Directly across the street stands a lovely two-story flat, vintage Victorian approximately the same age as, if not a bit older than, the 105-year-old house that shelters me so cozily. Painted in a simple gray & white style, it has all the potential in the world to anchor the south end of the street with the charm and style that characterizes the houses along the way.
But it’s an eyesore. The poor place has been victimized, or downright brutalized, by the neglect of its landlords (three brothers who can never agree on anything) and the depredations of its tenants, chief among whom has been for the last decade a meth addict and drug dealer who was not only cooking up his product in the house but who attracted an appalling swarm of outcasts, vagrants, and junkies to our little street. The contrast could not have been more dramatic: a shaded, intimate and charming San Francisco byway all of one block long and one lane wide, lined with pastel-colored Victorians inhabited mostly by longterm owners and tenants, but anchored at one end by a decaying flophouse blasting forth raucous drug-rock music day and night and filled with the ceaseless strife of rootless low-lifery.
The meth guy, Chris, had been a bush-league marijuana dealer at first but graduated onwards to sterner stuff. Along the way he became an enthusiastic consumer of his own product and was visibly wasting away under the ravages of meth addiction. He had little mind left and less responsibility; apparently he was the flat’s manager, as it were, and collected rents from the various transients inhabiting the bedrooms. Chris himself wasn’t paying rent and had been embroiled in a long legal dispute with the landlords. San Francisco rent law being as it is, the landlords were hard pressed to evict him, but sooner or later they would manage to do it.
Meanwhile, the lower of the two flats was taken by a nice enough couple who were members of a mediocre club band. They were squeaking by, I daresay, playing their gigs, usually working at night. Utterly inoffensive folks. Sure, they practiced at home—and I’m not a fan of good jazz trumpet playing, much less the middling variety—but that was hardly any issue. Besides, most of the time the trumpet was drowned out by Chris’s pounding rock. The jazz couple were also victims of Chris’s menagerie, but I can well imagine they were reluctant to leave given the undoubtedly cheap rent which may have well been partly responsible for their being able to pursue their life in jazz clubs instead of having to slave away in the retail or corporate world.
About a year ago the landlords put the property on the market, at a ridiculously high price. They had no takers. Most shoppers would walk in, take a quick look around, and walk right back out again. The years of neglect plus Chris & Co.’s depredations had utterly wrecked the place, and there remained the dicey issue of getting Chris & Co. out of the upstairs flat, even in the instance of a new owner taking the building. Then of course the depressed housing market dropped its wet blanket over whatever hope was left.
I had been yearning for the place to be sold. Being the neighbor directly across the very narrow street, I was catching the full force of the pounding rock noise, and I heard the worst of the scrabbles, scuffles, screaming, and scariness emanating from the front steps and upstairs flat. But the house could not be sold in its condition, at that price, and eventually it went off the market. I was sad. Chris & Co. stayed on. The beat—street-vibrating, window-rattling, ear-aching—went on.
Then the miracle happened. Chris & Co. set fire to the house, whether deliberately (they were due to be evicted within a few weeks) or accidentally remains unclear, although the fire folks said it was almost certainly the result of carelessness. Chris and his equally meth-ravaged girlfriend were so zonked they didn’t realized the fire had broken out; their next-door neighbor saw the fire breaking out in the back and got them out. The jazz couple were not home, it being about 9:00 PM or so.
It was a decently festive blaze, at two alarms requiring plenty of firefighters and inspiring what quickly became an impromptu block party. The lead fireman was a bit nonplussed by the general mood of gaiety, but he understood soon enough. There was no damage to any other houses, but the big two-story flat was almost wrecked. Chris & Co. on the top floor were burned out almost completely, while water damage ravaged the lower floor as well. The house was inhabitable.
We all felt sorry for the jazz couple, especially given the shock they must have felt upon coming home after the gig and finding out they had no home any more. But they were young and resourceful and had themselves moved out within a few days. Chris & Co. had a rougher time of it. Late that week what was left of their possessions—a pitiful pile of crap—was stacked out on the front driveway with Chris & Co. standing guard. Apparently some “friend with a truck” was due to pick things up. “Friend with a truck” didn’t show up for three days, during which time Chris and his girlfriend lived in an old jeep, watching over the pile of junk. (One gets the impression that “friend with a truck” was one of Chris’s customers.) Eventually it was gone, but the neighbors (myself included) were counting the days before we would be calling city services.
The quiet and peace that descended was glorious to behold. Our street, originally a near-miraculous haven when I first moved into the house in 1986, promptly re-acquired its aura of peaceful prosperity. The vagrant types hung around for a while, seemingly at a loss what to do with the disappearance of their shelter, but bit by bit they faded away. The house went back on the market, this time at a remarkably lower price and frankly as a major fixer-upper requiring almost an complete rebuilding.
It sold before too long, to a couple who happen to be contractors and who are, gently and considerately, beginning a restoration. They’ve taken firm steps to keep the vagrants away. For the first time in a decade or so, we aren’t pestered with druggies around the south corner. I don’t mind the sounds of sawing and hammering and the like, given the oh-so-welcome reasons for them. (Besides, major sewer construction one block over is drowning everything else out.)
I always figured I could outwait Chris & Co., and I did. We all did. But where did he go? Is some other neighborhood cringing under the blasts now? Somehow I doubt it; from the look of things, Chris’s next address was likely to be the street. After that, the morgue. The path of meth addiction is like that.