Prisoners on North Street, it's a dirty little war

So....I'm standing on my porch last night, holding my cat and waiting for Richard to come over. Ever hear of that 'reverse paranoia' thing? That's where they ARE out to get you, but you're pretending very hard that they're not.

So I'm staring resolutely ahead and trying not to notice that the guy in apartment F is spitting on my porch, and the girl in D is hanging out the window yelling "you HAVE to move!" at me.

I should point out I've maybe had all of two or three words with D girl since they moved in, and when F moved in me & Z helped them with their computer set up.

I have to move. Nevermind I've never done or said a single mean thing, or much of anything, to these people. Nevermind none of them has lived there longer than a half year while I've been in the same apartment since 2002.

I guess it's ok tho. I want to move, to be honest. Since people like these have moved in this place hasn't been a good place anyway. I have maybe a handful of friends who would dare visit at all, this neighborhood is getting such a (well deserved) bad rep. But...I don't much like being threatened, or having ultimatums laid on me. By noobs, no less.

Ok, this is the tl;dr part. Some of you already know much of this, but for the sake of those who just walked in, here we go again.

Flashback. Almost two years ago. October 9, 2009. I'm sitting around at my apartment with my caregiver Xoe and I ordered some food from 864-TOGO, the local service that drives around to restaurants and picks you up things. Why? Because I have a bad leg and walking the 6 blocks or so to Shalimar is just too much hassle for me. Because neither of us have eaten yet and last I heard it isn't a crime to order takeout food.

Apparently tho, to the rednecks of North Street it is.

Now, at that particular time I should also point out, tho I don't blame television for bad kids so much as I blame crappy parenting, there's a group of wrestlers had just come out called The Nexus. Their big gimmick, the thing that makes them 'hip' is they gang up on other wrestlers, 6 on 1.

This being so, there's this little teenage gang on North Street trying to earn themselves a little rep. I find out after the fact that they had been messing with the TOGO drivers for months before this. But this particular time, Xoe's on the porch waiting for the driver, and the gang of kids is in the street (or so Xoe said at the time. I'm not going to deny, for the sake of fair witnessing there are parts of this story that only Xoe has been present for. Much as I like Xoe, I don't want to be biased in this). Xoe said they surrounded the driver and grabbed the bag of food from him.

Xoe's hungry. Xoe's grieving (one of our friends had passed away a few days earlier), and most importantly, Xoe's off her meds. She'd been whiddling this stick with some sandpaper all day to make into some kind of wand/athame thing, and she stuffed it in her jacket and took off after these guys.

By the time I got on the porch some creepy old guy from around the corner is following her around, and there's a lady come out of the laundromat. Insofar as I saw, they were the only people on the street.

I asked the laundry lady if she saw anything, but she claimed at that time that she hadn't.

Well. Any normal red-blooded human being is going to do what when there's been theft and drama on their doorstep? I called the police. Xoe also sort of turned herself in admitting that dashing after the kids had been rash. She said she had just wanted to ID them, not hurt them, but since she had been very angry it may have been misconstrued. Old Man had blocked her from proceeding. She thought at the time that he had done so so she wouldn't get hurt, but it turns up she couldn't have been more wrong.

Now, my landlord, Bill Bissonette, is kinda notorious for not screening the people he lets into this place. Prior to this tale we had already had two stalkers and one noise maker who eventually got themselves evicted; all of the aforementioned were parolees/ex-cons. One'd think if you wanted to make a rep for yourself in a new neighborhood you'd pick the second biggest badass and go after him? But no, these skanks just love bullying weaker people. I'm this old-too-young chick who, due to the dis-eases in my body is already walking with a cane at 45 and my caregiver? Well, legally by Vermont law she's female. Her driver's ID says female.

There are those who might beg to differ.

Long story short tho is, we must look like uber easy prey to these kinds of scumbags. How hard is it to just leave people who aren't interested in redneck drama alone? or help your neighbors if you see them robbed or harassed?

The neighborhood decided they hated us. Since there are so many ex-cons we had done the Bad Thing. How dare we call cops into this area? Mostly we got a lot of stinkeye, and folk following us around, or making ominous statements like "snitches get stitches' and suchlike.

At the time tho we still had one neighbor who sort of tried to keep the peace. This guy Ace. Every day he'd be out in early morning cleaning up the messes the drunks made, and yelling at people who were causing trouble.

Of course we told him, and the longest-living-in-the-building neighbor, Donna, whatall happened. But this didn't slow any of the next stuff down.

Xoe got in touch with the TOGO driver and found out these kids had been bugging him previously. Dude by the name of Thomas. He gave Xoe his number and asked her to let him know if she saw the perp again.

Which of course she did; turns out he's buds with the folk who had just moved into D at the time. Thom and Xoe go off to the police station to tell them they had a visual ID and a lead where to find the dude, and that should be that, right?

Wrong. Suddenly Laundry Lady and Old Man are spreading rumors; first Old Man (whose name I never found out until after he died was Bob Bellisle http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/burlingtonfreepress/obituary.aspx?n=robert-p-bellisle&pid=150262663 but that's getting waaaaay ahead...) claims Xoe went after him with a knife, and then began claiming this happened more than once, the sizes of the knife and the amounts of time Xoe was waving it varying as the tale went around. Then...when it's clear nobody is really buying Bob's story.... Laundry Lady starts claiming that not only is Xoe still running around with aknife every three seconds, but is coming in to the laundromat, in BROAD DAYLIGHT, while it is open, and raping her at knifepoint.

These tales went on for the next year.

Bizarrely, even though many of the rape tales (which are already kinda ridiculous- umm....a laundromat that has lots of business coming in and out?! with HUGE bay windows and an open back door???) were super farfetched, the neighbors- even the ones who had asked then why didn't she ever report these to the police? or get a rape kit done? actually start spreading them too.

Apparently half the teen gang are kids of these people, so rather than rein in their kids they want to defame us so when the kids get 'revenge' on us calling the cops on them, no one will believe us.

I should point out that none of these people even know our names, nor we theirs. Their common catcall was 'hey FAGGOT' at Xoe, and me, I'm 'fatty' or 'that fat bitch' even tho I haven't done anything to anyone. (Oh, I was 'faggot' too. I....kinda thought the term for gay females is 'lesbian'? and.... if Xoe is a guy to them and therefore a 'faggot'....wouldn't that mean 'he' wouldn't have any interest in women? So why would 'he' be raping one?

Also Laundry's tales of wanton rapine always seem to take place when we're actually out somewhere in town, which, again, due to my leg? it isn't likely I can be two places at once (yes, by now in order to add me to the fun I'm somehow there holding her down as the public looks on). I think the first one I'd heard of we were actually in Colchester, at a Bible study. And one of the times Xoe is apparently raping her? she was actually at the Zombie Parade on Church Street, being videotaped at same. But somehow magically us evil faggots are really committing acts of rape in public places, not where we actually know we were.

The funniest one of these to me was just a week and a half ago. While rumors flew around the neighborhood that we were at Laundry Lady's house (the laundromat had since closed; we don't even know where she lives) raping her even as she phoned her friends to tell them so, we were actually on live call in TV at Nick Brisette's Wrestling Hour on channel 15 VCAM. Yep, while we were miles away raping this girl we were also talking to some of the people who were telling people we were doing this, while simultaneously prank calling the show.

Anyway, to try to get back on track with the linear, Ace died in July of 2010 and suddenly all these drunks were camped out under our steps, waiting to bother us when we came in. Bisonette actually went and did something! going so far as to just put up some 'no trespassing' signs, but the drunks just tore them down.

Things got relatively quiet in winter, with just the occasional odd drunk yelling challenges at our window (oh, yeh, I'm really going to answer to 'faggot' and come down to a crowd that wants to beat me) and scads of loud-enough-that-anyone-can-hear gossiping.

Then... Bellisle died a month or so ago.

Now, I was standing on the porch when the ambulances pulled up. I don't know -exact- details, and honestly? don't care, but since I'd seen him buy and sell other people's prescription meds (more than once on MY porch!) and he was a notorious drinker it seemed a pretty cut-and-dry case of a junky ODing himself....but NO.

The bizarre thing is, most of the tales about us are -utterly- irrational. The leader of the kid gang eventually got caught hiding in the closet of a house he'd been trying to rob. The house's owner caught him, and he got sent up for 4 months. I only know this from the gossips talking loudly about it, and the house was apparently blocks away but somehow? We called them on him. Ruined his young life, we did.

How dare we.

We also somehow magically killed Bob, too. I'm still not sure how that was achieved, since it seems to me since he hated us we wouldn't have had any way near him. Just somehow flew in his room and poured drugs down his throat, did we? With our Evil Gay Powers. Because everyone knows faggots and narcs can do anything.

Now, all this talk of anti-gay epithets, you can guess, hasn't sat well with everyone. This IS Burlington, after all, the gay marriage capital of like the World. Bob did lose some customers when some of the rednecks came out of the closet in protest of all the 'kill the faggot' sentiments. This didn't slow them a jot; after all, Xoe's part Korean. Just replace 'faggot' with the word 'gook'. All should be well. Excepting that, just as they got to talking about fagbashing just as there was a rash of news about that sort of hate crime all over the world, about when they tried to turn the tides on us for our obvious Asian weirdness suddenly the Japan tragedy happened.

So so far it's been just trash talk. The world keeps churning out stories that make killing us oh so inconvenient. (not that that's stopped our new neighbor down in C, a sex offender https://secure.vermont.gov/DPS/sor/details.php?oid=307 from deciding he was singlehandedly going to stop the 'rapist' by trying to hire a hitman -wtf??- to knock out Xoe's teeth. I mean... a child molester who just moved in thinking he's a hero? and how does ruining someone's teeth stop them from raping if they really were? not to mention how's he going to pay a hitman with a welfare check???) Nonetheless we get death threats almost every day for the 'crime' of daring to sit on the porch, or walk to the store. We get anti-gay slurs. Threats of violence. More and more rumors. (The other day, I was going- again to a Bible study with some friends, and the guy in F tries telling my friends not to associate with me because I was- get this!- a Moslem terrorist.)

So. This brings me to the night, on the porch. Earlier, some kids I'd never seen in my life who had been visiting F threatened to push me down the stairs while I was heading out. Push me. A handicapped woman who they don't even know, off my OWN porch. Why? Because I'm fat, and I'm gay, and I don't just lay down and take it when people screw with me, I call police into the neighborhood they'd rather have be a comfort zone for crime.

There was an article in the Burlington Free Press last month about the drunks on North Street. http://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/article/20110407/NEWS02/104070309/North-St-loitering-concerns-Burlington-neighbors I actually stopped in to talk to the guy who wrote it to see if he was willing to do a follow up, because man, he hasn't even touched the tip of the iceberg. No one mentions the anti-gay stuff. And Bisonette? Unlike the article says, hasn't done a thing about these guys yet.

So far Baird hasn't gotten back to me either.

Look. I don't claim to be any kind of saint. But I've lived on this street for 7 years, and I don't bother much of anyone; can't really as I can barely get around. But....when I could get around I was sort of Somebody. Never super famous, but Somebody. I wrote zines, played shows, had art hangings. Even today I continue to do a music show on VCAM channel 15 that I've been doing since 2004. I have a radio show on The Radiator, which I'm sure not a lot of people tune in to since it's in the daytime on a work day, but it's there. I'm an active member in not one, but several churches in town when I can find rides to attend, as is Xoe. (She also does pub acc TV and a show on The Radiator). Xoe's active at groups at RU12? as well as St.Mike's Japan Society, a few roleplay groups at Quarterstaff, a nominal role in Nightmare Vermont.

I'd like to hope if something happened to us someone would notice, someone would care. What kind of neighborhood is okay with people defaming and threatening a couple of women for daring to not want to be robbed?

I'd like to hope if something happened to us someone would notice.

I'd prefer it if nothing happened to us at all.

I'd really like it if someone would take notice how screwed up North Street really is and DO SOMETHING.

Because I actually agree with random lady in apartment D, I do need to move, the way things are now. Too bad I'm too broke, and handicapped, and I can't move, because I'm guessing the unspoken 'or else' is that they kill us for not moving, and I hate to sound conceited, but I'm way too cool a person to die that way.