staying safe
She opened the stairwell and was blasted with a cloud of smoke. Her sister was with her. I followed about 5 or 6 feet behind. When I got up to them, I grabbed them, and said, “come back here.” The first guy was already up and heading down the stairs. Before the door closed, the second guy turned his head slowly and said, “Oh, shit” and started getting up.
Fifteen years ago I was familiar with the aromas of lots of different kinds of drugs. This wasn’t pot, opium, or hash. It smelled like evergreen, I thought, or household cleaner. I’ve been saying it was crack, though I suppose it could’ve been meth. As I mentioned, I’m not up on the drugs these days.
What I am doing now is reminding myself that nothing has really changed. My older daughter plays outside with the neighborhood children after school. She still will. We love it here, and we mostly will continue loving it. But, we’re going to move. She doesn’t know that, and I won’t be discussing it with her until next spring when we begin getting ready to go.
There is a police officer I’ve become familiar with who works in our area. I saw him in the corner Starbucks a few days after he had been at our neighbor’s apartment. He had put our neighbor in the back of his car and my daughter saw him get “patted down.” I asked the officer if there was something I needed to worry about with that guy and he said no, he was getting a ride to the hospital. He patted him down because “nobody gets in back there unless I check ’em.”
Last night I saw the same cop at a different Starbucks and I started talking with him about the stairwell drug users. Earlier that evening, I posted a note on each of the doors of our building saying that I had no interest in getting into anyone else’s business but if it affected my children, things were different. I said if I found someone using in the stairwell or hallway or laundry room again, I wouldn’t hesitate calling the police. After a good and in-depth conversation with this cop, I made the decision last night that we will move. Examining all our options (he suggested forgetting the security deposit and moving immediately), I’ve decided I have to be pragmatic. If I were to pack up and go now it would cost too much, financially and emotionally. Mostly financially.
I told him how I hated that good people couldn’t stay. I told him that I wanted to help the place be a better place. He understood and agreed that knowing neighbors, invested tenants, people who care are all important. He even seemed to agree that in some cases ideas like mine were good. The fact was, though, he knows our apartment complex and our building in particular. He pointed out our landlord has known about the lockless (door knob-less) back door for months and hasn’t fixed it. “He hasn’t shown signs that he is doing anything about it [the drugs],” he said of the landlord. “It’s a transient population. There’s no one who has been there for 15 years, for example. Even if you have a bunch of good people in a building, you get a few who are bringing in really bad characters and it’s not a good thing.” Of my idea to get to know my neighbors, he said, “Most of them just really don’t care. It would be an uphill battle.”