Please Don’t Wake The Sleeping Crackhead: July 2006

I went outside one morning and discovered Gordon in my front yard. His jacket was spread out and he was lying on it with his eyes closed. I wasn’t sure if he was dead or just sleeping so I walked over and called his name. As he slowly got up, it became apparent that he was pretty high. Without saying a word, he started to wander away. When I asked him to take his jacket with him he seemed a bit bothered by my request.

For the next hour Gordon came and went, frequently selling drugs to people all the while. He was staying off my property, and I was busy working on my house, so I just tried to ignore him as best I could. This was made difficult however as he kept mumbling incoherently and loudly. It was difficult to tell whether he was speaking to me or just to himself, so again, I tried to ignore him.

At one point he started rambling on about how his head hurt. The way he was hollering, I expected to see blood as I turned towards him. Instead, he was holding his hands over his ears and saying “Man, why do you have to make all that noise? Can’t you work somewhere else?” I put down my tools, walked over to him, and explained that if he thought that I was going to schedule my home-improvement projects around his drug-dealing activities, that he was very mistaken. He apologized and said I had misunderstood him. He continued coming and going from the area for the next hour, but with no further complaints about my noise.

My phone rang, so I stepped inside for about five minutes. I had a lot of tools out, but they seemed pretty safe being on my porch, and the front door was left standing open. When I came back outside and got back to work, I discovered that my circular saw was missing. Things were pretty messy out there, and if it had been something smaller like a tape measure or box cutter I would have just assumed I had misplaced it. But it’s hard to lose a circular saw, and the cord that it had been plugged into was still there, so obviously it had been swiped. And I had a pretty good idea who took it.

I called the police to report this. I seriously didn’t expect them to find or even to look for my saw. But by this point I had decided that I needed to make sure that things were being documented. In the past, most of the times that I had called the police here or otherwise been involved with them I didn’t ask for a copy of their report. But as time went on I realized that without obtaining a police report on a particular incident, I had no way of knowing what was being said by FWPD or even if reports were actually filed. So I gave the information, asked for the officer's name and the report number, and went back to work.

A few minutes later, Brian walked over and asked what the police were doing here. Brian is one of the older guys here. Although he was probably a major player back in the day, his business activities here are very rare and very quiet. I’ve always gotten along well with him after the time he told me that some kids were trying to climb into my house through a window I’d left open. I explained to Brian what had happened and who I suspected of taking the saw. I told Brian that I was getting tired of what was going on here and that I am going to start calling the police more frequently if the problems persist.

A couple hours later, I was still working out front when I noticed a patrol car had stopped in the middle of the street beside my house. Just then, Carl came walking towards me, carrying my saw. He said he had found it in the empty lot behind my house and heard that I had lost a saw. For a brief moment, I almost responded angrily towards Carl. My saw had been stolen and he now had it in his hands. But I quickly realized there was a more likely explanation than that Carl had stolen my saw.

When I refer to Carl and some of the others here as businessmen rather than just drug dealers, this might seem odd to some people. This terminology might seem to imbue them with more dignity than is deserved. But my choice of wording has absolutely nothing to do with the righteousness of their activities. There is a significant difference between the guys who seem to want to make trouble here, and guys like Carl who make more money with less hassle. My calling these guys businessmen is no different than referring to someone as a professional thief. You can be good at what you do, even if what you do is bad.

Stealing an old saw that is only worth about twenty bucks, and getting the police called out for it, is not a good business strategy. But resolving the problem is. It’s possible that Carl actually did just happen to find the saw lying around. But I think it’s more likely that he had heard from Brian what I said about calling the police. And it’s likely that he didn’t have much trouble finding who took the saw and where it was at.

My statement that day to the guys here was that I had called the police because of the stolen saw, not because of the crackhead who had been wondering around the block all day. And they responded by getting my saw returned to me. I thanked Carl and shook his hand, then went over to the police officer who was watching the entire time. I explained to him that I didn’t think Carl had taken the saw and I was satisfied now that it had been returned. I didn’t have the control number for the report on me, but I told this officer that Officer Kissinger had filed it. I asked that he mention to Officer Kissinger that the saw had been recovered so that he could amend his report.

When I think back on this day, I still laugh a bit. I don’t think the patrol car was in sight when Carl began approaching my house with the stolen saw. And by the time it caught up to him he had nowhere to go other than to continue on towards me. If I had acted on my initial impulse, I would have shouted at Carl and accused him of being a thief. And of course him holding the saw with the police officer as a witness would make his explanation of “I just found it” seem pretty lame.

I think that Carl and I both gained a good understanding of each other that day. We certainly have some significant differences between us: he’s a drug dealer and I’m not. But I think we have something in common in our style. One could debate the morality or the intelligence of deciding to be a drug dealer, but without knowing all the circumstances that led Carl to this it really is meaningless. But knowing the position Carl is currently in, and his current options, I would generally characterize his behavior as very rational.

For reasons that are unknown to me, Carl has decided to sell drugs, but he tries to do so in a sensible fashion. Not only does he not purposely try to offend the residents here, as many of the dealers do, but he actually works to maintain cordial relations or solve disagreements between the two groups. My assessment of Carl as being a rational actor was what led to an interesting conversation between the two of us later in the year. And I believe Carl’s own assessment of my rational behavior was what convinced him to help smooth over a very serious rift between myself and some of the other dealers here.