Tales From the ‘Hood
Travel south on Alpine Avenue until you hear the sound of gun shots. Follow the noises of gats and nines popping furiously at one another until you see the chalk outline of a body in the street. The body may or may not still be there. Turn right. My house is the yellow one with the nice picket fence out front.
These are the directions that I give people when they visit me at my house for the first time.
While this is somewhat exaggerated (the chalk outlines usually disappear after a couple of good rains), the neighborhood has severely deteriorated in the past two and a half years since we moved into our house in the city of Grand Rapids. The winters are typically pretty quiet, but once spring rolls around, just like the orange construction barrels that seem to magically grow out of the ground on April 1st, the element of thugs and wannabe gang bangers come out of hibernation to cause mayhem in the ‘hood and to litter their half-pint gin bottles and empty Cheetos wrappers onto my front yard.
I’m not trying to say that I live in a warzone, though. In actuality, according to the police, my neighborhood has the 4th lowest crime level in the whole city, and generally the NW side of GR is known as the safest of the four quadrants. But we aren’t without our incidents.
Four weeks ago, I went to work on Friday morning as usual. About 20 minutes after I’d gotten the store opened up, my cell phone rang. The caller ID read, “Erin”.
Erin is a gal-pal of mine whom I’ve known for about 15 years or so. We became good friends in high school and college and picked things up again when she and her husband moved to GR.
Erin is not an early riser. I normally wouldn’t even take a call on my cell while I was working, but Erin NEVER calls that early, so I thought something may have been up with her car, since we’d worked on it recently.
“Good morning, Erin”, I answered more chipperly than I typically do at eight in the morning.
“Good, you’re still alive,” Erin said in a genuinely relieved tone.
“Yeah of course I am still alive. What the hell are you talking about?”
She went on to tell me that she saw a news story about a shooting at 1:30 that morning on my street. Apparently some dude, likely a drug dealer, got clipped in his front yard in front of his four kids. I didn’t think a whole lot of it, other than that my street is several miles long and it could have happened anywhere.
I thanked her for her concern and made a mental note to check the local news websites when I got the chance. Not five minutes after hanging up with Erin, my phone buzzed again with a single chirp. “Incoming text,” the outer screen displayed. I flipped open my Samsung Alias and the screen read, “dude you didn’t get shot last night?” The text was from a buddy of mine I’ve mentioned before on this site. I’d just went and watched the first day of the NCAA tournament with him and a few other friends the night before.
I texted back quickly to let him know I was ok and jumped online to check this out. It turned out that the shooting took place one block north of where I live!! I completely slept through the night without hearing any gunshots or any of the police and media commotion that followed.
Then my cell phone rang again. This time it was my ex-wife, but she just to make sure that I was alive and that child support would be still paid on time (OK she didn’t actually say that).
Later that day it occurred to me that I had passed by that house just two and a half hours before the incident on the ride home from the bar. I got kind of an eerie feeling that evening when I drove by to see the remnants of police tape still wrapped around the front porch.
I later learned from a cop-buddy of mine that the victim had a prior conviction for posession with intent to distribute and had been sentenced 4-10 years for the crime. That was 10 years ago. They made an arrest the following day, and that’s the last I heard about it. In a city with over 250,000 people not including the suburbs, news stories tend to fade pretty fast, even murders.
