Neighbors #2

I wrote about neighbors recently, and I promised more. There have been so many neighbors in so many different places, that the stories go on forever or at least, I hope they do.


When I moved away from my house in suburban Birmingham, MI, I moved into a rental house in downtown Birmingham. This was a wonderful place to live, just urban enough to be interesting, and never gritty! It’s just upscale urban.

Now, in fact I was in a home about to be torn down to make way for four townhouses. The architect who owned it had to wait until City Council approved his plan to demolish my house and build the others. In his own best interest he decided to rent the house (actually a semi-detached home with two apartments) rather than let it sit unattended. He wanted two tenants to help pay the taxes and mortgage until the plan could go through, which it eventually did.

I took the larger of the two apartments, a former architectural office with rough textured walls, with two floors and one bedroom and one bath. It was great, and while I was living like a college student, it suited my needs. For a bit my oldest son, who had a post degree job in Birmingham, lived with me until he was ready to move to Washington DC, where he stayed.

The apartment next door was occupied by a guy who became my buddy. He ran a wine department in a local store, and was a great consultant on what to buy and what the best buy was. I bought lots of stuff from him and he arranged for lots wine for school parties for us.

He was a former drug runner, who was under indictment by some agency or another, and was constantly awaiting some kind of trial. There were a number of nefarious crimes he was accused of, but he seemed to stay out of jail. He had a bad record of international travel which cost him his veil of secrecy. He traveled a lot, to all sorts of interesting places, and was watched carefully as he had no visible means of support. The government is good at looking at you once you draw their attention.

When I knew him this was all behind him, all except a trial, and I lost touch with him after he moved out. I saw him again once in a while but eventually he was gone from the wine job and he had no forwarding address.

The one thing that stuck with me over all these years is that I asked him where you would buy drugs around there. We were away from downtown Detroit, but nearby. I had no idea, nor was I looking, but I thought, given my kids are all in high school, I wondered how far afield one would have to go to purchase, we will say, some marijuana.

We were sitting out on our adjoining front porches, enjoying a glass of wine and talking, and he started to laugh. I asked why, was my question funny? No, it wasn’t, but he asked me to wait a bit and he would answer.

A little while later a silver VW bug came down the street. My neighbor raised his hand to them and whistled, and then he laughed and went over to see the guy who had stopped on the street. He returned a few minutes later with a bag of grass.

You see, much like the proverbial Good Humor or Mr. Softee Man, you just had to wait until our local drug dealer came around the corner and wave. He did not use a bell or music, but, this was the 80’s!