You’ve come back from your Labor Day vacation to find a new resident moved into the rental down the street. He’s not really new to the neighborhood, though: your buddy next door told you he lived here a few years back but had to move out after he lost his job.
Most days, he seems friendly enough, waving to people as they walk by. He’s not so much waving to them, though. More like waving at them: he’s just standing in his front door waving, and if you happen to pass by, so be it. When you’re walking the dog, you wave back out of an unstated neighborly obligation. He calls it his personal “community review” everyone produces specifically for him.
A week after he moved in, he erected a fence around the yard, something explicitly against your HOA’s rules. But he says he’s allowed to because he used to run the board, so he’s allowed. He was real popular, you see, because he cut monthly fees to practically nothing; that means he’s got special rules, he explains.
The current board says that’s not true about the fence or the special rules, but they can’t be sure because he took all the meeting minutes with him when he moved. He did, however, leave behind hundreds of thousands of debt for unpaid contractors. Gossip is he used HOA money to make his car and rent payments, and he moved out of state to avoid charges.
Talking with him at your daughter’s school bus stop one morning–it’s odd, you think, because he doesn’t have school-aged kids of his own but he’s always at the bus stop–he tells you about how attractive his daughter was when she was your girl’s age. “She should’ve been a model. She had a great body, built kinda like yours,” he says. Your daughter is seven. His daughter doesn’t talk to him much anymore, except during obligatory calls on Father’s Day and maybe Christmas. He’s proud of her, though: she married into a Jewish family with money.
Occasionally, he’ll reminisce about the neighborhood in the old days, and how much he misses his “good buddy” Jeff. Those stories are a break from his normal tales about “my friend Jim” who no one seems to remember. But you knew Jeff. Jeff got hauled away by the feds for child porn.
Nobody’s really sure what he does for a living. One day, he’s talking about cryptocurrency and NFTs; the next he’s showing you photos of Chinese-made sneakers he can get cheap by the truckload. “The margin on them is great,” he says. “And we’ll just add the ‘Made in the USA’ sticker here.”
Despite his claims of great wealth–generational wealth, he says–he’s always short of cash. His lawn’s not mowed, and the front screen door is off its hinge. Still, a sign declaring it, “Best House in Community” by something called the Somerset Village Aesthetic Board hangs in the window. You don’t live in Somerset Village and the sign looks like it was printed on an InkJet.
He’s talking about running for the community board again. “This place became a hellhole since I left,” he says. “It’s gone to the pigs and rats, I see it every day strutting by my house like they own the place.”
Sure, you’re not thrilled with the daylilies they planted at the community entry sign, but you don’t see pigs and rats walking by your hou– HEY…..
But before you can say anything, he jumps in, “I don’t have to worry about your vote. I know I’ll win, unless they rig it against me. Just in case, give me $25 bucks so I can put up fliers. I’ll only use $10 of it for my legal issues. (“Legal issues?” you think. “What legal issues?”) And I want to babysit your daughter on Saturday night for, like, two hours.” You walk away cringing. “At my house!” he calls after.
Before you reach your front door, your phone vibrates with a text. It’s him. You don’t know how he got your number. “Let me babysit your daughter,” he demands. “And give me your credit card number for my legal fees from my embezzlement trial, which I’m totally innocent of by the way, which I need to delay until after I get elected board president so I can drop the charges.” An hour later you get another text message from him. Then another. Then another. Then an invitation to his cryptocurrency group. Then an offer for designer sneakers: “Made right here in the USA!” it says.
No one would send him money. No one would let him babysit their daughter. No one would vote for him to lead their community board. So why would some vote for him for President?