HOUSING | Bruce Rushton
Linda Sexton knows about promises. Promises to replace her Brady-Bunch-era kitchen cabinets. Promises for a new living room carpet. Promises for a backyard patio behind her apartment, one of more than 170 units just off MacArthur Boulevard, next to Jerome.
“They told me six months ago they ordered my windows,” Sexton says.
After nearly 13 years of living in a MacArthur Park apartment amid buildings recently placarded with unfit-for-human-habitation stickers, Sexton has learned to do things for herself. Instead of a patio, a relative made a poor-man’s deck, eight inches high, out of pallets and plywood. Sexton, 68, says that she weeds her own yard, and that she, not management, installed the ceiling fan that circulates air in her living room.
Duct tape bridges gaps between windows and frames. More duct tape covers more gaps between the bottom of Sexton’s living-room wall and the floor, with tape extending around her front-door frame. Unseen, Sexton says, is “foamy stuff” she bought from a dollar store and stuffed into cracks between the floor and wall, then covered and secured with the silver fixes-all tape.
“There was air coming from under the house,” she explains. “I’ve been looking for another place, one that we can afford.”
Management did secure her back door about six months ago after burglars kicked it open. Her landlord screwed the broken door frame back in place, installed metal brackets on either side of the entryway and gave Sexton a two-by-four to place in the brackets, spanning the door horizontally, to prevent a repeat. For added measure, she jams a metal shower rod between the door and the bottom stair of a flight leading to her upperfloor bedroom.
MacArthur Park can be a dicey place, judging by police records that show more than 840 calls for officers since 2006, including more than 150 this year for such events as fights, a sexual assault, drug violations, shots fired, loud parties and burglary.
Sexton isn’t complaining about burglars. If she had her way, they wouldn’t go to jail, but would instead be sentenced to church every Sunday for a month. The Lord, truly, is Sexton’s shepherd, evidenced by prints of The Last Supper, Jesus with a flock of lambs and Mary with holy child on walls throughout her apartment, overlooking ashes of her beloved poodle Sam, who died in January, kept on an end table in a mahogany box – Sam was too precious to put in tin, she says.
“The druggies are my angels out here – they would never hurt me,” she says. “Some of it I hear, some of it I don’t. I’m telling you right now: I’m not a dog, and neither are these people.”
Sexton says that she worries about the children who meander in the potholed-parking lot, without swing sets, slides or decent grass to play on.
“They don’t have no play area,” Sexton says. “What about where the pool used to be? Oh, no, no – insurance would be too high. That’s all I ever heard.”
In the parking lot sits Sexton’s 1992 Buick Century, not far from a rusting 1991 Plymouth Voyager van owned by her room mate-cum-soulmate Harmon “Buzzy” Sours. A Springfield cop, she says, came by a day or two ago, telling her that the van where she’s been storing her lawnmower must go – never mind that it has new tires and current tags, albeit a dead battery and questionable transmission.
“They sent me a notice that I have so many days to have it out,” Sexton says.
Never mind the welcome mat, angel figurines and American flag outside Sexton’s front door, which sports a neighborhoodwatch sticker. Who cares that her oven is spotless, and the drip pans on her stove show nary a drop?
So far as the city of Springfield is concerned, Sexton is part of the problem – she needs to either get that van running or get it out of here.
A landlord lives in luxury “Buzzy!” So Sexton calls the man in her life. Sours, 70, comes down from upstairs. They can’t recall whether they’ve been a couple for 18 years or just 16. Whichever, Sexton and Sours are together for the long haul, talking openly about their love for one another in front of a stranger who knocked on their door a half-hour ago, asking about what it is like to live here. They are interested in seeing photographs of their landlord’s house that the stranger has brought.