Hillbilly Heaven

Major Hoop’s House. One of the oldest houses in New Jersey.

My partner and I had a minor disagreement over how I should title this post. They wanted me to call it “Hillbilly Hell.” And they sure had a point! It was hell for us! In 1992, Belvidere, NJ, was one of the most isolated places in northwestern New Jersey. It was a rural backwater surrounded by cornfields. There was a little strip mall with a supermarket, a Chinese restaurant, and small retail shops. And, of course, there was a laundromat. It was close enough to walk to, which was a mercy. Otherwise, you were stuck with the shops in town. 

There was a tiny grocery store in the town center, a pet shop, an excellent deli, a little bookshop, and two libraries. Belvidere was the country seat, so we got the county and town library. At least I always had reading material. The grocery store had a very nice meat counter, but it was a little on the expensive side. Sounds absolutely idyllic, doesn’t it? We hated every second we had to live there. We were utterly isolated. We only got to see or catch up with our old friends on the Third Sunday in May Picnic in Sheep’s Meadow in Central Park. We never missed a picnic. It was the only time we felt any connection with our old lives.

Belvidere was one of the oldest bergs in New Jersey. Maybe one of the first cities in that part of the state. It was founded by Major Hoops and once home to Robert “Bob” Miller, who was famous for embezzling the Continental Congress into insolvency. There were a few revolutionary war-era buildings in the area. My mother-in-law nearly burned one of them down. She had her oil pan replaced, and the mechanics didn’t put a new cap on it. So oil splashed on the engine as she drove, and black smoke rose from under the hood.

Of course, MIL called the garage and asked about it. But the mechanic assured her that oil had spilled on the engine during the replacement. She shouldn’t worry about it, and it would burn away on its own. MIL took him at his word and decided to drive the 70 miles to our house. She figured the oil would burn off by the time she got to us. Things went fine on the highway, where there weren’t many twists, turns, and bumps. But once she turned onto Alternate 22, the oil splashed out of her engine in buckets. Her whole car was surrounded by black smoke, but the mechanic had assured her that it was supposed to do that, so she kept driving. 

So there she was, driving down Mauch Chunk Road with a solid thunderhead of black smoke pouring out from under her hood. MIL was a mile from our place and decided to pull into a diner to use the bathroom. The restaurant was a log cabin built a little after the constitution was ratified and a county landmark. MIL parked up against the 200-year-old wooden building and ran into the bathroom.

She was no sooner in the restroom when the car burst into flames. Fire shot out from under the hood and kissed the cabin’s well-seasoned logs. A pair of Belvidere cops and a few volunteer firefighters were having lunch. They jumped into action. One of the cops burned both his palms pushing the car away from the diner. While a firefighter grabbed an extinguisher. The second firefighter called for a truck while the second cop banged on the lady’s room door and shouted, “Hey, Lady, your car’s on fire.”

MIL yells back, “don’t worry, it’s supposed to do that!”

MIL came back outside, and her car had been pushed to the middle of the lot while firefighters doused it with a high-pressure hose. The entire front end was blackened and cracked, and the tires exploded. To this day, my partner and I crack up if one of us says, “it’s supposed to do that.” 

I went into town the following Monday and saw one of the town cops in civvies, whose hands were bandaged. “Hi, Bob; what happened to your hands?” I asked

“You’re not going to believe this, Bill, but this ditzy redhead was driving with black smoke pouring out of the hood. Kent and I were having lunch at the Log Cabin, and we were putting our food down to get in the car to stop her. But she drove into the lot and parked right next to us. Then her car caught fire!”

“I heard it was supposed to do that,” I said, my face flushed. “That was my mother-in-law.”

“You poor son of a bitch,” Bob said sympathetically.

I can’t blame my mother-in-law, really. Not only is she one of the kindest and most generous people I have ever met, but she is also the least mechanically inclined. Besides, she was heading for Blair House. I’m convinced we lived on top of a cursed burial ground, like in that movie. I never saw any paranormal events, like floating toys or dead preachers. Still, the place seemed to attract misery and bad luck. And who needed dead preachers when we had the apartment manager? That woman was misery on two legs.

I was outside late one evening, and I saw Manager lumbering around in her bedclothes. She looked like a bear in a pink nightgown. I still shudder at the memory. When I first moved in, a volleyball net was set up, and we’d go outside on the weekends and play. Manager decided that she wanted to manage a Blair House softball team. Nobody was interested. Half the players were Sikhs who didn’t know baseball from Jujitsu. And we weren’t playing by any rules. We were drinking beer and hitting the ball back and forth.

Two days later, we got a letter written on Blair House Stationary forbidding the playing of volleyball. Manager took our refusal personally. The nut thought she was Nurse Ratchet and the rest of us were her inmates. Then she wondered why we all gave her the fish eye when she tried to sign us up for her softball team. Only Chris, her ex-husband, joined. But poor Chris couldn’t get himself to stand up to her. 

My poor partner had moved in several months before I did. And Manager tried to dictate my partner’s life. They put up with it because they hoped management would let me move in. Then we found out that Manager had been lying, and did the gloves come off! I didn’t announce I was moving in. I just showed up with all my stuff. A few days later, Manager was at the door, threatening to have my family evicted if I didn’t leave immediately. Then my partner showed her all the papers, all legal and proper, and told her to take a long walk off a short pier. That woman spent the next three and a half years trying to me kicked out. 

As luck would have it, Manager had a kid the same age as our youngest boy. Our apartments adjoined, and the kids became fast friends. We let our guard down enough to let our toddler into Manager’s apartment to play. We figured it would be alright if her ex-husband, the maintenance man, was around. But one day, Chris wasn’t there, and Manager burst into the bathroom while our son was peeing. Our youngest is autistic, and that moron traumatized him so severely that he still can’t go to the toilet unless the door is locked.

Manager found what she was looking for, though. There was a ring of contact dermatitis on both legs. I also get the same type of rash from many artificial fibers. His mom and I had already spotted it and treated it. But Manager reported it to DYFS.  

Now the Division of Youth and Family Services gets crank calls twice an hour. And god knows my parents had phoned in their own share. But when Manager called in her crank report, they had crank reports from two unrelated cranks and had to send an investigator.

The local DYFS office had its share of problems. They were notorious for having snatched a kid from a loving home because the kid had the same name as an abused child. And instead of admitting to the problem, they doubled down and insisted they were right. And the poor abused child was left in hell. DYFS sent us an investigator who must have been a significant problem. She violated our 5th, 6th, and 14th amendment rights by staring through our window without announcing herself. This caused further trauma to my youngest, a teen, before we could open the shades. 

Madam Stormtrooper then pounded on the door like a cop. Mom was in the bathroom, so my ten-year-old answered the door and physically blocked her from storming inside. Our four-year-old was in the middle of a full-scale meltdown over the nasty person who stared through our windows. My partner heard our oldest yelling that a business card wasn’t legal identification. The woman tried to force her way in without legal identification, and our oldest kid kept blocking her. 

Stymied by a ten-year-old. My partner went to the phone and started calling the cops while the idiot yelled she was from DYFS, waving her card over her head. I don’t think that ever happened to her before. 

My partner put down the phone to demand her business, and do you know what the first question was out of that idiot social worker’s mouth? She pointed to my youngest and asked, “Is his father Black?”

My partner slammed the door in that racist bitch’s face and told her to come back with the cops. Then they called the local NAACP chapter to ask for advice for reporting racism from a state social worker. Then they called DYFS and made a phone complaint. Later, I found the direct number of the president of the NAACP and gave him a call. I can’t remember his name, but he was a Baptist preacher and very supportive. He called DYFS on our behalf. We got a very conciliatory call from DYFS while I was at work, and they scheduled a legal interview.

“I want to see a copy of the complaint and a legal warrant before she steps foot in here,” My partner demanded. “I also want to know why she thought it was appropriate or legal to ask if my husband is Black.”

 My partner got a stammering apology and promised everything would be legal and proper. The same social worker returned the next day before I went to work; she was all smiles and reconciliation. We didn’t get a copy of the complaint. But we did get a letter of apology for the “misunderstanding” on county stationery, and she presented a county photo ID. I also showed the woman my contact dermatitis and how it was treated.

Then I told her exactly who had been making the reports and why. She hemmed and hawed and told me she couldn’t say who it was. I replied, “that’s okay; I know who has been making those reports and why.”

“I guess we can put this down to welfare wars,” she said with a smile.

“By the way,” I added as she headed out the door. “We Dunlaps are from Scotland.” I can never resist a final dig. Out of my many bad qualities, that one is the worst. But I will never regret that one last needle.

That Social Worker’s casual racism saved us from any more visits from social services. Like all the other Warren County Social Services, DYFS was racist and afraid of being called out. Which was a relief because siccing the authorities on neighbors was a popular pastime at Blair House. That was what the social worker meant by “Welfare Wars.”

We were frequently harassed by false police reports. The residents literally didn’t have anything better to do than call the cops on each other. My partner and I always responded to this by not responding. The cops would come, we spoke to the cops, the cops left, and we went on with our lives. We never called the cops on anybody unless it was something serious like child abuse and domestic violence. We never responded to harassment with more harassment. People stopped messing with us after a few months. It was no fun when we didn’t play too.

There was one guy nobody dared to call the cops on. He was a full brother in the Pagans MC. He lived in the corner apartment. We along great. I ran with YIP in my younger days and learned the care and feeding of bikers. I knew how not to offend, which was more than some other people I could mention, like Chris.

As I mentioned in The Night Carlos Died, Chris was a raging alcoholic. And when he drank, he became the biggest asshole on the planet. He and Debbie lived above the biker, and sparks frequently flew. Chris was in a lawn chair on the shared porch one day. He was so drunk he mouthed off at the biker, who picked him up, lawn chair and all, and tossed him about ten feet. Chris landed on the pavement, and I was the one who went to the hospital with him. 

I managed to broker peace and convinced Chris to keep his mouth shut when the biker was around. But of course, it didn’t last more than a week. The Biker started accusing Chris and Debby of making a thumping sound all night. They denied doing it, and the thumping didn’t stop. It looked like The Biker would take his lost sleep out on them with a tire iron.

The problem was the baby upstairs. He was banging his head on his crib from the moment his mom left to work until she got home. The poor thing’s father was a piece of work. We used to hear the child crying, and the father would respond by screaming at him. Then we listened to the baby being spanked and the child crying in pain and panic. That was when we called the police.

The cops played it cool and said it was an anonymous welfare check. The next day the father tried to blast the television to keep people from hearing him screaming, which annoyed The Biker. I have no idea how that creep kept his baby from crying, but it resulted in head-banging that kept The Biker up all night. It got to the point where The Biker called the cops and invited them into his apartment to hear the banging. Then the cops went upstairs to investigate. 

Once in Chris and Debbie’s apartment, the cops could hear the banging coming from the apartment next to Chris and Debbie. That poor baby was hitting his head with considerable force. The police contacted the mom, who came home, found out what was happening, and sparks flew. She moved out the next day. I still remember her exit. She was dressed for work, and her hair coiled in a perfect French braid. She carried a suitcase in one hand and had the baby on their hip. My partner even helped her get the baby in the car seat. That was the last I saw of them. I hope they had a happily ever after.

Relations were strained between the father and me, by the way. Lucky for me, the full wrath of The Biker was now focused on him. The father left a few days later, and The Biker seemed to have a sense of accomplishment about it. He was so glad to get things resolved that he made peace with Chris and Debbie. 

Of course, it was too much to ask that Blair House become peaceful. Perish the thought! The drama with Chris and Debbie was over, and the baby was in a safer place, but The Biker still had his girlfriend. Much of The Biker’s problems with Chris and Debbie stemmed from living with his girlfriend. She was a one-woman riot. She was the craziest, meanest, and nastiest drunk I had ever met. Like many alcoholics, she was pleasant when she was sober, but she wasn’t pleasant very often. And, of course, she was totally unpleasant to her boyfriend.

The biker was a very even-tempered person, not at all the stereotype. I haven’t met any outlaw bikers who I consider crazy or nuts. And they’re rarely violent without a sound financial reason. My main rule for dealing with bikers is to never do business with them and always buy a round. If The Biker was any stereotype, he would have been violent to his girlfriend. But he refrained from defending himself when she punched, kicked, and bit him. 

I remember them returning from a bar at about two in the morning. They were both drunk, but The Biker was steadier than his chick. She was yelling and screaming at his back. But he just ignored her and headed for the door. Biker Chick was way too drunk to watch where she was going, and she hit her head on a tree branch and landed on her ass. Anybody else would have been concussed, but Biker Chick jumped to her feet and screamed, “hit me again, motherfucker,” and started to punch out the tree. She hit that tree until her knuckles were bloody. Biker lifted her under his arm and carried her inside. Her limbs thrashed, and she screamed like a cat in heat.

Of course, it was hell for the Biker Chick’s daughter. The poor kid acted out her mother’s violence. She was the same age as my stepson, who tried to play nicely with her. But it always devolved into violence. I always put it down to the girl having to grow up seeing her mother’s drunken rages. Watching her mother’s rages was traumatic, and I was in my 30s. God knows how bad it must have been for a kid.

My stepson was raised to never raise his hand to a female. He ended up taking a couple of bad beatings from the kid, and I would have to intervene. To give Biker Chick credit, she tried to be an involved parent when she wasn’t shit-faced. She laid down the law and forbade her daughter from playing with my stepson. None of us were happy about it, but we agreed it was the only way to prevent violence.

The Biker finally kicked his girlfriend out of the apartment, and Blair House became quieter without them screaming at each other. The Biker had a boy my stepson’s age. He came over a lot more since Biker Chick and her daughter moved out. Some afternoons Biker and I would sit on the porch, drink beer and listen to The Grateful Dead and Neil Young. The Biker also had a son with his ex-wife, who lived near the river. He and my stepson got along well enough. It’s a shame that years later, he and his father got busted for distributing meth and are both serving life sentences.

Maybe I should call this post “Hillbilly Hell.” I don’t think anybody was happy there. Not me, not Chris or Debbie, and The Manager was the most miserable of all. The Managers’ kids had it worse. She had two. One my toddler’s age and a girl a few years older. That woman had Munchhausen’s by Proxy. She was constantly diagnosing her children with the most amazingly mysterious ailments. Worse, She found a doctor feelgood in Philadelphia willing to give the kids heavy drugs for any disorder Manager-mama could think up.

I remember talking to Chris and begging him to do something. Manager had those kids on Ritalin for imaginary ADHD. I had watched them nodding out like dockside junkies. I begged Chris to intervene, but, of course, he wouldn’t do anything. He didn’t have the backbone. I understand the kids grew up alright, but all those pharmaceuticals couldn’t have been good for them.

Soon after the baby incident, a young couple with several terrariums of snakes moved in right next to us. I’m phobic of snakes. I’m also phobic of loud, aggressive assholes who abuse their girlfriends. And this guy was the abusive bastard from hell. On the first night there, he beat his girlfriend so severely that I was the one who called the cops. 

I never call the police if I can help it. Not even a mellow bunch of cops like the BPD, but there was no way I could ignore that. I could hear him striking her. And her screams were terrifying. The cops came, but the girl was too scared to press charges. The next day, the boyfriend took the girl’s battery out of her car to ensure she didn’t leave him. That was alright, we had an automobile, and the battery was charged and ready. My partner helped the girl pack her things and return home to her parents.

Things were tense for a while. The boyfriend kept threatening to kill us, only to have The Biker pick him up by the collar and told to behave. Two days later, the boyfriend was arrested for stealing a car battery and beating his girlfriend black and blue. She got braver once she was no longer in physical danger, and I understand the creep went to jail. But that left an apartment full of snakes in the apartment.

Clearing out that apartment was not Chris’s finest moment. He managed to break a terrarium holding a seven-foot python. Chris freaked and ran from the snake who disappeared. Nobody wanted a seven-foot python wandering around Blair House. Chris and The Biker dropped their animosity and searched that apartment from stem to stern. They even chain-sawed the sofa in case the snake was hiding there. But there was no sign of the snake. 

Eventually, fall moved aside for winter, and the temperatures fell under twenty degrees. We figured that Mr. Snake had frozen to death, and we stopped worrying about him. Then after winter turned to spring, Mr. Snake decided to venture out of the basement for some evening air. Unknown to anybody, the snake found its way into the Blair House Basement, which was nice, toasty warm, and filled with yummy rats. And it was such a perfect environment that the snake grew another two feet.

Of course, that was the evening my youngest was running barefoot through the grass. My son met Mr. Snake near a hole in the foundation. The snake poked his head out, and my kid froze in terror. The head moved, and my kid kicked at it reflexively. Then the snake bit him on the foot, and my kid finally screamed.

“That can’t be a snakebite,” My partner said, looking at the puncture marks on his foot.

“I looks like a snakebite,” I replied.

“When was the last time you saw a snakebite?” my partner demanded. Today we could have called up a picture on the internet. Back in 1995, we had to find help. Several Sikhs were living in one of the upstairs apartments. I found myself asking one of them for help, and being some of the nicest people on Earth, my neighbor came to see my son’s foot.

The poor kid became nonverbal during stress and couldn’t tell us what had happened. Our Sikh neighbor came and looked at the foot, and he turned ashen gray and told us to take him to the emergency room immediately.

Who knew that boa constrictors left a similar bite mark pattern as some venomous snakes in Punjab? Not us and not our neighbor. We got the kid in the car and high-tailed it for Warren Hospital. The fact that we had a possible venomous snakebite won us an immediate room and a doctor. The doctor looked at the bite and said there weren’t any venomous snakes that big in the Northeast, and if he had to guess, our kid had been bit by a pet boa constrictor.

That was when we remembered the lost snake. It was still alive. “No, it can’t be,” was Chris’s reaction when we woke him up to tell him the fucking boa was still alive.

“My dad found one in a cellar once,” Debbie said. Debbie’s late father had been a professional exterminator specializing in larger pests like raccoons and snakes. 

Chris didn’t want to hear that. I felt terrible for telling him, but he was the maintenance man. The next day, he and The Biker were in the basement with flashlights, looking for the snake. As Debbie observed, this was a job for a professional exterminator. Still, the owner wasn’t going to spring for a professional, not when Chris got free rent. Needless to say, the snake was never found. For all I know, it’s still in the bowels of Blair House, growing fat on river rats and growing until it’s big enough to crush and eat residents. And if anybody is still living in those apartments, I hope they sleep well tonight.

I don’t think anybody could have found that snake because the evil forces of Blair House protected it with dark and ancient magic born of opiates and madness. Maybe my partner is right. Perhaps I should call this Hillbilly Hell. But there were so many good times as well. My partner and I joined Chris with our instruments on a summer evening. There was hitting the volleyball over the next with one hand while drinking Budweiser with the other. And I got to grill every nice evening. I learned to grill corn on the cob at Blair House.

It wasn’t all that bad during the first two years. And much of what we were going through was more due to work than when we lived. It wasn’t until the last two years that it became Hillbilly Hell.