My Wilson Lane neighborhood, as I drive down to the Choir College and turn toward Haddam’s west end, is a far cry from the days when I flogged houses here and my kids were young. Although the casual observer might not notice much has been altered.
Most of the small, frame, President-streets houses, on their manageable fifty-foot lots, look as they have since the boomer ’90s. Though residential stock has slowly begun passing into less confident hands — the banks, absentee owners, weekenders from Gotham, and property managements. They mostly keep things ship-shape, but not as if every owner lived in every abode the way they used to.
And more change is already in evidence. A code variance for a chiropractor. A single-hand lawyer’s-office conversion where a widow recently lived and died. A holistic wellness center with Pilates and Reiki gurus inside. An online travel agent and copy shop. Following which, it’s a quick descent to a head shop, a T-shirt emporium, a RadioShack, and a tattoo/nail salon. Mixed use — the end of life as we know it. Though my bet is I’ll be in my resting place before that bad day dawns. If there’s a spirit of one-ness in my b. ’45 generation, it’s that we all plan to be dead before the big shit train finds the station.
In the eight years since Sally and I arrived back from Sea-Clift, we haven’t much become acquainted with our neighbors. Very little gabbing over the fence to share a humorous “W” story. Few if any spontaneous invitations in for a Heineken. No Super Bowl parties, potlucks, or house-warmings. Next door might be a Manhattan Project pioneer, Tolstoy’s granddaughter, or John Wayne Gacy. But you’d hardly know it, and no one seems interested. Neighbors are another vestige of a bygone time. All of which I’m fine with.
However, just after Thanksgiving, a month ago, I found a letter in my mailbox, hand-addressed in pencil to RESIDENT. On a sheet of coarse, lined, drugstore bond, in block letters was a message that said, “Sir or Madame. My name is Reginald P. Oakes. I was convicted of carnal knowledge of a juvenile in 2010. I now reside at 28 Cleveland Street, Haddam, New Jersey. 085_.”
“They have to do that,” Sally said, finishing a client report at the dining room table. Being a grief counselor-in-training, she’s now versed in all things publicly protective and child sensitive. “It’s part of their release deal. If you petition the court, he’ll have to move. It’s pretty unfair, if you ask me.”
I took little note, but not no note.
Not long before that, in August, another letter turned up, this one addressed to me on official blue-and-white American Express letterhead. It contained a brand-new AMEX card in the name of a Muhammad Ali Akbar, who as far as I could find out, no one here-around knew. This letter I hand-delivered to the Haddam PD, but have since heard nothing back. Twice then in the fall, the Garden State Bank, which has foreclosed on two houses on our block, authorized the same police to stage mock hostage extractions in one of the now-empty homes, just a few doors down. We all stood in our yards and watched as SWAT units broke in the front door of what had been a former Democratic mayor’s daughter’s townhouse, until she got divorced and booted out. There was a lot of wild shouting and bullhorns blaring and lights flashing and sirens whooping, plus the appearance of some kind of robot. After which a tiny African American woman (Officer Sanger, whom we all know) was led out in handcuffs and driven away to “safety.”
How these occurrences foretell changes that’ll eventuate in a Vietnamese massage becoming my new neighbor is far from clear. But it happens — like tectonic plates, whose movement you don’t feel ’til it’s the big one and your QOL goes away in an afternoon.
All signs bear watching: how many visits Animal Control makes to your block in a month; whether the lady across the street marries her Jamaican gardener to secure him a green card; how often a barking dog appears on the roof next door — like in Bangalore or Karachi; how many Koreans of the same family grouping buy in, in a two-year period. Last week I walked out to sprinkle sno-melt on the walk so the postman, who happens to be named Scott Fitzgerald, wouldn’t slip and end up suing me. And right in the crusty grass I found someone’s upper plate — as intimate and shocking as a human body part. Who knows who’d left it there — as a joke, out of frustration, as an act of vengeance, or just as a sign of things to come that can’t at this late stage in civilization be interpreted. My old, departed friend Carter Knott (an Alzheimer’s casualty who one winter night went kayaking off Barnegat Lighthouse and never found the shore again) used to say to me: “The geniuses are the people who spot the trends, Frank, the ones who see Orion where the rest of us assholes just see a bunch of pretty stars.” What’s trending around me now and here — my own neighborhood — I’m sure I’ll never have the time or genius to figure out.
I DO NOTICE, AS I CROSS HODGE ROAD TO THE WELL-HEELED west side — my window down to take in the unseasonable springtime breezes — that a briny-sulfur tang now floats about, as if the hurricane’s insult has vaporized and come inland, two months on, leaving a new stinging atmosphere everyone senses but would just as soon not. Possibly the radio callers aren’t so crazy after all.
Eddie Medley’s big, in-town mansion at #28 is, to my eye, little changed from his glory days of invention, mammon, the Swedish wife, boats, cars, voyages — the grinning, well-heeled devil-may-care-when-everybody-was-your-pal. Eddie’s is one of the old, lauded west-side ramblers, far back from the street and visible only in peeks through the privet and yews and rhododendrons the driveway winds through. Ann used to covet Eddie’s house as her “perfect house,” disparaging our old Tudor half-timber as kitsch — which it was, and which was the idea. (I loved it and mourned when it got hauled down by a family of right-wing, proto-Tea-Party Kentucky brown-shirts, who backed David Duke for President and kept a private army at the ready in the coal-mining hills, but who ultimately grew demoralized by how many Jews there were up the seaboard — plenty — and retreated back to Ironville where white people run everything.)
Eddie’s house indeed rambles all the hell around into the trees in “wings” that extend from the pillared and pedimented Greek Revival original home place. The add-ons were built by successive generations of owners, so kids could have their own “space,” so phalanxes of new wives could have a dance-and-yoga studio, a dark room, a gallery for the mezzo-American collection, a solarium, a herbarium, a print shop, a greenhouse, and a screening room. Plus, a granny apartment, and more than one neat little place just to be quiet in and think, while the men of the house were off in Hong Kong and Dubai doing mammoth deals to bring in tons of money to pay for everything. It’s not an unusual house history on the west side. Though the unhappy result is that few who abide here now have much of a toehold on where they live — the way real people used to. Money sweeps in, money sweeps out. Only the houses — grand and still and equity-rich — testify to the lives that pass through.
Eddie, however, is an exception, having owned his big larruping, cobbled-up pile since the ’70s, when he paid 350K and could now (Eddie’s “now,” of course, is about to transfer to “then”) bring 4 mil and maybe more. Though as I come to a stop in the pea-gravel front turnaround that encircles a lump of female-inspired bronze sculpture that could be a Henry Moore, I see his house has suffered considerable “deferred maintenance”—realtor lingo for physical decline destined to inflict wounds to the wallet. Eddie’s house could use a paint job, a new roof, new sills and soffits, and some repointing in its brick foundation and chimneys. The Greek columns could stand new pedestals. The rambling wings are also showing subsidence signs, suggesting unaddressed water issues (or worse). Four million might be optimistic. Not that Eddie gives a shit. Though if an emir or an oligarch or an African warlord with a Wharton MBA bought the place, the first thing he’d do would be to level it, the way the rabid Kentuckians leveled my old house, flattening the past and all my old dreams in a day.