My 15-year-old refers to the rental house I own around the corner from where we live as the crack house. (Actually, it is not crack cocaine that they use and sell out of there — it is methamphetamine.)
Before my kids leave for school, I drink a cup of coffee and meditate for an hour. This inward-looking time puts me into a current in which life is less effortful, less a race, less scary; I become calm, and full of certainty about everything . . . until the phone rings, and it’s my 17-year-old. He’s in his car in front of the rental house, and there are a lot of police. And a hazmat vehicle. Sheets of plywood barricade each window. Doors padlocked.
Goodbye, quiet certainty. Hello, fear and struggle. I arrive to find a man, crouched down on one knee, facing the front of the house, writing on bright red and orange cardboard notices. Lengths of “Denver Police Line, Do Not Enter, Crime Scene” lie in tangled heaps on the grass. The letters DEA are emblazoned on the back of his jacket.
“Stolen property?” I ask him, hopefully. “Meth lab,” he says. “Oh, no.” I’ve rented to a man and a woman who have turned my lovely house into a meth lab and into trauma for their 7-year-old child. He, a 40ish man credentialed as a used-car broker, with a side job: buying up the contents of abandoned storage units to sell on eBay or the flea market. She, a mortgage broker who is currently a full-time mom. The man, an extrovert with incessant bonhomie, buddied up to the neighbors by pledging to do odd jobs for the infirm and female, if asked, and to spend snowy mornings clearing sidewalks with his snow blower.
When the SWAT unit crashes through the front and back doors, blowing out the glass from the picture windows, does the couple think, “Unbridled hell is breaking loose in my quiet, leafy neighborhood”? With firearms pointed dead-aim and police screaming at them to lay face- down on the floor, do they look up to see the female officer make her way to a back bedroom, grab up the child and slip away before sleepy eyes open enough to comprehend the trauma she’s waking to?
The notices are taped on the exterior of the house. “Clandestine Drug Lab Found On This Property!” “Hazardous Contamination!” “Do Not Enter!” “Not Safe For Human Occupancy!”
Wind, snow, rain, they cling. For 90 days, the postings salute the neighbors. Finally, the day before the demolition crew arrives to scrape off 1,200 square feet of three-bedroom, one-bath ranch, I yank the notices off.
The former tenants and I cross through terrain that is similar in some respects. We are shocked, distressed, numb, fearful. We feel the world caving in on us: They, a bleak existence, incarcerated, with felony child abuse charges coming down hardest. I talk to lawyers and insurance companies, police detectives, neighborhood nuisance abatement people. I learn that meth “cleanup” starts at $20,000, and can climb to $100,000. I find out that most insurance companies, mine included, write policies to exclude the coverage of chemical contamination. “Industrial hygienists,” called in to swab surfaces for meth contaminate, follow up with multi-thousand-dollar invoices. Contractors in the disaster-remediation industry haul away the contents of the house for $4,000. I realize that even decontaminated to state standards, the taint will deter potential buyers if I try to sell it.
Impending financial ruin provokes flight or fight, decisively. But the peril is more than financial; it is safe haven breached, the base of operations where my kids function, threatened. It is emotional stability, oriented around certainty, predictability, comfort, and good fortune, lapsing. Suddenly, I’m on the Bad Luck Roller Coaster, vulnerable and powerless. There is no getting off until the ride is over. Until then, I am dodging dread, clamping down on spiraling emotions, and globally freaking out.
Every so often, life’s current seems to deposit us into regions that are a hairsbreadth away from disaster. What can we do? Often, it’s reducing experience down to a minute at a time: I’m OK now, I’m OK now, and an hour, a night, a week later and I’m OK. Eventually the OKs add up to six months, and you realize that each of those now-moments were just little surrenders, to the whatever is out there that makes things OK — if we let it.
Linda King (lindaking@comcast.net) of Denver is a mother of three boys and an incorrigible multitasker.
