In the first part of this post, I talked about how I met Alfred, a mentally disabled man who lived across the street from me with his barely functional mother and grandfather.
A few years after I moved into the neighborhood, Alfred’s grandfather died. Not long after that, his mother’s condition worsened. Within a few years, she would be carted off to an assisted-living facility. Amazingly, Alfred was now in the house by himself. And despite his disabilities, the neighbors who’d known him all his life made no effort to help him.
While there is no shortage of transient renters on my block, there’s also a strong quotient of homeowners. For example, in the bank of eight houses where I live, not only is each one of them occupant-owned (I bought mine two years after moving in), but after nine years, I’m still the new kid on the block; everyone’s been here longer than I have.
But none of that seemed to matter as Alfred’s situation became increasingly bleak. No sense of community emerged. No one felt compelled to act on his behalf. Instead, his situation was left to crumble.
Part of the issue was that none of the neighbors I spoke with seemed willing to acknowledge the obvious: that Alfred is mildly retarded and clearly incapable of taking care of himself. Rather, everyone I had casual conversations with held him to the same standards that one would hold a “normal” person.
When Alfred’s disabled mother ended up in a facility, they blamed him for being an uncaring son who callously “shipped his mother off to a home,” whereas I couldn’t imagine him having any role in the decision whatsoever. When he occasionally came around looking to borrow money for medicine or food, they treated him like a panhandler and griped about him being too lazy to get a job, while I wondered who would actually hire him or if he even knew how to look for one.
I was always stunned by these responses from our neighbors. If Alfred had all of his faculties, then their attitude would have been understandable. But they seemed to be in utter denial about him. They simply refused to believe what seemed so patently obvious to me, and I came to see their stance as nothing short of willful ignorance.
Alfred actually did get a job eventually. He managed to catch on as an usher at Camden Yards, home of the Baltimore Orioles baseball team. It was the kind of work he could actually do. He was issued a polo shirt, a wind breaker, an orange cap, and tan polyester pants. Eighty-one days a year, he’d hop on the local number 27 bus and take the half-hour ride downtown, always arriving very early. His job was to look at tickets and show people to their 
seats. Apart from some tips on Opening Day, he earned state minimum wage (Maryland’s rate is a couple of bucks higher than the national mandate). He netted between three and four thousand dollars a year. I know because for a few years I did his taxes, making sure to get him the full refund as well as some Earned Income Credit.
Of course it wasn’t enough. First the phone got shut off. Then the gas and electric. Alfred had no heat, but due to his sizable heft and Baltimore’s short and not terribly difficult winters, he didn’t seem to mind. He managed to get a cheap cell phone. For a while, he charged it on the external outlet on the side wall of the corner bar. I’d given him a skillet so he could save money by cooking food, but once the utilities went, he seemed to subsist on crap from our local version of 7-11, the Royal Farms.
If my neighbors were willfully ignorant, bordering on the delusional, about Alfred’s impaired mental faculties, then in retrospect the same could be said about me for my willingness to believe that this was a tenable situation. Clearly, it wasn’t. A friend pointed that out toe me and suggested that I call social services so they could put Alfred into assisted living. I was reticent. Who was I to initiate state proceedings to toss someone from their home? I wasn’t family. I was just some guy who lived across the street. I contented myself with idle gossip around the neighborhood that the house was owned outright, and mention of an uncle who helped out.
The most obvious threat to Alfred staying in the house was property taxes. Our hundred year-old houses in this transitional working class neighborhood aren’t worth that much, but the city has an astronomical property tax rate of well over two percent. I figured his annual bill would be similar to mine, approaching $2,000 a year, which he clearly could not afford. I asked him about it a couple of times, and he mentioned something about a city program that took care of it. It sounded vaguely feasible given his situation, and that was enough for me. I knew no details, but was happy to believe that, despite all the evidence to the contrary, Alfred would not lose his home.
Of course I was wrong.
Last month a twenty yard dumpster appeared in front of his house. A couple of workers spent three days hauling stuff out. Each day they filled that dumpster, had it emptied, and started over. They were gutting the place.
One neighbor spoke to the workers. She says they told her that Alfred apparently had not been taking the garbage out. Instead, he was for years tossing his refuse into the basement, nearly filling it up. The windows were painted shut and the smell was so bad that the workers broke some of them open to let in fresh air. Word is they also found all of his sports 
memorabilia, several thousand dollars worth, still scattered about the house. My neighbor claims the workers said their boss had bought the house for $13,000. That’s barely one-tenth of its value, even in that condition, implying it had been gotten at auction, possibly for tax default. But that was a rumor, and this neighborhood is chock full of unreliable chatter.
And as for Alfred himself? No one seems to know where he is. There aren’t even any rumors about it. He’s just gone. And no one seems to give a shit.
There is no community.