Slugs for the snitches
"I swear," I said to Honnie, "I'd be gone. You'd see my legs spinning underneath me like a cartoon character."
I don't remember what Honnie said next, but I wish I did because in the end a bullet didn't go through my window ... it went through hers. And it was no accident. Someone stood on the sidewalk in front of her house, aimed a gun at her living room window and pulled the trigger. Three times. The bullets ripped through the curtains and chipped the tile on one of the fireplaces inside the home Honnie shares with her husband, Todd Kitchens, and her mother, Bren Goode.
"They didn't make much noise when they came through," says Bren of the bullets. "You'd think it would be louder than that."
If you want loud you should have heard the girl who threatened Bren's life earlier that day. The police didn't think the incident merited the filing of a formal complaint, even though when they arrived on the scene the girl was still standing there screaming at Bren on the street in front of her house. She was a little thing, the screaming girl, but God what a volcanic bitch she could be. According to her shrieks, Honnie's house was going to be blown up or burned down or both. She didn't even live in the house that started all this ruckus, the suspected crack house Honnie and her family were helping to close down. But the girl's boyfriend lived there so she felt it was her mission to go door-to-door on a campaign to convince people Honnie and her family were part of the Klan.
"Yeah, right," says Honnie to the tune of rap music blaring from the house next door:
Guess who back in the motherfuckin' house
With a fat dick for your motherfuckin' mouth.
"This is the first place a white supremacist would want to live," she finishes wryly.
In short, Honnie and Todd are not Klan members -- they're artists. Aside from their separate careers (Honnie's paintings will be featured in a solo exhibit at the Lowe Gallery in October, and the following month she'll tour Russia with another exhibit), together they are also part of the atmospheric musical ensemble Fascia, which is scheduled to perform collaborative installations at the Atlanta College of Art and the Dalton Galleries at Agnes Scott College later this year.
Honnie's family is cultured but not elitist. Bren, Honnie's mother, even makes her own soap, and their house always smells like a spa. I like to go in there and literally sniff around. Bren is also a devout member of the pacifist Baha'i faith, so when Todd brought home a legally purchased gun after the bullets flew through his front window, he kept it secret from Bren because her religion precludes her from abiding weapons. Perhaps, though, Todd should not have shown it to the suspected drug dealer next door, but more on that later.
From the beginning Honnie and Todd picked a risky street even by this neighborhood's standards. We live in Capitol View in southwest Atlanta. Four minutes from downtown, Capitol View is one of the last communities this close in where you can still buy an old, diamond-in-the-rough house for less than what law partners pay for one of their luxury cars. Bummer about those drug addicts and all, but hey, when is the last time you saw a wrap-around porch at these prices? And seriously, these days even Buckhead boasts a crack whore here and there. So Honnie and Todd bypassed houses on calmer streets because this house was cheaper, bigger, nicer and had an in-law suite in the back for Bren. It also had a solid foundation, those fabulous tiled fireplaces, high ceilings and, oh my God, that kitchen. You could live in that kitchen. My own kitchen counter is so small it couldn't support a card game, but Honnie and Todd's kitchen is bigger than my garage. And then there was the price; it was cheap enough to make their monthly house payment less than the cost of a day at Disney World. So they jumped on it, knowing it was a rough neighborhood, but not knowing there was a reputed crack house across the street.
"I'd heard there was illegal activity going on in there that involved drugs and prostitution," says Housing Inspector Robin Camp, who inspected the house and issued numerous code violations. Though she says she never saw any drugs or drug paraphernalia, she did note that it was an illegal boarding house popular with local prostitutes and full of tenants who appeared to be high. "It was obvious," she says.
"You cannot imagine the hassle it is to have a crack house on your block," Honnie tells me. But I erroneously think I can relate. I live nearby and once a prostitute solicited a john on the street in front of my home, which made me have to yell, "Whore yourself somewhere else!"
So like I said, I think I can imagine, but I'm so wrong. For example, Honnie tells me she was driving to work one morning and looked over to see a crack whore giving blow jobs to three men standing in line. There they were, she says, right in the yard along the side of the crack house: The Neighborhood Open-Air Porno Presentation. So Honnie is right, I can't even imagine that. "What a great way to start the day," she says dryly.
And from there it got worse. Honnie and Todd say neighborhood grade-schoolers were enlisted to sell dope. The couple lives almost directly across from Capitol View Elementary School, and Honnie has seen "8-year-olds dealing drugs to people driving by." And perhaps just as infuriating are the drug-addict panhandlers who impersonate charity employees. They stand in the middle of the street at intersections in bogus uniforms and flag people down for money. "I've seen them collect donations and go straight next door to buy drugs," says Honnie. It got to the point where she was calling the police to report criminal activity more often than she was calling her own friends to say hello.
But in the end, Honnie, Bren, Todd and other neighborhood activists bypassed police and resorted to red tape to strangle the place. The house's owner was slammed with housing-code violations like a blizzard of bureaucratic confetti. Rather than finance the mandated improvements, he simply emptied the house of tenants and put it up for sale. Now it's been transformed from a skanky, illegal boarding house into a piece of hot property.
"It's gorgeous in there," says Will Mathis, a real-estate agent who specializes in the area. "It's got four bedrooms, two bathrooms and four fireplaces," he's excited now, "four fireplaces!" Mathis knows the house's former life probably won't deter future buyers. At these prices, most houses in Capitol View sell before the sign goes up in the yard, and this one has guaranteed itself an increase in value simply by obliterating itself of its former life -- now that the crack house is gone, the neighborhood is, well, almost nice. "They're asking $86,000 for it," says Honnie incredulously, "as is." After just a few days on the market, it sold.
But that's not the end to her troubles. The neighbor right next door to Honnie is a man prosecutors suspect of being a drug dealer, according to City Solicitor Raines Carter. And he appears to be resisting his neighborhood's budding resistance to criminal behavior by launching his own campaign of intimidation. After the crack house closed down, he blared the same rap song continuously one day, at ear-bleeding decibels, the chorus of which goes like this:
" ... Snitches, snitches, snitches
They be running they mouth just like bitches
Snitches, snitches, snitches
I got a slug for ya'll muthafuckin' snitches ... "
Then later, according to Bren's recollection, there was the incident in which Bren ended up with his gun pointed in her direction. He wasn't really aiming at her. He apparently was aiming at someone running from his house at the time and Bren, while walking to her car, simply got in the way. "He didn't even apologize," she says. I mean, she realizes he's a suspected drug dealer and all, but you'd think he'd still be capable of that one basic neighborly cordiality.
Instead, this man had Bren arrested. He told the police that she -- Bren, the Baha'i worshiper who literally would not touch a gun if her own daughter's life depended on it -- pointed the gun at him. Evidently, this situation was not unique: Another neighbor was arrested after the man told police he had threatened him with a shovel. Last week, a judge dismissed both cases.
Still, it didn't help Bren's case that the gun her next-door neighbor described in his report matches the one police later found in her house. It was the one Todd kept there without her knowledge. Like I said, maybe Todd shouldn't have shown his neighbor the gun the day he bought it. But it was only a few days after his window was shot out, and he let the neighbor see it because he wanted him to know that he could protect himself. When you're not a violent person, though, you're not automatically equipped to predict the actions of others who might be.
In the meantime, the irony isn't lost on Bren that, when her life was threatened by the screaming girl just days before her own arrest, the police didn't deem it necessary to write a formal report, yet a person authorities suspect is a drug dealer can use these same police officers to cart off unfavored neighbors like he's got all the power of an ill-tempered emperor. With police protection this thin, Todd says, it's no wonder someone felt secure enough to stand out in the open and fire a gun at their house. The spent shells were found right on the sidewalk, for Christ sakes. (When Todd called to get a copy of the police report from that incident, he was told it had disappeared. Only the photos of the bullet holes remained.)
"This is the Zone 3 Precinct. When cops get transferred here they wonder what they did wrong to deserve it," says Honnie. She's referring to that tempest of crappy press the precinct withstood a couple of years ago, when a group of its officers were busted for pocketing kickbacks from drug dealers, among other offenses. But surely it's improved since then, right? I mean, what about the Multi-Zone Initiative instigated only two years ago? Wasn't that supposed to stamp out persistent drug and prostitution problems in this very neighborhood?
"I've been assigned to this area for over two years," says Camp, the building inspector, "and I've never seen a [systematic] police patrol here." So where are the policemen? "Well, I've seen them playing basketball down at Perkerson Park sometimes," she says.
"It's not like these drug dealers and prostitutes are shy about what they're doing," says Honnie. "It happens 10, 20 times a day. If I see it and you see it and everyone who visits us sees it, why can't the police see it?"
None of the Zone 3 police officers I called, specifically those involved in Bren's arrest, returned my messages to explain to me why crack whores can pull trains in broad daylight across the street from an elementary school yet a woman who makes her own soap and cares for aging canines is the one who gets arrested. I should say, though, that the random officers who answered the precinct's main phone line did sound concerned when I informed them of Honnie's family's predicament. They took down names and addresses and promised to "look into it." Other officials have shown concern as well, councilman Derrick Boazman and state Sen. Vincent Fort, who attended a neighborhood prayer vigil after Honnie's window was shot out. Also, Carter, the city solicitor, seems adamant that action will soon be taken to clean up the neighborhood.
But still the drugs and the terror continue. And let's not forget that this is a school zone. According to Georgia law, dealing drugs in a school zone carries stiffer penalties than your garden-variety prison sentence, so you'd think it would matter, then, that all this drug pushing and dog fighting and cluster fucking was not just happening in front of kids, but involving them as well.
I tried to talk to Honnie's next-door neighbor about that, as well as his allegations against his neighbors, but he refused comment, or at least I think that's what he meant when he drew his fingers across his neck like he was cutting his throat.
Honnie is bemused when I tell her about the gesture. "Sounds threatening to me," she says.
In any case, how long all this will go on is anybody's guess. So, in the meantime, I always drive by Honnie's house on my way home these days because she asked me to. So do a lot of her other friends who live nearby. Other than next door, her street is looking pretty nice now that the crack house is gone. Many houses have been bought up, fixed up and landscaped. Others show for-sale signs put there by landowners who discovered the neighborhood is starting to pull in prices that make small-time whoring and drug dealing less profitable by comparison. And in the middle of it, Honnie's house sits there like a little jewel, with potted flowers on the porch, bullet holes in the window and music bellowing from one house over:
hollow tips in ya', bang!
so duck when you hear that rat-tat-tat
'cause bullets got no name.
