Last night, Tim and his new girl, Nicolette, came home. Tim was drunk, which he'd apparently been for a couple of days, and belligerent as hell because....
I should back up for a minute here, I guess.
When Tim was on the streets, he fell in with a lot of gang members. He'd had some affiliations of that sort in his youth, but when he was homeless it was more of a matter of survival. I never gave him shit about it; I understood that people do what they need to do to survive in extreme situations.
Well, apparently, while he had been out over the past two days, he had had drunken run-ins with several opposition gang members--real or imagined!--on the North Side, on the bus, and--in an instance of total idiocy--with one of the guys across the street. He and his girl were walking, someone said something to him, and instead of handling it like an adult, he got all dramatic and gangsta and whatever. I don't even know entirely what it was about, other than Stupid Drunken Shit.
He and his girl came in, anyway, and for about four hours she and I were treated to the paranoid rantings of a pissed-off drunk guy, about all the "opposition", punctuated with enough gang signs and hand-gestures to fill a 50 Cent movie. We TRIED to get him to shut up, but it wasn't happening. While all this was going on, the three of us were drinking beer--so Tim wasn't getting any LESS drunk, and both the females in the house were getting a little buzzed too. (I'd had about 4 beers, when all this went down, just for the record. In hindsight, my judgement and emotional stability were probably not at their sharpest, and it almost certainly made me react more strongly than I otherwise would have.)
Finally, at about 10:30, the two of them went into Tim's room, much to my great relief. A few minutes later, while I'm sitting at the computer, Tim comes charging out and tells me that he hears someone in the yard. I'm assuming they're in the next-door yard, but when I go to the window over the back stairwell, there's a guy there. And he's lighting newspaper and throwing burning paper into the stairwell, and there's this....noise...down there.
I yelled to get the guy's attention, but he just lit more paper and threw it into the stairwell. It was blazing pretty well, too, and I could smell lighter-fluid.
Then Tim's girl says: There's a CAT on fire down there. (I will pause here and tell all you animal-lovers, and people who know how I feel about my cats, that it a) was not a cat, and b) was not one of my cats. So please put your hearts back out of your throats for a minute.)
By this time, I'm on the phone with the fire department. Meanwhile, the guy is telling me some line about "it tried to bite me" and "I just saw the fire from the alley" and a bunch of other contradictory crap, like nobody had just seen him throw burning papers into my stairwell. Whatever. I hear the sirens in the distance, and this....whatever-it-is....is burning in my stairwell, and the guy has taken off, and Tim is ranting about how this is retaliation for the stuff that happened earlier, which I'm totally prepared to believe because I've been listening to his paranoia all night. So I'm freaking out, to say the least, and not least of all because the story I'm hearing is STILL that the dying animal outside is a CAT. Now, everyone in this neighborhood knows how I am about cats, so if they were trying to intimidate me, burning a cat in my yard would definitely accomplish that aim.
The firefighters arrive. Tim (drunk) goes out to talk to them. I, meanwhile, am on the phone with LJ, telling him to get his ass back to the house. He's the enforcer around here, I figured, let him handle this mess if it needs handling.
The fire is put out, and then the cops show up. I'm still in the house, trying not to have a heart-attack; Tim comes in and tells me "They want to talk to you." Okay, fine. I go outside and there are three cops: a young African-American female, an older white man, and a younger white man. I answer all their questions: how many people did you see, what did he look like, have you had any problems like this before, blah blah blah. And I tell them: I have been in this house for 3 1/2 years, and I have never had any trouble til now. (I deliberately, for reasons you might guess, don't mention the garage break-in of a few months back--no need to complicate matters, but I silently curse LJ for allowing that to happen in the first place.)
The cops tell me: We don't think you were targeted. I say: I think we were. And here's why. I explain the Tim situation. The older cop asks pointed questions about Tim, which I answer as neutrally as possible, knowing they've already run his name through the computer and have his record.
At this point, I'm thinking about how fast I can get a moving van hired, my stuff packed, and the utilities turned off. Tim is in the house, ranting and raving to LJ (who arrived while I was on the porch answering questions) and not making my state of mind any better. Tim's girl is like What have I got myself into here???
The younger cop comes back. "It's a possum," he tells us. I ask him, six ways to Sunday: "You're SURE it's not a cat??" He's sure. "Not with that pointy nose and those big claws..." Len and Phoebe's older son, who was across the street while all this was going on, comes over and talks to the cops--which made me feel much better, because one of the evidences that Tim used to support his "personal attack" theory was that Junior had been sitting across the street, had supposedly seen the guy come through our front gate, and had just let it happen. Junior tells the cops that he'd seen two guys from the block chase a possum into my yard, and they just happened to corner it in my stairwell--that the possum had apparently tried to bite one of them. I pause a moment to feel bad for the possum--what kind of sick fuck BURNS AN ANIMAL??? That's some pathological shit right there. Meanwhile, I have a dead possum in my stairwell, three cops asking me all sorts of questions about the living situation here at Chez Gladys, and every single porch on the block covered with inquisitive neighbors who want to know what the hell is going on.
The cops pretty much promise me that this was NOT an attempt to intimidate us or burn us out--"If they wanted to scare you or burn your house, believe me, they'd have thrown a molotov cocktail in your window--they wouldn't have bothered burning a possum." Police Bomb and Arson takes pictures of the scene for the records, and corroborate this view. Eventually, the authorities leave and I go in the house. LJ has a quiet chuckle at the expense of jumpy white females under the influence of Corona; Tim gets some very pointed questions from me as to WHY, exactly, he felt the need to start up on that testosterone-laced bullshit (I found out later EXACTLY why--he was with Nicolette, his girl, and the guy on the corner made some remark about her--you know, the usual crotch-grabbing machismo practiced on street-corners since time immemorial. Well, you don't talk like that about Tim's lady when he's sober; you DAMN sure don't do it when he's NOT. I'm really beginning to wonder about the judgement of my penis-bearing friends--no offense, my male readers, but you must admit I've got some doozies here in the gratuitous-pissing-contest department. And when a woman is involved, the chaos increases tenfold.) Eventually, everyone wound down enough to go to their various rooms for the night.
But just because I was in my room didn't mean I could sleep--an exceptionally bad thing when you consider I had two interviews scheduled for today and there was not much likelihood of sleeping past 8. I sat down at my desk and started making a list of all the rooms in my house, and the contents of each room, divided into three lists: move, store, and toss. And this morning, when I talked to my mother, I asked her point-blank: If I wanted to move home and take over your basement, could I do that? And she said yes.
I'm not sure it's going to happen; at least, I'm not as sure as I was this morning. General consensus on the block is that it really was just some dumbasses with a hate-on against this possum; it wasn't, Len from next-door told me, directed at us. He would know; his older son is the one who talked to the cops, who saw the whole thing happen. I even think I know where the possum came from--they're clearing out a lot down the street which has been a fenced-in wreck full of junked truck parts and semi-trailers since before I moved in. I'm thinking the possum got rousted from his long-time home, ran afoul of these jackasses, and paid the price. I'm not a fan of possums, but I hate to hear of an animal suffering. (I am, however, disproportionately glad that it wasn't a cat or a dog. That would have been it for me; attack or no attack, I'd have been packing my stuff by now.)
I don't want to give up my house. I love this house, and I would like to stay here and realize the profit eventually. It's close to everything, and except for the odd piece of possum-burning human riffraff, the neighbors have been good to me. (Though Tim coming through on some gangsta bullshit could change that...he explained it to me, repeatedly, last night, but to the real question--"why would you start on that shit HERE, though?"--I'm still the only one answering: "testosterone and beer in equal quantities, shaken and stirred.") I don't want to move home to Mom's, or even to an apartment elsewhere in the city. I picked this house for myself, and I resent that circumstances I didn't create can make me consider giving it up.
But the drama is only part of the picture; the rest, of course, is the foreclosure, still crawling through the maze of due process. I know the other shoe will fall shortly. So I've decided: if I get a job by the time they set a sale-date for the house, then I'll fight to keep it. If not, I'll accept that as a sign, and go about the task of selling it and moving back to Mom's for a while. I have bills to pay, some of which have been waiting since before I lost my job in October. If I moved home to Mom's, I could get a job, pay those off in a couple of months and then start saving--or, heaven forbid, maybe even buy some luxuries I've gone without...a decent stereo, maybe, or an HDTV...Just the thought of having money in the bank, though, makes it tempting.
See, I realized something as I lay awake last night, trying to will myself not to panic about the "attack": As much as I love this house, it IS just a house. There are other houses in this world, other chances; maybe even better and more timely ones than this. Maybe I just overreached, trying to bring this one around. Maybe my energy and money could be better spent if I didn't have And anyway the things I value will come with me; all the things I love can be packed and moved when I move. Maybe it's time to think about what I'm fighting for, exactly...and, more importantly, WHY.
I feel peaceful, now--like whatever might be about to happen, it's something I will be able to handle. For the first time in a long time, I can actually BELIEVE that everything is going to be all right--no matter what happens.
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