A story of one-legged men in wheelchairs

Tonight I sat out on my porch swing with my guitar working on a new song the band is learning. I spent almost 3 hours scrubbing the whole porch down -- columns and railings and floor -- last night. I wanted to enjoy it before the city air made it grungy again.

Dusk fell, and I could barely see my lead sheet. As I strummed, I looked up and saw 3 one-legged men in wheelchairs rolling down the sidewalk single file on the other side of the street.

I've been seeing these chair-wheeling men a lot this summer -- some with one leg (each) and some with more. They're usually alone, or sometimes with a non-wheeling male companion. None of them seem to use their hands to move their chairs. They all either walk in their chairs or walk behind them and push.

I don't know where they come from. Maybe the nursing home around the corner? One of the halfway houses? I didn't see them until this summer though. If Melvin were still alive, he would know. He would have somehow talked them into coming up on his porch or mine to share a nip of gut-burning gin and juice.

One evening a few weeks ago my granddaughter Coraline and I were swinging on the porch, and one of the wheelchair men came walking his wheelchair down the sidewalk. He stopped in front of one of the houses across the street -- one that's been empty for several years -- turned to face the house, unzipped his pants and peed on the stairs. Then he pushed his wheelchair on down the street. I considered yelling at him, but it didn't seem like something a toddler should witness -- her grandma yelling at a man in a wheelchair for peeing on the sidewalk. That shit can escalate if you don't know your opponent's level of crazy.

Did I digress? I do that ....

Tonight as I strummed my guitar I watched the 3 one-legged men sit-walk their wheelchairs down the street and stop in front of the very house the other man had peed in front of (obviously he had 2 legs). They rolled to a stop and turned their chairs to face the street, side by side like they were waiting for fireworks.

It was almost dark, so I suspected they couldn't see me across the street on my porch. One of them took a bag off his wheelchair handle and started digging around in it. After a while he lit something with a lighter -- several times. Then he passed it to the guy in the middle, who also lit it a couple of times and then passed it to the third guy. Obviously they were passing a pipe.

They don't let you smoke weed in a nursing home, I would imagine. Even if you are down to only one leg. I wonder how people in nursing homes even get weed.

As they smoked and murmured over there, I started playing "Me and Bobby McGee," very quietly. I didn't think they could hear me, but you can't tell how sound will travel at night. I just like to sit out in the summer night with my guitar, watch the bats dive for mosquitoes, listen to the trains in the distance and the neighbors fighting ... kids playing in the streets.

I played a couple more slow quiet songs -- "Creep" and "Free Fallin'" -- and it seemed they probably were listening as they passed their pipe in silence. One of them had lit a cigarette and was smoking it; I could see the tip flare every so often. I noticed one of the neighborhood cats had stopped to sit for a while and listen.

Sometimes people walked past in twos or threes. The wheelchair men didn't move, nor did they stop smoking their pipe. I stopped playing when the walkers were right in front of me because I wasn't really out there to put on a show, but then as they faded down the street, I took up where I'd left off, playing in the darkness of my porch. Brandi Carlile's "Turpentine," one of my all-time favorite songs ... "Angel from Montgomery" ... "The Book of Love" .... a few more.

Finally, I ran out of songs I wanted to play so I just rocked in the swing and let the crickets take the stage. The cat slipped on down the street. Eventually I came inside, but the wheelchair men were still out there, sitting across the street and probably very stoned given how many times that pipe went around.

A few minutes after I came in, I passed the front door and glanced out. They were gone, back to where they'd come from.

*******
Today after a committee meeting for a big production I'm involved with (more on that later) a few of us stayed behind sipping coffee or beer and talking about old white men, one member's new client, good places to live in the area. I'm going to reveal that I was the oldest person at the table; that information is rarely relevant, yet sometimes is. I'm not sure if it is now, but maybe. It certainly will be in the near future when I write about old white men.

We were down to 4 of us, and none of the other 3 thought my neighborhood sounded like a place they'd like to live. Mo said she gets scared staying in a house by herself. She said she lived in a rough neighborhood in Chicago before, and she ended up almost housebound. The other two agreed they prefer safer, quieter quarters.

I told them almost everything I see and write about in my neighborhood is shit that's happening to other people, not to me, and that I'm rarely scared. I told a couple of Snoop Dog stories, like how he used to stand in the street and not let me pass and the time the SWAT team busted down his door. I realized these stories weren't really making my point that my neighborhood isn't unsafe .... it's just interesting. I said I ride my bike home at 2:00 am and I've always been fine. Their expressions suggested I could expect to be taken away in a straight jacket if I kept it up, so I stopped trying. I didn't even mention Melvin.

After a few seconds of silence, J, who lives in the nice, quiet suburb where I lived for 20 years before I moved into the city, said, "The old lady who lives next door to me sometimes puts a note on my garbage can if I leave it in the driveway an extra day."

We all laughed.

I remembered how bored I was in that nice, quiet suburb. Oh, there were stories there too, but they took place behind closed doors in houses separated by half an acre of putting-green lawn.

Maybe I'm not afraid here because I've  learned I'm far less likely to be hurt by strangers in my environment -- no matter how expensive it is -- than I am by people who claim they love me. It took me a lot of years to accept that, but it's true.

So, I'd rather be here where there are one-legged men in wheelchairs passing a bowl in front of an abandoned house where a woman named Stella used to run an illegal soul-food restaurant. I hear her fried chicken was the best chicken in the city back in the day. Oh, the stories this street could tell.

What is this neighborhood coming to?

I've written often about my street and some of the people on it. When I first moved in, I noticed the guy in the third house to the north, the one I called Snoop Dog, was dealing drugs. He would throw a ball across the street for his pitbull, Grandma, to fetch, and wait for people in cars to pull up and chat with him. I wrote about how he used to block the street so I couldn't get home, and how we resolved that situation. And later I wrote about the day the SWAT team visited him while I was getting groceries out of my van. Various times I whined
about the noise down there -- how his girlfriend screamed at him out in the street for hours and the irritating back-up beepers on his truck.

About 8 months ago, somebody bought Snoops Dog's big 4-bedroom house for $3000. A few days after Snoop was arrested, somebody came and cleared out all his stuff -- red leather couches, plastic shelves, a cheap entertainment center. Melvin said the owner did a bunch of rehab on it last winter, but it couldn't have been much because I didn't see any of that. It just sits there empty, although somebody mows the grass sometimes.

Art used to live in the second house to the north. Until he got divorced, he and his wife would have huge fights out in the backyard that consisted of him yelling the same thing over and over (I've found it's a cultural thing, the yelling or saying the same thing over and over). "Bitch, you called the police on me. Bitch, you called the police on me. Bitch, you called the police on me. Bitch, you called the police on me. Bitch, you called the police on me .... " In between I'd hear her softly trying to defend herself and probably trying to keep the kids from hearing.

No surprise --they got divorced. But Art's problems didn't end there. He dated a series of young women who turned his life into hell. Instead of Art standing outside yelling at his wife, now these women would stand on his porch and yell at him and pound on his door. At least we think there were several of them. As Melvin said they all looked alike, so it was hard to tell. They would yell the same thing over and over too. Things like, "Give me my son's TV. Give me my son's TV. Give me my son's TV. Give me my son's TV. I'm not going to stop pounding on this door until you give me my son's TV. I know you're in there. Give me my son's TV." Bitches were persistent.

Art finally moved out because of all the women he'd pissed off. Even though it's his own fault for dating women he picked up in an asylum, it's too bad. He'd rehabbed the house, which is reported to have been an overflow whore house at one time, himself, and it's nice inside. But now he can't live in it.

And there were the neighbors on the other side. Loretta, the matriarch with the strong Kentucky accent who always wore a faded, colorless house dress with worn gray slippers, even when she went out to get McDonald's; her husband Lou, who had had a stroke and took short walks with his walker and then his cane; their mini wiener dogs, Mona and Sugar Shack; their daughter Linda; and Linda's son Kevin, who was 30 and used a red grocery cart to haul 5-gallon buckets into the garage where he worked at something all through the night, night after night. Your guess is as good as mine. cough meth cough Teenage boys also stopped by for short visits on the porch with Kevin. And one time I suspect Linda wrote "bitch" on my windshield because she didn't like the way I parked my van in front of my house.


Of course Melvin is gone now. As I was mowing the yard today I felt a stab of grief that he would never again holler over from his porch where he'd been watching me the whole time, "Baby, you shouldn't be mowing that grass. You should have let me mow that grass. You should never have to mow grass ...." It's too damn quiet over there. The gossip died with him, and nobody offers me gin and juice any more. I miss him terribly.

I also haven't heard any random arrests take place out there on the street, like the night some kid on a bike pulled a gun on one of the bike cops. Oh, I am sometimes awakened by a transient couple walking down the street fighting. A few weeks ago a guy was threatening to bash a woman's head in. He thought she was fucking around on him. And then there was the time .... umm .... yeah, I got nothing else.

Oh, I do hear gunshots with some regularity, and sometimes they sound pretty close. But they aren't on my street.

I don't know where they come from, but this summer I've watched a parade of men in wheelchairs go by on the other side of the street. They walk the wheelchairs with their feet. One guy pushes his wheelchair from behind, and then gets in it and walks it other times. They don't seem to live at the halfway house on the corner. Or either of the other halfway houses within a couple of blocks. I dunno. They aren't very exciting anyway, the old men in wheelchairs.

In fact, nothing is exciting on my street any more, because my street has become populated with .... wait for it ..... families with kids. Yep, families with kids outnumber all the rest of us on this street now.

As I said, Snoop Dog's house is empty. Art rented his to a young single mom with two little boys. There was some excitement when she first moved him. Somebody backed into her truck over and over while honking the horn the first night, but not much since then. She's friendly and her boys are adorable.

Across the street from them are 3 houses in a row with kids -- 9 all together. A pair of little girls who just turned 5 came over from a couple of those houses to play with Coraline. I blew bubbles for them and they swung on my porch swing. No guns were involved.

Melvin told me Loretta and Lou moved to Florida, and Linda and her son Kevin moved to a nearby suburb. They visit sometimes, but now Lou and Loretta's granddaughter lives there with her 6-year-old son and a pretty little baby girl. I didn't realize she was pregnant until the baby showed up. But she seems nice, and we say hi when we're both out. I don't like that she lets the baby cry and I can hear it, but I don't suppose that's something I can do anything about. At least she doesn't seem to be cooking up anything in the garage.

The only excitement was the day the little boy and his friend climbed out the window onto their very steep second-story roof and were playing there. They wouldn't get down when Melvin told them, but they did when I yelled at them and said I was going to go get the kid's mom. No police were involved because I haven't seen them up there again.

Now, instead of listening to Snoop Dog's parties or Art's girlfriends yelling at him or police shouting at gun-toting cyclists, I listen to the sounds of children playing outside in the warm summer evenings and the fucking ice cream truck that plays Music Box Dancer over and over and over and over. I hate that fucking ice cream truck.

The family at the end of the street planted a garden in the vacant lot next to them. And the boy next door colors on my sidewalk with pastel chalk.

Everybody is just too damn normal now. I hate to complain, but my stories about this street have dried up. I don't mean to wish trouble on anybody else, but we need some excitement around here -- just as long as it doesn't happen at my house.