One thing about living next to a meth head – life is never dull. For awhile, we tried to tell ourselves that he wasn't really back on the drugs, and he did indeed have sober stretches that lasted a week or more. But, although self delusion can be entertaining, it is not very helpful, and we finally admitted we were going to have to do something or come up with a coping strategy.

When Pepe is clean, he is a really nice guy – both charismatic and shy, sweet, helpful, even gallant. But when he is high, he's a raging asshole. The transformation is swift and complete, which makes it really easy to tell when he is high. The first time he went swaggering down our street, we knew we were in for trouble.

It turns out that we didn't need to visually see Pepe to know he is high. I think our dogs could work for the DEA. They can smell meth at about 400 meters. The dogs will be peacefully sleeping next to my desk, then all of the sudden get up, charge the windows, and bark like they are crazed. We always go look to see what the dogs are barking at. It didn't take us long to see that the crazed barking always preceded Pepe sauntering past the house. It also happens with his friends. The dogs never bark at Pepe when he is sober.

Right after we were robbed, the house underwent some fortification: new and additional locks, new walls on the roof, and chain-link fence with barbed wire wherever our roof might possibly be accessible from a neighbor's. The dog door never got added to our bedroom door, so when it became warm enough to need the AC to sleep, we hung a heavy pleather curtain over the bedroom door. It works pretty well to keep the cold air in while still allowing the dogs to come and go as they please. But seeing Pepe brought back all of the stomach-churning unease.

We added some new security to the house. We mounted night-vision led cameras on the roof that see as well at night as they do in the bright Mazatlan sun. We alarmed all of the doors. We also put vibration detecting alarms on the air conditioners. If you don't have an iron cage installed around your AC, thieves can pull it out and use that hole to get into your house. Then we trained the dogs to run to the sound whenever they heard one of the alarms. There were a couple of adrenaline-filled nights when the wind kicked up and set off the upstairs AC alarm, but we took reassurance in the fact that the alarm was obviously working.

We also started recording Pepe whenever we saw him. Next to our house is for some reason his favorite place for mischief. It started with getting high with very young girls. We have lots of footage of that. If he wasn't in the act of getting high, he was doing something furtive. We didn't realize it when we recorded it, but we got footage of him loading up and selling a stolen propane tank.

We asked several of our Mazatlecan friends what to do with the video. They all said in no circumstances volunteer that we have the recording. The only way we could safely hand it over is if the police came and asked for it.

A few hours later, the police were on our street investigating the theft. We watched as several officers went door-to-door asking people if they saw anything. I sat down and burned a dvd with all the footage we had on Pepe, with everything we had relating to the gas tank theft in a special, labeled folder. Then we waited. And waited.

It's kind of funny, at least I think it is. We don't get random officers whenever the police show up. We get our beat cops. They know this hill. They know the residents. They know us. They know we don't speak a lot of Spanish. We watched a couple of them head toward our gate, then veer away as they changed their mind. We saw a new guy look up at our cameras and head our way, but then he saw the Texas plates on our truck. We did not get to deliver our video.

The police left the area, and Pepe magically reappeared, more agitated and crazed that usual. We heard lots of shouting and then a loud crash from up the street. For reasons known only to his drug addled brain, Pepe smashed all the first floor windows out of the house on the corner. The police quickly returned and arrested Pepe. As the police truck drove away with Pepe in the back, we did a little happy dance. That night, we slept deep and long. Everyone loves to talk about how difficult it is to get out of a Mexican jail, so we felt confident that we would be Pepe free for awhile. As if.

We were very surprised the next morning to see Pepe sitting on the stoop next door. The sneaky little miscreant had made a half-assed attempt to slit his wrists while in jail. There is no hospital ward in the jail and no jail ward in the hospital. There is no budget or provision at all for dealing with that kind of thing, so they let him go.

So we are back to living next door to an unpredictable meth-head thief, but at least we got a one night respite and some sleep.

The whole story:
Robbery Redux [4]
The Saga Continues...
So Close [5]
And Yet So Far [6]
Ding Dong, the Meth Head's Gone [7]