Chapter 31: House Keys (9/28)
This Is a Good One
We usually have plenty of blanks for house keys.
When the students come back to town, typically that’s when the landlords will show up for their annual visit to their property. They come from the South (Cape Cod, most likely), in their BMW M5 and pull right up. I typically walk over to the door and hold out my hands, anticipating a clutch of keys.
But not this year.
The Southie real estate market is brimstone-hot and landlords can move their crappiest units. Help to fix them up, however, must be in short supply as they apparently have to do it themselves. One such Boomer was picking up supplies as I was cutting his keys and he’s asking me the best way to patch a wall.
In a rare show of attitude I looked up from the iron shavings pummeling my face and said: “Google it.”
And then the strangest thing happened.
Suddenly, outside, there were cops everywhere, sirens wailing. I looked out the window and could see a police helicopter. They had blocked off the street at the bottom of Perkins hill and had cleared the road.
They were setting up a mini-blockade on the street directly outside our shop, and I had a kind of bird’s eye view.
Then—in the security mirror posted over the key machine that points up the hill—I saw two troopers come barreling over Broadway, and directly behind it, an absolutely massive dump-truck. It was truly shocking.
Then the troopers in front of the truck started laying on their breaks, and the massive truck followed suit, making a terrifying squealing sound.
Cops love hardware stores so eventually they came in to use the bathroom and gave me the lowdown.
Apparently a construction truck driver was going through Andrew Square and ran a red light. Andrew Square is a dangerous six-way intersection down the road from us and is always notoriously crowded with junkies and drunks.
Turns out, this dump-truck barreled through the square and ran over one of these vagrants.
Not only that, but the body had been ripped in half and one half of it had become wedged in the body of the truck. So the driver, clearly inebriated (I’d guess Xanax), had no idea he had run anyone over and kept on driving with the body bleeding out into the street.
So the cops had to somehow corral the runaway dump-truck and, somehow, get the driver to slow down, and stop, so they could arrest him.
Except they didn’t.
As I watched this scene unfold one thing was clear: The driver was very much hopped up on pills (or drunk, maybe) because once they pulled him from the cab he clearly had no idea what was going on.
Slowly the cruisers peeled away, one by one, and I’m thinking “When are they going to arrest this guy?”
Sure enough, up pulls a very official-looking car carrying a Builders Union rep and they put the driver into the union cruiser and drove away.
He was … protected (probably by the Thug Mayor). Later on, some TV reporters showed up and I was on Boston TV one last time (it was removed).
We re-enacted the scene like it was a case of Unsolved Mysteries … because it really was. When I went to look it up later to post to social media… the story had completely vanished (the one report I found is below—and the mask from the “reporter” is hilarious to me now).
It was then I started to become laser-focused on one thought: “I have to get the hell out of here.”
At the very least, I was now a witness to a crime, at the most, the city was overrun with criminality.
It would not be the last time that God would send me a sign that the city was going to hell in a hand basket, very quickly. More on that next week. And by next week I mean, tomorrow.
Time is an illusion.