Alaska with attitude : Overwhelming mess is a tragedy in layers

The back yard in this photo by a neighbor is a story all its own.

It felt a little bit like a block party as neighbors came by to chat and laugh a little and take a tour to view the damage. Some offered congratulations, others offered sympathy and most offered to help with the cleanup. It could have been a group of neighbors socializing on a sunny summer Alaska evening. The thirteen police cars lining both sides of the street might have given it away, but, then hadn't a block party ended now and then when one neighbor had a beer too many and let another neighbor know what he really thought of him, eventually leading to a call to the police?

The table by the bed.

Despite the social aspect this wasn't your normal neighborhood party. What they had just observed, and were celebrating in a way, was an eviction. Neighbors who had dealt with the denizens of this home where they stood had come by to cheer and congratulate my friend for finally getting them out.

That friend had spent the past six months attempting to evict the band of tweakers and thieves who lived in the rental unit she owns. Time after time she went to court and was discouraged by one technicality after another. Meanwhile neighbors were complaining to the police who often visited the place finding stolen cars and investigating various illegal activities.

Finally this week the eviction went through. It took all those police cars and some insistence but the inhabitants packed up and took what they could in a big U-Haul. and left. Then the neighbors started showing up, But there is more frustration in store as the former residents have two weeks to come back and take what they want before they are out for good, so that keeps us from getting in there and cleaning up.

Cleaning up is a mild term for what needs to be done. It would be difficult to imagine much less describe how absolutely horrible the mess is. Seriously, there is barely a spot on a floor anywhere that isn't covered with something. Piles of garbage, stuffing a dog tore out of a mattress cover infused with spilled soft drinks next to a table in the master bedroom holding at least two crack pipes, several tiny plastic baggies, empty energy drink bottles, evidence of spilled foods, cigarette lighters and various other objects a druggie would keep next to the bed. Here and there in that room were items a child would use, toys, discarded boxes for toys, The Lego Movie DVD. Next to the table on the floor was a tangle of mattress stuffing held together by a spilled Slurpees of some sort plus anything else that would stick to the mess including a shoe, couple of broken smart phones and a couple of phone

cases. Around the room wires ran from a rack on the wall that would have held a flat screen TV. A line of small Velcro patches crosses about half the ceiling like they might have held up some kind of a curtain that could have shielded a child from the goings on in the bed and next to it.

That's just the bedroom. In the kitchen the sink was so full of dirty dishes you couldn't even find it. We moved a big bookshelf and discovered a stack of dirty pans still thick with grease and crawling with little flying bugs. Every flat display surface like the top of the wall cabinets was lined with empty liquor bottles of one kind of another. Our shoes stuck slightly to the floor when we walked through. We got the kitchen window boarded up.

It's a small living room, but it holds a Coca Cola vending machine, a full-sized slot machine and one of those electronic games you see in stores with the claw you can manipulate to pick up prizes in the base. The prizes in this one were soft dice like we used to hang from the rear view mirror. I counted at least three flatscreens on the floor and not plugged in. Speaking of which extension cords ran everywhere often plugged into splitters that led into a spider web of cords going elsewhere. We tried to get them all unplugged before we turn on the electricity and start a fire.

Electronic pieces and parts and a child's book.

Speaking of that, the electricity has been turned off for several months for nonpayment. There are pieces and parts of various electronic components all over the place, plus three couches where people obviously crashed. And trash, piles of it everywhere. Found three pairs of various kinds of boots. There was very little visible floor.

The outside yard is a story all its own. I could go on and on but the pictures pretty much tell the story. At present we are boarding it up but not cleaning too much. The tenant has two weeks to get everything out so we have to let that happen. At that point we might have lots of help.

Kind of makes you wonder who Teenah was.

As I was working through the mess moving stuff out of the way so we could get at the windows to measure them for their new plywood coverings, a thought began nagging my mind. Now and then someone would comment something like "you wonder how people can live like this." And eventually I began to wonder too and I realized my friend Kitty had lived in places like this with people like this. If you have followed this blog you have seen snippets of a book I have been working on for years about a young girl who ran away from an abusive home, became a meth addict and prostitute and lived in crash pads with other drug users. She had even described for me once how she and her friends had trashed a woman's apartment when they were high. And, this woman had taken Kitty in after a boyfriend/pimp had almost killed her when he shot her up with a mix of drugs. She had no remorse and thought it was odd that I would criticize her for it. As I was finishing up what needed to be done and making lists of materials and tools I would need the next day, Kitty and I carried on a conversation in my head about her life in a world that looked like the inside of this house. I lost the will to socialize. I suddenly hated the people who had done this to my friend's house and, too, I hated the people who had done what they did to Kitty. Though she was a welcoming participant, still, they trashed her mind and body in the same way these people had trashed this house, and who knows how many other Kittys might have wandered into a mess like this. I felt a sympathy for them though I hated them with my whole being.

Toward the end of the evening as the crowd thinned out and we had finished measuring the windows for boards. A young girl from the neighborhood was talking with the owner. She looked maybe 14, only a couple of years younger than Kitty was when she ran away from that abusive father and fell into the life.

As she was about to leave, with all her innocent enthusiasm and desire to help, and standing in that disaster area she asked the owner, "are you going to need some help cleaning this up?" I laughed right out loud and then the owner joined in. For a moment the girl looked consternated wondering why we would laugh at her heart-felt offer and then she realized what she had said and had a good laugh with us.

Are we going to need some help cleaning all this up? Yes we are, sweetheart, yes we are.

An afterthought: It turns out this isn't an isolated incident. As I have told other people about this, just about everyone at least knows someone who went through the same thing. I wrote not long ago about how in Alaska no matter what you do someone has done it better, gone farther or higher, did it faster and suffered more hardship than you have. The next day after the first entry, I ran into a guy whose father had encountered the same problem. Only that house was so bad the guy burned it down.

Alaska Dispatch News story
A peek into one of the human layers
One path to life on the street

An online conversation with a young prostitute

AN UPDATE AFTER TWO WEEKS: We finally got in there to clean Aug. 3. We hauled out more than six bags of trash, a couple of heavy shelving units, some hazmat stuff (paint and cleaners) and about 40 pounds of spoiled, thawed salmon and you couldn't even see the difference. Then the owner called a pro. Estimate to clean up the damage done by tweakers to this house? $9,000. And that is only for hauling the junk away, not repairs or general cleaning or removing that truck. The guy estimated a crew of five or six people would need three or four days. He said his crew had cleaned dirtier places than this but never one with this much trash to haul away. Today I uncovered six like-new propane tanks. We also found evidence of a potential fraud, a death certificate and two birth certificates for the same person. Ain't life grand?

AND HERE IS WHAT IT DOES TO OTHERS: I asked the woman who owns the house if she minded if I wrote something about the estimate and cost of the cleanup. This is what she said:

"Absolutely okay. Go for it! I am not embarrassed anymore. It is what it is, and while it is terrible, at least it is spectacularly terrible. I had nothing to do with it, so it's okay to celebrate the terrible-ness in a spectacular way.

"For a while, I could not talk about it because I was embarrassed and shocked and ashamed, but I have worked through it and have accepted that it's just another life experience.

"I can get angry. I can grieve. I can be embarrassed. However, those are not helpful, and whatever my attitude, the situation will stay the same. If I can find ways to keep an upbeat attitude (most of the time), then maybe I can simply face what needs to be done.

"I choose to try to find the least traumatic or depressing way to deal with it all, and that helps me take care of me."

Comments lifted from facebook

Terri Golden I am so sorry for your friend

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Friday, July 21, 2017

Overwhelming mess is a tragedy in layers

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