PaulPallazola
February, 1991.
81 Whiting Street, Lynn, Massachusetts
The Lynn Commons has a reputation of being a bad area, with a long history of issues with drugs and prostitution. Whiting Street was a short distance from there, and I felt a little anxious when my then girlfriend Youngor rented an apartment there. In December of 1990 she asked me to move in with her. I told her I wasn’t thrilled about the neighborhood but part of me felt like I should say yes just because she would be safer there with me around. Since I couldn’t persuade her to pursue a better neighborhood, I agreed to move in and share the rent. This part seemed good. I had been paying $395.00 a month for a studio apartment. The one bedroom on Whiting Street was $560.00, so my share would be $280 each month. I moved in the second week of January 1991- the week before George H.W. Bush started the Iraqi War with “Operation Desert Storm “. The apartment seemed okay at first, and we weren’t there a lot. Youngor was a Nursing Assistant at Lenox Hill Nursing Home and I worked full time for Greater Lynn Mental Health.
One night I returned home and found the front door to our third floor apartment was pushed in, it looked like it had been hit with a sledgehammer. Our apartment was ransacked, papers and clothing all over the floor, Youngor’s television, stereo, and jewelry all gone. I called Youngor and then called the Lynn Police. They took a report and dusted the place for fingerprints. No one was ever charged for the break- in. Younger grew paranoid in the following weeks. She put 3 more locks on the door. She asked me why they had taken her 25 inch television and left my 13 inch TV. I told her mine was old, beat up looking and not of much resale value to a drug addict. I was relieved we were unharmed. Sure, it was unsettling to know someone had been able to force their way into our home, turn things upside down, and take things. Nonetheless, they took material things: jewelry, a stereo, a television set. These things could be replaced. Youngor didn’t see it that way, and this became yet another issue straining our then six month old relationship.
It shouldn’t have strained your relationship. It’s not like it was your fault or something!
There were a few other factors that were starting to strain the relationship. She had flown supposedly to visit relatives in Detroit. I lent her a book to take on the flight. When she returned I noticed that the boarding pass she had used for a bookmark was stamped to “Dallas/Fort Worth, where curiously enough her supposedly ex boyfriend Kobe lived. When I asked her about the boarding pass she claimed her flight had been rerouted and stopped in Dallas. That seemed like a curious path but I let it go until our phone bill arrived and I noticed that collect calls she had made to me for three nights in a row came from Dallas, not Detroit. It started to erode my trust.
That would have eroded my trust as well! She sounds toxic :/
That is scary, glad you were safe and it is horrible that it happened. But, you are right material items can be replaced but it is hard to get to that place sometimes.
That is too bad that it happened to you, people can be so greedy and have this theory that
it is ok to steal.
I think the area we lived in had a lot of people with drug abuse problems. Lynn was a once proud city that had gone from a major producer of shoes in the first part of the 20th century ti an economically depressed area where cocaine use was widespread and that resulted in a lot of crime. Two years before Reverend Jesse Jackson said “The best way to fight drugs is to build a society where people don’t feel the desire to escape reality. For too many people in Lynn thete was little hope and much desire to escape reality.
Drugs have just taken over so much of our country, it is a tragedy.
This type of story happens too much these days. I am like you when you told her they were just material things. Just glad it didn’t happen with you there.