Ax murderer

Last week I started a new roll -- like I do every week. And I'm in a nice neighborhood -- like I am every week. So I pretty much don't expect to find a crack house in an up-scale neighborhood but that's what I felt like I stumbled on to in this case. I swear, I am not making this up. I'm going from house to house working the roll. One of my houses is on a corner. Beautiful house and immaculate landscaping. Nice lady at home. Then I round the corner and my next house is a complete 180.

First impression is the grass is all gone to seed. But that sometimes happens when the homeowner is out of town for a couple weeks. There are two decorative pillars kind of "U" shaped with a gate hanging open off one of them. This gate hasn't seen any use in quite a while. There are two concrete lions resting on the bottom of the "U" in each pillar. Normally they'd be turned outward but these two have been turned to face the pillar. So that was kind of weird. You can't see the house from the road because there are too many cedar trees grown around it. So I drive up to the house and I start to get the creeps as scenes from Chainsaw Massacre flash through my mind. There are two derelict vehicles in the driveway (a car and a truck) that have been sitting there for so long the grass is grown up around them. The front end of the car is totally burnt. The garage door is hanging open and it's all full of junk. Which matches the yard. There is junk and garbage scattered all over the yard. There used to be a pile of ceramic tile stacked up beside the driveway that had gotten scattered and totally crushed into thousands of bits so that you couldn't help but run over it.

Now, some of the places I've been to have seen better days. I guess sometimes there comes a point when people's circumstances change and things start to wear out and maintenance doesn't get done. Every once in a while I'll come across a house and the first thing I think of is 'renters.' Toys scattered all over the place, etc.

But this house was different. It was just plain nasty. It was worse than nasty but I can't think of a worse adjective to describe it. There was a huge fountain in the front that had dried up leaving scum and algae all in the bottom of it. There was what used to be nice lawn furniture on what used to be nice landscaped terraces. But the furniture had all kinds of mold on it and the chairs were laying on their sides like they'd been blown over by the wind. Nobody has used that area in a long time. I carefully walked up to the door and I could see inside the house looked like a superfund site. There was a futon on the front porch that had months of mold growing on the cushion. Yuck. There was mold on the stone walls, the front door, the eaves....everything just reeked of negligence.

So I knock on the door, give it all of about 20 seconds, and am relieved when nobody answers. When I get back to the road, I study the picture to try to see why the photographer shot it. To be honest, it doesn't look that bad from the air. The lawn furniture is hidden by a grove of cedar trees. You can see the junk cars in the driveway but the rest of the house doesn't look that bad. It does look a tad shaggy in the photo but the camera just didn't pick up all the mold and bits of trash and garbage around the house. There were just enough trees so that you couldn't really tell just how neglected the yard was.

The next day I was selling a print to the man who lives in the house diagonally opposite from the other really nice house on the corner. When I asked him if he knew who lived there his first words were, "Yes, and don't go there." I told him too late, I'd already been and he told me not to go back. "Why, is it a crack house?" (I was only half joking.) He said the man there was really strange (no shit!) and that the homeowners association (of which he was president) were trying to decide what to do about him. He and his neighbor were the ones who had put out the car fire in his driveway and when they knocked on his door to tell him about it, the dude was like, well whatever. Dude thanked them, went back inside, and closed the door. He said you couldn't really see how bad the house was from the road and so they really didn't have much leverage to do anything about the guy. You can't get rid of someone just because they're a weirdo.

And it's a real shame. He said he knew the previous owners and they took a lot of pride in their landscaping. He said there were more terraces in the back of the house and that they used to be really beautiful.

I have something called a hardcard that gets sent back to Air Photo along with all the rejected prints. On it I list the status for each print, whether it was sold and for how much or whether it was rejected and the reason. For 57BUVD3-88 I put R-Ax murderer.

Note to David: This is what I was going to tell you on the phone before my train of thought derailed.