My Wife was supposed to get a truck for Saturday so we could move it all in one trip. Plus, I have some car parts that are too big to fit in the back of my little pickup (ute), so a big truck is needed. Well, she forgot and then couldn't get one when she finally called. So we made many, many trips back and forth between houses, covered in sweat and overloaded with stuff. I had a shelf blow out of my truck and land in the road. I had another shelf come apart and fly all over the road. I had something magically work it's way out of the bed and fall behind me with a loud CLANG as it hit the asphalt and rolled in the street. I have no idea how it got out of the bed of the truck without using magic.
And still there is more crap to haul.
We are so sore. And so tired. And boy is My Wife cranky. Yessiree Bob! (I think that's 'bloody hell' for you UK folks.)
I hadn't mentioned this before, but I'll go ahead and mention it now, basically because I have nothing else to say. 2 weeks ago we came home at 8 p.m. on a Saturday night to find the gate wide open. I went to check it out and found a small aluminum bat lying on the ground in my backyard. When I picked up the bat I saw glass. Then I saw our kitchen window, all smashed in. I told My Wife that we had a burglar. Then I grabbed my cell phone out of the truck and called the police. My Wife, meanwhile, walked around to the front of the house.
"There's a window broken here, too," she shouted to me.
The police came and searched the house. We hadn't gone inside yet and weren't sure if the burglar was in there or not. I hadn't been home since Friday morning at 8 a.m., which left all of Friday night and Saturday for someone to invade my home. They clearly had been close by and noticed no lights and no truck in the driveway Friday night after all the high school partiers had gone home to bed. So they took the opportunity to give me this goodbye present.
Unlike all the times that my lovely neighbor has tried to murder me through sabotaging my cars, this time the police actually called for a CSI unit to come and take evidence. And this time, like all the other times, there was no shortage of evidence to be found.
This particular redneck neighbor of mine is not what you'd call a rocket scientist. He tends to get high and then come pay me a late-night visit, often involving tools. He likes to drain my brakes of fluid, disconnect my shocks, stab my roof in an attempt at making a hole all the way through, remove lug nuts, deflate tires, overinflate tires, slice fuel lines, try to open the windows of the house, try to pry the sliding glass door in back of my house off the tracks, try to pick the locks of the doors with a screwdriver, and other fun and exciting diversions that a criminal finds amusing. He never wears gloves and always leaves lots of himself behind.
Up until now, the police have never bothered gathering any of the evidence he leaves. Apparently attempted murder is not nearly as serious as a burglary in Redneckville.
But this time they did gather evidence. They said they "hoped" he left some prints behind. Well good God, did he ever! Prints and blood everywhere you could hope to find it. He practically left his driver's license.
Yes, blood. 'Grandmaster Genius', as I am now calling my mysterious repeat visitor, took his bat to the window and then climbed through, ignoring the jagged broken glass poking out from every direction, but still managing to place his hand on the shards covering the windowsill as he entered, puncturing his hand and dripping blood in a nice, large puddle just under the window.
Interestingly, he didn't take his bat to the 2 large glass doors just beside the window. These doors have a glass break alarm on them as well as a regular sensor. Grandmaster Genius knows this from the 3 previous attempts to pry them open over the past 8 years in which he has set off our alarm.
Ah, the alarm. Where was the alarm during all of this? Well, as the house is for sale and being shown, we were asked not to set the alarm so that the agents coming inside wouldn't have to fumble with it to turn it off. So, no alarm was on. Had it been, even though Grandmaster Genius broke through the kitchen window instead of the glass doors, the glass break alarm would have gone off anyway, saving him the trouble of cutting himself and bleeding on our home.
We searched the house to see if Grandmaster Genius had taken anything. What we found makes sense only if you remember that he's a drug dealer and addict. He apparently went from the kitchen, into the den, where he tried to open the sliding glass doors from the inside. Being a Redneck Mensa candidate, he couldn't even open the door from inside the house. No, it doesn't require a key. It just requires a functioning brain, which he lacks while stoned. He smeared his blood on it, but could not open it.
So then, being frustrated by the door, and finding no cash or bank statements or anything of value that he could carry all by himself, he went out into my garage, opened my toolbox, scattered the tools around, and pulled out a baseball-sized socket.
He used to be a fairly good baseball player, or so his former coach tells me.
He went back inside the house and threw the socket as hard as he could at one of our front windows, ironically aiming straight for his own house. It barely went throught the window, glancing off the frame as it smashed through the glass, and landed in the front yard. Then he left.
The company that installed our windows, all of which are brand new, said that these double-paned windows are extremely hard to break, even if you have a bat. They demonstrate this for you when you buy them, throwing a mallet at one of their own windows as hard as they can. The mallet bounces off and the glass doesn't break. Grandmaster Genius had to swing his aluminum bat pretty hard to do as much damage as he did. The neighbor behind us said she heard something, but didn't know what it was and didn't call the police, although she thought about it. She said she heard furniture moving, too. This would have been Grandmaster Genius climbing in the window and sliding the kitchen table and chairs as he fumbled his way in, spilling his own blood in the process.
The police went around to my neighbors and questioned one or two of them. They questioned Yo G and his parents, Mr and Mrs G. They went looking to question Rooster, or so they said, but they didn't find him. Rooster had closed up his garage, which is normally open with him sitting just inside of it from about 9 pm until 2 a.m. every single night of the week and especially on Friday and Saturday. The high school kids like to hang out there from time to time because he gives them beer and cigarettes and sometimes other things which Yo G supplies to him. The door is always open. Rooster is always there. But not tonight. All the lights were out and he wasn't answering the door.
The police indicated that with all the evidence they found, catching the person responsible was simply a matter of processing and acting on the results. They also said that more than likely, whomever did this was going to brag to someone and then, as is usually the case, word would get back to the police. They count on this, in fact, because it is so common and so predictable as to be nearly foolproof.
Ah well, that may be the case with normal criminals, but that's not how Grandmaster Genius rolls. In all the 8 years that he has targeted us, he has never told anyone anything. One of the reasons for this, according to the original detective assigned to handle our ongoing case, is because he gets so stoned before committing his crimes that by the next morning he can't really remember it well. Sometimes he can't remember it at all. Ironically, his inebriated state of mind protects him from himself. He can't brag about things he can't entirely recall, although he has tried a few times, prompting a few arguments with some of the older high school kids at Rooster's in which they called him "a fucking criminal" loudly enough for me to hear from all the way across the street at my house.
Say what you want about the bunch of high school kids hanging out and partying across the street from my house, but they know a criminal when they meet one and they themselves have never caused me any problems. If they knew who broke in, they would tell the police eventually.
Since the break-in, 'someone' has been spreading the usual rumor around the neighborhood that we are certain it was Rooster who did it. This same someone, we believe, is the someone who claimed to have witnessed him shoot out the window of my truck 8 years ago in the very first attack on us that didn't involve The Fireman's kid and friends.
The Fireman's kid and friends is an entirely different story, and we did suspect them at first, but having an apparent eye-witness who pointed the finger at Rooster and said, to both me and the police, "I saw him" pretty well diverted my attention away from them. It also diverted our attention away from his son, Yo G.
For about 5 years, Rooster and The G Family were having a very heated feud. Rooster was frequently drunk and out of his mind, and Yo G was on parole for buglary. Neither family wanted to have anything at all to do with the police, so they rarely ever involved them. Whenever they had a fight, the mysterious Grandmaster Genius would vandalize my cars in the middle of the night. When I called the police, Mr. Yo G Senior would come over, ask what had happened, ask who I thought did it, and then point the finger at Rooster.
After 5 years, their feud ended. Yo G was frequently seen sitting with Rooster in the doorway of Rooster's garage, drinking and smoking and talking about this and that. Rooster had been in trouble with the law a few times during all of this in incidents involving his drunkeness and his mother, who often was the one who had called the police to report that Rooster was out of control and she was afraid.
When the feud stopped, the attempts on my life eased, but didn't stop entirely. The last one was a close call, nearly setting my car on fire. As the police were taking their report, Mr. Yo G Senior appeared, as usual, asking me who I thought did it. I knew what he wanted to hear, although I no longer believed it to be true, so I answered, "Rooster."
"What? Rooster? Why do you think that?" he exclaimed incredulously, "I don't think Rooster is doing this at all."
"Well, all these years you've said you believed it was Rooster, and you've known him far longer than I have. And you said you saw him that first time," I reminded Mr. G.
"Whaaaat? I never said that! I never said that!" he repeated.
He is quoted in the police report saying that, but apparently he doesn't know this. He assumes I have forgotten why I dropped my own initial suspicions and turned my attention to Rooster. But I have not. I have written down every incident and made careful notes of whom I suspect and why. He and his son appear in those notes frequently.
Several days after the break-in and brief questioning of Yo G by a police officer, My Wife stopped at the house where the pretty high school neighbor girl lives. She's a soccer and basketball player, one-time cheerleader, and was the initial attraction that began drawing in ever larger crowds of high school boys to our corner of the neighborhood. Eventually, other pretty girls came along and the whole thing grew into a sort of outdoor roving club, with her house as the entry point. She's a nice girl and very friendly.
My Wife asked her, in front of several of her friends, if she knew anything or had heard anything about our house being broken into. The girl said she had heard that we think Rooster did it.
We hadn't said anything to anyone about who we suspected, and yet already someone had spread the word among the crowd that hangs out with Rooster that we think he did it. Meanwhile, Yo G was over at Rooster's house telling Rooster the same thing, that we suspected him, even though the police never even questioned Rooster. Rooster was in a panic and had withdrawn into his house and not appeared in his garage for over a week. And who can blame him?
To be fair, there have been problems involving Rooster over the years, when he was drinking hard and coming outside into the street to shout at phantoms, or anyone who happened by. More than once I watched him stand in the middle of the intersection, pointing angrily up the road at no one in particular and screaming, "damn niggers!" When he first came over to our house to introduce himself, My Wife answered the door to a slightly inebriated man with long hair and a scruffy beard who identified himself as 'Rooster' as his dog peed on the side of our house. This did not make a good first impression with My Wife. Things did not improve from there.
One week before the break-in, we came home from church to find Rooster in a fight with Mr. and Mrs. Yo G. Mrs. G was shouting "I'm calling the police!" And then Mr. G said it, too. Rooster went into a panic. We didn't know what the fight was about, but we knew the odds of the Gs calling the police on Rooster, who knows so much about their son, Yo G, was slim. We watched Rooster pace around his driveway and then go back out to the intersection to scream at no one in particular as he waited for the police. Several hours later, no police had arrived and Rooster went in the house.
The very next weekend, our house was broken into.
The next weekend after that, we had movers take our remaining furniture out and move it to the new house.
This past weekend, while we were packing our truck, Mr. Yo G Senior came by. He asked me about the break-in and mentioned that the police had rather aggressively accused his son, Yo G. All I knew was that the police had gone to question several of my neighbors while examining them for cuts from the window. Apparently they only ever questioned Yo G, and not in a matter-of-fact manner, either.
The next day, yesterday, Mrs. Yo G came over. She asked us about the "broken window", never saying "burglary." Then she said, "you know who I think did it? It was them high school kids always hanging out over there with Rooster. They're out there until all hours of the night, drinking and making noise. He has no business hanging out with kids like that. He's too old. He's 54 years old! I've been tempted to call the police and report him for corrupting minors. He's giving them beer. That's the only reason they're over there. I told them one time that I was calling the police on them and then they all scattered."
I mentioned that I had seen them there all summer and never had a problem with them. I remember being a high school kid and hanging out just like they are. People didn't like us, but we didn't cause problems. And we had nowhere else to go.
As this conversation was taking place, the pretty high school girl came by on her bicycle, looking for Rooster. He was nowhere in sight, but she could easily overhear our conversation.
Mrs. G paid no attention to her, but went on about her suspicions of the high school kids and how they were hanging out right outside her bedroom window, keeping her awake at night.
We talked about a few other things and then, somehow, it came out that the woman who owns the gym I now work out is her ex-sister-in-law, who apparently divorced Mrs. G's brother to marry her personal trainer, the same trainer whom I am talking to about hiring for myself.
I doubt that I'll leave My Wife to marry him, though, in case you were worried about me.
Later, after Mrs. G had gone home, The Pretty Girl on the bicycle found Rooster and sat with him outside his garage. They talked and watched us packing. They weren't exactly smiling at us, either. Later, more high school kids came over and hung out. I don't know for sure that The Pretty Girl overheard Mrs. G accusing them of the break-in, or if she was simply comforting Rooster, who no doubt believes we are accusing him. But it was nice of her to sit with him. And I'm sure he appreciates it very much.
The detective handling our case called me on Friday to inform me that he had only just submitted the evidence for processing. There is no telling how long processing will take. It concerns me that the person I suspect of being Grandmaster Genius appears to enjoy a certain amount of police protection in exchange for informing on his clients, who are then arrested just when they happen to have large quantities of recently purchased illegal substances on them. I'm concerned that, should he be considered valuable by the police, they may not choose to give me the correct results so that we can prosecute. But we'll just have to wait and see.
This is life here in Redneckville, just outside of Memphis, where your neighbors are mostly white, and life is rarely dull. Yeeha.
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