Two Years, and change

The first couple of years on J Street were great in the early '80s. I remember it being a quiet, working-class neighborhood where people got along well with one another, every family on the block had kids within our age range, so there were plenty of other kids to play with. We never went so far as to have a block party or cookout, but everyone knew one another after a while. I remember that the electricity would occasionally go out, and people would leave their houses and sort of stand around on the sidewalk, joshing around about what they were doing, and waiting for the power to come back on, which it did after a handful of minutes. Everyone would quietly cheer, and we'd all go back in for the evening.

The people who left next to us in 910 on the left were interesting. I remember that they had a dog, and their owners went out to the beach a lot, doing a lot of underwater exploring. So much so that they even had some diving equipment made for their dog, including a diving mask and swimming flippers. I never got to see the dog in action, but did see him quite a few times in his diving gear. They came over a few times for a neighborly visit in the early days. The only drawback to that was that there would be their kid with whom you would be sort of thrown together with while the grown-ups were downstairs having a drink or three together, and you hated it because he'd be one of those kids that a) pissed and whined about everything, b) had a perpetually runny nose that he was constantly snorking up, or c) he'd be putting his dirty, dookey hands all over everything of yours.

The family on the right of us in 906 had two daughters, so Angie was naturally inclined to hang out with them, as they did girly things together, which I was not part of. Across the street were the Francis brothers, Alan and Kenny, who had a weird hobby of collecting bees in glass jars. They showed me how to do it one time, which wasn't too hard, and after they'd get about a dozen or so bees collected, then they'd inflict some strange thing to do with them. They'd fill the jar with water and drown them, or they'd throw the jar across the church parking lot, then run like hell when it shattered on the pavement. They were forbidden to do this after one of the guys had a jar of bees in the family car, and it somehow got opened (or dropped) while the whole family was in the car.

Seems like after my parents split up, almost everything around there changed within the space of a year. Alan and Laura moved away, and we never saw them again anywhere. Ken, Laura, Eric and Zack had slipped out of their house around the same time, with no fanfare. The family next door was still there, but the dad would come over and ask to use the bathroom, since one of the girls was busy using theirs, and then go and disappear into ours for about half an hour at a time. I didn't know it then, but he was smoking either crack or freebase in there.

That family moved out of that house in the summer of 1984, which was soon taken over by a bunch of people I can only describe as drug users and low-grade prostitutes. On the other side of us, the house was occupied by a pimp, his girlfriend (who was said have been a stripper at some sleazy dive), and her three kids. And then, over in Alan and Laura's old place, lived a motley household of a brother and sister, and her three kids. They grew and sold weed in the house, and they pretty much sat around in the living room all hours of the day and night, watching either horror movies or pornos. I always thought it was kind of funny how they had really good TV, stereo and VCR equipment, but they always seemed to be broke, and were always telling of what they scored down at the local food banks.

The real beginning of the end was when the area on 9th and K Streets with our beloved laundromat and adjoining vacant lot was demolished, scraped all up and hauled out of there. Next thing we know, the ground was leveled, cement foundations were laid, and a three-wing building began to be built on top of it all. The main attraction was to be a 7-Eleven store, with two ore businesses to be opening there later. Work went on through that whole summer, and by November, the 7-Eleven store was open. (Over on the left, the laundromat re-opened, though it wasn't the same or as fun as the old place, and the spot in the middle was a series of short-lived and unsuccessful businesses that came and went over the next few years)

It was nice having a place to go for snacks and drinks and the like, but the new traffic also ushered in an era of drugs, crime and street-gangs that would begin to permeate the area, well down to the 25th Street area, and taint it for many years to come. This was one of the factors that eventually had us pack up and leave the area for good, and never return there.