Dancing With The Mafia On A Monday Afternoon Poem by Ron Stock

My girlfriend, Jackie, and I had moved into the middle apartment of an old Victorian in the Haight-Ashbury District of San Francisco near Golden Gate Park. The year,1970, and the Haight, after it's Flower Child Glory days, was no sweet garden, but a marginal neighborhood saturated with drugs. So our rent, at least, was cheap.
On a Sunday, at 10 in the evening, one week after we moved in, three friendly dudes occupying the basement apartment cranked the music up. It was party time. Loud party time. Extremely loud party time. So loud, the thin walls of our apartment were vibrating, vibrating, vibrating. We thought about joining the fun, but I had a long commute in the morning to my job as a picture framer down the peninsula. The gallery opened at 9 am.
We could not get to sleep, so I knocked on the door of the basement apartment and asked the men to turn the volume down. They did, for as long as it took me to get back under the covers. Now the music was louder. I knocked on the door again. Received the same response. Again. The same response. So I called the police and made a complaint.
Fifteen minutes later the cops showed up in force and spent an hour tearing the place apart. I fell asleep after they left. Early the next morning, before work, I walked down to see the apartment. The fridge was toppled; chairs upset; mattresses in disarray; closets emptied; drawers, upside down, tossed to the floor. Personal items scattered everywhere.
From work I called a lawyer. He called back, said, "You screwed up. The police used your name to obtain a search warrant. They knew that apartment was a mafia hotspot, but couldn't do a thing without a citizen's complaint. You, buddy, were that citizen. It'll cost you a beautiful landscape painting if you want me to seal your name from the police report so the mafia lawyers can't find out who made that call." I agreed to his terms.
After work, everything was cool, until we heard a knock on the door. There, stood a tall, clean, attractive Ivy League-type man dressed in a beige business suit. Jackie was in the background. "Would you like to come in for some tea? " I asked? " He did. And sat on our funky overstuffed burgundy couch. Eventually, I suppose, he had to asked, "Were you the person who called the police last night? " I knew this is an important moment in my life and tried to steady my shaking hands. I also knew I could not tell the truth, so I lie, and tried hard, to feel, innocent, "Me? No, it wasn't me. I went down and complained a few times but then let it go, took a pill, and went to sleep." Did he believe my lie? I don't know. But as he was leaving he paused at the door, then turned to look me in the eye, "If I find out you are lying to me now, I am going to remember this conversation."
So of course, Jackie and I were shaking in our boots and didn't sleep very much. After work on Tuesday we arrived home and found our two new 10-speed bicycles missing from the locked back porch. No sign of forced entry. 'Wow, what a coincidence? ' we thought, 'Or was it? ' On Wednesday after work we walked into our living room with the funky overstuffed burgundy couch and discovered all our stereo equipment gone, even the speakers, even our huge collection of LP records.
That was enough for us. Obviously no coincidence. We moved out one hour later.