Landlordy
1. Dee Dee and the Linder Group
In August 2023 I bought a fixer-upper house on W. Catalpa. From my first meeting there with the realtor, a weatherbeaten sprite of a woman accompanied the house. She was a steward of sorts, and a raggedy representative of the neighbor-clan that I would first call “the Reavers” (because of their constant, insufferable motorcycle-revving), then “the Wildlings” (because of their clannish, off-grid, impoverished state of living), and eventually “The Linder Group,” (because it sounds like some sort of white-collar investment firm, which is exactly the opposite of who they are). Dee Dee was the local busybody who co-mingled with all the loosely allied humans of the Linder Group, from the actual property owners, Jenelle and her common-law husband Chris, to the various migrants who lived in the variety of rooms, sheds, trailers, and tents that agglomerated behind the LinderHouse.
Dee Dee emerged from the fenced back yard when I first came to see the house, immediately establishing that she had been keeping the place mowed. She presented this as an act of good citizenship, but with enough emphasis to suggest that she deserved to be paid for it. She said she mowed because no one was keeping up with it, and because the old people — Chris’s grandparents — who lived there before, always kept it nice and she knew them, so she wanted to keep it nice in the same tradition. Eventually I would see that there were mild ulterior motives to Dee Dee’s dedication to mowing, including a desire to make some money, but I decided early on that I wasn’t going to pay her for stuff that happened before my involvement.
Actually, Dee Dee’s intense involvement with my Catalpa house would soon lead me to connect dots about the history of the house. Besides mowing, she followed me into the house and described how she had pulled up all the old carpet after they ran off some squatters, and apparently some of the godawful paint on the walls (dogshit brown, as I would call it months later when painting over it) was her work.
Why, you may ask, was Dee Dee doing all this work inside a house she didn’t own? That’s what I wondered. I assume she would have used her same reasons for mowing — just trying to be helpful, etc. But I eventually concluded that after the Linder boys sold the house in financial desperation about five years earlier to an investor in Colorado (the woman who sold it to me), they found that she wasn’t around to keep them from doing what they wanted with it. I have no proof, but I think after it sat there for a few months and got reroofed by the new owner, they* broke back into it and housed “friends” there until those people became non-friends. The assumption would be that they charged folks to live in “Grandpa’s house” until those folks stopped paying and became the “squatters” that Dee Dee told me they ran out of there. But there’s also the possibility that the squatters just got in there on their own, or that the Linder Group let them stay there for free. There is, however, no chance that the squatters were there unbeknownst to the Linders — nothing happens there without their awareness.
*“They” is a rich, challenging concept here, because The Linder Group is a shifting tribe of unknown number — three or four core adults allied with at least eight other people who visit/live in their enclave of one house, two sheds, one camper, and some defunct vehicles including a boat that served as a dog house for a pit bull during the year I worked on the Catalpa House. Their tribe expands and contracts with seasons and interpersonal drama. To complicate things further, they also commingle with the even more broke-ass tribe across the street, the Pete Clan. The two groups are mainly at peace, but there’s a steady thread of distrust there as well.
When I bought the house, all windows and doors were boarded up with plywood and plentiful Torx screws, presumably because the owner (probably at the demands of the city) was tired of having break-ins. I knew at the purchase date that there were abundant homeless folks in the area. What I didn’t know yet was how deeply established the transient locals were with my neighbors on both sides of the street. All this was the likely reason my new property lacked electric breakers/fuses, and some of its wiring. Before I could address the wiring problems, I needed to replace some doors and windows. One broken window made it possible to crawl into the basement, and the front door, while intact, was a flimsy interior door that any robust high-school football player could have rammed through Kool-Aid-Man-style.
And as a bonus, the property lines blurred — at least in their minds. I had a document showing exactly the plot of land I’d bought. It included all of the gravel driveway that was often shared by the Linder Group, and everything on my side of a long, wobbly privacy fence. This fence was probably mine, since it was built with the pickets facing my property, but the Linder Group had shelters butted right up to it, and had little gaps in it where they passed through to walk dogs (in my back yard), or, very likely, to go potty themselves when I wasn’t around. There was no evidence of this, but it would eventually become clear that at least one of them used my back spigot to bathe. But the key point is, the fence seemed like “theirs.” At the time, this seemed like a problem for me, in that it took property away from me. I figured, after I got the house in shape, I could reckon with the fence, regardless of who felt they owned it. What I did not know yet was, in the battles to come, the fence would be a liability.
But back to Dee Dee. She was little — probably under 100 lbs — and hard to gauge regarding age. Weathered and wiry, blondish but graying, overly tan, she could have been 60, but we eventually learned she was a bit younger than me: late 40s or nearly 50. She lived in a fold-out camper just over the privacy fence, wedged between that and a shed which contained the much younger, louder, and more robust Danielle. For much of my fixer-upper year, Dee Dee lived in the camper with a skinny, younger man with longish fair hair who would get up each morning and exit the enclave on a bicycle pulling a small wagon. He generally returned with a little load of firewood on the wagon, gathered from the furniture factory’s scrap pile about half a mile up the road. I don’t know if they were a couple or not. Possibly they just cohabitated for warmth. Their camper was partially shaded by some ratty, life-sized artificial banana trees whose leaves had gone gray in the elements.
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Early on, my biggest frustration with their quasi-homeless encampment was that trash got tossed from the outbuildings over my fence. At first there was a pile of partially burned junk by a concrete slab in my yard, along with a bunch of brush that I soon added to in cleaning my fences. But eventually I found that new trash was being added to it, and there were always new cups, cans, wrappers and broken things (headphones, sunglasses, etc) showing up. I eventually had a bonfire one December night, punctuated by bursts of furious cussing that Danielle heard over the crackling flames. I think I made it clear that I didn’t like hosting a trash dump.
Dee Dee wasn’t pretty or smart, but she was energetic, sociable, and basically trustworthy. It was easy to feel sorry for her, because she was little, and aside from being slightly pushy at times, she was never an asshole. I made it clear that I liked to do things myself, but she promoted her mowing proclivities a lot, so eventually I let her mow my yard a few times. I paid her $30 each time. She wanted to mow more often than I wanted, so there were a couple of times when I was like, “It doesn’t need it yet!” but then I’d feel guilty and pay her anyway. One of the times, it was mowed by a short, beefy guy named Cookie from up the street. He had a speech impediment and said he lived with his dad. I didn’t know why he was mowing my grass. I presume he was subcontracting for Dee Dee, under some deal made in that feeble west-side burnout economy.
I also let Dee Dee charge her phone on my porch, since the Linder Group, soon after I got going, lost their utilities one by one because of unpaid bills. They had no power, then they had no water, no heat, etc. Soon cold weather would be coming on… I called them “Wildlings” at the time, so of course “Winter is (always) coming” for Wildlings. But in the meantime, it was still hot and dry. They had water jugs on a little wagon in the back yard. I saw them loading or unloading jugs into a car. At some point, Dee Dee said they were filling them up at a gas station a few miles away. I told her she could get water from the hose at the back of my house. I even brought a short, cut-off hose from work that would make it easier to fill jugs. I just thought it was stupid for them to haul water when I could let them have a few gallons at a time and it wouldn’t cost me more than nickels per week as long as they didn’t leave it running.
This brings me to the little trash alley alongside my house. Under the kitchen window begins a run to the rear of the house that was overgrown into a mostly blind mess of mulberry-mobbed chainlink, blocked partially from street view by the AC condenser. I cleaned it up in the first month. It seemed to have been a squatter’s nest for a bit: discarded shirt and underwear, a few used drink bottles, and a dish that said “H2O for my canine buddy” scrawled in Sharpie. The junk didn’t move or grow for weeks, so I assumed it was left from a past camper. Removing weeds and branches would make the alley transparent to the neighbor to the east — an old man who mowed and weeded habitually — so cleanup seemed like an effective stratagem.
As I settled in to weeks of house repairs, I would find lots more graffiti in black marker. Most of it was loud and proud, like when you walked into the kitchen, the white stove hood said, “The fuck you lookin at?” One of the back windows, in the dining room, said “FUCK 12.” I never deciphered that, and the oddest thing about that one, discovered months later when I installed new windows, was that FUCK 12 was actually written on the OUTSIDE of the pane, which meant they had to write it backwards, because it was properly oriented for inside viewing. Then there was a bathroom mirror inspirational nugget: “Thank you BabyCake!” written in loopy pink cursive, and “Don’t crash out alone” on the ceiling of the front bedroom, along with something like “you’re awesome.” Finally, one that I wouldn’t find till the following spring, written in bold, ornamental cursive on the underside of the kitchen sink in two colors of paint marker: “Little Buddy and BabyCake, Jan 2023.” That would fit the timeline of Dee Dee’s tale of squatters who they ran off.
It would take some time and effort to rehabilitate this squatter’s paradise. I often wondered, “Were any of the Wildlings ‘Little Buddy’ or ‘BabyCake’?” I overheard a lot of their loud conversations/fights, but never heard anyone use those names. Maybe Dee Dee’s story was true, that the squatters were simply intruders, strangers from a different tribe. Somehow that’s hard to square with the never-ending presence of the Linder Group at the gates of that property. They would almost have to be a party to anyone living there. They’re ever-present. Twice in the first months I owned the place, large tree branches broke out of my front (roadside) fence, partially blocking the street. Before I even knew, both times the Linderfolk dragged or partially cut the branches into the ditch. They’re always in conversation and commerce with Team Pete across the street, and two of them are on constant motorcycle patrol. It’s almost impossible to get around them there.
Sometime in September, someone stole one of the gates from my chain link fence. It didn’t matter much, since it only got in my way when mowing, but I was still peeved, with that faint WTF feeling of being violated and disrespected. Again, hard to imagine it happening without Linder-awareness — but, why would they take it? It didn’t fit their fence, and the recycling value of galvanized tubing and wire isn’t worth the gasoline needed to haul it in.
As fall weather came, they had backyard fires for warmth and probably some for cooking. Normally this would not bother me, but it often wafted in my direction smoke that reeked like they fed the fire with plastic and styrofoam — confirmed when I noticed the guys returning home in their moving truck and unloading big bunches of cardboard boxes full of packing materials. At first this didn’t make sense, because they had complained about having trash to get rid of (Chris once mentioned they had to haul off 16,000 lbs of trash after a shed burned and damaged a trailer, both of which I assumed had been inhabited), but then I realized it was stuff to burn.
So, these are not do-nothing people. They always have something going on, it’s just not always constructive stuff. Between the moving truck that went out every day so the guys could work, and apparently a Storage Wars-style acquisition of junk from abandoned storage units (Danielle told me about this later), the Linders had a neverending supply of debatably valuable wares to barter, hoard, and sell at frequent garage sales. When nice weather came, so would an approximately monthly yard sale — that filled the entire front of their property and sometimes spilled over onto mine.
That fall they acquired a gas generator that ran most all the time, until it eventually broke down the next spring. It was noisy, but only enough to cover conversations, not enough to block fight-yelling or Harley Davidson engine rage. At least it let them run a few appliances and keep lights on…
