by Matt Witten
Yes, even a cynic like myself had to admit: life on Elm Street was good.
Except for those dagnab neighbors.
It was absurd. It was outrageous. I'm an American, by God. "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—" doesn't that include the right to a good night's sleep?
So when I left Dave's backyard that morning, I didn't just go home and sulk. I did the Jimmy Stewart thing and marched off to fight City Hall.
Having lived in big cities most of my life, I expected to face thick layers of municipal bureaucracy. But as it turned out, all I had to face was one red-cheeked, gray-haired lady in the city clerk's office. As a West Sider herself (I recognized her from the S.O.S. meetings), she was more than happy to help me. She found the file for Elm Street in record time. Obviously she was the person who actually ran the city, while the East Side politicians shook hands and took each other out to lunch.
I quickly located the zoning status document for 107 Elm, the offending house. "Excellent," I said out loud as I read it. The house was supposed to be a one-family—not a three-family, the way Pop had been renting it out for years. I'd always suspected Pop was skating on thin legal ice, and now I had proof.
"Find something good?" the gray-haired lady asked.
"You bet," I said, and explained my plan. "I'll get Pop cited for zoning violations. Then he'll be forced to tear down the cardboard walls that split the place into three peanut-sized apartments. And once that house goes back to being a moderate-sized one-family, like it should be, we'll have good people"—jeez, I was talking like a native—"moving in, instead of crack dealers."
Grayhair got up and stepped over to a file cabinet. "This is 107 Elm you're talking about? Are you going to the hearing tonight?"
I stared at her. "What hearing?"
She handed me an official notice. "The zoning hearing. Pop is selling the house, and he applied to get it officially rezoned as a three-family so he can get more money for it."
My jaw dropped. "Shit—excuse my language. If they rezone it so it's permanently three-family, I'll be stuck with scumbag neighbors forever!"
"I'm surprised you didn't know. The Zoning Board is supposed to notify all neighbors in a hundred-yard radius."
"I didn't get notification, and neither did anyone else on the block. They'd have told me."
She gave a tight, ironic smile. "Maybe the post office lost it."
"Yeah, sure. I guess Pop has connections on the Zoning Board."
"How about you?" Grayhair asked. "Got any connections?"
Connections.
Well, all right, I'd make some darn connections.
Back in my teens, I was a political activist of sorts. We played hookey from high school to protest the Vietnam War, beat up any kids we caught eating non-union grapes in the cafeteria, and even made the local news once marching against a nuclear bomb test up in the Aleutian Islands somewhere.
So I went home and wrote up an angry petition on my computer, featuring buzzwords like "Late-night noise . . . drugs . . . doesn't fit in with the family character of the neighborhood..." Then I headed outside to knock on doors and fill my page with signatures.
But the neighborhood was virtually empty. All the kids were off at school, day care, or other child detention centers, and most of the adults were off at work. The two women I came across at the corner of Elm and Beekman were steering stolen shopping carts filled with babies and packages, and they turned their faces away as I approached them. I heard a teenage couple screaming at each other through an open window.
The West Side, usually so neighborly, felt uncomfortably hostile today. Eager for my first ally, I headed across the street to see my old friend Dennis O'Keefe. Dennis is a large, big-hearted man with a serious beer belly, which doesn't seem quite fair since he gave up beer a decade ago. He also gave up his other major vices—heroin, tobacco, and real estate work—and devoted himself to working with troubled kids, trying to save them from the addictions and other foolishnesses that had almost wrecked his own life.
Five years ago he helped some Saratoga post-post-Generation Xers form a group they named Arcturus, after a star that was shining brightly in the sky on the night when they had their first meeting. By hook and by crook (and by a government grant or two), they scraped together enough cash to buy a decrepit foreclosed house at the corner of Elm and Beekman. They fixed it up, sort of, and now they had an African drumming group on Mondays, a "young women's consciousness-raising group" on Tuesdays, a theatre improv/folk music coffeehouse on Thursdays, and "hanging out night" on Fridays.
Shades of the 60s.
They also ran a skateboarding shop there, and the streets outside the building were often taken over by teenagers whizzing around recklessly. But despite their creating a serious local driving hazard, I had a soft spot in my heart for Arcturus. When I walked in that afternoon, Dennis and three green-haired boys were performing a kazoo rendition of the Star Spangled Banner, accompanied by Jimi Hendrix's "Purple Haze" in the background. It sounded great. I felt spiritually at home, like I always did at Arcturus.
After they finished playing, and the teenagers went outside to risk death on their skateboards, I showed Dennis my petition. His blue Irish eyes lit up when he heard the word "petition"—he's always ready to take on a new political battle—but when he actually sat down and read what it was about, he frowned. "I can't sign this," he declared, shooting me an accusing look.
"Why not?"
He tossed the petition at me. "What is this nimby gentrification horseshit, Jacob? You turning Republican on me?"
Ouch! Dennis was verbalizing my deepest fears. By getting rid of the relatively low-rent apartments next door, I'd be robbing poor people of places to live. Was I betraying the socialist politics of my youth?
But on the other hand, Andrea and I needed our sleep. "Look, you try living next door to a bunch of drug dealers, see how you like it."
"If they're dealing drugs, then call the police—"
"I did!"
"—but that's no reason the house shouldn't be three apartments. We need affordable small apartments in this town."
I was so pissed off at Dennis's holier-than-thou attitude, and my suspicion that he really might be holier than I, that I started shouting. "Hey, I've been inside those places. What Pop did there is criminal, he ought to be shot! There's old paint flaking off the walls that has got to be lead, there's asbestos crumbling from the ceiling, there's scalding hot, exposed water pipes—"
"Jacob—"
"And the apartments aren't just small, they're pathetic—one minuscule, claustrophobic room with a kitchenette you couldn't fit a bathtub in—"
"Hey, I've got kids coming in here all the time, eighteen, nineteen years old, no money, whacked out parents, desperate for a place to stay. You wouldn't believe some of the stories I hear—"
But I was in no mood for his stories. Dennis was a loud opinionated guy, which made him a good advocate for troubled youth, but also made him a royal pain in the ass. "So I take it you're not with me on this," I interrupted.
Dennis blinked, taken aback at being cut off in mid-harangue. Then he gave me a small tentative smile, strangely at odds with his previous demeanor, and said, "Sorry, Jacob."
"No sweat. Always good to have a sixties retro around to keep us yuppie scum on our toes."
I headed out the door, with Dennis calling after me, "Man, the sixties are coming back! You oughta listen to these kids!"
I did listen as I walked up the street, but all I heard was a discussion of skateboarding techniques. I wondered, would the 60s ever really come back . . . and if they did, would an old fart like me be truly happy about it?
I wondered, also, if there might be some other unspoken reason why Dennis wasn't signing my petition. After all, Pop was one of the foot patrolmen for the beat that included Arcturus—and Pop knew how to read a signature.
I headed over to Cherry Street to try to get hold of Lia Kalmus. Maybe Dennis hadn't come through, I thought, but
one signature from Lia would be worth a hundred signatures from ordinary mortals.
You see, five days a week, Lia was a mild-mannered billing clerk at Saratoga Hospital. But when she got off work, she put on her Superwoman cape and magically transformed into the president of the Save Our West Side Association.
Lia was of average height and weight, with light blond hair, but she was emphatically not a pretty woman, due to a horrible burn scar that discolored the left half of her face and gave her left eye a bloodshot, drooping look. Rumor had it that when she was a child in Estonia forty-some years ago, her house was burned down as punishment for her father's political dissidence.
Possibly in response to her scar, Lia made no effort to look good. She cut her hair short and wore clothes that looked like they came from Kmart's half-price bin. Nevertheless, she didn't seem like an unhappy woman. S.O.S. was her family.
When she came to the front door to answer my knock, she was on a cordless phone doing her community organizing thing. She waved me inside.
I'd never been in her house before, and I glanced around. The place was chock full of velvet-covered sofas, quasi-Chippendale chairs, and ornate paintings and statues of a host of saints that my Jewish eyes didn't recognize (of course, maybe they were special Estonian saints). I've noticed this with other people who live alone: They tend to load up their houses with all kinds of stuff. Some of Lia's stuff was probably expensive, paid for with all the money she saved by not having kids, but I still didn't like it much.
Meanwhile she was talking on the phone. Or rather, shouting. "You have to come to the meeting tonight! Look, I don't give a hoot about your niece's piano recital, I don't care if she's the next Liberace for God's sake, this is the future of the West Side we're talking about!"
I couldn't help grinning. I pitied the poor soul on the other end of the line, feeling the brunt of a Lia Kalmus onslaught.
After successfully browbeating the other person into submission, Lia hung up the phone and started working on me. "Now, of course you're coming tonight, right? Eight o'clock."
"Well—"
"You've got to come. It's our most important meeting of the year. We're voting on whether to accept the Grand Hotel proposal."
I had to admit, this truly was a big deal.
Every city or neighborhood has some issue that defines its future. For us, the issue was: What do we do with the Grand Hotel?
The Grand Hotel was a four-story affair on Washington Street in the heart of the West Side that had housed visitors to Saratoga for over a century. Now when I say "Grand Hotel," please don't be misled into imagining a grand hotel. And when I say "visitors," don't think "Vanderbilts." No, the hotel in question was the domicile of choice for over-the-hill prostitutes, drug-abusing pimps, and minimum-wage racetrack workers with gambling problems.
The building itself was once reasonably attractive, judging from old photographs. Even if it wasn't really grand, it wasn't an actual embarrassment to the working class families who lived nearby. But for the past three decades or so no one had bothered with maintenance, and the building had begun crumbling apart, brick by brick, roof tile by roof tile. Ever since the hotel went bankrupt five years ago, the building's decay had been even more rapid.
Two years ago some new owners bought the building from the bank for a song—well, maybe more than a song, maybe a whole CD. They were investing in the future of the revitalized West Side, I guess. But so far they hadn't lifted a finger to fix up the place. The windows were still broken, the graffitied bricks were still turning into powder, and now part of the roof was caving in. Soon, unless the owners began working on the place themselves or sold it to someone who would, the building would be beyond hope, suitable only to be condemned.
But last month, miraculously, a potential buyer surfaced: the Saratoga Economic Redevelopment Council. The SERC was a semi-public, semi-private, semi-who-knows-what nonprofit corporation that wanted to purchase the hotel and renovate it. They even had the money to back up their talk, thanks to some federal HUD grants.
The owners of the building were no doubt thrilled at this surprise windfall. And you'd think all of us on the West Side would be thrilled, too. A giant abandoned eyesore blighting our entire neighborhood would become a viable building once again.
But there was a catch. A big catch. The SERC plan called for the top floor to house single homeless men.
Talk about your archetypal nimby issue.
Tell me, would you want a bunch of single homeless men living right close to you? If so, then you're a better person than I.
Even worse, it felt to many West Siders like our neighborhood was being flooded with one do-gooder organization after another, bringing a huge array of screwed-up people along with them. Sometimes I felt that way too, I must confess. It seemed like every other block now contained a shelter or halfway house for drug addicts, battered women, "nonviolent" parolees. . . . Sure, these folks need help, but couldn't some of the places devoted to their welfare be located on the East Side for a change?
I still had enough liberal guilt that I supported the SERC plan—but without enthusiasm. We lived five blocks away from the Grand Hotel; and to be honest, if we lived closer I might have been on the other side of the issue.
Lia herself lived a mere one block from the hotel. "So how do you feel about it, Lia?" I asked.
"I have very mixed feelings," she said, troubled. "I mean, that building makes the whole West Side look like a dump. I feel like crying every time I walk by. If the SERC takes it over, at least they'll turn it around. But how much control will they really have over those homeless men?" She sighed heavily, then shook away her doubts. "The main thing is, the West Side has to go to this meeting in force and make ourselves heard. We're taking a vote tonight, and the mayor and city council have agreed to abide by our decision."
"That's terrific." Boy, Lia was getting more and more powerful all the time. "I do wish I could come—"
"Of course you can!"
"—but I have a meeting at seven that I was hoping you would come to." Then I told her all about it, and confidently handed her my petition and my pen.
But she handed them right back. "No, thank you," she said quietly.
Et tu, Lia? I stared at her. "Why not?"
She squirmed, uncomfortable. "Pop isn't a bad guy. He takes decent care of his properties—"
"Are you kidding? Every house he owns is unsafe, full of illegal apartments—"
"He's better than a lot of the other landlords around here. Look, I wish I could talk more, but I've got a lot of calls to make."
Lia didn't exactly slam the door in my face.
But she came close.
Feeling like Don Quixote on an especially windy day, I headed back to Elm to continue my one-man petition drive. Three houses down from Beekman, I stepped around a heap of mildewed boards and rusty nails and knocked on the front door of a dilapidated duplex.
Answering my knock was a runty nine-year-old boy with a stuffy nose and dull eyes that brightened considerably when he saw me. "Hi, Mr. Burns," he called out happily.
This was Tony Martinelli, a kid I was tutoring through a Literacy Volunteers program. Andrea is on their board of directors, and she twisted my arm into working with local kids for a couple of hours per week. Tony M. couldn't read worth a darn when I started with him three months ago. Now he still couldn't read worth a darn—he just wasn't into it—but he was definitely into me. I was the new father figure in his life. Come to think of it, maybe I was the first father figure in his life.
Lately he'd been coming by our house every single afternoon after school, filling up on Cheerios, peanuts, and whatever else we had in our kitchen. I was happy to feed him, although the kid had a habit of committing petty larcenies, so every time he came over I had to make sure there were no purses, wallets, or other easily liftable items lying around. Still, I truly liked the little shrimp.
"Hi, Tony," I said. "How come you're not at school?"
"I'm sick,"
he told me, giving a big gooey sneeze to prove it. He wiped the snot on his sleeve and I started to say something, then remembered I was just his father figure, not his father. Besides, there was probably no Kleenex in the house, and only a fifty-fifty chance of toilet paper. Next time he came to my house, I should give him some. Actually, there were a lot of things I should be doing for this kid, and it was starting to gnaw at me.
"Where's your mom?" I asked.
Tony shrugged. I didn't push it. "What's that?" he said, pointing to the sheet of paper in my hand.
"A petition."
He wrinkled his forehead, confused. "A position?"
I explained what it was, and he instantly got so excited he literally jumped up and down. "Cool, I hate Pop! He's always doing a police harassment thing on me. One time he beat me up really bad!"
"You're kidding." Was he kidding? Or was Pop actually beating up nine-year-old kids?!
"No, for real. And I wasn't even doing anything. Hey, can I come to the meeting tonight so I can boo him and stuff? Maybe I could put thumbtacks on his seat!"
I started to say no, but then it hit me that having kids at the meeting would emphasize the "family character of the neighborhood." So I said, "Sure, if it's okay with your mom."
He gave another shrug. Again I didn't push it. His Mom didn't give a flying Fig Newton what Tony did or where he went, as long as it didn't interfere with her partying.
I promised to pick him up at 6:45 and said good-bye. Tony stood at the rotting doorway watching me as I walked away.
I was glad to make it back up Elm Street toward my own block, with its (except for the blot next door) well-kept homes, trimmed hedges, and mowed lawns. I finally got my first signature, from Lorenzo, the retired blacksmith across the street. Unfortunately, Lorenzo had had a stroke recently, which made his signature illegible.
It was 3:00, almost time to go pick up Babe Ruth at the bus stop. But first I played the one trump card I had left. I called up Judy Demarest, my wife's bowling buddy, who is also the editor-in-chief of the Daily Saratogian. Judy and I get along pretty well, especially considering that I once accused her—falsely, as it turned out—of murder. Fortunately she has a good sense of humor, and gets a kick out of the idea that she used to be a real live murder suspect.