Barking Dogs

So here's my story.
I found the house of my dreams, at the time, on a suburban street 29 miles from San Francisco. It had been owned only twice before, the original owner having sold the previous year to the current owner, who was selling to me. The little angels had to fly back up to heaven, or Portland, as the family was about to be re-blessed and there was not enough bedspace nor plumbing in the current home for a fifth child. So blessed, so young.

Soon thereafter, my realtor showed me a multi-family residential rental property which taught me the phrase "deferred maintenance" as a preferred alternative to total neglect, and I bought it at a very good price.

Upon taking possession of the multi-family property, I introduced myself to the tenants. I felt it important to be up-front with them, answer any questions, and update their leases. Some terms were going to change, and they needed proper notification.

There was a long-term tenant who was getting a rent reduction in exchange for her services as "Resident Property Manager." For the previous two years, she had been simultaneously receiving a salary and an apartment gratis at another complex across town, and was sub-letting to her daughter and roommates. The same woman had lived with her husband and small daughter at the end of the street where I live. She had fled an abusive relationship with a physically violent man to live in the multi-family property that I bought. There is another tenant in the property, who has lived at this address for many years. She moved in as a single mom with two teenage sons. She grew up on this street, in the house next door to that of the woman who fled the abusive husband. Oh, and the daughter of the Property Manager who as a small girl had fled an abusive home life at the end of this street had a roommate - a hunky young guy named "Yogi" - whose family lives in the next house down.

When the apartment occupied by the daughter and her friends, including Yogi, was flooded out that first winter of my management, when the gypsy roofer's hired hands stripped off the existing membrane too early on the Sunday January morning on which record rains fell to please the agoraphobic insomniac in the next apartment, whose only crime was to blanch all of the metal fixtures with pure bleach. She once wept to me in the laundry room about having caught the husband in flagrante delicto. She had thrown him out and now was worried about how she would make ends meet. Perhaps she had been hoping I was wanting her, and would jump at the chance to take care of her rent, but when I only offered to waive the late fee she reconciled with the guy and I became the cunt of all time.

The gypsy roofer tore off the old roof early one Sunday morning in January and awakened the agoraphobic insomniac in the next apartment, who telephoned me. Her message was brought to me in a conference room at the hotel in which I ultimately housed the tenants displaced by the flooding. I was teaching the first and penultimate seminar produced as an independent training provider. I had initially offered them a motel room around the corner from the apartment, but the girl insisted on something nicer, so I put them up at their preferred lodging and they stiffed me on a fifty-dollar phone bill. I imagine the girl's teary two-hour bubble bath as she recounted her ordeal on the phone to her mother, who at the time was struggling through her own latest round of re-hab.
As for my immediate neighbors on the block, my neighbors on all four sides came with the house. The Western neighbor introduced herself and her family with the distinction that they had once lived in a "really nice neighborhood" before a physical disability had prevented her husband from continuing his work as an instructor at a Tractor Trailor Driving Academy. They were forced to economize, and sold the mansion to move into this dump.
The neighbor to the East is a delightful woman of a certain age who enjoys travel, gardening, good music, good food, and the company of good friends. She has told me stories of our street, as humorous anectdotes, such as the funny time the kid down the block who was a notorious stoner drove his car into her tree, and later died of a drug overdose...this was apparently one of the sons of the single mother who is still my tenant in the multi-family property.
The houses clustered at the end of the cul-de-sac, where this drama continues, are time-worn little sad shacks. Some attempts to dramatically alter the original intent of the tract design with synthetic horizontal siding, pastel hues, and exotic garden statuary offer bleak hope beside rotting husks and thistled greenery.