Our immediate neighbors to the left are Junior, his wife Jeannie and their five children. There are usually at least two dead cars on their barren front yard. When they first move here, Jeannie makes a brief effort to beautify the garden, but her plantings never have a chance to flourish with the comings and goings of all the children, Junior’s friends, along with the vehicles and hulking, deceased appliances littered about.
Junior is an illiterate iron worker. His father is a Chinese cab driver and his mother is Native American. His mother has a little newspaper and doohickey shop in downtown Washington, D.C., just off 16th Street. I don’t know what Jeannie does otherwise, but sometimes she works in the small Dickerson’s store a long block down MacArthur Boulevard from my house.
Junior's place.
Junior is a big man, but not in height. He has a big, expanded belly from the beer he drinks, and black hair and eyes. He’s a regular at Touhey’s up the street, a beer bar and restaurant in a sagging old house on MacArthur Blvd. a block from our house, onveniently located near the volunteer firehouse. It’s the only restaurant in Cabin John. I am not allowed in there, but from time to time, I sneak in to buy something from the candy vending machine.
When Junior and Jeannie move in, their house is a pretty little two-bedroom cottage, with a flower bed at the front of the grassy yard. There is an ample fenced-in back yard for children to play in. It doesn’t take long, though, before the seeds of neglect begin to bear fruit.
The children are wild. Eventually there will be five, four boys and a girl. Jeannie gives up on the front flower bed early in the game when the first dying car staggers into the yard to shudder into its final resting place. More will follow.
Junior’s house devolves into an awful sight; the weight of family habits has rendered it almost unlivable for anybody else. The front porch sags away from the main house and there is junk strewn everywhere. I am rarely inside the place and grateful for it. On the odd occasion when I do go inside, a strange feeling settles over me and I am hyper-alert to the horrendous circumstances in which they live. At one point, someone pulls a red rug onto the porch roof to air it out. It is there for years.
Junior likes my mother and sometimes when he’s drunk, he stops in to visit. He calls her ‘Mama,” accepts her beer, and waxes philosophical, talking well into the evening.
Junior can rip a phone book in half. Well, it takes a few minutes, tearing a bit at a time.
His friends come by his place, an unsavory bunch at best. Junior must have warned them off my mother’s property because they never bring their trouble to us. Once Jeannie fully gives up and leaves for good, these people show up more often and in greater numbers.
The other neighbors are frightened of Junior and his associates and encourage Mom to call the police on them. She won’t. The police come by several times a year without being called, anyway. But every time her property taxes go up, she sends one of us over to Junior’s place to take a picture, which she sends to the tax office. Her taxes do not go up.
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