name out of a hat, and we announce the winner on Monday. [...]