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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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...