LOVE THY NEIGHBOR (11th Increment)

What Dean had already gotten done was impressive. First, he had to figure out a drainage system to deal with the water that seeped into the rear foundation wall whenever it rained. He ingeniously developed a French drain-type system but it eventually required removing age-old linoleum tile, and jackhammering the cement floor underneath. First, though, Dean had lots of planning—and by planning I mean standing for hours in Home Depot staring at the various items on the shelf to figure out how they all worked. And if he didn't, well, then, he would jury-rig what he needed. That's how Dean rolls. In fact, he wants to start his own HGTV show called HALF-ASS IT, but that's another story for another time.

Then he set about replacing all of the insulation (I helped with that; I'm not a total laze-about), designing the wall configurations and framing them, replacing all of the doors and windows, and finally laying a special subfloor that allowed water to drain underneath, should the drainage system fail. Fortuitously, our next-door neighbor, Lou (he bought the house next door from Steve—goodbye Steve! Don't forget your catamaran!), is a retired contractor. He helped install the French doors in the front and informed us that the wall had absolutely no support, held up by nothing but prayer and a bit of luck. This tidbit I learned whilst I was cheerfully coming over, Starbucks coffee for them in hand, to see the progress. As I was about to enter through the enlarged opening, Lou shouted at me, DON'T COME IN!!! It was too dangerous! All those other times that I walked in—not to mention all those drunken bar patrons over five decades—not knowing that the whole front of the building could come crashing on my head . . . well, what's done is done. But now Lou could prevent a tragedy. He helped Dean shore up the wall and correctly install the frame to accommodate the new doors.

The list of our accomplishments was growing long, and it did bring a deep sense of satisfaction to see the old building transform from what my sister called Depression-era chic to a really pretty little structure. In addition to renovating the entire apartment, we had had the septic redone, replaced the roof, and had a wooden porch built under the newly revamped overhang (after we got the variance). As I already mentioned, we replaced all of the windows and doors on the ground floor (the windows in the upstairs apartment were decent, if not great). We put standard Andersen windows and builder-grade doors on the sides of the building but in the front we put beautiful divided-light coffee colored windows (the trim was coffee colored that is) and matching French doors. We painted the exterior a sort of soft buttery beige on the upper story and a dark café au lait on the ground level (Noticing a coffee pattern here?). We installed cedar shutters and painted them a dark red. The shutter dogs were black wrought iron. I wanted to put Smith and Hawken window boxes up but the overhang prevented any flower boxes on the upper level, at least in front. All of these projects sucked up our entire budget of a hundred Gs.

Now what? Well, now was the time for the housing market to completely tank. Not that we didn't see it coming. Apparently Dean and I, right brainers and money-stupid all the way, were able to see what seasoned Wall Streeters and bankers could not—that housing prices could not go up forever (what goes up must come down, etc.). Also, most Americans would probably figure—if they knew what these numbskulls were up to—that something as retarded as selling mortgage-backed securities and at the same time betting that they would fail (credit default swaps) might be a tad illegal. BUT IT WASN'T! Wall Street should be renamed Greedy Boneheads with Ill-Gotten Money Street. So the market tanked the second week we put dear old Dad's Florida house up for sale. Did I mention that the Florida market crapped out so badly that properties were difficult to even give away? Alas, we were stuck with Dad's shitty little house instead of the bucks we needed to finish our renovations. We could, however, take some solace that our New York properties pretty much held most of their value as long as we didn't try to sell them during this lifetime. So much for trying to get back to Los Angeles.

LOVE THY NEIGHBOR (10th increment)

Nothing is ever easily done when one is dealing with government agencies. And that holds true even when the government is a motley collection of a few small-town pols. In our town, in order to do anything to one's own real estate property, one needs a permit. Most of the time, you cannot get that permit without a variance if your building is over thirty years old, or about how long the town has had a zoning code. The process can quickly become ridiculous and unnavigable by all but the most determined engineers and architects. Having lived through it, I think I finally understand why people become crazed anti-government wackos who live in compounds and shoot at FBI agents. Government red tape really blows and can make a maniac out of a Buddhist monk in no time.

We were incorrectly advised by the town's zoning code enforcement officer at the time we bought the bar. He told us that we would have to open a bar that served liquor, within six months of the bar's closing or lose the grandfather status. Buildings that predate the zoning codes are "grandfathered" in, meaning that what is currently in operation (business-wise, usually) is allowed but anything new would then have to conform to current zoning requirements. Obviously we weren't going to sell liquor but when I asked him if we could open a coffee bar, he looked at me sternly (over the phone) and told me unequivocally no. How about a wine bar? Not only did he say no, but he was clearly getting pissed. I gave up at that point for I knew I needed to keep him on my side or at least not despising me.

I believed what he said, since who else would know about the zoning code but the zoning code enforcement officer. Right? So we let the six-month deadline elapse since there was no way we were going to keep the liquor flowing. A year or two later, this particular fellow retired from his post. It was only when we hired our engineer a few years after that I learned I was given entirely incorrect information. It turned out that in our town, bars are not permitted. Restaurants, however, are allowed to serve alcoholic beverages but food must also be served. Ah, it then became clear why there was the most revolting "kitchen" behind the bar that I ever was unlucky enough to see (and I've lived in various NYC apartments). I hope anyone who ate—or drank for that matter—in that bar was up on his or her tetanus shots.

So, in effect, we could easily have ditched the liquor and kept the business open selling food, thereby saving thousands of dollars, dozens of hours, and mountains of grief to get the permit we'd need to open our general store. For fuck's sake, you can't even depend on the freaking zoning code enforcement officer to give you correct zoning information. How can he enforce the zoning code if he doesn't know it? I guess he just made it up as he went along. He owes us thousands at this point.

Oh, right, the general store—it's what Dean and I always wanted to have when we visited places like Cape Cod, where his father used to live. Our favorite one was fittingly in a town named Brewster and it was an old-fashioned store, with sawdust on the floor, a vintage peanut-roasting machine, penny candy, and dusty antiques for sale. Having a store like that was Dean's dream.

My idea of our eventual store was cleaner, with more of a Starbucks sensibility—Italian espresso machines, and Murano glass light pendants. Still, I thought we could meet somewhere in the middle and produce a charming little shop. And it would have to be very little, since we only had about 600 square feet or so on the main floor.

Luckily, Dean and I agree on interior design. The floor, for example: hardwood with a dark rustic finish. The ceiling? Probably copper-plated tin tiles. We'd use the old bar as a counter and we'd try to find antique—preferably tiger oak—display cases. Dean usually lets me choose the paint colors (smart man), so there'd be no issue there. Our design inclinations are the same 99 percent of the time.

But before we could start appointing the place, there were piddling things to do, such as rewiring and replumbing the entire space, and electricians and plumbers have this pesky habit of wanting to be paid—and handsomely—for their services. This job was going to be pricey. My septic guy had cut off the water supply to the first floor, in an attempt to save us money at the time we addressed the septic failures of the previous owners, an open litigation when we purchased the property. That would have to be dealt with. But the biggest problem for us remained the commercial building status in a residential zone.

That obstacle seemed to go away when the town decided to rezone what they called their "gateway" areas—areas that were close to the town's borders. Since our property was in such a region, we were rezoned to a commercial status. But as always in our lives, there was a catch. Retail was not one of the permitted uses. Ironically, restaurants were a zoned use but the health department would not allow us to open one since we had limited septic capability and we were across from a DEP reservoir. Okay, so we just needed a variance for retail, no biggie.

Oh, but it was indeed a tortuous route (and torturous, for that matter), as our engineer/architect explained to us. First, we had to go to the town board and have it deny us; then, it was on to the planning board, to get its refusal. Finally, to the zoning board to get the last denial we needed before we had to begin the process again. And this multiple-denial process is perfectly acceptable as the normal required channel. I mean, none of them find anything wrong with making property owners go through ridiculous, costly and duplicative measures to obtain a permit. I would better deal with these constraints if the codes prevented the big guys from really violating the community. BUT THEY DON'T!! The big developers automatically get variances from the towns, and if it's too circuitous a route, well then the town will simply alter the code to suit their favorite sons. Consequently, the only ones who suffer from these absurd zoning regs are the very people they are ostensibly trying to protect—the regular Joes. Like us.

My behavior at the board meetings left much to be desired. I mean, it would be excellent behavior if my intention was to piss people off and make them dislike me. But we needed something from them. At the first one, I got up to speak when our request was presented. My voice, though starting out politely, became more strident as the minutes wore on. These board members were so idiotic and infuriating, I couldn't stand it and began to just vent about everything that frustrated me about the town. Dean and James, our architect, realized instinctively that yelling at people is not a good way to ingratiate yourself into their good graces. I knew I had lost my cool, though. Without even being told to do so, I willingly banished myself from further hearings and allowed Dean to take over. He has the inexplicable ability to tolerate stupidity much more calmly than I. How does he do it? Maybe he employs his husbandly talent of not listening to a word they say. However he did it, I'm proud of him, for he was able to see the process through to the end. James was being paid to suffer the fools, and in any case, he is of a very serene nature which no doubt serves him well in this circus of morons.

In short, we spent nearly two years and about seven thousand dollars, first to get permission to fix a corroded overhang that threatened to fall on someone's head (but didn't meet setback requirements), and then the prized retail permit. By the time we completed the process , we were flat-out broke and couldn't finish the work needed to open the freaking store.

With not even a shoe-string budget to go on, we had an enormous amount of work left to complete. Even if we were flush with funds, it would be a challenge, as the to-do list was daunting. All of the plumbing and HVAC had yet to be done. The wiring had to be replaced throughout the space. The firebox in the fireplace was broken and needed replacement, in addition to other maintenance. One of the workers that we hired for something or other was a bar patron and told us the drunken customers broke it one cold night when they tried to shove something very large into it to start a fire. How nice, I wish I could kill them all right about now. The bar was around so long and was so mystifyingly popular that every worker we hired for whatever usually had a few stories to tell of the glory days. Yeah, yeah, get a life already, people.

And the kitchen I mentioned a few paragraphs ago? There were drawers held together with old, curling duct tape. The duct tape was generously slathered with skins of greased dust. Things were hanging by splintered wood and there was a thick and viscous coat of decades of cooking slime on every surface. There was a single stove, the kind you find in a cheap studio apartment, a refrigerator that doubled as a laboratory, growing all kinds of life one might generally find in a petri dish, and a few decrepit shelves housing some dry goods, long past their expiration dates. Everywhere were brownish yellow stains from years of tobacco smoke. It literally took a year to eradicate the nasty smell of the place. Until we did, I continually felt as if I were on enemy territory. Only once the odor was gone and new materials were in, did I feel at peace and didn't have to shower immediately upon leaving.

We ripped out the kitchen right away, and by we I mean Dean. He also removed all of the fire-damaged joists and insulation. Right smack in the middle of the place, dead center actually, was an elevated platform, about 4x4, that housed the ladies' room, and I use the term ladies loosely obviously. This room was as disgusting as you might imagine but there was one interesting aspect about it that Dean noticed right away. The rear wall of it was the original exterior wall of the building. Apparently when it was first built, the footprint of the building was much smaller. At some point, it was expanded and a second floor was added, as evidenced by the chimney, which starts out as stone and turns into brick a couple of feet above the roofline. We thought about leaving the old wall for historic purposes but in the end, simply could not make it work and it was demolished.

LOVE THY NEIGHBOR (update)

Hi all,

I took a holiday break and will be picking up the thread of the blog very soon. I'm almost at the point where I stopped writing, to first see if there was interest. I've decided to keep going since the blog is sort of a deadline that keeps me writing, if not deeply motivated. Since the new teaching semester doesn't start till mid January, I have the time! Of course, I plan to finish my YA novel and refinish all the wood molding in my living room, as well. We'll see how that goes. Stay tuned. The new increment will be posted within a few days.

Peace out,

LA

Love Thy Neighbor (ninth increment)

November, 2003

We learned a few weeks before that the owner of the building that housed the biker bar, whom we knew was very ill, had finally died (and I say finally with all the respect owed a man who made our lives a living hell for his continued and obscene profit). We also learned that his out-of-town sons were planning on selling the place. The guy who managed the bar for years—a retired NYC cop—did not want to pay good money for the decrepit building, so it was up to us to decide if we wanted it. After Dean took a tour through the structure, he was frightened off, but the good news was that the price the father wanted for it was almost halved by the sons. We were biding our time, attempting to wait out a better deal when we left for California for the Thanksgiving holiday. I was unable to reach my broker, Lisa L., for an update before I left.

I finally reached her minutes after our plane landed. She told me the owners had accepted an offer from a plumber who planned to make the bar bigger and better. ("C'mon, God, haven't you toyed with us enough?)

I stiffened my resolve. “Listen, Lisa, you have to be our advocate here. If this plumber gets the place, our property value becomes friends with zero. Make a higher offer and an entreaty to the owners to do the right thing. No one needs a busy bar on a residential road, one that is impossible to get to without driving to and from it. That place dumps a lot of drunk drivers on the road (not to mention the drive-by shooters).

And it did. One time I stood in my driveway with a deputy sheriff who was there at my request to see how fast people drove on my road. He wore a hat that was about four feet tall and the idiot drivers easily spotted him and were flashing lights to warn each other. The result was that all of a sudden, everyone was driving 30 mph, the speed limit. This officer was either incredibly dense, in denial, or liked to speed himself. He dismissed the notion that they were onto him, insisting since his car was parked well down my driveway, no one could see him. Uh, and your four-foot hat is invisible, I suppose, officer?

During my uncomfortable few minutes with this guy, I casually mentioned all the drunk drivers on the road because of the bar next door. He said, "Oh, I don't think that's true." I looked at him incredulously, searching his face for a hint of humor. None was to be found. Either he liked to drink at the bar himself or he was covering for his retired police buddy who ran the joint. Whatever. If the cops refuse to see the people staggering to their cars, then who will ever do anything? The answer, of course, is no one. My kids' bus drivers would often complain but their efforts would fall on deaf ears 'cause the cops didn't give a shit.

February, 2004

We bought the bar. The owners did the right thing and made a cool five thou extra in the process. The building was one of the most disgusting places I’ve ever been unfortunate enough to see. I seriously had to take a shower after every time I stepped foot into it. It was about a hundred years old and no one had spent a nickel on it since, it seemed. Part of the agreement for purchase at a reduced price was that we could not have an inspection. Normally, we would never buy real estate without an inspection but in this case we had no choice. It was either buy the bar or chuck everything and move back to California or Santa Fe. Why oh why didn’t we move back to California or Santa Fe? What is it about us that insists upon torture? Perversity is a family trait, I fear.

A few months before the sale went through, the manager had rented the apartment above the bar to a single woman with a beautiful Siberian husky. The older woman who moved in after the very boisterous family of six (in a junior 2-bedroom!!) and was delightfully quiet, had fled after the drive-by shooting. Because I am an animal lover and I know how hard it is to find an apartment that takes dogs, I told my broker to allow the tenant with husky to stay. She thought it was a bad idea but it became moot anyway since the woman moved out before the closing date. I've always felt badly about that especially after I heard she was pregnant—the woman—and the dog was really cute.

Since the building was delivered to us vacant, we planned to gut and renovate the apartment first and get it rented to secure some income, warding off the money hemorrhage—or at least bandaging it. So in February '04 we headed up there to do just that.

It was a decent layout, and it was sunny and warm. The attic door that had been nailed shut to ensure that we had no access to it during the walk-through, was filled with the noisy family's garbage and family memorabilia. (Why they bothered to move it all from the trailer to the apartment only to leave it all behind I'll never know. Apparently they absconded in the wee hours of the morning so as to avoid paying any rent.) The bathroom was one notch above gas station restroom. We did see the attempts, however feeble, of the genteel older woman, to try to make the place habitable. There was fresh paint on the walls and carpet nails along the edges where she ripped out her carpet when she moved.

One of the first problems we noticed was the uneven floor when you first walked in. You kind of lost your balance right inside the front door. The bathroom floor was also lopsided. When we ripped up the multiple layers of linoleum flooring we had a surprise: apparently there was a major fire in the building at one time and rather than replacing the charred joists, they had just installed new ones atop the others, hence the uneven floors.

It gets better. The bathroom floor was uneven 'cause they didn't feel like carving a slight notch in the floor joists to lay the pipe. They just plopped it right on top and covered it with vinyl flooring so there was a huge lump where the pipe lay. We ripped out all the flooring and put down tile in the bath and faux wood laminate in the rest. The bathroom was completely redone, all in white. When I went in to paint the walls red, I felt almost like a criminal, doing away with fresh white walls by smearing some obnoxious bloody red all over it. After about six coats, though, it finally stopped looking like a gory murder scene and actually looked good.

With the bathroom looking really fab, sporting an all new white tub, toilet, vanity, mirror trim, and floor, and Pottery Barn polished nickel hardware, we moved on to the kitchen and living room. All that winter, while keeping company with Air America, I painted and fixed things. Little did I know that while Rachel Maddoe would end up having her own television show (without Liz and Chuck D.) Al Franken would go on to become the U.S. senator of the great state of Minnesota. You go, Al. When I was pulling off the acoustic ceiling tiles in the living room, skeletons of mice and others began raining down. I quickly made the executive decision that the tiles would stay in the rest of the apartment. After all, it was a rental so it's not smart to renovate to one's taste anyway—and I just don't handle skeletons of any size very well. Some people find treasures in the walls or in the attic—maybe an original copy of the Constitution? I only find vermin skeletons and old negatives of a little boy in knickers on the running board of an old truck. Creepy, and not exactly like winning the lottery, is it?

We put beadboard on the living room ceiling, and fresh paint on the acoustic tiles in the other rooms (much easier said than done, by the way. Acoustic tiles do not take paint easily; rather they absorb it). Since the apartment had no architectural flair whatsoever, I tried to make it interesting with paint colors. I bought four of the five shades on a Martha Stewart color swatch in soft sage greens. I put the lightest one in the kitchen—it was almost white with just a titch of green. The darkest one, a deep sage, I put in the hallway for a bit of drama. The medium color I used in the small bedroom.

The master bedroom gave me copious amounts of grief. The pretty green/taupe cottage-y color (a shade lighter than in the smaller bedroom) went up on the walls like a shocking lime-ish pastel. I had to repaint the entire room in ivory (meanwhile, the room was getting smaller with all the paint on the walls). When I used the same green on the window frames, it came out exactly right. Go figure. It was just the way the light hit the walls that made the color funky.

In the kitchen, we reconfigured the room. We installed pretty maple flat panel cabinetry and a green laminate countertop to pick up the green in the wall color. I found a maple pot rack at Crate and Barrel that matched the cabinets perfectly, which we put above the range. I bought new white midrange appliances and a white fan/light fixture. Satin nickel hardware was installed on the cabinetry, and a stainless sink finished the renovation. Voila. The kitchen was now done.

Dean enlarged the entrance into the living room and fixed or replaced all the window frames and sills. We installed white plantation wood blinds in all the front windows, and put miniature blinds in the rest (I had dreamed of doing that for all those years that I stared at the decrepit mismatched curtains hanging in the windows that none of the tenants ever thought to change). We installed all new light fixtures, some acquired on ebay.

Finally, finally in mid-August it was ready to rent. We managed to find a great tenant through a friend of a friend. Now it was time to turn to the first floor.

LOVE THY NEIGHBOR (8TH INCREMENT)

Chapter Five

Buying the Bar

2003-2004

Five years had passed since we bought our house. Including sweat equity, we've easily spent over a hundred thousand dollars in improvements and renovations. Alas, the neighborhood has not been improving at the same rate as our house. We kept hearing that a bike path would be built—the third leg of it, actually—across the road, following the path of the old Putnam railroad line. The first two legs have been finished for a while and this third part would really make life much more bearable for us. Walking anywhere in this town means you must have your insurance paid up for there is an excellent chance that you will be mowed down.

The residents of the rehab center, though their behavior improved after our efforts, continued to have a penchant for obscene language and decibel-splitting music. It was much quieter in Manhattan, actually.

More salt in the wound: three years ago, in 2000, I was surfing on a real estate Web site (the same one that handled the Garrison house) when what should I see but “the Garrison house.” Stunned, I note the asking price is almost double what it had sold for two years prior. Something, however, is not right. It lists only 1.8 acres instead of 2.8. I call the broker. The house has already been resold, I’m told, at nearly the asking price. The buyers (who had prevailed over us) had sold off an acre of property and apparently used the proceeds to make a few cosmetic renovations, subsequently selling the house at twice the price. I felt so badly for the original elderly owners who rightfully should have realized the enormous profit from the stratospheric rise in property values. And I was heartsick that the scenic property had been fragmented and reduced.

I told Dean about it. His philosophy, skewed though it may be, is that even though the house would be worth over half a million (land intact), he would never have sold it had we acquired it. He would have lived there forever. So . . . it wouldn’t matter how much it was worth on the open market. See?

No, I really do not since I am a clear-eyed realist. His sweet sentiment did not make me feel a whit better. That $31,500 price difference that once had me beaming had ballooned into a whopping $300,000 difference in market value in a mere few years. Ten times the original disparity. I kicked myself for the gazillionth time—the black and blues were piling up— and vowed never to let my husband forget our collective stupidity, for which he is somehow more responsible than I was. I’m happy to report that I’ve been fulfilling that promise over the ensuing years.

So now everyone is asking, why is she agonizing over a measly six or seven hundred thou when she could have made millions if she bought in Tribeca in the late 70s/early 80s and sold when the world went mad? Well, yes, that’s true but in the late 70s when I moved to Tribeca I was earning somewhere around $11,000, if that. Annually. So buying was not always an option for me. As time went by, it just seemed easier to rent. I had heard horror stories about co-op boards and the draconian personalities that get elected to those boards and I wanted no part of them. I had a friend who lived in a Soho building that had a monstrous shareholder. This person is a partner in a famed New York gourmet food store but he is such an ugly little person that when my friend or I would leave food for the stray cats in the neighborhood, he’d wait at his window and, as soon as we left, scurry down and throw away the food. I wished the building's rats well. Since he tried to eradicate the cats, I felt it fitting for him to have rats instead.

Anyway, Dean and I had seen the real estate prices rocket up in every neighborhood we ever lived in . . . almost as soon as we left. By no means are we trendsetters, though. We’re just poor and cheap and the areas we picked were always the most affordable ones available. At this point our New York City neighborhood, our Chicago neighborhood, and our L.A. neighborhood have all fallen prey to the tragically hip and affluent. I’m not sure about our Santa Fe neighborhood. Anyway, I picked the Garrison house that got away to suffer over.

This story is a cautionary tale for naive, fallible first-time home buyers. I figured, why not help others avoid our insane mistakes? What I wasn’t willing to admit, even to myself, was that other home buyers probably have much more sense than we had. How could two educated, experienced, older people—and by older I of course mean over 25—commit such careless, unthinking mistakes when making one of the most, if not the most, important purchases of their lives?

Well, we did. The adage about location, location, location holds a lot of weight here. Tis far better to buy the worst house in the best neighborhood than to buy the best in the worst. While most people do the former and set about making their abode a better place, we decided to buy a nice house and then change the neighborhood. A few points to clarify here: one, we did not buy the best house in a lousy neighborhood, simply a house, one that had potential but was still what is quaintly referred to in the real estate world as a fixer; second, the neighborhood wasn’t bad, per se, just not really our cup of tea, um, ideologically, let's say. And our house sat on a busy, ever growing busier, road. Very bad, unless you plan to sell coffee out of your living room (which we plan to practically do but I get ahead of my story).

So after having lived in some really rough areas—Dean in parts of Brooklyn and L.A., me in Hell’s Kitchen in the 70s—we have to move to Brewster, "the place where the country begins," to get up close and personal with a drive-by shooting. Yes, there was nary a freeway drive-by in L.A (where they were invented) when we lived there but in Brewster—well, we found one right next door.

The Shootout (2002)

Sitting on the living room couch one night, around eleven-ish when all of a sudden, boom boom boom. The loud sounds seem to come from right behind our heads somewhere. And they did since right behind our heads were our windows and out those windows was the bar. Dean immediately recognized the sounds as gunshots—I don't know why, now that I think about it. A few minutes later we saw the red and blue lights on the police cruisers outside and Dean went to speak to them.

Basically, the police gave him no information other than that there was a drive-by shooting at the bar, which we already knew. He told him to go back inside.

Love Thy Neighbor (seventh increment)

About a year before, I had discovered Tip and Toe living under my neighbor's shed. They were wee black kittens that looked like twins and apparently were on their own. Unfortunately, they were feral and wouldn't let me near them. I began leaving food—the universal sign of friendship—near the shed every day. As they grew older and realized I had not yet attempted to brutalize them, they started getting a tiny bit bolder. As more time passed, the absolutely gorgeous-faced one became my friend. I called them Tip and Toe because the less friendly one—Tip—was all black except for the tip of her tail, which was pure white. Both girls were polydactyl (extra toes). So they were dubbed Tip and Toe, though admittedly the name Toe wasn't the most fitting moniker for a raven beauty.

About a year after I met this dynamic duo, Dean casually mentioned that it was about time to have them spayed before they started proliferating. He made the announcement and then it was entirely up to me to carry it out. First, I had to find a Have-a-Heart trap. Done. Then I had to trap each of them. Finally, done. Then I brought them to a vet to be spayed. Done . . . not so fast. The vet called me a few hours later to report that they were on the table unconscious but both were in an advanced state of pregnancy.

I went to get them. They waited for their kittens' birth in a room in my basement that bears a startling resemblance to a medieval dungeon. Tip gave birth to four kittens the night before we left for a trip to Florida; Toe had five kittens sometime thereafter. So now I had nine kittens, all male save one, to find homes for. A local rescue group helped me place most of them and we ended up keeping two. Poor Luca, I gave away his favorite kitten. It's not that I enjoy being cruel to small children. It's just that he tormented the kitten for the seven or eight weeks we had the little guy. Also, that kitten was the most striking of the lot, with fantastic markings. I knew he would be adopted and he was indeed the first one to go, as predicted. The decision to give away Luca's kitten would come back to bite me (literally) a few years later when I had to make amends.

Tip and Toe were spayed and immunized as soon as the kittens were weaned. I wrestled with the decision as to what to do next. Toe was easily adaptable to life inside; Tip was stubbornly feral. In the end, I released them but figured they'd stay close with their two kittens inside. I figured wrong, as usual.

In the beginning it worked out nicely. We would put Greyboy, one of Toe's babies, on a leash and let him cavort with Ma. Tip would eye their fraternity suspiciously and I came to realize that we probably kept two of Toe's kittens inadvertently and none of Tip's. Polly was the only female and the second kitten we ended up with and she was fast becoming a pain. She wasn't interested in either Tip or Toe, and followed her own bitchy agenda, which eventually included peeing all over the house in surprising places, as in, Surprise, guess who has been here first? Grey and Toe were so adorable together but their time was short. In October, just before Halloween, I spotted a dead black cat on Route 6, a major artery by our house, and as I drove back with shaking hands, I prayed it wasn't one of my girls but I sort of knew it was.

It was Toe and she was almost in pieces. I asked Dean to come home from work so he could pick her up but he couldn't. I asked the Humane Society if they could get her for me so I could bury her but they would not. I am too squeamish to do it—especially since I got a look at one particular horrific injury—so I waited until Dean came home and by then she was gone. Her body fell right by the hotdog truck and the operator called the highway department to pick her up before I had arrived at the scene. They must have gotten her soon after. My inability to do right by her haunted me for months and years to come, especially since Tip kept looking for her sister. I also worried that perhaps she was still alive and I left her there alone and mortally wounded. Intellectually, I know it was not possible but I simply agonize over these types of torments.

Afterward, Grey would continually go to Tip, thinking she was his mother and she would rain paw punches upon his head until they became mortal enemies. Tip thought I had stolen Toe and would sit on our steps meowing for hours. It was heartbreaking and I blamed myself for letting them out again. On September 11th, I had felt so guilty coming back to my home where everything was so normal and unscathed, my two Nubian princesses there waiting for me, quiet peace amid a vibrant blue sky . . . while dark chaos had descended on and enveloped my family, friends and city. Now fate was catching up with me, it seemed.

After a week or so, Tip decided to leave and rejoin her feral cat family, I could only surmise. I was relieved for I didn't know how much more grief I could bear. But about two weeks after Toe died, Dean went out to the garage and saw three pairs of eyes peeping out at him from under some stuff. Those eyes belonged to three tiny kittens who were somehow deposited in the garage and left to fend for themselves. And the cycle started again.

Enough about cats. I had a bunch of burly bikers to deal with. One night I was feeling really ill and I retired early. My bedroom is in the back of our house and was partially shielded from the din of the bar. I was lying in bed, propped up by pillows, reading a book (probably something intellectually stimulating like Crime and Punishment, or War and Peace; certainly not Patricia Cornwall with her grisly forensic descriptions of murder victims). The window was open and a silky breeze slid into the room. It's the little things in life that make it worthwhile. Then a motorcycle started up. It revved and revved. I kept saying to myself, it will stop soon. He'll take off soon; he can't sit there forever. But it didn't stop. It just kept roaring. Five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen minutes.

That's it! I've had enough of this fucking shit. I jumped out of bed, ran downstairs, and into the porch, my loyal Houston glued to my side every step of the way. Dean just sat in the living room with a "What are you gonna do" look on his face. In Dean's world, you don't go against when it comes to the sacred motorcycle culture. I flung open the porch window and screamed at the offending biker, "Will you take off already or cut off the engine? I'm trying to sleep." Houston accompanied my tirade with loud, angry barking to punctuate our collective anger. Good boy!

The son of a bitch yelled back, "That's what you get when you buy a house next to a bar."

What? What the fuck? (Excuse the blue language but I'm being true to the story.) How dare this little dick say that to me? I was primed and ready to do battle. "I'm calling the police and you can explain to them that I shouldn't have bought the house, okay? We have tried to be good neighbors but this is enough bullshit already!" Long before the police came he took off, the gutless coward.

Back inside Dean told me he recognized the engine on the motorcycle and knew it was the bar's manager. Wait, back up a sec. You recognize the sound of the engine? What is wrong with you, Dean?

Okay, so I knew it was the manager slash bartender. I told the police all about it when they finally arrived. They went over to tell the bar people to keep it down, for all the good it did. In our town the police hold no sway. The two or three officers we have are really just for show. They don't solve crimes—I don't think they even know how to go about it. They don't give tickets for driving infractions, Lord knows. What do they do? Hmmmm. That's a good question.

Now what? What was the best course to pursue? While I was mulling this question over, Steve on the other side of us, decided to sell one of his many cars. Did he list it in the Pennysaver? Uh-uh. On ebay? Guess again. He parked it on the saddle of land that straddles our driveways—it's his property but it looks like it's mine. He stuck a FOR SALE sign on the lawn near my driveway and that was that. The problem was that everyone who was interested in the shitbox thought I was selling it and pulled into my driveway. Grrrrrr. So I asked Steve if he could move the sign closer to his driveway to clear up the confusion. He kindly acquiesced and moved it two inches to the other side. Problem solved.

So, for the foreseeable future I had lots of scary looking people pulling into my driveway and blocking it while they ogled the junk car. Until Steve finally gave up and moved the car, it was an eyesore that gnawed at my soul, but it was our fault. After all, that's what you get when you buy a house next to a bar.

Love Thy Neighbor (sixth increment)

2001

Ah, and it's back to the neighbors: Dean wasn’t as bothered by all of the grievances. He was mostly disturbed by the noise pollution and, though he has loved motorcycles his whole life, he came to hate the sound of them—at least for a few minutes. But what stuck in his craw the stickiest was the weekend noise generated by the substance abusers. After working all week and only getting to enjoy his greenery on the weekend, he expected some peace and quiet. Didn’t get it, though. Our house is located downwind from the rehab town homes a.k.a the ugly houses, so with a canyon effect, the sounds traveled efficiently right to our door. And these people had a fondness for ear-shattering decibels of rap music, not to mention very colorful language. And so one day while I was in Westport, Connecticut, happily shopping for new bedding at Eddie Bauer, my cell phone chimed.

“Hello?” I answered quickly.

“It’s me,” Dean responded. “I may have gone too far but we have to do something about that damn place in back of us."

"Did you . . . kill anyone?" I asked, for "going too far" implied something serious in my dictionary.

"No. They were screaming and blasting their music so I told them to shut up and they just got louder. I put the kids in the car and drove over there . . . I lost my temper. (Pregnant pause.) Maybe you should come home.”

Dean's "going too far" was actually quite pathetic. I was expecting blood and lots of it. “Well, there's nothing I can really do to help at this point. And Eddie Bauer Home is having a close-out sale, Dean. Close out, as in the store is permanently closing? Your tantrum is really inconvenient." Long sigh. "I'll be home as soon as I can. Don't worry, we’ll get a lawyer and we'll make it right. See you soon.”

So we called a lawyer and made an appointment to go in for a consultation—but not before I got my new luxury mattress pad and 400-thread bed linens. We had chosen one of the better-known local attorneys, though we had never met him. He walked into his tacky, leather-covered office and we explained our problem to him. He nodded his head knowingly and began to tell us all about the rehab center. Finally, here was someone who knew about the center, knew they actually existed and what they did, because the health department claimed, indeed insisted, that they didn’t even know they were there and the police knew nothing—or so they claimed—and we were beginning to think we were hallucinating the whole freaking thing.

I should explain that in Putnam County, New York, the term “conflict of interest” is entirely devoid of meaning. Here's a case in point: a group of us were trying to stop one of the lake communities from slaughtering Canada geese whose droppings were despoiling their pretty green lawns, apparently (they really should be much more worried about their hideous houses that sit on those lawns). Across the region there were about five of these communities that were planning a wholesale kill, downy goslings and all. The judge who was hearing one of the related cases happened to live on the shores of one of the lakes planning the slaughter but not the precise one we were suing to try to prevent the killing. His lake was a mile or two away. This judge saw no conflict of interest and refused to recuse himself. Of course, the geese lost the case and were duly rounded up and slaughtered in the most horrific way. The judge never saw a problem with his behavior, and, unfortunately, managed to defy the mandatory retirement age. He continues to wreak havoc to this day.

So, what constitutes conflict of interest anywhere else is business as usual here: this attorney graciously accepted our money and agreed to help us despite having the owner/director of the rehab facility’s telephone number on his speed dial. To Dean and I that was a shout-out that there may be a slight . . . ahem . . . conflict, to represent us against a friend, an individual he knows so well that his number's on his speed dial? Our response was just to say okay, whatever, just make them stop. The two hundred dollar price tag was well worth the peace and quiet it would hopefully bring. He quickly arranged an appointment for us to meet directly with the people behind this facility, so to speak. He further informed us, in a gossipy tone, that the rehab's clients—the patients—were very wealthy and some were even famous, and they all paid enormous sums to be rehabilitated. He personally knew the director and he assured us that he would be reasonable once he learned of our problems with the site.

Economic discrimination pisses me off more than many other injustices. These people, both the rehab clinic as well as the families of the "clients," want them to live among a community—but not their community. It's NIMBYism at it's worst. Let's plop them in a neighborhood where the people have no clout to get them out. And that inclination infuriates me above all.

On thing we learned, a lesson driven home again and again when you live in a small town, is that corruption is not reserved for the big players only. It is alive and well, and thriving in small-town America.

Smarmy is the word that best describes the creepy man we met with, one of the honchos of the rehab facility. He was grotesque, and I couldn't believe any parent would consign his or her child to this man's care. But they did, and in droves. (I guess a drugged out kid can really impinge on the lives of the rich and famous.) He was very patronizing in his approach and expressed how happy he was to hear that his patients were so rowdy for that meant they were actually getting better. Say what? Well, can we move the facility into his backyard so he could celebrate firsthand?

The only concession he made to us was to provide us with a direct contact number to the on-site director so that if the noise became unbearable, we could complain. He refused to consider putting up a fence or anything that might reduce the noise, ergo cost him money. And that settled that. In subsequent years, the OSH has been trying to shut down this sad excuse for a rehab facility but with no success thus far. It (OSH) revoked the center's license to practice and fined it heavily but guess who reinstated the license and repealed the fines? Did you guess the corrupt judge who killed the geese? Bingo. Still, there are former patients who won't go away quietly. It seems that some of them did not appreciate the physical and emotional abuse they were subjected to and have had the temerity to complain. Here's hoping that it eventually goes their way.