June, 2002

There's a guy on my block who's irritating the hell out of the neighborhood and for the past ten years my neighborhood has been Europe. You know the type, every town seems to have one, totally out of control.

Europe is tidy and we all keep our lawns mowed, set out the garbage for pickup, pretty much respect each other and try to be good neighbors. We like to think we're civilized. Multi-cultural, but civilized. It's been that way a long time and even the new guys on the block, the Czechs and Poles, Hungarians and Slovaks, Latvians and Lithuanians are scraping the paint, putting up modest new shutters and cutting their grass.

But we got this one guy, big, brassy, inconsiderate and he's right in our face, where he can't be ignored. Won't listen to reason, got an answer for everything, a real slob. God knows we've tried to talk to him, made all the concessions we can and let me tell you the outcome.

Maybe you can suggest something.

Guy's got the biggest house on the block, six car garage, the whole nine yards. Richer by far than we are, so you'd think he'd care. But no, he sits there on his porch tossing beer cans and banana peels into the yard. The weeds are waist high. He keeps wrecking stuff and just lets it lie there, rusting. Old cars, old countries, old alliances just left wherever he wants, all shot to hell and deteriorating. You try to talk to him, he comes out on the porch with a gun, gives you the finger, then slams the door in your face. The guy's a gun nut, loaded with weaponry and he's been selling them to all the street people, all those homeless who'd break your window for a ten dollar fix. When he's sober he lectures us on civic responsibility and when he's drunk he's too belligerent to talk to.

It's frustrating.

We put together a plan for the whole town, something that would encourage everyone to stop burning their garbage in the yard, to clean things up a bit before property values sink right off the map. You know the kind of thing, he even tried to run the show, came to all the meetings, told us how it should be and wore his best suit. So we made it law and everybody got excited, got on board to put flowers in the window box, spruce things up even though it was mostly his crap that made things unlivable.

Know what he did? Laughed in our faces when we came around and asked him to comply. Like it was all a joke. Just pitched some more junk into the yard and dared us to complain. And this, after all his big talk about how we all needed to be good neighbors, respect each other. Can you believe it?

We're frantic, but what do you do with an outlaw?

Lately he's been trying to get all of us to back him in a dispute he has with some guys down the street. Not even our street, a couple blocks over. Seems they set fire to his garage and we were frankly pretty shocked, but there's some of us think what he got m he got might have been what he deserved after all these years. We don't say that to his face, but a lot of people think it. Now he's not only refusing to clean up his place, but he's walking the neighborhood, packing a gun and telling us we're either with him or against him. Getting really hot under the collar.

The guy's obviously dangerous.

Normally, you know, we'd just go to the authorities and work through channels, point to the codes and that's that, the guy shapes up. But frankly (and I don't know how to say this delicately), the authorities are privately scared to death of this guy. He's that big and lately, he's been that out of control. The cops ask us to try and work it out in the neighborhood. The courts don't even want to mess with him and yet, if you have laws with no enforcement, what do you have?

We're getting pretty tired of it. It's really a pain to have a rich guy show up at our neighborhood meetings, all slicked up in a white shirt and tie, telling us how it's going to be and then bullying us, fouling up the block with his own trash and quietly arming us against each other. Selling a gun with a wink here and a switchblade with a sly smile there is making it really scary to walk our streets at night.

Got any suggestions?

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