The House Behind The House

Jan. 19, 2010 - First full day in new house.

2010-01-30T22:08:00.000-08:00

For the record, since this is the first blog I’ve ever published and since I am not interested in making a web-faux-paus, and since I am not interested in notoriety for myself nor for my family, and since I have no interest in exposing the lives of any friends or neighbors or acquaintances to public scrutiny, I’ve decided to alter the names and certain identifying features of details herein.

That said, when we had dinner on our first night here in our new weekend getaway / summer-house, and we heard a thumping on the roof, we just assumed it must have been a raccoon or skunk. It may have been. But now I’m not so sure…

This blog will be titled “The House Behind the House” for reasons that will soon make themselves evident.

I don’t usually blog but what we discovered today was so unnerving, it seems blog-worthy.

First, a little background. I’m typing on my laptop from the living room of our new weekend getaway / summer-home, located off the Pacific Coast Highway just South of Mendocino on a road called Salmon River.

The property is on a hillside, surrounded by a thick forest of redwoods overlooking the ocean, about a mile below.

My daughter Juliet would normally be in school this time of year, but my wife June and I decided to home-school her for the next semester (which we are perfectly capable of doing) and come to our summer house before summer. We drove up yesterday, on Martin Luther King’s birthday, and spent most of the car ride here lamenting the fact that the great State of Massachusetts was about to elect a George Bush look-a-like to fill Ted Kennedy’s seat.

Anyway, I know some of our friends and family think our decision to take Juliet out of school is selfish, but frankly the idea seems beyond reasonable to me. Nothing is more important than being with family, and those intimate bonds, so why shouldn’t we spend a season together? Why must we conform with every single one of society’s norms?

Juliet will have plenty of time in the future to lose her identity in a big public school and bond with her friends. And frankly, I needed the sabbatical desperately (thankfully my financial and work situation allows for it) and a chance to reconnect with my wife and child.

In any case, out the floor to ceiling window, at the moment as I type this, there’s a dense fog and I can’t see a thing. My wife June is asleep in bed with Juliet. Juliet didn’t want to sleep alone tonight and, well, I don’t blame her.

When our realtor Alice Witt of Redwood Realty showed us this house in the fall, we were sold within minutes. The isolation and quietude was a big selling point.

Our family normally lives in San Francisco in a busy part of the SOMA district, in a loft. We have noise problems with our upstairs neighbors, who are always getting into late night fights while we try to sleep, so the prospect of a quiet getaway in nature was our fantasy.

To be utterly frank, June and I have had so many problems with our neighbors in SF as of late, the problems have began effecting us—kind of severely, actually. For example, sometimes they wake us up in the middle of the night, and my wife can’t go back to sleep and her insomnia sours her mood all the next day and this rubs off on me and then we find ourselves arguing about how to solve the problem of the noise upstairs and our opinions differ and pretty soon we’re at each other’s throats barking like dogs... just like the people upstairs.

Point is, when we first got here today, we were very happy to get away, like I said.

But today that happiness took a creepy turn…and it’s why I’m awake typing these words…

At about two o’clock, while we were enjoying a late lunch, my daughter Juliet realized our family dog Bono (half blind from cataracts) had gone missing. So Juliet and my wife June went searching in the woods.

They didn’t find little Bono (who is still missing), but they did discover something that our realtor hadn’t mentioned when she sold us the property…

About fifty yards behind our house, hidden by the dense Northern California flora (ancient, actually), on what our realtor had told us was public land, in a small clearing, they found ANOTHER HOUSE.

Smartly, they didn’t go inside to see if anyone was there, but instead quietly turned tail and rushed back to tell me about it.

They said the house was constructed entirely of obsessively woven branches—like a wicker chair. My daughter said it looked like the kind of place where Shrek would live.

And so we returned together. And I could hardly believe my eyes.

From the outside, my first impression is that the house was made by an unskilled, but dedicated craftsman—something, it seemed to me, a mad man had spent the better part of his (or her?) life piecing together.

From top to bottom, the house looks as such:

The walls are made of braided twigs, like a dark wicker basket, and there are no glass windows, but instead shutters made of similar twigs, except of another variety so the house appears two-toned. The roof seems to be made of multiple layers of curved redwood bark. There doesn’t seem to be any kind of foundation and there are no roads leading to or from the house. There are no electrical boxes or water tanks or any other signs of utilities. There is no mailbox but there is a pair of old cowboy boots left by the front-door. When we approached the boots (cautiously, as you can imagine), I was relieved to find that, inside the shafts of the crusty old leather footwear was a labyrinth of cob webs which meant to me that no one had put them on in quite a while.

I called out to see if anyone was present but got no answer. I told June that we should go inside but she thought it was a mistake. We argued about it a moment but then Juliet just pushed open the door, making the choice for us.

And so we followed our fearless daughter inside the odd lair…

Inside, the place is strangely modern—a total contrast to the exterior. Orange shag carpet lines the floor. All the décor has an easily recognizable 1970s motif. I’m not sure if it’s the smell or the visual aspect of it, but being in here reminds me of reading the old Playboy Magazines I used to buy at garage sales when I was a boy.

Poking around a bit, I find a sink with a faucet that does not work and pipes that go to nowhere but that is not the strangest thing.

In the refrigerator, which has a plug but no outlet to plug into, there’s a rotten chicken surrounded by shriveled old roasted winter vegetables but the meat does not appear entirely dried out—it is still somewhat moist, meaning, it’s not that old. This fact quickens our pulses very suddenly because it indicates that someone has been living here not too long ago, even if he has not used the boots on the stoop for ages.

And in the bedroom, where we wander next, there’s a waterbed with another pair of cowboy boots by the side. These boots have no cob-webs in them.

Juliet jumped onto the waterbed and started wiggling around before June told her that was extremely inappropriate.

We looked about some more, and there was nothing much more of note…EXCEPT, on the dining nook table there is an old Scrabble board and a half burnt candle nearby it and the word YOU spelled down the center.

Fearing the big bad wolf might suddenly jump out of the shadows to devour us, we gathered up Juliet and drove the coastal route ten miles to town to speak with the woman who sold us our house. When we arrived at her office, she was out to lunch, but we decided to wait.

While we sat on her stoop, we speculated about what this odd house behind our house might be. Naturally, we listed a catalogue of horrific ideas, but of course we were laughing the whole time because the notion of our discovery seemed absurd to us, even if it was genuinely frightening…

Before long our realtor Alice came back from lunch, and of course she was astonished by our story. She told us that the house we’d bought had not been occupied in two years and that the previous owner was an elderly woman (deceased for as long as the house had been vacant) who’d lived alone for over two decades, as far as she knew...

Of course, Alice was dead curious to see the place herself. So we hopped in our cars and went back.

Like us, Alice was shocked by the sight of it and like us, wanted to see the inside.

By now Juliet had scared herself into believing something wicked resided in there, so she held my hand tightly, her palms sweating, while we wandered around and then I heard my wife make a strange sound—a gasp I’ve only ever heard her make when watching horror films on TV late at night.

She was standing over by the kitchen nook table, hovering over that Scrabble board.

There was a new word on the face of it, built off the O in YOU. The new word was OUT. Like so:

YOU

Now fearing for our lives, it didn’t take us long to evacuate.

Standing in front of our house, Alice said she would do some research and call us in the morning. Then she bid us farewell, suggesting that perhaps tonight we stay at a hotel.

June, Juliet and I spent a few more minutes in our kitchen talking it over, and unanimously decided to do just as Alice suggested but when I called around it turned out that literally every room in town was occupied by a group of motorcycle tourists on their way to Garberville.

As an aside, this has happened to me three times in my life since I first moved to California—I need a hotel and there are none available because of motorcycle tourists!!

Juliet is a little relieved that we’re not going to a hotel because Bono has still not reappeared and she is really afraid that the dog will freak out if she comes home and we’re not here.

Anyway, the bottom line is we’re spending the night in our new summer-house and I can not sleep and am writing this blog, half believing some psychotic in old cowboy boots is about to rush up to the picture window and slap his bloody palms on the glass.

I think I’m going to go open a bottle of wine and try to relax. Maybe I’ll download a book on my Kindle and sit by the gas fed fire and read.

Assuming we’re all alive and well tomorrow, I’ll let you know what, if anything, our realtor Alice discovers.

Jan. 20, 2010 - We meet the man who lives in the house.

2010-01-29T16:57:00.000-08:00

I fell asleep on the couch last night and was awoken at about ten by my wife and daughter who made me pancakes and bacon.

The fog and rain had momentarily cleared and the ocean was a startling sea-green.

Down below, too far for us to see from our hillside retreat, the most psychedelic tide pools swirl in the rocks and kelp rises up like underwater streamers.

I’ve SCUBA’d here in Mendocino and it’s really remarkable. The kelp’s like a thick forest. It’s eerie and gray and cold, and occasionally you can spot a seal swimming around or a gray fish. It’s not a tropical sea-life paradise like other places more popular for diving, but the cold Northern Pacific has a calming Zen-like quality to it—less overwhelming than other seascapes.

I’m not sure why I’m suddenly blogging about being under water except for the fact that it’s just so beautiful here in the mornings and I’ve always believed good writing (though perhaps not good blogging?) is stream of consciousness, so why not let it flow? I suppose the point is, the nature here is so vibrant and overwhelming as to have nearly eclipsed the fact that there’s an ominous house behind our house.

While we ate breakfast, a call came in from Alice who asked us to meet her at the local public library to go over the records of the property.

At the library she shows us that our house was been owned by one woman, from 1964 till 1997, until she died. This woman, Peggy Buckingham, had a son, Lester, but according to the public record Lester died in combat during the Viet Nam War in 1972. More records showed that Peggy’s husband Bill had disappeared and Peggy had retired from teaching school, middle school English, in 1984. I wonder what grade Mrs. Peggy Buckingham, were she alive to read this blog, would give me for my bad grammar!

Other than deaths and a mysterious missing husband/father, there was nothing else on the public record, but clearly the dead people etc associated with our house gave us no comfort.

Alice, who I would describe as part old hippie, part Stepford wife, closes up the last file she has out and says she’s sure there’s nothing to worry about. That’s when I remind her that the Scrabble board in the mysterious kitchen went from YOU to YOU OUT and so obviously there IS something to worry about.

I thought to ask her who had received the monies from the sale of our property (thinking this might be a clue to who built the house behind our house), since the previous owner had no living relatives, and she tells me that in such cases the profit goes into a public trust—basically it goes into a fund with any other monies collected by the local government, such as taxes and parking tickets…

A few minutes later we’re entering the local Sheriff’s office (a man named Sheriff Mel Willits) and he is surprisingly helpful—also, weirdly soft and handsome for a Sheriff. He looks more like a prototypical stoner forest ranger than the photo-ideal of small town law enforcement, with curly brown shoulder length hair and warm brown eyes, mid thirties, tops.

I’m certain my wife is attracted to him, the way she keeps laughing at his simple sense of humor which right now is being employed to josh us about ghosts and goblins in the magical forest behind our haunted house.

In any case, he says, getting serious, “if there is someone living out there in that house, they are doing it illegally and without a permit." He tells us we should sit tight while he and his deputy go stake out the situation.

Relieved that the authorities are taking us seriously, we stay in town all day shopping and enjoying ourselves. We see a 2D version of Avatar at a local cinema (Juliet has been dying to see it) and then we had dinner at a fish joint.

I’m in the middle of updating this blog from a cafe with an internet connection when we get a phone call from the Sheriff’s office asking us to come over. And so we did…

When we arrive to the station, Willits sits us down and explains to us the following:

After staking out the house behind our house for hours, they apprehended a middle-aged man (late 50s) as he approached the house with a deer he’d shot in the woods. When they came up to the man, apparently he had not behaved weirdly or violently but seemed to know exactly why the officers had come for him. He identified himself as Lester Buckingham, son of the previous owner of our house, Peggy—same name as the man our realtor Alice said was killed in action in Viet Nam, 1972. Photographs of the young man who died in Viet Nam and this old man’s face confirm he is who he says he is.

Naturally, my first line of questioning is such as: “How is it that no one knew he was alive for the last thirty years? Does he seem disturbed?” And so on and so on and so on…

The Sheriff says he seems like a “gentle, harmless odd-ball” whose been living like a ghost, self-sufficient, for the past thirty years, in contact with no one other than his now deceased mother, who by all accounts was a hermit in her own right.

“So are you going to arrest him and tear his house down or what? It’s illegal, he’s a squatter, isn’t he?” My wife quite rightly asked.

Willits said yes, Lester is a squatter but in fact, he went on to inform us, squatters who have resided on a property for as long as he has, do in fact have certain common law rights—squatter’s rights, he told us, believe it or not!

I’d thought “squatter’s rights” was just some lingo used in the school-yard to stake the claim of a certain jungle-gym or something like that, but it turns out there are real laws providing real legal protections to people who have occupied land for enough time, even if they never purchased the land, paid property taxes, or filed for legal ownership.

He told us that, in his opinion, we ought to speak with Lester and decide for ourselves what we wanted to do.

“What we want to do about what?” I asked.

“If you want to pursue a legal action to get him to clear out,” Willits replied.

Unreal!!: the burden of ridding ourselves of our surprise, creepy neighbor is on us! Typical.

The next thing you know, my wife and I are having a face to face with Lester Buckingham…

My first impression of him is that he is gay, or sexually ambivalent. Certainly he has very fair skin and he’s cleanly shaven and pale, as if he has used sunscreen his whole life. He’s not the stereotype at all of a man who hunts deer in the woods, not at all the jittery Viet Nam Vet Survivalist or bearded Unabomber Grisly Adams I’d expected.

The only thing stereotypical about this man is he talks with a slow and simple drawl, like a man from Appalachia, where, it turns out, his mother and father migrated from in 1964, when Lester was a teenager.

In general he has a soft disposition and avoids looking you in the eye when he speaks, as if he doesn’t want to offend you, but also he seems honest enough to make eye contact when it counts.

He tells us that the Army had mistakenly told his parents he’d died in action, but in fact he’d been a POW from 1969 till 1973—that he’d lived in an underground cage by himself and everyday a “sweet looking yella boy” would feed him and he’d beg the boy in a strange game of charades (since they did not speak the same language) to unlock the cage and set him free. For three years, according to Lester, the boy refused to help him, but then “one day he just unlocked the cage and I climbed out and found myself in the middle of the jungle on the outskirts of a village.”

He told us he’d been so disoriented by the experience of having lived in solitude and darkness for all those years, he felt like an alien to the human race and was terrified, in particular, to return to the States for reasons that not even he could fully grasp. After spending the next five years living in Saigon, working odd jobs, never letting anyone from his past know he was actually alive, in 1982 he returned to America (off the record) to find that his father had gone missing "a complete mystery," he says, and that his mother, although physically functional, had become demented and didn’t remember him.

He’d wanted to live with his mother and take care of her, but because she couldn’t recall him, she was afraid of him, so the best he could think to do was build a house just out of sight of her house to keep track of her health but also to stay hidden himself, because the last thing in the world Lester desired was to return to the hell of the normal world—to work a dead end job, to pay money to the IRS, to be a member of “polite society”, as he called it, an obvious slug of distaste rolling his mouth.

He said he’d always planned to hook up the plumbing of his house to his mother’s house, and the same with the electricity, but fear of becoming known to the outside world had kept him from it—should some nosey electric meter reader have noticed his usage, his anonymity would’ve been foiled.

Bottom line, he’d been living off the grid and off the land and caring for his mother and keeping to himself for decades… at least until we bought the property.

My wife asked him about the gag with the Scrabble board (YOU OUT) and then he mumbled something about being real sorry, he was just trying to scare us away.

All in all, after sitting with him for a half hour or so, I must say my general first impression of him is that he’s a sincere person, and despite his traumatic background, relatively well-adjusted /sane—only living a life most of us would not be able to comprehend!

If these positive first impressions of mine sound bizarrely generous/optimistic/unfounded given all, I don’t blame you, but I do have some expertise in evaluating human beings. In fact, my lifelong profession is that of psychiatrist (which you already know if you read the bio of the writer of this blog, of course!).

Bottom line is, I’ve toiled most of my career in public health and for a decade have been a staff psychiatrist in the San Francisco jail system and I’ve evaluated some serious “nut jobs” and so I know how to read signs of mania and psychosis from the outset, and frankly my first impressions of people usually turn out to be fairly accurate portraits of them when I later compare those impressions (which I always notate in my patient’s files) to my long term experience of people I end up seeing on an ongoing basis.

Of course, my wife does not trust my instincts on Lester one bit. She believes that if Lester is allowed to continue to live in the house behind our house, he will surely come murder us with an axe in our sleep. She tells Sheriff Willits that she wants his house demolished and she wants him relocated immediately.

He tells us if that’s so, we better get a lawyer to expedite the process because there’s nothing he can accomplish in the short term except to charge him with the misdemeanors of hunting without a permit and illegal possession of a firearm and to recommend to the powers that be that they investigate Lester’s property rights, but, the Sheriff says, “You know how those bureaucratic things go—it could be months or years before anything gets done.” Willits went on to tell us he could probably not hold Lester in custody for more than a couple more hours—that he would be sleeping in his own waterbed tonight!

As we left the Sheriff’s office, my wife was pretty rattled. It started raining again and we dashed to our car.

Inside the car, June insisted on finding a hotel with a free room. She said we shouldn’t be like those idiotic people in horror movies who stay in a house despite the fact that they keep hearing thumps in the night. She said she refused to put Juliet in harm’s way and that was the end of the story.

After calling every hotel and motel in town again, while it poured like cats and dogs on our windshield, we finally found a free room (at a resort so expensive not even Bill Gates would stay there) and we spent the rest of the day luxuriating at the resort spa while discussing our options and we agreed to get the best lawyer money could buy.

At around 3pm we called a friend of ours in San Francisco who practices criminal defense, and he gave us the name of a supposedly great lawyer living in Mendocino who specializes in property issues and land disputes, a Jewish attorney named Alan Weissman. I only mention that he’s a Jewish attorney because I’m racist in one single regard: Jewish men are not always good lawyers, but the best lawyers are ALWAYS Jewish men (:

Weissman will see us in the late afternoon tomorrow, and tonight we will eat room service and watch pay per view movies until we fall asleep.

Jan. 21, 2010 - Lester pays Juliet a visit.

2010-01-28T20:21:00.000-08:00

We hang around the heated pool, drink Diet Cokes and read the newspapers in the morning, while Juliet practices swimming and diving, which she loves to do. Since she was four she’s been a veritable fish—even in the rough ocean, much to my dismay. She’s liable to stay in the water all day if we let her, whether the waves are twenty feet high or she is risking hypothermia, it doesn’t matter. And she has no fear of sharks, which always inhibits me from swimming in the ocean for very long (at least, without SCUBA gear on, where it seems like I have a fighting chance, since I can at least see my potential enemy coming!).

Random shark phobia blogging aside, at 3:00 we drag Juliet out of the pool and at 4 O’clock, we visit the lawyer’s office.

Alan Weissman is a short man with a red beard and piercing blue eyes, calm eyes, the kind that immediately put you at ease because the soul behind them is so clearly at ease.

He has an impressive office built entirely of recycled, eco-friendly materials on the hillside overlooking downtown, which (if you’ve never been here) is a quaint village of seaside Victorians, each of them manicured and perfectly restored as if the town was just built and it’s 1914 all over again. There’s not a fast food marquee or billboard in sight.

After Weissman shows us around the grounds, which June is particularly interested to see (she studied and worked in architecture before Juliet was born, when she became a full-time mom / exercise-junkie / internet-addict), we sit down and he tells us our options.

He believes that the cheapest and easiest way to get rid of Mr. Buckingham is to live and let live, rather than pursue an action against him.

Weissman predicts that within a year or two, now that Lester has been noticed by the authorities, he will be evicted because the so-called “squatter’s laws” are antiquated and will hold no sway in the final analysis, especially because he staked his claim on public land. Recent local case law supports his theory, and he cites multiple decisions in which long-time residents of the forest have been booted out of their homes, including a similar case of a man who lived in a tree house just outside the boundaries of UC Santa Cruz. Supporting his argument is that one of the key tenants necessary to achieve squatting rights (or what is known in legalese as “adverse possession”) is that one must have a long history of “open and notorious use of the property.” Clearly, Lester has not been using his property openly or notoriously, but covertly.

Weissman says he is happy to pursue expediting the process of having Buckingham evacuated, but it won’t be cheap and tells us that in his experience in such matters, the path of least resistance is usually the least painful. He has nothing to gain by telling us this, so he obviously means it.

But June doesn’t want to spend a single solitary night living next-door to this weirdo who put YOU OUT on his Scrabble board and has a sink in his kitchen with drainage pipes that go nowhere.

Long-story-short, Weissman gets a twenty thousand dollar retainer from us and promises to prepare a case immediately.

He tells us he’s already spoken with Sheriff Willits, and Buckingham is going to be released from the jail today, but his firearms will have been confiscated until he is able to qualify for an official permit, which should, by all rights, be next to impossible for a man as dysfunctional as he.

June points out that Buckingham was functional enough to procure his firearm illegally in the first place and build an entire house by hand (no doubt using all sorts of sharp objects!), so the prospect of his shotgun being confiscated is of no great comfort to her. She reminds Weissman that Buckingham is a Viet Nam War Vet. Weissman says that if we want to play it safe, we should go back to San Francisco for the week while he figures out the legal game-plan.

By now it’s getting dark and rainy and the option of a seven-hour coastal drive is not appealing, so we decide to spend one more night in our very fancy sea-side resort.

At first I’m not sure we’re making the right decision, hiring a lawyer (I am a believer in the live the live and let live philosophy), but what happens next seals the deal.

While June was in the shower and I was at the hotel gym on the Stairmaster watching the nightly news, there was a knock on our hotel door and Juliet went to answer it.

And when she opened up, who was there but Lester Buckingham!

How he knew where to find us is a complete mystery. Maybe he overheard something from his cell at the Sheriff’s station, who knows.

Of course, Juliet’s scared out of her little mind, but mannered as she’s been taught to be, she did not slam the door on Lester, but instead said “Hello sir, how can I help you?”

After two hours of grilling her about it, here’s what June and I gathered about their interaction:

Buckingham was polite, asking Juliet to relay to us that we have nothing to worry about as far as he is concerned. He wants us to know he will be a peaceful, quiet neighbor and if there is ever any trouble, it won’t be because he’d made it.

Finally, and most frighteningly, he told Juliet he wasn't sure he could live if not in that house. Whatever the hell that means, I have no idea.

He did not explain himself any further, but turned and walked away when he heard June getting out of the shower. While she was dripping wet, she found Juliet still standing by the open hotel door…holding an odd looking antique cardboard shoe box.

Inside the box was a little brown finch that you could see through a bunch of tiny peep holes (or were they air holes?) that Lester had cut out of the cardboard.

Handing the box over to her, he’d said,“I brought you this playpretty to thank you and your family for your advance understanding.”

He called the bird a playpretty! Juliet found the term amusing. However June and I found the term disturbing…though I’m not sure why.

In any case, by the time I returned from the gym, June had already set the finch free and scolded Juliet ten different ways for opening the hotel door for a stranger.

And I must admit, now that he’s done THIS, I am ready to abandon my initial analysis of his mental stability and I am fully on board with evicting him and/or selling the property and finding some place different in which to vacation.

Funny thing is now Juliet believes Lester is harmless. She says he seems like a little boy to her, just scared of losing his home.

Jan. 21, 2010 - iPhone photo of house.

2010-01-27T02:10:00.000-08:00

I have just figured out how to upload a photo of the house that I took with my iPhone on the 19th. I'm not sure how to attach it to this blog entree, so I made it my profile picture.

Jan. 22, 2010 - Back to SF.

2010-01-26T08:46:00.000-08:00

Taking Highway One from Mendocino to the Bay Area is one of the most beautiful drives imaginable, but I don’t think we once looked at the views and marveled at them.

We spent the better half of the drive deciding to sell our new property rather than paying Weissman to rid us of our nuisance, and then, as soon as that was decided, calling and hearing from Alice that we would of course have to disclose the fact of Mr. Buckingham to any potential buyer which would, no doubt, diminish the property value greatly…and in this slow housing-market where hardly anyone is buying second homes these days, that could leave us high and dry (or should I say "under water"?--what's worse??) for quite some time.

Surely a lawsuit would be less expensive than reselling our house, now that Lester Buckingham is a known quantity.

Juliet argued a bit that it was mean to kick Lester out of his home, but her logic held little sway with us given the context and by the time we got back to our loft, we had affirmed our resolve to get rid of Buckingham, whatever the expense and headache.

Like I mentioned in my first entree, our loft in San Francisco is situated directly below some fairly obnoxious neighbors named The Greens who yell and scream and stomp around their hardwood floor above us on a regular basis. And when we laid down to sleep this night, there is no exception.

Amid the echoes of the Greens’ screaming match and their TV playing too loudly, I suggested to June that maybe we should sell the loft, since we would not have to disclose our treacherous upstairs neighbors. Not amused, she went and got the broom from the closet and banged on the ceiling loudly while yelling at The Greens to please be quiet, we're trying to sleep!

The apartment above our apartment immediately quieted down, as it usually does when June bangs our ceiling, which by now has a patina of broom-stick handle dents.

And so now I am writing this while June pleasantly snores.

It should be noted that I am tremendously disturbed that we had to leave our dog unfound in Mendocino (as is Juliet and June), and I know we all feel tremendously guilty that we did not do a more exhaustive search for her before we left. The Sheriff has promised us he will look for her tomorrow on his lunch hour, but I do not have a good feeling (despite my repeated reassurances to Juliet).

Jan. 23, 2010 - Cruising the net for Bad Buckinghams.

2010-01-25T21:16:00.000-08:00

It’s Saturday night and Juliet and June are watching some horrid reality TV while I am cruising around Google looking up Lester Buckingham’s family history, or as much as is documented on the internet. There isn’t much, but I do discover that not only Lester’s father disappeared in 1979, but also Lester’s uncle, his father’s brother who moved West with the family when they migrated. Also, there is an article that is archived from the local Mendocino paper about Lester’s mother—apparently she didn’t retire from teaching but was fired because she slapped one of her students in the face when she caught him cheating on a test. Other than that, there’s not much on the internet about the California side of the Buckingham family. There are a whole bunch of articles about the Buckinghams of Appalachia in local papers there—and they are not a savory family. It’s hard to know how closely related any of these Buckinghams are to Lester but there is a bank robber Buckingham, a child molester Buckingham, a Buckingham who murdered his wife and kids and another Buckingham who was arrested for prostitution. Of course, I am only searching for Buckingham + nefarious keywords, so I’m sure there are a lot of very decent Buckinghams over in Appalachia as well, but who is interested in them, right? (:

In any case, can't fault Buckingham for having bad apples in his family--you can do a search of my last name and find killers and drug dealers and villains galore--a few of them my close cousins, in fact. That's how it goes when you come from a working class family like mine--when you grow up in a poor part of New Jersey!!

Anyway, my eyes are bleary from staring at the computer screen all night. I’m going to go watch reality TV with my wife and child and relax. Good night.

Jan. 26, 2010 - Weissman lays out our case.

2010-01-24T07:26:00.000-08:00

Nothing of note happened regarding the house behind our house in the past couple days and that’s why I haven’t been blogging. The only thing to report is that Sheriff Willits called to let us know he had not found our dog yet. I imagine she was eaten by a mountain lion, or dumbly got into a fight with a bear in the redwoods. Are there bears in the redwoods in Mendocino? I don’t know, I’ll have to check Wikipedia!

In any case, rather than blogging, I’ve been jogging in Golden Gate Park and we went sailing on the Bay with some friends who have a boat in the Sausalito harbor.

We’ve generally just been in a wait and see what Weissman tells us mode in regards to our property problems.

On that note, today we got a call last night from him and here is what he told us:

Assuming we want to proceed, he will immediately file a civil law suit to have Mr. Buckingham removed from the forest on the basis that he is a nuisance to us and because his house unfairly diminishes the value of our property (in addition to the “adverse possession” qualification failure).

He assures us that the presiding Judge, Warren Steel, who is a conservative property rights advocate based on previous rulings, will see it our way. He predicts that Steel will humor our request for an immediate order of destruction of the illegal unit and he doubts Buckingham will have the wherewithal to appeal, since such an action would take a great deal of organization, money and sophistication.

And even if Buckingham were able enough to organize an appeal, Weissman goes on to say, he would have to be quick on his feet, because unless he is savvy enough to request and receive an immediate order of enjoinment, we would be within our rights to hire a demolition crew the very next day and have his place knocked down, like it or not.

He says the Mendocino court system is the opposite of clogged up, and he thinks we can be in court by next Monday morning, which at this point is less than a week away.

All this will cost us is another twenty grand, assuming we decide to proceed, but Weissman guarantees us that if things drag out longer than he expects, he will cap his final costs at no more than fifty grand.

If we want him to file the case, he tells us he can have it done before the end of the day today, and Lester Buckingham will receive notice before he goes to bed tonight.

After another round of moral contemplation and dialog, June and I agreed that it was the right thing to do to get rid of Lester and so we went online to our bank account and had the additional funds forwarded to Weissman.

Although our neighbors above us were up to their usual antics last, June slept more soundly than she had in days, knowing that the problems of the house behind our house would soon to be demolished by a wrecking crew of our choice!

Feb. 1, 2010 - Pondering our choice.

2010-01-23T22:35:00.000-08:00

When official court papers are served there is usually a road and a driveway for the server to drive up to, there is usually a doorbell or a wooden door to knock upon, and so I can hardly imagine the horror of the poor guy who had to wander through the woods behind our house looking for Lester Buckingham’s bizarre wicker palace.

I can also hardly imagine the look on Lester’s face when he received his notice, since avoidance of the hellish red tape of “polite society” has been his life’s work.

And I’m sure it was a sinking feeling and a terrible moment for him, to discover that the construction of his whole life would soon be crashing down around him (literally).

Truth be told, the thought of what he must be going through psychologically makes me somewhat ashamed of our actions, but then again life is not fair on any level (especially when it comes to property rights), and certainly I have worked very hard in my life to achieve things such as being able to own a summer house—all the education, all the work, all the savings, all the playing by the rules of Lester’s “polite society” has given June and I the resources to acquire our house and it wasn’t us who deceived Lester when we bought the house, but he who quietly deceived we, and who by his silence deceived Alice, our real estate agent.

He surely could have announced himself to her, for certainly he knew what she was up to when she came visiting with potential buyers. No doubt he’d seen her around. The upsetting fact is that he could have given us the choice to buy a house with him behind it or not to, but he chose to remain hidden, which is the reason he has gotten himself into the mess he now finds himself in—which is why he has no right to “adverse possession”. He has no one to blame but himself.

Of course even the most heinous offenders of law and order will often blame the outside world for their behaviors and for the consequences of their behaviors, which is a truth I know all too well from my years of work in public mental health.

I’m sure Lester would rationalize that his traumas in Viet Nam account for his need to have isolated himself in a shroud of secrecy for all these years, or that his years of self-imposed isolation have altered his sense of reality and therefore judgment.

And perhaps all this is true, but does that mean our family ought to be punished for the sins society and history have inflicted on him? Should we have relied solely on the sympathetic fact of his POW / PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) status in the determination of our course? Did we make a disgusting bourgeois decision to have him evicted? Should our liberal hearts have bled for him more?? I don’t know. None of this is easily answered in my physician’s conscience (do no harm) but in the balancing act of tough mathematical decision-making, I believe that we made the right choice.

I of course wonder how you, my blog reader (if there in fact is a you and I am not just a tree falling in the forest??) judge me for following through with our eviction proceedings…

I know June seems remarkably settled in our choice, considering the complexity of it. And although Juliet has resisted the decision, she has also begun to grow suspicious that Lester did something to Bono (our dog) and so her sympathy for the kind-weird man who brought her a “playpretty” (finch in a box) has wavered.

In any case, it turns out Weissman couldn't get Lester served before the weekend (Lester was no where to be found) so the court case will be delayed a bit. But he was served this morning, Monday, and now we will have to wait till next Monday to meet him in court.

And just now we spent the better part of dinner AGAIN discussing the moral-ethical implications of what we are endeavoring, and for the most part I am convinced we are doing the right thing.

Onward....

Feb. 2, 2010 - Ding dong the nut has come.

2010-01-22T08:00:00.000-08:00

It’s Tuesday morning, and since yesterday a lot has happened.

Here’s how our day began…

We were having breakfast and there was a knock on our front door.

June swung it open automatically, without checking the peephole because that’s how safe we ordinarily feel, and who was on the other side but…

Lester Buckingham.

Dressed in a suit that must have been thirty years old, if not older, cheeks rosy red like a little boy, piercing blue eyes glassy with emotion, there was Lester Buckingham, middle name unknown...

He had with him a bouquet of red daisies and his hair was neatly combed, stiffly held in place by some sort of 1950s-1980s era type gel product. And he smelled of the distinct odor of lavender, as if he had rubbed lavender bush all over his body to make himself more palatable.

“John!” June called for me before she had even said hello. And so I came and made my way shoulder to shoulder with my wife.

Of course maybe our natural fear of Buckinham is hallucinatory and unwarranted, but nevertheless it is real fear, whether he comes bearing gifts or not.

My heart was honestly racing, about to leap through my throat, as I calmly said “Hello Mr. Buckingham, what can we do for you?”

“I know it seems extreme, me showing up at your door and all, come all the way from up North, but the way I look at it extreme times call for extreme measures. See, I’m facing the possibility of losing my home here to you good folks and I just feel I need to do everything in my power to persuade you to reconsider what you’re doing here.”

“We have considered it,” I told him, “And we recognize that we’re putting you out. But you’re of able body, so why can’t you follow the rules like anybody else, get some paying work and rent yourself a legal unit?”

The moment after I said it, I could hardly believe I had said something so ice cold.

I half expected him to leap at me and choke me to death right then and there but he barely reacted. Which was all the more frightening.

June then filled the silent void with a surprisingly generous offer. She said, “Are you going to say something Mr. Buckingham? If you want to say something, we’ll listen.”

And then we stood there by the door while he pled his case, Juliet creeping up just a few feet behind us, listening attentively.

When he started speaking, he did not stop, not for a moment to let us get a word in edgewise, and it was unclear how he was managing to breathe between his sentences.

Now I have never written down a person’s monologue before, especially one like this, but I will try to capture the feeling he gave and the words he used as accurately as I can. The fact is, he was remarkably articulate and seemed very sincere in his approach. But why should I editorialize kindly about how I felt about his speech? To ease my guilt that we would ultimately, inevitably reject him?? Probably. I don’t know.

Whatever the case, more or less, this is what he said, without stopping:

“Mister and Misses Johns if you would please try to see this situation my way, I would be obliged to you forever, I would gladly be like an angel for you, I would be a caretaker of your property and a handyman of your house and I would keep out of your way completely.

It gives me no pleasure to have to beg you this, Mister and Misses Johns, but I come to you humbly, even as your lawsuit against me flies in the face of all my beliefs.

What are my beliefs, you must be asking yourself. First and foremost my views are not the normal ones compared with the way the civilized world views property. And these are not uneducated views, Mister and Misses Johns, I attended a four year university in my day.

[Thinking about it in retrospect, I can't quite calculate when Lester would've gone to a University since he must've been 18 when he went to Viet Nam; maybe he was just trying to impress us?]

See, I believe that God gave us our land to do as we please--it's our natural right--and so all the rules that we have to regulate it—you with your fence and me with mine and so on and so forth—these are bogus laws, ancient laws, but bogus, for as far as I’m concerned though men have been worshipping the false prophet of gold from time immemorial, nevertheless it is still false.

In fact I believe that the hammer of the law which you have swung at me is just a signature of our mutual corruption here on earth, or more correctly, a signature of the devil, if you go in for such things.

I doubt in heaven there are walls or fences or city ordinances.

But even though I don’t agree with that man made law which gives you the authority to take me to court, I recognize that you adhere to that structure and I can’t fault you for it—you people are no more unholy or holy than anyone else who is a law abiding citizen. So I can’t fault you for the direction you’re taking—you’re taking the route most men and women would take. And neither can I pretend any longer that I am my own master, as clearly I am subject to all the earthly rulea even if I would wish they weren’t real.

So what am I here for? What am I asking of you Mister and Misses Johns? I’m asking you to search your hearts and be generous to a poor soul like me. Let me be, that’s all. Live and let live, and let that be a lesson to young Juliet, your precious daughter…

[How he knew Juliet’s name, I do not know, but it startled me]

…All I’m asking you for is to look the other way and allow me to maintain that tiny piece of Eden that I’ve been laying my bones on all these years. I’m not asking for none of yours or to take what ain’t mine. I ain’t even asking to be in your line of sight. Just let me disappear into that wilderness and I’ll be like a quiet little beetle that lives in the bark. I’ll die there and I’ll pay men to remove my house and bury me after. Hell, I’ll probably die young since I’m too stubborn to see a doctor and since I don’t believe in medicine.

Even if you want, Mister and Misses Johns, I’ll move my whole house even farther away from yours. It would be back breaking work and take me the better part of a year, no doubt, but I’ll do it, if it would satisfy you.”

He said a lot more, but that was the essence, except it should be noted that I thought for a moment he was going to cry.

And when he was done, June said, very politely, “We feel for you Mr. Buckingham, we really do, and we take what you have said very seriously.”

“Thank you Misses Johns,” Lester replied, thinking he’d made some headway.

But he hadn’t made any headway, he’d just provoked June to be as politic as humanly possible, because she did not want to incite his ire.

“We’ll think about it,” she said, as she smiled a false smile and shut the door.

But she had already done all the thinking she was willing to do.

We double locked the doors and made sure the windows were all locked.

And then we all watched from the front of our apartment as Lester wandered out of our stairwell, still clutching those red daisies June had never received from him and which he must have forgotten he’d brought to give to us in the heat of the moment.

He set the daisies on a blue recycle bin, glanced up at our window and we all jumped back before we even saw the look in his eye.

We laughed at each other about what a fucked up situation we were in and about how tense we all were.

And then we looked back out the window and Lester was gone.

Feb. 4, 2010 - Our upstairs neighbors are dead.

2010-01-21T23:36:00.000-08:00

After Lester was gone we called Weissman and he told us that the court date was set and Lester would receive official notice that he was due to appear before a Judge shortly.

And now our upstairs neighbors are dead.

They were slaughtered with a knife, with the same type of boning blade Willits found on Lester’s body when he was apprehended bringing home his dead deer.

Could this be a coincidence?

Yes, possibly.

But when you consider that a dead finch (the same variety of bird Lester gave to Juliet less than a week ago) was found laying on our doorstep when we exited our apartment this morning (long before the Police arrived and found our neighbor’s bodies), that’s all the evidence I need to deduce the obvious…

Lester Buckingham, after receiving notice that we were to meet him in court, traveled back to San Francisco (however the hell he travels, I have no idea—or maybe he never left San Francisco in the first place? But then, how did he receive his notice??) and he fulfilled my wife’s bitter wish that Mister and Misses Green upstairs would be quiet… permanently.

Now I have no idea how Lester knew about our problems with our upstairs neighbors, perhaps he’s been spying on us?

And why he didn’t kill us instead of them, I can only speculate. Maybe he preferred us to feel morally culpable in our neighbor’s death than for us to be dead ourselves. Maybe he views the anguish we now feel to be a fitting punishment, equivalent to the anguish he feels at the prospect of losing his home.

I am with my laptop at the Police Station and we are being interviewed one by one by the District Attorney’s office. June has already been interrogated and now it’s Juliet’s turn.

I can not imagine my poor daughter’s terror. If Lester Buckingham intended to trump us, he has succeeded.

Juliet’s innocence is no doubt gone. She will never look at a stranger the same way again. She will inevitably have nightmares about this for the rest of her life. His ugly violence will be her psychological legacy and I hate him for tarnishing her like that.

June and I will obviously not be sleeping at home until this creepy animal is caught. Since no doubt Lester is capable of great deception and could be reading this blog to ascertain our location, I will not mention where we plan to spend the night, not even what city, and since this case is sure to grab headlines, and since the information I am writing in this could possibly be grounds for a mistrial later-on (even though all names have been changed, even names of places, if a juror should read it and put it all together...), I will cease to write more until Lester is caught and I am assured by a legal representative that continuing to publish this is not ill-advised.

Feb. 21, 2010 - The Murderer is Caught

2010-01-20T21:22:00.000-08:00

So it turns out Lester did not murder our upstairs neighbors, The Greens. The storyline of The Greens deaths sadly plays out like a banal episode of Law & Order SVU (one of my favorite TV shows, BTW). And you can file this one into the category of “truth is stranger than fiction.”

The facts that have now come out are that Scott Green, our upstairs troublemaker, was having a long-term affair with a woman named Petra Marks. Apparently, he had tried to end things with her about a month ago when Petra revealed she was pregnant with his baby.

Mr. Green then procured a drug called Misoprostol, a potent medicine normally used by obstetricians to induce labor and then he went over to Ms. Marks house and seduced her, slipping some of the powdery substance into her vagina without her knowledge, or so he thought. However, Ms. Marks had noticed him doing something suspicious with his hand during foreplay, and when she miscarried an hour after he left her apartment, she went to the hospital and the attending physician (at her urging) tested some of the substance that she had found spotted on her underwear and discovered what it was.

She then apparently bought a knife, broke into The Green’s apartment and killed Scott and his wife in their sleep.

Unbelievable.

Even more unbelievable is that Lester Buckingham nearly took the fall for her!

And he would have if not for the fact that while he was in custody for the past three weeks awaiting trial, Ms. Marks wrote an elaborate suicide note and hung herself in her apartment.

Lester was promptly released.

In the meantime, our civil case against him was postponed and his house remains erect.

However we have not returned to Mendocino, nor have we been staying in our place in San Francisco…

We were so traumatized by all of the unfortunate events of the past few weeks, we decided to vacate the mainland and we’ve spent the last three weeks in Kauai, on the North shore, staying on the property of an old friend, Juaquin Hanwright, who I met in college and who later I went with to medical school.

The Hanwright’s property is a secluded two story house, exterior wood hand carved by local artisans, surrounded by about five acres of banana trees and the like.

Not much of note has happened here in Kauai since we arrived. We have mainly hung out on the beach and breathed easy, or at least as easy as could be given the circumstances.

Oh yes, and we have learned our lesson the hard way about eating unripe bananas straight off the tree – do not do it! It turns out that if you bite into a banana that is truly not ripe, straight from a tree, all the moisture in your tongue will be quickly wicked away and leave you with something that could only be described as “dry banana mouth.”

We leave Kauai tonight on our way back home to SF. Now that Lester is out of jail, unfortunately we must get back to our annoying civil suit against him. The new hearing is set for five days from now. I’ll let you know how it goes…

May 11, 2010 - Our day in Court

2010-01-19T14:14:00.000-08:00

It's been some time since I last updated you and since then a lot has passed, and a lot of it worse than unpleasant--which is why I haven't written. It will be difficult for me to sum up all at once, so I will do it slowly, or as quickly as I can bare to write it down.

First off, when we got back from Kauai a few months ago, we had our day in court.

Lester appeared, wearing that same thirty dollar suit he was wearing when he came to us with those red daisies, but it was now rumpled and he had ring around the collar.

He would not make eye contact with us in court, which was fine with me, but it was unsettling. When he passed us in the hall outside the courtroom without so much as a nod, I felt dead inside. And I felt terrible because I had empathy for the poor guy, even if our actions spoke differently.

The judge heard both our sides, very plainly, and our lawyer did his job with calm collectedness. Lester had hired some young befuddled attorney who took his case out of pity and for the experience of it, and it was easy to tell he was not in command of the law nor did he show much confidence or persuasiveness when he was making his points.

The Judge ordered Lester's house be demolished by a local contractor and he put a lien against Lester for the bill, since Lester did not have the funds to pay for it himself. The Judge gave him seven days to evacuate the property.

After the gavel came down, Lester was in tears and did not move from his seat.

The courtroom emptied but he remained.

I felt horribly empty and terrible.

June and I thought it would be best not to go to our house in Mendocino yet, because what if Lester, in the interim before his home was demolished, would decide to take his feelings out on us?

So we went to a hotel and turned on cable TV and stewed in our juices. My juices were pure guilt and I secretly resolved to cure my guilt by giving Lester something in return for his troubles which by now I felt responsible for.

In the morning I went to the bank and withdrew fifteen thousand dollars--a big sum for us in this recession--and I drove to our summer house to go make peace with Lester; to give him some seed money; a relocation fee if you will...

May 12, 2010 - Blood Money

2010-01-18T14:42:00.001-08:00

When I came to find Lester he was of course chopping fire wood with a sharp axe and even though he knew I was approaching he did not stop the chopping. For about five or six swings I was sure he would never look up.

Then I said "Hey" in a sheepish little voice and he put the axe down and looked up at me, a mean new look in his eye I had never seen before beaming off him like fire.

"What do you want?" He said.

I told him that I felt terrible about his predicament and I offered him the money. "Blood money" he said as he took the bag of cash from me.

"How much does this make you feel better about your miserable life?" He asked, "Just a little bit, or a lot?"

I told him that it did not surprise me that he would respond this way, but nevertheless fifteen thousand dollars is no small sum in any case, and especially for a man who doesn't have anything in the world in the first place.

"I have a home, God damn it," he said cooly, damming up a well of hostility no doubt, "Or at least I did till you and your wife and your precious little Juliet came around."

"Do you want the money or not?" I said, knowing that was the only question worth discussing at this time.

He nodded and put the money bag on the ground and then started hacking away at the logs again.

"I'm sorry for all this," I said, quite earnestly.

But he did not reply. He just kept chopping.

And so I wandered back through the woods toward my car and I got in, feeling a bit shaken.

May 13, 2010 - Demolition

2010-01-17T14:42:00.000-08:00

When the bulldozers arrived Lester was no where to be found and he left nearly all his belongings inside the house.

June and I stood by with Juliet and watched the place get torn apart and the contractors loading up their trucks with all the scraps. The beep beep beep of their vehicles an odd punctuation to the event.

His home taken away, the bare spot on the forest looked strange. The dirt was an oily black, moist, from where his plywood and carpet had sealed in years of evaporation.

We felt unsafe going to bed in our house that night but we resolved to do it, because if we didn't move in now, then when? I have learned in my life that many men appear dangerous, but the fear they create is usually only a tactic--and most men's bark is much bigger than their bite.

As the lights went out, June and I listened quietly to every bump in the night and soon Juliet joined us in our bed because she too was afraid. Having Juliet with us felt good--she had stopped wanting to sleep with us years ago, and it was a wonderful thing about her early childhood that I missed dearly. Making her feel safe, made me feel safe, because it took the focus off myself and my own fears.

The whole experience of having a child is like this. Your own mortality, your own ego driven needs, are so far out-shadowed by the needs of the little one who depends on you, it's relaxing. At least that's been the case for me since I became a father.

I wondered if Lester had ever been with a woman or contemplated having children. I wondered what secrets he had in his past. Had he ever lived a normal life? When he was a boy, would he and I have been friends or was he a strange one every year of his life? What had happened to him to make him who he was? These were the thoughts that plagued me as we lay in bed in silence, me not wanting to talk about these thoughts out loud, not wanting to disturb my bed-mates.

May 14, 2010 - Terrorizing us?

2010-01-16T02:50:00.000-08:00

The morning after demolition of his home, we decided to go to breakfast in town and as we pulled off the dirt road from our house we were startled to see—on the wide turnoff next to highway 1, under the shade of some trees—an old Army tent… and Lester making coffee over a Coleman stove.

Something had changed about him. He no longer looked so boyish or so pale. And he was wearing an uncharacteristic camouflage cap, like the kind duck hunters wear. He looked at us as we pulled slowly by him and turned on to the highway.

Lumps in our throats and silence for a minute permeated the car. In the rear view mirror, I saw Juliet was rubbernecking and Lester was standing, sipping his coffee watching us depart. “Do you think he’s going to go trash our house while we’re gone?” June then asked.

“I sure hope not,” I replied.

“Is it legal to camp out on the road like that?”

“You want to take him to court again?”

“I’m going to call the Sheriff and invite him to breakfast.”

I nodded and June called Mel Willits on her cell.

So we ordered waffles at a local breakfast spot called The Tides and comforted ourselves in carbohydrates and maple syrup. After he drove by Lester’s campsite and checked our property to make sure it hadn’t been molested, Willits joined us half way through the meal and sat at a booth with us. Level headed as he always was, he told us he didn’t think harassing Lester was wise—that probably Lester will get sick of camping by the side of the road and move on. “He probably is going through a mourning period and is afraid to leave the area.”

“If he was afraid to leave the area and wanted to camp out near home, why on the side of the road?”

“What do you mean?”

“Why not deeper in the woods, out of sight??”

“You’re saying he wants you to know he’s still around.”

I nodded. “He’s trying to terrify us.”

The Sheriff thought it over and mentioned that I was probably right. “I can talk to him,” he then said. “And I can tell him to move… I just don’t want to inflame things for you.”

“You’re probably right,” June said. “Don’t do anything for now.”

May 16, 2010 - Night Sounds

2010-01-16T00:12:00.000-08:00

We decided to overcome our fears and go sleep in our home. On the way home we saw his tent but not him. Maybe he was inside it sleeping, but who knows.

When June and Juliet were settled in the house, I went on line and started researching what it would take to purchase a gun for protection and I learned it would not be a simple thing to do in California—at least not in the short term, which was all I cared about at the moment. I have been pro-gun control laws my whole adult life and I have never wanted a gun before, but Lester’s presence had changed all that. I did know how to handle a gun, however, because my father had owned several—he was a collector of sorts—and had taken me to the firing range as a boy. I resolved to call my father and have him FedEx me one of his, which he agreed to as soon as I explained our predicament.

The gun would come the next day, but that seemed far away to me—too far away.

When there was another thump on the roof that night, like the one we experienced the first night in the house—my heart nearly stopped. All the windows and doors were well locked but it gave me little comfort. A maniac could break in if a maniac wanted to.

Juliet slept in our bed that night but nothing very eventful happened. Just a lot more night sounds to drive us all crazy.

May 16, 2010 - Man to Man

2010-01-14T20:18:00.000-08:00

The Fedex came the next morning and I examined the gun my father had sent. He'd sent along a box of bullets as well and I loaded the weapon, then unloaded it.

June and Juliet went to the grocery store to get some things and I decided to do a little target practice. Of course I wasn't really shooting the gun to practice my shot, I was doing it because I figured Lester would hear me shooting and it would make him aware I was armed and could protect myself. Nevertheless it turned out I was still a pretty good shot. I was able to hit an old garbage can from about thirty yards away almost every time I squeezed. It was actually kind of fun and gave me a charge. The smell of the gunpowder brought me straight back to childhood.

I sat on the stoop of my house after I was done shooting and I had a beer. Perhaps it was the adrenaline that the shooting generated, or maybe it was the fact that alcohol has a tendency to make me a little bit manic, but I resolved that I should go have a face to face with Lester at his tent and tell him man to man that I didn't appreciate him camping out so close to us, especially after I had paid him so much money to relocate.

I walked down the gravel road that lead to the highway and there he was, roasting some hot dogs over his Coleman stove.

As I stepped up before him, some of the John Wayne bravado I had been feeling slipped away from me, but not all of it.

"You come for a hot dog?" He asked, as he bit off some meat.

"I came to tell you that I'd prefer it if you'd make your camp somewhere father away, where you weren't intimidating myself or my family."

"Am I intimidating you, Dr. Johns, just by simply being a human being within your line of sight?"

"I think that's what you're intending to do. Otherwise I assume you would camp somewhere else or use the money I gave you to stay in a hotel for a while and get on your feet."

"I'm on my feet Dr. Johns," he said as he rose up to my level.

"I'm warning you Lester."

"Warning me of what? You going to shoot your little gun at me? Were you trying to intimidate me firing that thing all morning? You got a license to carry that thing? Maybe I ought to call the Sheriff and have him confiscate it from you like he confiscated mine?"

"You do what you want, Lester, but I'm telling you man to man that I want you to clear out of here."

"Man to man, ha?"

"Man to man."

"Hardly," he said bluntly as he stared daggers in my eyes.

"I want you out of here by tomorrow or I'll go get a restraining order."

"Sure, go run to your Kike lawyer for help. See if I care."

"Go to hell," I then said as I turned tail and walked back toward my house.

I did not look back. And I half expected to hear his footsteps rush up to me and tackle me. But they didn't come.

Even though I had acted like a tough guy and was convinced it was a reasonable tactic, there was a shadow hanging over my conscience the entire time I had acted--something that said: this is a mistake...you're playing with fire...you could be making matters worse.

And of course that shadow side of my awareness was correct, as I would find out the very next morning.

May 19, 2010 - Blood Money Part II

2010-01-12T22:36:00.000-08:00

We woke up the next morning to the sound of crinkling.

And as I cleared my groggy eyes and sat upright in bed, I got focused on the source of the sound.

The money I'd given Lester had been returned to us. And it was laying on top of us. A blanket of hundred dollar bills scattered about like fallen leaves.

"June, wake up." And then she did. And both our hearts nearly stopped.

"What the hell is this?" She asked, unclear, unfocused; earnestly confused about what this nightmare image meant.

"I think this is the cash I gave Lester to relocate. I think he returned it to us."

Her mother's instincts kicking in very suddenly, she lept from the bed calling for Juliet to find Juliet fine, still asleep in her bed. "What, what is it?" She said to her now hysterical mom.

"Nothing, it's nothing. Just a bad dream," she said, not wanting to alarm her.

Back in our bedroom, we asked ourselves how the hell he got in our house. Had the locks not been changed since his mother moved out, did he still have the keys?

We called the locksmith and had a very long discussion about what we had to do next.