Ground Zero MicroHood Report
(Neighbors • Media)
After years serving as a local reporter within my little Texas county, I have finally seen the light of journalistic evolution, thanks to an enduring news fashion trend known as “hyperlocal” reporting.
Hyperlocal aficionados have declared that it’s not sufficient merely to provide coverage of the main tax-money spenders in a particular county government, or the criminal offenses and court escapades of local scofflaws, the eruption of new business ventures, or the doings of councils in a county’s largest cities. What about school board budget committees? What about parent-teacher organizations? What about village councils? What about church festivals? How about the municipal utility district? What about the Rosedale Chamber of Commerce’s downtown beautification committee? Isn’t this where decisions are made that truly effect people’s lives?
Convinced by such logic, every gathering at any population center important enough to boast of a post office now has its own resident hyperblogger, swigging coffee, laptop a-quiver, waiting for the session to end so he can ask the chairman what exactly just happened? I find myself living for the meaningful hyperpublic discourse that soon follows.
But can it be enough? If hyperlocal represents a fuller public service than local, imagine the fullness of a service fueled by cheap Internet bandwidth and earnest reporting on a microlocal scale. All it requires is a few dedicated souls willing to take responsibility for their microscopic corners of America.
Which brings me to Mitchell and the midsection of Sunny Slope, the forgotten Richmond, Texas river-bottom community that serves as my MicroHood.
Mitchell
It’s probably none of our business, but that hasn’t prevented Mitchell from serving as lead story around here most of the time, really for the past three months now, ever since Helen kind of wigged out and took off to live in a series of motel rooms.
Mitchell can be such an asshole that at first we all figured he’d done or said something abusive, or that maybe Helen just got sick of the cumulative effects of living with an unshaven contrarian backyard mechanic and the rusty cast-off vehicles representing his failed resurrectional talents.
Conceivably that was part of it, however, evidence now suggests that Helen has slid into some manic mental state due to some health problems from which she suffers and for which she’s apparently required to be occasionally treated. Only somewhere around the time she took off, she also lost her computer programming job and the health insurance that went with it. According to semi-reliable sources (which is the best you’re going to get in Sunny Slope) she required some complex $10,000 blood work every month or two, which among other things helped her maintain a level of mental stability that isn’t at present being maintained.
Keep in mind that none of this represents Helen’s side of the story, but as Helen is on the lam and unavailable for comment, we’re having to rely on other sources.
Which is to say, mostly, Hayden – the big motorhead across the street whose affinity for monster trucks and motorcycles has drawn him close to Mitchell over the years. Thus, while Mitchell might be too reserved to speak frankly of his personal travails to the likes of This Reporter, fearing (with good reason) that his MicroLife might be laid bare in these very digital pages, he has no such qualms about opening up to his buddy Hayden. Thankfully, Hayden recognizes his MicroResponsibility to the public and thus is usually willing to spill.
So we learn that Helen also took off with Mitchell’s Visa card. For the first six weeks or so, she kept moving around, living a few days at this motel, then moving somewhere else. No one could find her, even after she started buying a series of expensive electronic console games and other gizmos which she lavished upon herself for completely unknown reasons.
We all figured Mitchell would hire a lawyer or a detective and get a protective order or start divorce proceedings. But the whole episode seems to have left him stunned and unsure what to do next. Thankfully, has his feud with the Tard Brothers to keep his mind occupied.
The Tard Brothers
The Tard Brothers actually are two cousins, but they look so much alike, and they take action with such enthusiastic abandon, that Mitchell christened them the Tard Brothers one day and the name just kind of clicked with everyone else who’d ever run up against them.
One of the Tard Brothers lives in a forlorn, nondescript 1970s-era box house next to Mitchell’s, along with his father, his huge wife, their tiny toddler son and two dogs who spend much of the day sleeping stretched out in the middle of the street. The other Tard Brother, who is really a cousin, doesn’t reside there but is ever present nonetheless.
The feud started last summer, when the Tard Brothers bought themselves a little flat-bottom boat and trailer and started driving it through their back yard, across the back portion of Mitchell’s property, then through the back of Mark and Mary’s place, Peggy’s acreage and on to the tiny strip of land I own that runs down to the Brazos River.
Keep in mind that every yard through which the Tard Brothers drove, including their own, backs up to the river, too. But I’m the only person in the neighborhood who bothers to weed-eat his portion of the riverbank, so I can get down there and fish without stepping on a snake in three feet of grass. Apparently the Tard Brothers took this as an implicit invitation to create a boat launch.
The first time I spotted them, they’d backed up their trailer and were preparing to haul the boat down the bank – my bank – on a rope. I hustled down there and, in what I felt was very plain language, told them to get out.
By the time I spotted them the second time, a couple of days later, they’d already been out sweating in their little boat and pretending to fish (in the middle of a 100-degree summer day) for probably five hours, and they were pulling the boat back up my little strip of weed-eaten riverbank, cutting deep notches through the Bermuda grass and into the sand, where the next good rain would form a nice gully and basically ruin the manicured ambiance of my fish camp. This time I used exceedingly plain language, suggesting they take their boat and shove it down the bank behind their own house, instead of driving over to my tiny strip of land.
They got the message the second time, but instead of making a boat launch on their own property, they sneaked over to Peggy’s yard one day with a can of Round-Up and defoliated a 15-foot-wide section of her riverbank, which they then turned into their personal boat ramp for the next three months until Mitchell got sick of them making ruts through his property and told them to stay the hell out.
Two weeks later, they drove their father/uncle’s new pickup out back of their place and got it stuck in the mud. They revved it up good until, between the ruts and the hill running down to the river back there, the only way to get it out was to turn it and drive parallel to the slope, through Mitchell’s yard and up into his back driveway. The Tard Brothers asked Mitchell for permission and he told them to go fuck themselves.
After that, the Tard Brothers strung a big cable between two cottonwood trees on roughly the border between their property and Mitchell’s, with a big “No Trespassing” sign hung in the middle, which was pretty funny considering trespassing was almost a daily pastime for them.
Mitchell showed the sign to Hayden one Saturday right after Hayden had purchased a Ruger LCP .380 pistol whose accuracy he was interested in testing. So they shot the Tard Brothers’ “No Trespassing” sign full of holes.
That really pissed off the Tard Brothers for some reason, and thus was the feud cemented.
Mostly it manifests itself like this: Mitchell drinks a six-pack of Bud Light, which puts him in the mood to play his electric guitar badly. He sees that the Tard Brothers are home, so he turns up the amplifier a little.
The one Tard Brother tells his wife to call the police, so she complains about the noise. Hayden’s police woman friend Brenda calls Hayden to tell him that the Tard Brother’s wife just called the cops on Mitchell. So Hayden calls Mitchell and tells him to cut off the amplifier because the cops are coming. The police pull into Mitchell’s driveway and find him leaning on the fence drinking a beer and listening to the crickets. The Tard Brothers’ angry eyes peer through the curtains in the house on the other side of the driveway.
Foiled again.
→ B.Dunn, Sep 28, 2009, 06 40 am
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Slip-Sliding Away
(Neighbors • River)
Natives to the woodsy river-bottom country hereabout are a sturdy and secretive bunch. At first they regarded us with suspicion but, over the years they have come to accept us. So much so that yesterday we were allowed to witness their little-known gene-pool rejuvenation ceremony, held only in concurrence with the rare emergence of the Chicharra Grande.
Prone to misunderstanding by outsiders, the ceremony stems from hard times in centuries past, when crop failure and angry Indians both took a great toll on the river dwellers. With scant food and no medical attention available, only the strong survived. And, apparently, to assure a stronger people in the future, better able to adapt to the harsh cards they’d been dealt, the river dwellers found a humane if religiously troubling method of culling the weakest among their numbers.
In days gone by the ceremony would be accomplished using carefully gathered containers of water poured down a muddy and sacred riverbank. Today, the same effect is achieved with a wide swath of triple-thickness greenhouse plastic and several squeeze bottles of dish-washing detergent.
The children of the clan are dressed in light costume, honored with a party including their favorite tidbits and hugged all around by resolute yet hopeful elders who then encourage them to partake of a time-honored competition to determine the future leaders among them. Who can get to the bottom of the slide in the fastest time? they are asked. Who wants to be Junior Boss President?
Well, of course they all do, and so they charge off and fling their little bodies upon the soapy plastic, frolicking and laughing through what, for many, will be their last moments as they realize, with only seconds to spare, that the Great Slide extends all the way to the waters of the Brazos River below.
The clever and the strong somehow find a way to pull themselves to safety before the churning river claims their bodies. And for the rest, mercifully, the whirlpools drag them down and make a quick, painless end of it. 
We found it a heart-rending undertaking, even as detached observers. It was made the more difficult as one among a mostly stoic group of elders broke ranks and attempted to retrieve a favorite daughter from the arms of the Brazos, only to suffer a similar fate.
“The gods accept our gifts and bless us for it,” the Senior Boss President explained simply.
→ B.Dunn, Sep 13, 2009, 07 18 am
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Mystery Neighbors
(Neighbors • Richmond)
After Peggy’s last trip to the hospital, her son told me they’d decided to admit her to a nursing-home kind of place in Rosenberg for a couple weeks, “and then we’ll just see.”
So it surprised me a bit when a slick-haired dude in a BMW showed up in her driveway about eight hours later and put a For Sale sign in the front yard.
Not many people seriously looked the place over in the next few weeks, but a few did. We eyed them with more than curiosity, wondering if they would be the sort of neighbor to move in and start a tow-truck repair business in the side yard.
You can do that in Richmond. There are no zoning restrictions at all, except that you’re not allowed to locate a mobile home within 20 feet of Larry’s Mexican Restaurant, because that’s where the city police and fire fighters park for their daily free lunch.
One of my other neighbors took advantage of the City Zoneless Ordinance to build something the size of a dairy barn 10 feet from my side fence, covering most of the area that used to be his back yard. Now not only does the sun come up two hours later than it used to on that side of the yard, when it rains I get a free temporary lake from the water running off the new structure. But that’s another story.
This story is about how, three days ago, the For Sale sign disappeared. No one had been mowing Peggy’s lawn, either, and the grass had hit about eight inches long. One more good rain and they’ll have to hire someone with a combine to come in and bale her two acres.
Yesterday I saw the mail lady fiddling at Peggy’s old mailbox, so I went out and snooped. Yes, she had new mail for someone at the address. Later I snooped even more and opened the mailbox to see the new name the mail lady had written in black marker. I hadn’t heard it before, so I snooped some more, this time on Google. Sorry about that, what can I say? I spent too many years as a reporter.
Google returned nada. Thus was our mystery neighbor born.
Having a mystery neighbor is not especially exciting, at least not for us. We are working to keep our expectations in check. My wife and our friend Janie, two doors down, are praying that someone “normal” moves in. I endorse and concur with such prayers.
I’ve had abnormal neighbors before, most recently six years ago in west Houston, before we moved here. We lived in a nice older suburb, with well-kept homes with high, solid wood fences between the (for me) claustrophobic yards. On one side of me was a captain with the Houston Police Department whose wife was about to divorce him. He was a great neighbor.
Unfortunately, I had two others. One was a family of renters who moved in about a year after we’d been living there. They were Wiccan which, in this case anyway, meant the woman wore too much eye makeup and one night they built a little bonfire-alter in their back yard and started dancing around it in kind of a subdued way but without sacrificing anything to my knowledge.
They had a neglected and untrained female Great Pyrenees, which they kept in the tiny back yard all day while they went out looking for eyes of newts or whatever they did. The damn dog whined and barked all day until I finally started buying a dozen 25-cent frozen pot pies every time I went to the grocery. Finally the dog and I reached an understanding. It would only whine a little bit in the morning, and then I would unwrap a frozen pot pie and toss it in the yard. The dog would lick it for two or three hours and then eat it, I suppose.
One night one of the guys living over there had his bedroom window opened and was playing some Indian sitar music at high volume at about 3 a.m. The window was about eight feet from Nick’s bedroom window, who was a baby at the time.
I went out the front door, walked around to the little strip of grass between our houses, looked in and saw a guy in his mid-20s with long frizzy hair and glasses, sucking hard on a bong pipe. I waited until he had sucked all of the marijuana smoke and was just at the apex of his inhale.
“Hey! What the hell are you doing?” I hollered in my best army-sergeant voice through his screen window. “You know what time it is? My kid is right across from your window trying to sleep! Turn the damn music down!” While I was hollering, I was watching him cough his lungs out in fear, knocking his bong over and throwing some kind of cloth over it while hoping I didn’t see it or the bag of pot he pushed onto the floor. “Yes sir! Yes, sir!” he said in a panicked voice. It was like a scene out of Super Troopers.
But the Wiccans weren’t my bad neighbor. My bad neighbor was like a dumber alcoholic Al Bundy. Their house was behind our back fence, with their swimming pool in between. I never figured it out for sure, but believe they had two kids of around 10 or 11, either that or a grown child whose kids lived with the alcoholic Bundys.
They would have friends over for big drunken pool parties that lasted until 4 in the morning, and they’d make their poor little kids hang out with them and show their pool diving tricks for the drunks at least until 11 p.m. Then about a dozen alleged adults would pack themselves in the little pool and hoot, drunk as loons. I hated them, because they only held these parties on nights when I had to get in to work early the next morning, or when we had overnight company. These people were raging alcoholics, and there was no reasoning with them because they possessed no reason. Even the police captain left them alone.
One night when my oldest daughter was visiting, their party had died down around midnight and they went inside. But at 3:30, they were back outside. A bunch of drunks took their spots in the pool and began chanting. I went outside to see what the hell. Al Bundy had climbed onto his garage roof and was allowing himself to be coaxed to jump from the roof across a cement deck into the pool. They were shining flashlights on him as he swayed, hairy, pink and naked, up there on the roof. I swore at fate for not owning a BB gun at the time – so all I could do was pray hard that he’d slip and break his leg.
It didn’t happen. God broke my heart and allowed the guy to make the leap into the pool unscathed.
I planned many revenges for alcoholic Al Bundy after that night. But unfortunately we moved here before any of them could hatch, except for the brochures from the substance abuse clinics I filled out for him online and had mailed in his name.
This time around, I could probably handle another Wiccan neighbor if I really had to, since there’s a half acre and a lot of tall shrubbery between the houses. Even a Baptist. Just, please Lord, no tow-truck repair business.
→ B.Dunn, Aug 30, 2009, 05 40 am
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The Ride Home
(Neighbors • )
I saw Peggy’s former maid’s car parked in her front yard Sunday afternoon (they never put in a driveway when they built the house; you just drive up over the grass and park). So I assumed my neighbor was or soon would be home from the hospital again, and had somehow talked Suzy into working for her once more.
I didn’t give it another thought until around 10 that night, when I fed Bosco his second dog meal and started to lock the driveway gate. I heard an engine, then looked up as a taxi glided over the grass from Peggy’s house to the road.
“Bob!” she hollered, insistent and impatient. “Come help me get in the house!”
I swore under my breath and went back inside to tell my wife and kids, who were busy brushing their teeth and getting ready for bed, where I was going. Then I walked across her yard in the dark, to find her standing in the glow of her little pink porch light bulb, short and round and somewhat toad-shaped in silhouette.
“Why didn’t you bring your light?” she demanded.
“What do I need a light for?” I asked.
Because she had hidden her key under one of her potted plants along the front of the little house. Only she didn’t know which one, and my sense of touch told me there was no key under any of them.
I trudged back across the dark yard to get the key she’d given me, which I had used from time to time in order to go in and feed her Jack Daniels Terrier while she was recuperating from one or another of the maladies that keep befalling her.
Then I was back with the key, opened her front door and helped her up the steps onto her porch and inside. Which was when I realized that she was crocked.
“Are you just getting home from the hospital?” I asked.
“Just this very minute,” she lied.
There was a little metal shopping cart on wheels, on the porch, filled with bottles of fruit juice on top and some unidentified medicine-looking bottles underneath. I wheeled it inside and asked her if she wanted me to put the stuff away in the kitchen. But she wanted it there next to her by the couch. The dog was nowhere to be seen; she told me her daughter was keeping it at her place in San Antonio.
I walked back home with the realization that Peggy, an aging, widowed diabetic with a myriad of other health problems, had probably taken a cab ride from the hospital straight to her favorite bar, where she’d spent some considerable time drinking before taking another cab home. I wondered if she’d called her kids to let them know she was back.
There was a lot of news waiting for me to break on Tuesday if I could only get answers to a few key questions, so I was in my little home office, busy making certain calls on one phone, certain calls on the other and trying to time it so everyone didn’t call back at once. In between, I was composing fresh crime stories – a typical morning.
Bosco would not shut up, and he was using the bark he reserved when someone or something was too close to our yard for his comfort. Finally I flipped open the shutters, peered to the left and saw my neighbor Jimmy, on the other side of Peggy’s yard, puttering in his driveway along with his dogs. That explained the barking.
Except five minutes later Bosco was back at it, louder and more persistent than ever. My concentration broken, I went to the window on the way to stepping out back to shush the dog. I heard an engine, then watched as an ambulance passed in front of me, sliding over Peggy’s grass toward the road, lights flashing.
→ B.Dunn, Jun 10, 2009, 06 34 am
