Random Acts of Arrogance

I saw my “new” neighbor as I got out of my car this evening. I noticed her coming out of her garage that is located in the alley adjacent to my house. She just kind of came out of no where and as I glanced at her she seemed to suddenly look off in the other direction and scurried off toward her home. The “new” neighbors are like that. They mostly seem to only talk to their own kind. Maybe they all share some kind of “new” neighbor language that only they can understand. There seems to be this undercurrent of understanding between the new and old neighbors. Unless you’re a dog walker or you show up at our neighborhood volunteer events and political rallies, we’ll assume you’re the enemy.

My block has become so mixed with old and new neighbors. But instead of ending up with one neighborhood, we’ve ended up with two. The old neighbors still acknowledge each other, often giving each other the “special” look. The one that went from, “Can you believe this shit?” to “Well, I see you’re still here.” The new neighbors seem also to only acknowledge each other. The new neighbors are basically anyone who hasn’t been here for more than 10 years. As you can guess, the new neighbors are mostly white. The older neighbors are black but also mixed with white. It’s important to note that the new and old aren’t completely divided by color. It’s more about time served.

When I think about it; there are really several categories of neighbors living here. There are the African American families who grew up here and whose children have grown up here and may have their adult children and grand children also living in the home. Then there is the younger set of African Americans who took advantage of the extended tendrils of Capitol Hill after a surge of crime and a few high profile murders left a smattering of For Sale signs on what seemed like half the tiny front yards of the row houses in Northeast. That’s my category.

Then there are the older whites who moved in during the 1970s, usually keeping a low profile. And then, finally, the new neighbors. These are the largely white neighbors who flocked to DC after the Starbucks onslaught declared it yuppy-ready. It wouldn’t surprise me if each new neighbor profile was initially met with some level of resistance and resentment when their U-Hauls arrived. I know I was. But no group has been received with as much resentment as the “new” neighbors. If there’s one thing the new neighbors have been able to do is to unite many of all the old neighbor profiles into a similar category. The “I’m Sick of the New Neighbors” category.

I don’t think the old neighbors really set out to be against the new neighbors. I think there was a wait and see period and the new neighbors failed. They came in with their guarded facial expressions and their eyes that seemed to skit over you when they passed you by on the street, and their fixation on their dogs—made most bizarre because although they wouldn’t talk to you if you passed them on the street, they’d stop to spend quality time with your dog if you were walking with one. But most of all, they came in with their demands. The demands for every service that neighbors had been demanding over the years, but with a seemingly naïve concept of expectations. There was a theft from auto on our block last night. Why aren’t the police patrolling our block day and night? There was a fight in front of my house last Saturday night and it took the police more than 30 minutes to respond.

But then the demands started encroaching on the neighbors. I saw a black man standing on the corner when I walked into my house yesterday afternoon. Does anyone know who he is? There’s a drunk guy who’s always walking up and down our street. Can we call city services about him? And that was pretty much when the shit started to slowly hit the fan. The old neighbors had had enough of these “new” suburban-turned-urbanites who obviously didn’t have a clue as to what was reasonable expectation from the police force who had more than 500,000 residents to safeguard, the expectation of police response to a non emergency calls on a Saturday night and the seeming unawareness that there would actually be crime in a city. The old black neighbors weren’t the only ones grumbling, the old white neighbors were grumbling too. After all, they had braved the front during a time when most white folks in the metro area sailed into DC only to work or for an occasional social outing and then rushed back to the sanctuary of their VA homes only too eager to wipe the smut of DC from the bottom of their suburban heels. These were the people who talked about DC like it was a four-lettered word and scoffed at its citizens who voted in a notorious mayor. Then those Starbucks kept popping up and the next thing you know---“Oh my God, there are white people hanging out on U Street! Yes girl, U Street; I’m looking at them right now!”

The Birth of Cool, took place in Ben’s Chili Bowl for white folks vying for the bragging rights to call it their new hang out joint. And then just like that, DC was PC. But the old white DC residents who had been here all along didn’t need a Starbucks to feel comfortable in “Chocolate City.” They enjoyed “U” Street, when they were sometimes the only white face on it and it pissed them off to see a new generation of white folks flocking to black-owned and black-loved joints. Suddenly the “U” wasn’t so cool anymore.

And someone said they walked into Ben’s Chili Bowl’s where the jukebox had famously played old school jams like “Flash Light” and “Before I Let Go” for decades and heard “Chicago” blaring though the speakers. The old white neighbors had been trying to blend in. The new white neighbors were bringing down the neighborhood with their incessant calls to the police, weekly neighborhood planting sessions and enthusiastic group visits to local soul food joints. Watering down what little flavor there was of DC every where they went.

My next door neighbor, a middle aged white woman who probably embodied the term “hippy” during the sixties, was fed up with the new wave of arrogance the new neighbors seemed to bring with them. She had gotten into at least two verbal confrontations with the new white neighbor who moved in the house around the corner. You could see the sadness in her eyes as she voiced her concern about how the neighborhood had changed. She had lived in the neighborhood during the days when the sound of gunfire was as common as the sound of sirens but stayed because she loved the neighborhood.

So the last thing she needed was to take some shit off the new white neighbor around the corner who she claimed yelled at her because she put her trash on the grassy area outside of his fence. The same grassy area where the neighborhood trash cans sat for years. The property where his house now stands was where the community garden existed for 20 years. Now, the space where the garbage cans rested was now his property, even though it rested outside of his fence. Who knew? Apparently he rang her doorbell and literally screamed at her for setting her trash on the boundaries of his land. She said he caught her by surprise and she stood speechless as he stomped back to his house. He must’ve because this is not a woman to be messed with.

School me once, shame on you. School me twice and it’s on.

The following week, she again placed her trash bag outside of his fence and he must’ve been on his back deck and said something because suddenly she got all “Janice Soprano” on him yelling, “You got somethin’-da-say-da-me? You got somethin’-da-say-da-me?!!” Then she just went off and all of the “old neighbor” “new neighbor” stuff just came flying out like how long she’d been living in the neighborhood and who did he think he was anyway coming in thinking he could go off on people. Then she called him arrogant and stomped back to her house, which looks pretty much like mine and is about half the size of the new, spacious home built on his property.

I remembered my brief encounter with the “arrogant” neighbor, when I tried to suggest the best way to get neighbors to stop placing their trash on the strip of land that bordered his property. He was basically like, “uh-huh” and then proceeded to tell me where people were supposed to put their trash cans. Now, I had been living there for almost a decade and he hadn’t been there for a year, but somehow he had acquired more accurate knowledge of the exact locations trash was to be disposed.

I was done with him. I had actually tried to do the good neighbor thing by inviting him to dinner with some of the older neighbors about a month or two after he first moved in. He politely declined and never even bothered to speak to me again. She was right. He was arrogant. But after the spat with my neighbor he seemed to chill out a bit. I think he got that it was a “you guys” versus “us guys” kind of deal and those kinds of conversations always seem to unsettle the new neighbors. Probably because they know it’s a fight they can’t win…until they outnumber the old neighbors. Or, perhaps he realized he had been a little arrogant after all.

The other day I was talking with a neighbor while standing at the mouth of the alley that rests between my fence and that of the arrogant neighbor-- who has to use the alley in order to access his car port. We didn’t realize that he had actually pulled up in his car behind us so he could drive into the alley. Where as a few years ago he probably would’ve just honked for us to move out of his way, he actually got out of his car and apologized for disturbing us. I was literally stunned by his humility.

Things in the neighborhood have changed somewhat. No one has placed trash on the grass outside the arrogant neighbor’s his fence in years, but he still doesn’t bother to speak to me. But Robert Frost wrote in his poem Mending Wall that “good fences make good neighbors”. So, I guess we’re good.