You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy™
The Technicolor Fence.
They say good fences make Good neighbors.
Not this fence.
This fence is an instigator, baking soda dropped into a bucket of lye.
This fence is a molitov cocktail, a poke in the eye, a slap in the face.
This neighborhood barrier is a honey badger, defiant, snarling, ready to rip a neighborhood apart with a single slice of it’s symbolic claw.
I am alerted to the fence by a city councilman whose inbox is filled with angst, consternation, demands to do something.
“This fence has got to be a codes violation” his emails say.
The councilman tells me this fence is a symbol of a neighborhood torn apart by impatience, by intolerance, by misunderstandings
They say fences make good neighbors, but I will quickly learn that this fence makes neighbors feel angry, segregated, agitated.
So I visit the fence.
It’s an eye opener.
As a piece of construction, it’s ordinary. It’s made of wooden slats, 7 feet tall, approximately 50 feet long. The fence runs along the property line.
From inside the home owners yard, you wouldn’t know what all the fuss is about.
The fence is a weathered brown, average, nothing out of the ordinary.
But walk around to the other side of the fence and you better be wearing sunglasses and have a good constitution.
The other side of the fence is a question of what is art and what is ugly.
You might lose your lunch.
Gaze at the other side of the fence, the side the neighbors get to see, and prepare to have your eye balls go all Ga Ga like a Road Runner Cartoon.
The fence is a 50 foot Andy Warhol painting.
Each slat is a different color.
Red. Blue. Black. Purple. Green. Orange.
The fence looks like a drunk rainbow vomited upon it.
The colors are incongruous with good taste, with home decor.
Nobody would paint the outside of their home like a carnival tent would they?
And if they did paint their fence like an abortion, would they really paint only the outside of the fence that the neighbors have to stare at night and day, day and night.
“It’s a spite fence” the HOA president will tell me.
“A spite fence? What’s that?” I ask.
“It’s directed at us, to make us mad, to incite us.”
The woman is surrounded by members of her community. We stand in the woman’s yard that is bordered by the spite fence.
It is a barrier of attrociousness. It is a wall of ugly.
A kindergartener’s fingerpainting would be more appealing.
I imagine being the woman whose yard is bordered by the fence. I imagine sitting in my living room every day and the colors of anarchy filling my view.
Would I slowly go mad? Would I too complain to the police and to the codes department, dozens and dozens of times.
“You wouldn’t think the city would allow something like that,” I ask the woman.
“You wouldn’t would you?” she responds sarcastically.
“What did they tell you?”
“They told me that it conforms to all structural codes. They told me that it is not graffitti. They told me that they can’t tell a person what color to paint their fence, essentailly it breaks no laws.”
“So ugly is not a codes violation?” I muse.
“Exactly,” she says realizing the degree of irony in the statement.
The HOA president will tell me that the fence is only part of a much bigger problem.
She describes a neighbor who is an ex con, evil, who lights off fireworks and says sexually inappropriate things to mentally retarded girls in the neighborhood.
Unfortunately, all this is undocumented accusations supported by no police reports or court documents.
So the fence is the focal point of the neighbors consternation.
I am about to leave when the fence builder hollers.
“When you’re done hearing their lies, come over here and hear the truth.”
The 1st tenet of journalism. Two sides to every story.
I go to the other side of the yard and a woman named Sue approaches.
She is from New York. She is nice enough. She indicates that her neighbors have nothing better to do than complain and call the police and the codes department.
She tells me that she doesn’t care what they say. “It’s a free country last time I checked,” she says.
She tells me the fence isn’t designed to anger her neighbors. The fence is a tribute to her brother who died.
“My dad painted his fence like this when my brother and I were kids,” she tells me.
I leave the neighborhood with a sense of satisfaction.
I have a balanced story, a controversial story, a visual story.
The fence leads the newscast. It will make its way to Good Morning America, the next day.
Good fences might not make good neighbors, but it certainly makes good TV.
Life’s Crazy™