Ep. 282: "The Grand Slam"
Hello.
Oh, hi.
Hi, John.
How's it going?
Oh, gosh.
Oh.
It's going well, although.
Although.
Got a little bit of a situation here.
Breaking news.
So, you know, over the last year, we saw, first of all, we saw Skeeter die of cirrhosis of the liver.
And then we lost Randy.
Randy man.
Remind me who Randy is?
Randy?
From across the street.
Randy.
Randy who lives in his van down by the river.
Oh.
And then the house got sold to the flippers.
Mm-hmm.
And they worked on it for a long time.
They spent a lot of money on it.
Fixed it up.
Check in with you to make sure you were keeping an eye on things.
Yep.
Checking in with me.
Checking in.
Spend a lot of money on it.
And then for some reason, couldn't quite.
They expected to put it on the market and it would just sell in an instant.
And I think maybe part of it was that the street appeal was somewhat...
the street that I live on doesn't have a ton of curb appeal.
Okay.
Patrick living next to me works in the underground sewer installation department of a, of a company that works with the city.
He's got a, he's got a working man's truck out front and, and he sometimes, I think his son-in-law wrecked a car and so he brought it over to,
To Patrick's and he put it under a tarp.
This is a neighborhood where people are working.
They're doing stuff.
They're not hiding anything under a bushel basket.
Nope.
I have an RV.
It's actually presently hidden under a bushel basket, but it's a huge bushel basket.
The guys that live across the street, they have a business on the side where they're working on cars.
Oh, people don't like that.
No, between 13 and 30 cars over there.
Anyway, they did a very nice job fixing up this house.
And it didn't sell right away, but then it finally did sell.
The flippers?
No.
Well, and I met the owners on the day before Christmas Eve.
And they were just a very delightful African-American couple with two children, young children, five and three, something like that.
And was it Jamaica?
Was that her name?
Jamaica then moved.
But this is for people who have deep catalog.
This is Jamaica's old house.
This is Jamaica's house.
And Jamaica moved.
And I don't know where.
I haven't heard from her since.
The last time Jamaica and I talked, she was asking me if I would take –
Randy's van into my yard for a couple of weeks while Randy got his stuff figured out.
That's a backdoor pilot.
That's pretty bad.
Yeah.
Did she decline?
I did.
Yeah.
Because I already got this bushel basket over here.
I did.
Well, I said... I said... And we may have talked about it at the time.
I said, you cannot...
We can't do this because this is not an asset, this van.
It is not an asset to – you need to stop thinking about it like it's his asset.
You know what I mean?
Like he's thinking right now – And think of it more as your monkey's paw.
Yeah.
And, of course, the man we're talking about is not named Randy.
Mm-hmm.
What is his name?
Merlin, I'm afraid... That's okay.
I think for purposes of this show, we'll go with Randy.
No, but what is his actual name?
It's not...
jesse uh randy is the name of the restaurant down at the bottom of the hill oh easy easy um uh i know this people are yelling yeah it's not skeeter it's nope skeeter it's not skeeter it's not it's a name like this oh boy what is his name why just bring that on me like that
I don't know.
Well, I'm just sitting here thinking like it sounds like it should be Randy, but it's not Randy.
He'd be yelling at his flip phone.
Yeah, we all know who it is.
You know, I know, they know.
People are screaming at us right now.
It's not Randy.
It's Jesse Pinkman is the guy from Breaking Bad.
Right, right.
It's not him.
No.
It's... It's going to be one for the Hall of Fame.
Why did I say Randy?
Randy.
I have no idea.
It'll come to us.
Yeah, it'll come to us.
Anyway... It's not an asset.
It's not an asset, this thing.
And he thinks it's like a piece of material that... He thinks this is where his retirement is, in this van.
And it's garbage.
It's like it needs to go to the crusher.
It's not restorable.
And I'm somebody who has some experience buying and trying to restore things that are garbage.
To me, apart from forgetting his name, I think you're really missing the elephant in the room, which is that...
I've given you advice before, unsolicited advice, that whenever you're thinking about a decision that involves a relationship with another person, it's useful to ask, do I want much more of this relationship or much less of this relationship?
Right?
Just to abstract this idea.
And in this instance, the idea of taking his asset onto your property is going to give you a lot more interaction with the artist formerly known as Randy.
I do not want that.
No.
He's going to be knocking on the door.
He's going to be hearing his calls.
No.
He smoked in there, right?
No.
Oh, it's the, it's, I mean, they're, it's not salvageable, like as a piece of metal, like there's nothing in it.
It's rust.
It's rusted.
It's completely rusted.
He like, it's like, it's like full of rats.
It's like not, it's, it's not just that it's not a nice truck.
It's like not, it's, it's tetanus.
It's tetanus on wheels.
Anyway, so this young couple buys the house.
We have a we have an extremely pleasant exchange on the street.
I'm like, you guys are moving in on Christmas Eve.
And they kind of were like, yeah, like that was with two kids.
That was no big deal.
And I was like, wow.
That seems like a really big deal.
Move into a new house on Christmas Eve.
But at the same time, how amazing you get to spend your first, you know, like first Christmas in the new house.
That's for adventure.
Those do.
Yeah.
And I was like, this is going to be fun.
We're going to have a fun time.
She said that she was a longtime Seattleite.
He was from Brooklyn.
And we were going to get along famously.
And the thing is, I was leaving for Christmas.
We spent Christmas up at a little house in the snow.
And so I was like, you know, we'll all get together.
Welcome wagon when I get back.
And then in January, I traveled a lot.
February, I traveled a lot and I didn't see them.
Right.
I didn't bump into them on the street very often.
Every once in a while there would be.
A car would pull up.
They drove nice cars, nice SUV-style new ones.
You know how somebody drives up in an SUV and it's pearlescent?
Wow, nice.
I don't even know what brand it is.
They all look the same.
It's the middle-class version of having fancy nails.
You know what I'm saying?
Yeah, yeah.
I'm not going to be digging with my hands anytime soon.
Yeah, this thing is full-time four-wheel drive and I'll never drive off of the road.
But then after a while and then there were there were a couple of Sundays where like Sunday evening I would come home and there would be cars parked all on the street.
And in our neighborhood, there are no sidewalks.
It feels kind of country out here.
And so the areas in front of people's houses were.
by by accepted convention in the neighborhood those areas sort of belong to the house if you're going to park your car on the street
You're going to park it in your area and not bleed over into somebody else's.
Right.
That's somebody else's shoulder.
Yeah.
And it's not like if there were sidewalks.
Right.
Then you just park your car on the sidewalk and you park your car in a parking spot and they don't belong to people.
But, you know, like the gravel in front of my house is an extension of my yard.
That's how we all are down here.
The neighbor that's right over here that's next to me on the other side, they'll bring the front bumper of their car right up to the fence line.
But they would never go two inches with their bumper over that fence line.
They know.
Anyway, I would come home on Sunday and there would be a bunch of cars parked on my side of the street in front of my house where I park.
So there was no place for me to park.
I was like, whoa.
But I talked to my mom about it.
I was like, what do I do in this situation?
She said, these are public roads.
If you go over and ask them not to park in front of your house, you are a very bad person.
Do not do that.
Really?
And I was like, all right, all right.
I said, but what about social convention?
And she was like, these are the public roads.
You do not mess with the public roads.
I know better than to disagree with your mom, but I'm not so sure about her police work there.
I think this is a culture.
This is, you know, we're living in a society.
That's what I thought too.
But, you know, as you say, you don't, you don't, you know, you go against mom and then you live to regret it.
Anyway, I didn't say anything.
A couple of Sundays went by.
I was like, whatever.
No problem.
It's a temporary thing.
But it did make me feel like, oh, they're church people.
They're having events on Sunday evening after church.
I see.
Or they're inviting people over.
And so it's going to be even harder to kind of go into this situation and be like, hi, I know that you're having like a church event, but don't park in front of my house.
Mm-hmm.
Couldn't do it.
You know, it's just like this is just we're just we're learning about each other.
Mm-hmm
But then it got real quiet over there.
And by the time the end of February rolled around, it had become curious.
I'd never seen or heard the kids.
Well, just to be clear now, no more pearlescent SUV coming and going?
Well, they have a garage with a door that opens and closes.
And I could always tell when Jamaica was here and Randy...
Paulie.
I could always tell when they were there because the garage was full of garbage, so they couldn't park inside, so the car was either there or not.
But now they could be parking inside.
It's a two-car garage.
They could be all inside.
But, you know, I'm out at all hours.
I come and go.
I never saw them come and go.
So I was like, it's interesting that they're very quiet.
And I don't mind a quiet neighbor.
Better than karaoke, you know what I'm saying?
Yeah.
But...
The house is very neatly kept.
It was put into neat zone in order to sell, and it still looks like it's a house for sale.
The yard is very kept.
It's very neat.
Well, about two, three weeks ago, all of a sudden, cars were coming and going from the house.
And it was a situation where I would be sitting in... I'm sorry, I don't want to interrupt you, just to be clear.
So you have or have not seen kids playing in the yard or being kids?
None.
Have not heard a single... You know, I sit in my house, I listen to what's going on on the street.
If I was a sibling and lived in a big, freestanding, single-family house, I'd be out playing.
You'd be out playing.
You'd be running around, you'd be hitting stuff with a stick.
Even though it's the winter, but if you come in the car and you get out on the way between the car and the house, as you know from having a kid...
Even that closing that that 20 yards from the.
Are we talking about like under under under 10?
Yeah, they're one.
So you don't see any bikes.
You don't see any big wheels, Frisbees, skateboards, scooters.
Not only do I not, but I have never heard someone go.
That's not a single time.
OK, this is you got me.
I'm hooked.
So I'm like, what's going on over there?
I'm peeking through the blinds every once in a while, but it's like opposite day.
I'm peeking through the blinds at nothing.
Nothing's happening.
But then I'm sitting in the living room and I start hearing telltale signs of people coming and going.
which are you hear some, you know, faint music playing as a car drives up, sits there with the motor running for a minute, turns off, and then a door slams as somebody gets out of the car.
And that's not, you know, that's not unusual.
Like I say, the people next door to them have between 13 and 30 cars.
So you hear doors slamming.
Sure.
But I started to hear these events where a car would pull up and I would hear
This slam slam slam slam slam slam slam slam slam slam.
That sounds like a mob.
That sounds like the mafia to me.
Yes.
If I was going just on sound and I heard nine door slams, I would assume that's a bunch of guys getting out of mob cars.
And that's what I felt, too.
And so I did what you do when you are somebody like me.
Mm-hmm.
Who takes an interest in other people?
Sure.
I would get up and I would go look out and say, what's going on?
You're a social creature.
That's right.
And what was happening was there were three cars that were arriving all at the same time.
And there were between nine and 13 white kids in their early 20s who all were
Pretty clean cut, you know, like fresh faced.
And they were all getting they were arriving at the same time, all getting out of the car at the same time.
Obviously from the obviously from the multiple slams, the Grand Slam, as I like to call it.
Yeah.
And then they were going in through the gate, not in through the front door, but in through the gate into the backyard.
Okay, okay.
Think it's a sports team or missionaries?
Well, so I immediately think missionaries.
Okay.
So you've got a young African-American family that has already established that sometimes they have Sunday evening events, and then you have a bunch of teenage, fresh-faced people
um, college age people who are coming and going as a group.
I'm thinking this guy is a pastor.
He's got a youth group of some kind.
They are learning the trade.
They're here for like youth.
These are like the, the leaders, the elders of their youth groups or whatever.
They're getting some extra Dickens in training.
Yeah.
Oh, I should mention at some point,
On the fence facing the front next to the garage appeared a sign that was the kind of sign that you would get at Target that said, like, this is Janet's room.
Keep out.
that's made to look like a street sign.
Right.
That could say keep calm and carry on, or it could say like Volkswagen bug parking only.
Parking for world's greatest people.
Right.
For world's greatest people.
But it is shaped like a city sign.
Looks like one.
And it said, what does it say?
It's not visitor parking only.
It's something like
parking for guests only.
It's worded strangely.
What?
It's like the kind of wording, like a city sign would say visitor parking only, something simple.
But this is like parking for guests only.
It's like something you would find in the front of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel.
This is tickling my zoning bone.
And it felt a little bit like, oh, this is the first expression of the family's
like, uh, personality that they've put in the house.
They didn't put a little statue of, or they didn't put two, two white lions on either side of the driveway.
Like you see in my neighborhood a lot.
They didn't put a Buddha next to the front door.
They didn't put a, like a little wind chime.
They put this like parking for guests only sign on the fence and, and it's charming.
But, but now I'm starting now, now they are thinking about parking.
Well, yeah.
Oh, and that's the other thing.
I was like, oh, okay.
Interesting.
Interesting.
Oh, you're parking.
You're not going to put 14 Lexuses in there, 14 Lexi.
Lexi.
Anyway, so I was here in the Grand Slam a lot.
Grand Slam in the morning, Grand Slam at noon, Grand Slam in the afternoon.
More than one occasion.
Grand Slam at night.
Fresh Face Whites coming in?
Like white people coming in?
Coming and going.
Okay.
Grand Slam at 1130 at night.
1130 at night.
Such that every time I heard a Grand Slam, which again is... Something organized.
Something very organized happening.
Coming and going.
And every time I would look out... Let's just be clear here.
I have no idea where this is going.
If it was a social occasion where you're going to have some potato salad, people would be coming at different times.
Some people would be late.
Their kids would be screaming.
This is a heterogeneous group of people arriving all at the same time and immediately doing a Grand Slam and then heading back through the gate.
Heading back through the gate.
Not going in through the front door.
Okay.
So I do a little bit of reconnoitering.
We slip on this robe.
Got a scimitar.
I went over and I looked at the cars.
One of the cars.
So there's a...
2010 Toyota 4Runner.
Wait, wait, wait.
Okay.
2010 4Runner.
Okay.
All right.
Got it.
With Montana plates.
Montana, you say?
And one sticker, which is of a blue whale with no other writing on it.
Is it the company that makes sportswear?
Nope.
It's just a blue whale.
There's a company with a whale.
My daughter likes their sportswear.
No, this is a different... This is like the type of blue whale that you would get at an aquarium.
Oh, it's not adorable.
No, it's not cute.
It is a verisimilitude whale.
Okay.
Okay.
But it doesn't say, like, Rhode Island Aquarium.
Okay.
It just says nothing.
Just a blue whale.
Okay.
And Montana Plates.
No other... That's Big Sky Country.
That's Big Sky Country.
Oh, no.
And one other thing.
There is a little sticker on the bottom corner of the window that I later decipher as a parking sticker for Boise State College.
Okay.
in in boise idaho yeah montana montana idaho forerunner guest parking only the second car is what i would guesstimate to be like a 2009 infinity
with Washington plates and no other sign, no stickers, no other sign of life.
Like if you look in the windows, it's just like grandma's car, nothing.
No NPR sticker.
No NPR.
No parking pass.
No sticker that says like Christian Leadership Conference.
No sticker that says, you know, coexist.
No like, no fish, no Darwin fish, no fish eating a fish, nothing.
And then the third car, which...
always parks in the, this parking for guests only spot because the other two cars park on the street.
They just park on, they park what I would consider correctly, like on the dirt in front of that house.
Okay.
But the one that always parks in the slot is,
is a brand new car with temporary license plates.
Okay.
Temporary Washington plates that have expired.
What?
So temporary Washington plates.
Because to me, that's the leader.
Yeah, I know.
But the plates are 10 days expired.
Leaders got a nice new car.
They recently either recently moved the area, recently bought a car in the area.
They have not gotten their permanent plates.
Right.
But they have let it lapse.
And they park in the place of honor.
Yep.
So now I am, now I'm prepared to the next time I see the kids, I'm going to say like, Hey, hi, I'm your neighbor.
What's up?
What you got?
What are you guys doing?
They don't know what you know.
No, but I am never in the, in the week that I'm trying to put myself into like this situation.
I'm never able to get,
the get to them between hearing the grand slam and them all disappearing behind the game very efficient i just point of information um so just to just to cross a t here if i'm understanding this correctly grand slam grand slam grand slam over a period of days but still no sign of the african-american family at all okay this okay yep okay kids never hear a kid no kids
Okay, okay.
Never hear a darn thing.
These presumptive missionaries, whoever this is, they seem to be kind of running the place.
Well, except they never go in the front door.
They don't go in the front door.
And when you look at the house at night, none of the lights are on.
Oh, this is such a good mystery, John.
You're so good at this.
I remember, so when it was being fixed up by the flippers, by Flipper Dan, and I do remember his name was Dan.
I toured the house many times, and what he did was he turned the downstairs, which had been a kind of slap-a-dash mother-in-law, he turned the downstairs into a proper... You could even call it a three-bedroom apartment, although the zoning would not allow you to describe it as that.
But it definitely... But if you wanted to have a relative come and live with you, they could be there very comfortably.
Very comfortably.
There was a nice big living room.
He put...
a full bath down there.
There was a nice staircase up to the main house, and it had three, I mean, one room that qualified as a large legal bedroom, and then an office, and then a bedroom that was, you know, like, you could have three people living down there, for sure.
Does it have its own means of egress?
It does.
It has its own entrance?
It does have its own entrance.
Okay, okay.
Flipper Dan was thinking ahead.
He was.
And there were a couple of people that came to look at the house during the period when it was for sale that were like, yeah, we're thinking about having my mother live in the basement.
And I'm like, that's a great idea.
It's a great house.
You should buy it.
The young family that did buy it did not show any signs of having a mother-in-law plan.
But they were like,
You know, they were affluent young family with two kids.
I assumed that they would fill up that house with toys and excitement.
Can I ask a question?
Yeah, go ahead.
I might have missed this.
How...
Did you establish that the initial African-American family were the owners of the house?
In the long first conversation.
So you did talk about this and they were the people who bought the house in your estimation?
Yeah.
Well, they drove up.
I was standing out.
I think I was even packing my car to go to the mountains.
Yeah.
Oh, of course.
I'm sorry.
Christmas.
Yes, yes, yes, yes.
And they drive up and I'm like, hello.
I march over.
Hello.
And they're like, hello.
And I said, are you the new owners?
And they're like, we are.
We just closed.
And I'm like, it's the day before the day before Christmas.
Yes, I'm sorry.
You did establish this.
But at that point, you've imprinted on this idea that this is the nuclear family that's going to live in Flipper Dan's old house.
That's right.
And they are going to be, uh, they're going to have kids that come over and play with my daughter.
Yeah, pushing a hoop around with a stick, lemonade stand.
And they are part of the kind of gentrification that I've been waiting for in the neighborhood, which is that because this neighborhood is the most diverse zip code in America, um,
We here in this neighborhood want to keep that true.
We do not want to see what's happened in the rest of Seattle happen here, which is that there is displacement.
We want instead for the standard of living to rise while mean whilst maintaining a diverse community.
So they were like decidedly a middle class family that was going to like increase the tax base so that the schools are better, you know, while at the same time, like not changing the fact that I'm the only white person in my neighborhood.
Right.
They need you.
They need me.
That's right.
To keep it diverse.
I'm the anchor baby in the neighborhood.
Anyway, so I keep putting myself in situations where I'm trying to anticipate when this grand slam of white millennials is going to show up and move as a group really fast through what is just one fence gate.
Like, I don't know how they do it, frankly.
And there was one time when I was driving up as they arrived and I was like, here's my chance.
And I put the car in park.
I opened the door and they were moving so fast.
And I got out and kind of was like, and they reflexively like looked down and away from me in a way suggesting that.
that they were young people who did not ever want to look at an adult or be not engaged with the olds, not engaged.
Nobody was like, hi or anything.
They were just like, get us out of here.
Okay.
So there's a third wrinkle.
Oh God.
Which is that the Mexican family that lives on the corner that has between 13 and 30 cars for the last several years has had a rooster and
Now, they have chickens, and the chickens are running around the neighborhood, and everybody thinks that's charming.
But they had a rooster, which is technically against Seattle city regulations.
Interesting.
You're not supposed to have a rooster, because roosters are a pain in the ass.
What is this, Hawaii?
Yeah, right.
Even out in the fucking farms, roosters are a pain in the ass.
But in a city?
What does a rooster do?
I wouldn't have gone to Hawaii if they warned me about the roosters.
They're fucking roosters.
They're on their own timetable.
Yeah.
And this rooster is a fucking dumbass like they all are.
And from the very, very, very first inkling of light, he's... And he does it all morning and then all day.
He's just fucking cock-a-doodle-doodling all the time.
Cock-a-doodle-walk.
And somebody said to me, like, well, you know, within Mexican culture, a rooster is a very important character.
He plays a role within, like, culturally within the whole sort of pantheon, like a rooster is a guy, right?
Rooster-splaining.
It's a rooster guy.
And I'm like, all right, okay, keep a rooster around, like, you know, like a...
It's a diverse neighborhood, John.
Roosters are welcome.
I'm going to claim the ravens and the raccoons.
You've got your rooster.
Everybody needs a familiar.
Yeah, that's right.
And somebody's going to want the possum.
It's not me.
Somebody wants them.
Let the cat have that.
We all get the rats.
The rats are around for us all.
But the ravens and I have an understanding.
So I was fine with the rooster.
I mean, I wasn't like thrilled about it, but I'm not somebody that's going to pick up the phone and be like, it's like someone with a motorcycle.
You just kind of got to go, that's the guy with the motorcycle.
You get used to it.
That's right.
There's a rooster and he wakes me up in the morning and whatever.
Okay.
So rooster.
But they also at some point along the way, I cannot remember exactly when, bought a dog that
which they keep penned in a pen at the far end of their property, which is pretty far from the house, but very close to...
the house that i'm describing oh flipper dan's old place good and close to this uh newly refurbished home yeah the the pen oh that's a that's a nuisance john right on the other side of the fence i didn't sign up for this and if you took a tape measure the pen of the dog is actually probably closer to my bedroom window than it is to any window of the house
To which the dog belongs.
To whom the dog belongs.
Now the dog.
I've been conscious of the dog for a long time.
Because the dog every once in a while goes.
Sounds like a dog.
And I'm like alright.
Okay.
Smelled something on the wind.
There's another dog somewhere in this neighborhood.
That every once in a while goes.
And then this dog goes.
And
That happens a few times a day.
And I go, that's just how it is.
It's just like then the rooster's... And there used to be a dog down the road that was just all day long.
No, see, now that's... Do you remember my place when there used to be the dog upstairs?
Oh, that dog.
Do you remember Linus?
Linus would attack you.
A sweet little dog, but they keep him in a kennel literally right over my head where I worked all day, and he would do this.
Ha!
Ha!
Hop!
Hop!
Hop!
Hop!
And in terms of tape measures, we're talking like eight feet from my ear was a dog all day.
And that'll make a person a little bit crazy after a while.
And they were gone during the day.
Oh, gosh, yeah.
That's why Linus, that sweet little Linus, that's why he was in his little candle, in his little bastic.
Yeah.
Hop!
You don't know what to tell Linus in that situation.
Here you go, sweetie.
Here's some cookie dough with some like a dizopram in it or whatever.
It isn't like I would resort to screaming three times a day.
Well, so.
Okay.
Well, we got a lot of pieces on the board here.
Yeah.
This dog, this rooster, this situation over here never was a problem for me.
The family that lives there is an extended family, by which I mean.
There's a family with the automobiles.
Yeah.
But in the 13 and 30 cars, there are also between three and five families living in the house.
It's a big house.
Mm-hmm.
And there are a lot of daughters.
There are, by my estimation, at least one quinceanera a year for the last eight years.
Oh, que bueno.
So I don't know how you do that.
I don't know how you keep the quinceanera factory spinning like that.
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But I love them as neighbors.
They're extremely conscientious.
I think that they are, you know, they're the best sort of version of... Oh, 100%.
Well, there's also something nice about this.
I mean, like when I go on Nextdoor and people are like, oh, there's people coming to steal my packages.
Part of that is there's just not much activity.
There's not much come and go.
There's not much... Like, I think people are a little bit more respectful of a neighborhood where there's stuff going on.
It's a living neighborhood.
Stuff is happening.
It's a nice place to live, except for the roosters.
In the morning, the girls are always going to school in a big gaggle, and then they come home in the afternoon, and there are moms around, and there are cars coming and going, and you know what it is?
It's a situation where everybody tips their hat over there.
If you walk by, if you drive by, you get a little hat tip, and you give a little hat tip.
Give a little, get a little.
Give a little, get a little.
So it just feels like exactly the right kind of like... You should cover this on your other program.
A lot of people don't know how to do head etiquette anymore.
I know, right?
It's a thing that you could find out by listening to Omnibus with Ken Jennings.
And now back to our regularly scheduled program.
Anyway, so the Grand Slams, what I'm realizing is that the Grand Slam comes in, goes through the back gate, goes around the back into the back door, but then I think is sitting around on the back porch of the house in a way that I cannot see, but that the penned dog right on the other side of the fence is very aware of.
Oh, interesting.
So starting... And the dog becomes like a little mirror that lets you look around the corner.
Yes.
And the way he mirrors it is... Okay.
From 10 to 2.
Oh.
P.M.?
P.M.
10 p.m.
to 2 a.m.
No, that's not good.
Okay.
If you ask Todd Sleep Bro, he would tell you, you do not want that.
No, no, he's mad.
I'm mad.
And the thing is, for a few days, I don't make the connection.
I'm like, what the fuck is going on around here?
Like, all of a sudden...
This dog that has been there for maybe between 1 and 11 years.
I don't know.
But now I'm conscious of this dog barking all night.
This isn't how things go around here.
And there's fucking kids across the street.
And where's the family that I thought I was going to be friends with?
And what the hell is going on around here?
And I actually got... He must be ready to bust.
This is... What do they call this?
One of those locked room mysteries?
What's it called?
Trap room?
Trap house?
It's a thumb box.
Finger box.
It's an Asian American finger trap.
Finger trap.
How did you even get in this situation?
You wake up one day and all of a sudden there's fucking roosters and kids in here and barking dogs?
Yeah.
And some kind of a cult?
Is it a cult?
I thought it was stability we were getting when Jamaica and...
And the nominal Randy went away.
It's not Dwayne.
Why am I calling him Randy?
What is his name?
People are so bad right now.
Should I text?
It's Gary!
Oh, Gary.
Oh, my God.
I'm spent.
Oh.
He's such a Gary and so not a Randy.
I don't know.
No, Gary's and Randy's are very related.
They're both usually assistant managers at restaurants.
They are.
It's true.
And the thing is that Randy is the stereotype name that we give to Gary's.
Yeah.
You can be a restaurant manager or a stepdad.
That's really...
Okay.
All right.
So this is now how long?
So your initial first contact was around in the Christmas holiday period.
Yep.
Where are we up to at this point in the story?
So then January, it just seemed like, oh, they're real quiet.
Also stipulated January and February, you're on the road a lot.
I'm touring a lot.
You're not gathering as much string.
You're not putting as many things together.
And it made it plausible that like, oh, I don't see these two because I'm gone.
They're on a regular schedule and it's winter.
Three reasons why you might not see people.
On Sundays, every once in a while, I come home and there's this traffic jam, but I'm also gone along to a lot of the Sundays.
So those traffic jams could be happening every Sunday, and I'm just not there.
Or it could be rarer than that.
There's two things in life you don't notice.
You don't notice the things you don't see, and you don't notice the things you don't notice.
Right.
This is going to be one of the it's like a cognitive bias.
But but King Madison reverse.
Once you start noticing, you know what?
You start really noticing.
But if you're not noticing, you can't notice because you don't notice.
But then once you notice, you're starting to put the string together is what I'm saying.
All I'm noticing up until about the end of February is.
I still haven't gotten to know my new neighbors, but I'm sure when the sun comes out and they're in the yard and I'm in the yard.
You're buying a house in a neighborhood.
You're buying a family house for a family in a neighborhood.
I'm not saying everybody, but most Americans in that situation, you want to at least like wave to your neighbors.
That's pretty normal.
Like, hey, you know, everything's good.
Hi.
Like, that's just such a normal thing for somebody new in the neighborhood, I think.
Well, and the thing is, I'm not seeing them even to wave at them.
It's not like they're being unfriendly, right?
I'm just not even seeing them.
And I understand, you know, I'm missing a tooth right now.
Sure.
How's your hair right now?
You cut your own hair and it looks pretty good.
I was looking at your Instagram.
It's a little bit too short.
I mean, it just seems like if you did have the option of...
Driving up to your house, pushing a button, the garage door goes up, you go in and the garage door goes closed.
If I'm standing there, you know, with like a pitchfork in one hand and like a Romanian flag in the other, like, hi, neighbor.
I understand why you would go straight in.
But that's not happening.
No.
It's only in March now that all of this starts to happen all at once.
The kids, the Grand Slam, the dog, and that's all causing me to realize, wait, I have not seen my neighbors in a long time.
Yeah.
And it got so bad that I got up, got dressed, and went out and down the block and
prepared to ring the doorbell at the Mexicans' house to say...
uh what's going on let's talk about this dog we've been friends for a long time and certainly they i mean they're right there they got the dog they got the cars they got the quinceañeras they must be seeing stuff well they can see in the backyard too right except that their dog and their dog's all the way down by uh flipper dan's and the house is further away from them than it is for me okay like they're the lots are big here and they're between their house and
and the house in question, there are between 13 and 30 cars.
That's the area that they do all the mechanical work.
That's where they have the quinceaneras.
That's where they have a basketball hoop.
It's a big area.
So you could be living in their house, and the dog just sounds like a dog in the distance, and the kids just sound like kids in the distance.
And you can't see into Flipper Dan's yard?
Can't see it, no.
So I go down there, and
And because there's a lot of activity at that house, there's a guy standing out in the yard.
Like a concierge?
At 1130 at night.
He's just in between.
He's coming and going.
Okay.
And I said, hey.
People are probably coming, dropping off cars, picking up cars.
There's stuff happening.
Well, and there are a few families living there.
So there's a lot going on.
I'll come and go.
Mm-hmm.
Oh, and I should say that in the different layers of languages that are happening in my neighborhood, and particularly there at that house, English is down somewhere.
It's not in first place.
Okay.
It's like it's down in the – it's between second and fifth place of the languages that are being regularly spoken.
So I go over and say, hey, and he's like, hey, what's up?
And I said –
Let's talk about this dog.
And he says, what's going on?
Oh, no, he said, what did he do?
And we're both standing there, and the dog is going.
And I said, well, it's 1130 at night, and the dog is doing this.
And I point over at the dog behind the fence.
And he looks over and looks at me.
And I'm like, and it's doing this all night.
It's barking now like this all the time.
I don't know what happened.
I don't know what changed.
But this is like, this has got to stop.
The dog can't just do this all the time.
And he kind of is concerned and nods.
And he says, well, I'll talk to the guy that owns the dog.
Okay.
And I'm like, okay, right.
That makes sense.
There are a lot of people living in this house.
Yeah.
A lot going on.
And he – this person that I'm talking to is not prepared to take responsibility for the dog.
And there is an understanding clearly within the house that there are – different things are owned by different people.
It's not like we all are just all in co-ownership of this dog or of –
of that Volkswagen, uh, GTI or of, uh, you know, or, or, of whatever of this, this, like, um, the, the, um, the plastic four foot tall illuminated, uh,
Christmas ornament of Jesus that is up all year.
Okay.
It's an all season Jesus.
All season Jesus.
And it's not clear.
It's not clear to me anymore who in the house owns it.
I used to think it was communally owned, but now I understand.
Oh, all these things are owned by individuals.
Okay.
And so he said, I'm going to talk to the guy that owns it and I'm going to tell him that you mentioned it.
I'm like, thank you.
That's all I, that's all I can ask for.
And I went home and listened for the rest of the night until the dog continued to signal into the night sky that he heard something or had a thought.
And it's frustrating when you go talk to somebody and then the problem doesn't go away immediately.
Yeah, I mean, this is already, you've got a couple different layers here.
But I had some faith.
I had some faith.
Like, I talked to him, they're going to have a family meeting tomorrow.
It's going to be, they're going to work it out.
So then there came a climactic moment.
Oh, boy.
Which was Grand Slam.
Okay, Grand Slam.
Three cars?
And it's a big Grand Slam.
This is like the 12, 13-person Grand Slam.
It's not the nine-person Grand Slam.
It's the big one.
And I see them.
They all go through the fence before I can get my shoes on and get outside.
Then they and this is like in the afternoon and then I see them through the fence Sitting together like some of them sitting up on rock walls some of them sitting, you know They're sitting in a semicircle having a meeting.
It's not like a culty thing.
They're having like a meeting and I'm like this is a situation this is an opportunity and
for me to go over and knock or like go through the gate and say, Hey, since we're all here and I'm like, I'm reluctant.
I'm reluctant to do.
Do you have a, do you have confidence that you have some kind of a reason for, uh,
Piercing their perimeter with a question?
Do you know what you're going to ask?
Do you have like a dog collar in your hand going, can you help me find my dog?
No, here, and that's exactly what I should have done, right?
Like say, hey, my fan belt broke.
Can you help a guy out?
But so here are the different factors in play, right?
Yeah.
I do not know, like in my neighborhood, there's always a racial component to every exchange because everyone is a different person.
ethnicity here so anytime one person from one house goes over to the other to another house there's not just sometimes a language problem like the neighbors over here where the guy parks just up to the fence line and not over they speak English as a second language their primary language is Vietnamese and so all of our exchanges although very friendly are like always somewhat kind of like hi um
You guys have been cutting my bamboo for some reason.
I'm not sure why.
If it's cultural, I'm curious about it.
Did you think it was just like there for you to make fences out of?
Or is it making you mad?
Is my bamboo making you mad?
If so, ask me.
Those conversations are very difficult.
Super, super difficult.
We have a neighbor that I thought we were on good terms on who slams a door in such a way that the entire house shakes.
And I went outside to say, you know, hey, neighbor of many, many years, did you know that when you slam that door, our entire house shakes and everyone says so?
And he got real mad, which made me think all the more that he's doing it on purpose.
And that's just me and like a white tech bro.
It's like there's not intersectionality.
That's the wrong word.
But like there's all these layers and layers of like how we communicate with other people, let alone language and culture, man.
That's going to get mad about it.
I don't know.
It felt kind of passive aggressive.
Like, well, I'm just taking out my trash.
And I was like, yeah, no, I know.
I mean, we all take out our trash once a week.
It's just that you just slam that door five times.
And when I say literally, I don't mean figuratively.
I mean, it literally made our house shake.
Like, do you need to slam it that hard every time?
Because that seems a little aggressive.
And he was playing it off legit.
So I think he's miffed us about something.
I don't know what.
So now I've got another thing to think about.
You know what I'm saying?
This is the layers.
It's layers.
And I don't – so there are a few layers here.
Like, this is a house owned by an affluent African-American family that now suddenly has... I feel like Hercule Poirot has just walked into the train compartment and is now ready to bring the entire mystery together.
Yeah.
But there are a dozen white millennials coming and going.
Okay.
So if it's Christian...
I feel like on the one hand, they're probably going to be inclined to answer politely.
But on the other hand, that is a cultural there's a cultural separation between me and they where.
I'm not sure exactly what I'm asking.
On this index card, I've written three words that is my guess at what it is, and I'm going to set it aside, but I have a guess.
Okay.
Go ahead.
Uh, and also I have at that point or at this point made the connection.
Oh, the dog is barking at the kids.
The dog's been there for years.
The dog never had a problem.
Never had a kid to bark at.
No, the dog just barked every once in a while when some sketchy person walked by.
Uh, the dog and Gary, I don't remember the dog barking at Gary being a problem.
Maybe the dog gave Gary a like high bark or a by bark, but he didn't sit and just constantly bark at Gary.
And when Gary was outside talking on the phone at 2 a.m., Gary was the problem, not the dog.
He's the one that should be in a pen.
Like he's the one I was going out to yell at.
Right.
Gary, goddammit, get a life.
So I do so I don't feel a hundred percent
secure in walking across the street and ringing the doorbell and demanding answers, particularly not after my mom told me that I have no right to yell at them about their parking.
That's going to be on your mind now.
So I'm like, what are my rights here?
Like, this is America.
Am I the problem?
Yeah, you can do what you want in your own house.
It's not like I can go over and say, can you 11 people who are all showing up at the same time, not all close your car doors at the same time?
Like, it's just the nature of 13 people arriving at the same time.
at once that you're going to get a grand slam and they they're millenniums.
They're not conscious of the dog, right?
They don't even hear the dog because the dog is just to them.
It's just the dog's always barking when they're out there.
So they just think that's what it is.
I was on a hiking trail the other day with my daughter and we were going down and some people were coming up and it was a wide trail.
It was like a Jeep trail.
And there were five kids coming up and they were walking five abreast.
And they're millenniums.
And so we're walking down and my daughter turns to me when they're about 100 feet away.
And this is the type of little person she is.
She says with some anxiousness, Daddy, how are we going to get by?
Mm hmm.
Isn't that a shame?
Isn't that a shame they have to find the trail now?
And I was like, wow, what an interesting little thing for you to be thinking about already.
And I said, well, sweetie, and I said it in a I wasn't whispering.
I said it in a in a loud conversational voice.
I said, well, as we get closer to them, I have to assume that they're going to give way for other people using the trail and they're going to move.
And as I'm saying this, we're getting closer and closer to them.
They're going to move to let us walk by because we're just two people just walking down the trail and they're coming up and they're going to.
And as I'm saying this, they come right up on us, five abreast.
And it's like two guys and three women.
And the two people that are like in the area of the trail where you should be, where you'd be allowing other people to go are both women.
And they just walk straight up on us.
And then at the very last second, kind of like become aware of,
of the existence of other people and like sort of like shrug their shoulders over to the side as though we're passing in a very confined and narrow space.
And like one of them actually brushes past me and, and, and, you know, and my kid has kind of gone over into the, into the grass on the, you know, like, and there's a ditch, there's a clear ditch.
So she's scared of the ditch or whatever.
And I'm just like, wow, I don't,
I don't know how to deal with that.
I don't even know how to deal with it.
That feels like something, though.
It's something.
It's a cultural, it's a generational difference.
It never, ever, ever, ever, ever would have happened before.
Especially in a situation like that, when you're not taking a hike, you say hi to people.
You say hi.
It's like a thing.
When we take hikes, we say hi.
It's a thing you do.
You say good morning.
In the culture of hiking, that you share the trail, that you say hello when you pass, that you acknowledge.
It's just in the culture.
You don't go for a hike unless you know these things.
You don't just go for a hike.
It's not Fyre Fest.
I mean, like, you know, help a brother out.
Yeah, we're walking up the trail.
I guess we own the world.
It's just like crazy.
So, but they're over there, they're not conscious of themselves being the source of the dog barking, right?
When I was that age, I wouldn't have either.
I don't think that's necessarily like, that's just, they're not aware that they're doing that.
It took me four days to figure it out myself.
But I don't feel secure.
I definitely felt secure going over to the people I know and saying, the dog barks.
Like, what's up?
But like to go over, ring the doorbell and say, who are you and why are you in my neighborhood all of a sudden?
And what precisely the fuck is going on here?
Yeah.
And is this a Jesus thing?
Because that's fine.
But I want to know.
And so I'm right at the point.
Where it's like, okay, this is... I can't live like this.
The dog all night.
The kid's coming and going.
My curiosity's going crazy.
What's the story here?
Did you guys kill the family that was living there?
Like, I need some answers.
Maybe Jamaica's house is cursed.
Well, don't say that.
It looks great.
Oh, oh, oh.
Oh, God.
The other thing, and the whole reason that I brought this up is that...
The family that owns the house now, Jamaica's house, Flipper Dan, hires landscrapers to come once a week with gas-powered leaf blowers.
Oh, come on.
To walk around just blowing leaves and dirt.
How's the dog respond to that?
So, confusingly, the dog... They've come in and caused a lot of tumults in this neighborhood.
Yeah.
Confusingly, the dog doesn't care about the leaf blower.
The dog is like, whatever.
But leaf blowers just in principle drive me crazy.
Did you ever read – there was an article in The Atlantic about – That's like 10 millenniums on a trail.
It's so aggressive.
There was an article in, I think, Atlantic about some rich –
neighborhood in Santa Barbara or something, some valley that's like a beautiful liberal oasis valley where everybody has a beautiful home and the trees rustle in the wind and it's always 75 degrees and it's the perfect incubator of like
Middle aged liberal culture, because because there are no problems, it seems like that's all that you need is the although all the rest of the world should do is just be like them, affluent and passive aggressive.
But what happened was at some point, a rich white person who lived in the neighborhood broke the social convention and hired landscapers that used gas powered leaf blowers.
And it became a huge issue within the community because then there were some people who decided that because the civil rights movement was already tied up with a bow, that now they had a new cause, which was to fight their neighbor who had a gas powered leaf blower.
And so then they were hanging up posters and saying, like, ban the gas-powered leaf blower.
And then the other guy who was a liberal but maybe like one degree more libertarian was like, you can't tell me what to do.
And then somebody acknowledged that all the people that were doing the work in the neighborhood were all Hispanic.
And so now it's a classic race issue because you're asking them to do this work with a broom.
Was this on your mind as you're going into this situation?
Well, I mean, every article like that I've read in my entire life is always on my mind in every situation.
Sure.
Like, it's part of being as woke as I am.
You don't walk down the street without being conscious of everything always.
It's all Tempest and teapots.
They're all in there somewhere.
But in this situation, I feel like dealing with white 22-year-olds that have a blue whale sticker on the back of their Toyota Xterra or whatever, I feel like...
So this is a group of people I can address in a shared language, except for the Millennium Generation X cultural gulf.
The language barrier there sometimes is even greater than with any of my others.
I'm trying to talk about a dog with a quinceanera, man.
Yeah.
Oh, God.
So are you at this point a little bit of a fit of pique?
You're frustrated at this point.
I don't know which way to go.
Okay.
Then yesterday, I hear a grand slam in the morning.
Here we go.
Off they go.
They have not returned.
The house is empty.
Of whites?
Of anybody's.
I see no sign of life there at all.
Is that a longer than usual amount of time between Grand Slams?
From the first Grand Slam, there was a Grand Slam four times a day through the entire Grand Slam period.
They were never not coming and going.
And now it has been... In fact, it wasn't yesterday.
It was the day before.
It has been 48 hours with not a single Grand Slam or sign of life, nor has the dog barked.
It is back to silence.
Silence.
Silence, emptiness, complete lack of motion.
Does this bring us up to date?
And now the entire reason I started to bring this up was right before you called, I was sitting in my chair looking out the window at the gas-powered leaf blower guy walking around the driveway of the house in question, blowing dirt and leaves around me.
which is all those things do, just blowing it around.
And I was like, oh, Merlin's going to call.
And then I've got this leaf blower guy.
Oh, it's on your mind.
And then the phone rang.
Leaf blower guy miraculously turned his motor off almost simultaneously with you.
And I was I started to tell this story in to prep you for the fact that there might be gas.
You hadn't gone into this expecting to tell me about this whole story.
No, I was just like, look, you got to be you got to be ready for this.
There's things have changed around here and there's going to be some machine noise in the background.
But he's gone.
The sun is out.
There's no rooster even.
I don't know what it's like.
Either everything's gone quiet because they're feeling some electromagnetic pulse and Mount Rainier is about to explode.
Or I don't know what happened.
Everybody got raptured.
So you don't have an answer?
I don't know.
What's on your 3x5 card?
It's a startup.
ah ah