The halfway house was on Edna avenue across from the house I was renting from my father. The neighbors all knew it was a halfway house. It was all the time police bringing them back and forth. The one dindu come knocked on my door and ask me for a cigarette and I told him I don’t smoke. I witnessed him go up and knock on every damned door on the street and ask every person for a cigarette. Then he turned the corner on Mary and came back with some cigarettes.

This same dindu was arguing with this white guy while I was outside mowing the lawn. Both of them lived there. They get into this shoving match, yelling about cigarettes. The white guy walks in the house and says don’t follow me and the black guy follows him in and you hear people screaming, yelling, things getting broke. The cops are there in a few minutes. They bring the two guys that were fighting out, then while they’re sitting on the porch, they’re each telling their side of the story and the black guy charged the white dude and him and the white guy get into a clutch by the shirt. The cop—a black cop—pulled out his expandable baton and smacked the black guy in the head four times. Other cops threw the white guy down, got the cuffs on him. They drug the black guy off the porch by the feet and cuffed him and threw him in the back of a police cruiser with a bleeding head. It didn’t knock him out, but it took the fight out of him, hit him a good four times.

It was probably ten or twelve people they pulled out. I only seen about four of them on a constant basis, coming and going. I had no idea there was that many. The other ones must have stayed inside all the time. A nuisance house is what it was. There was nothing too extreme, but the police were coming there for the eternal arguments in the house, cops taking people away, cops bringing people home. There was quite a bit of panhandling. They were just a sorry group of people. But I don’t recall any serious crime.