Thursday, June 02, 2005

Gettin' Out Da Hood

I wonder if nursing homes have pool tables. That'd be something to look forward to.

Well, there has been an increasingly worse problem with loud, annoying kids disturbing the peace in the projects over the past few weeks. Let me recap Tuesday, just as an example:

There is a drive that circles all the way around the apartments, sort of in a U-shape. As I am approaching where I normally park, one kid comes from completely out of my view, shoots out of the breezeway on a bicycle right in front of me, cuts a right turn and goes around the back of the apartments. If I had not been paying attention or had been going a little faster, that would not have been good.

Anyway, as I approach my front door, I find several kids I've never seen before outside, one of whom is sitting in one of my white plastic chairs that I have out on the patio. OK. Odd, I think. I wonder who they belong to, but I go on inside.

A little while later, I hear something hit one of my apartment windows. I walk outside to see three kids in a little triangle formation throwing a basketball. Two of them are standing about four feet from my truck. A fourth kid is sitting on my truck. And another is throwing rocks at the building. Let me interject at this point that there are probably a total of about 8 or 9 kids outside right now, and at least five of them don't live in the apartments. So I can't really say anything to their parents, because I don't know where they live. Anyhow, I tell them as nicely as I can they don't need to be throwing things around the cars and to go play in the grass. So they do, for about fifteen minutes.

All this time, mind you, there is incessant screaming, yelling, and occasional banging on the walls. And it doesn't help that these apartments were probably constructed in the Mesozoic Era and the walls are about as soundproof as a pup tent.

Anyway, a little while later, I hear another crash. I peek out my bathroom window to see a little boy picking his bicycle up off the ground right next to my truck. He has obviously run into my truck. Urgh. Let me mention here than over the past couple of years, I have had four or five dents mysteriously appear in my truck. Or not so mysteriously. Either way.

OK, so about 7:30 PM I go running. When I come back, there is what looks to be a 13 or 14 year old black boy sitting in one of my chairs with a similar-aged Hispanic-looking chick sitting in his lap. What the crap! OK, first of all, there are only ten apartments in the complex and there are no black or hispanic people living there, so I don't know where these kids came from. Second of all, they've probably been having sex on my front porch. It was at this point I decided to call the landlord. And of course, I got an answering machine.

So I shower and get cleaned up and later on I notice one of my neighbors is sitting outside on her porch. So I decide to go over and talk to her. She informs me that one of the little boys was throwing rocks at my truck earlier and she went over there and got on to him.

The yelling, screaming, and general loudness doesn't stop until after 10 PM. And that was all on Tuesday. So yesterday, I started pricing apartments here in Hartselle. Gah! I'm fixin' to bust up with some Napoleon Dynamite numchuck skillz out heahh!

Anyone for a game of bizarro Russian roulette, with only one empty chamber? I'll start!

"All my old flames have new names. There's a lot of girls in town who've tied the knot and settled down..."

1 comment:

  1. What you're going through it exactly why I finally bought a house. The riff-raff in and around some apartments, etc are not good - and it only gets worse.

    I have some awful stories of what I went through at my apartment - and your descriptions sound like you're going through the same problem. (my stomach knotted up just reading some of what is going on). I say move. Buy a house if you can. It'll be worth it. You're already cutting the grass anyway.

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