I recently learned that my family members have been the object of unwanted advances by a family who has been living across the street for about three years.
There’s an older mega-BT 800 who rules the roost, a seasoned adult male and a developmentally disabled young woman who are home all of the time. I have also seen young children there for periods of time. My best guess is that this is a foster care business, to include a mentally challenged young woman, occasional stints of young children whose presence doesn’t seem to be constant, and whom the young woman has had to babysit and take for walks. So it’s all a decent living to be made on the back of the Daddy State with young revolving check doors coming in and out, in addition to the regular stipend provided to the care giver for keeping someone who has a lifetime disability.
The other morning, my friend called his daughter to make sure she was ready for school before he got back to the house, so he asked her to come out front in advance. I kept an eye on her, because neither of us knew he was doing this and we were both looking for his car, so I waited with her also.
Well, what do you know? The retarded scout girl comes bounding over in a toothy smile and a quickly moving hand wave. She hunches her shoulders down as she looks at me, as if she has to hunch over to see me.
“Hi,” she says, the smile growing larger while the wave continues.”
“Hi,” I said, my eyes instantly narrowing, not smiling myself.
“Can I come over and talk to y’all sometime?”
“About what,” I ask?
“You know, just to talk.”
My head quickly cocks to the left, like half of a headshake for “NO,” which my courteous Eastern European upbringing doesn’t allow me to fully complete on both sides.
“Maybe if we’re coming and going,” I say. (Parse that out with your family and see if you can figure out what it means—duh, eff off.)
My friend drives up, his daughter hops in the car, I wave them off and call him. I tell him to put me on speaker so his daughter can hear also and tell them not to trust the girl, that when the family first moved in, the girl had been told to come over. She knocked at my door, asked if I rented or owned and about how much my monthly payments were, because her folks were “wondering about buying in the neighborhood.” I was much more naïve and polite at the time and was taken aback by this sweet, little retarded girl talking nicely to me. It threw me off, and in addition, I didn’t care whether I revealed that information, or let her see inside because I had no possessions of value and no furniture throughout most of the house. I also figured that if it was a scouting expedition, she could get the word out that I had jack shit worth burglarizing.
I tell them that about two years later, I noticed her taking regular walks up and down the alley behind my house. She had a notebook and pen in hand, one day peeking through the slats of a neighbor’s stockade fence while she took notes, another day bending down so that she could better see into another neighbor’s basement window and writing again, sometimes with a baby in a stroller as a prop during a “walk in the neighborhood,” of which she takes many. I am disturbed by this and call a neighborhood association board member to describe what I’ve seen. She knows who I’m talking about, and she is unconcerned and sure it’s harmless. The line between the two points of paranoia and lack of imagination can be long, especially when you think like a paleface and have no experience with the environment the new section eight residents have come from to live in their fortune of others’ foreclosures, and your neighborhood has been changing at a speed that seem to be careening out of control since Baltimore’s 2015 pillages, I mean riots.
Then my friend tells me that she has been running up to them regularly, greeting them, asking to talk to them and asking them for their phone numbers. My friend is also not American, also avoids discourteous behavior, so he gave her his daughter’s cell number, knowing that his daughter doesn’t answer unrecognized phone calls and warned her privately that while “the girl might be nice, something is not right with her…” running up to them regularly. Turns out this had been going on for a while now, that the girl uncannily bounded out no matter their schedule, and that he had been parking around back to avoid her and come and go more privately. Good plan, right? No. Last night he parked around back and was met by her once again with a greeting and a hand extended for a shake.
“How did you know I was here,” he asked?
“I like looking for you and coming to see you,” she answered.
“Well, you’ll have to stop looking for me. I don’t want you to do it anymore. I live with other people.”
“Okay, I understand,” she said and went back to her house.
“Can you believe that,” he asks me, “She and her mother were looking out of their window for me, even though I had parked out back, and then she came running over.”
I had to ask The Man Who Knows About All Things Dark and Ugly and Running the Streets, what it all meant.
Turns out, if you let an oppressed opportunist into your home, and you’re a home owner and not a renter, they could suffer an “accident” in your home after they leave it, and next thing you know, you’ve got social services and the law knocking at your door, and a big lawsuit which will ruin you, even if you don’t have much to ruin as it is.
This is Lili Hun, exposing my naïveté to all, so that you can learn from it, in case like me, you lack exposure to the criminal mind and are also missing a criminal imagination.
Just email White Daddy LaFond, i.e. Mr. James, and he’ll tell you how it really works in the hood and what the rats do to survive their life of forced leisure. It worked for me.
