Despite the gunshots in the street, despite the eggings and the muggings and the overpriced food, Capitol Hill didn’t suit me. I moved out at the end of July. Since then, I am told, the streets around Eastern Market have turned desolate. Hot winds blow through them; skeletons lie in the sun while the tumbleweeds scatter.

There is a neighbor who will not have me around as audience to his death-metal lyrics. There is a neighbor whose cats will not bring me any more presents of stiff baby mice. There is a roommate who will float his houseboat without me, and a landlady who no longer can hear my guitar on the stoop after dusk. I will miss them. And, dear reader, I will miss you.

But at least I won’t miss the crime. Where I’m going, I’m gonna need a lot more than a nine.

Youngin’s Towing and Auto Body needs permission to sink its hooks into any more cars.

Under a restraining order issued last Thursday in D.C. Superior Court, “Youngin’s shall be prohibited from all towing, except instances where they have an explicit agreement in advance with the owner of the vehicle to be towed.”

While the judge’s order is temporary, it is the city’s first major victory against the renegade tow trucks of James W. Gee. Car owners complain that Gee scraps vehicles after he tows them, charges exorbitant fees, and cusses out customers picking up their cars. After an investigation by the Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs, the city sued him on July 21. If the D.C. Attorney General wins that case, Gee could be shut down for good.

“I think this is an important action by the city on behalf of those who do business,” says DCRA spokesperson Karyn-Siobhan Robinson. “It’s not a quick process, but it is a process with which we are committed.”

Gee didn’t answer repeated phone calls. In a previous interview, he said he abuses car owners because they abuse him first. “They start calling us motherfuckers,” he said, explaining that African-American car owners “don’t know how to conduct business.”

This morning on the red line at Metro Center, a woman was trying to board my car. This was a difficult task, since the doors had closed on her. The entire right side of her body was outside the train, and had we started down the track, she would have split into even halves. Now, even though I’m from Texas and support prairie justice, I don’t like it when people get killed. So I tried to pull the doors apart until the woman got free. After she was in the car, I noticed who was standing next to me: a Metro employee. And I remembered that he had boarded just before the woman got caught. Through her ordeal, he stood almost as close to her as I did. Even though he was bigger than I, he didn’t help me hold those doors.

We read in December that Metro’s trains killed three workers within 14 months. We read in February that Metro’s buses killed five people within nine months. We have had doors closed on us or helped others out when the doors closed on them. And perhaps we wrote these things off as risks of urban living. But when Metro employees stand aside during obvious danger, shouldn’t we start to wonder what’s going on with our transportation agency?

The city is finally saying in court what car owners have said in private for years: James W. Gee is ripping us off.

In a lawsuit filed Friday, D.C. Attorney General Linda Singer asks the judge for an injunction to shut down Youngin’s Towing and Auto Body once and for all. Readers may remember that the city already tried to revoke Gee’s business license. He was able to fight that maneuver, and he has stayed in business, to the ruin of Charmain Walker’s ’93 Crown Vic.

Nearly a month after the Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs first tried to shut Gee down, his company towed Walker’s car from an illegal space. When she came to pick it up, Gee told her that he scrapped it for parts. According to the city, he offered to give her another car from his lot. Walker has sued in small-claims court. A hearing on her case is set for tomorrow, and a judge will hear arguments Thursday on whether to grant a temporary restraining order and close Youngin’s immediately.

Gee says he hasn’t read the city’s filings. “I didn’t know about it. I ain’t know nothing about it,” he says. “Suing me? How’s that suing me? ‘Suing me’ means they want money, right?”

After a moment, he says: “It’s nothing I can do about it. The fact that they suing me, ain’t nothing I can do about it.”

In May I started seeing the owner of an intelligent, well-trained Basset mix. The dog and I seemed to have an agreement from the beginning: I would stay out of his way, and he would stay out of mine. Faithful to my end of the bargain, I didn’t cover my girlfriend in kisses when she was throwing a chew toy across the room. Faithful to his end, the dog didn’t force his way between us in bed.

This was how it went, until one night, when all got tense. My girlfriend and I were doing one of those things in which dogs do not generally participate. As I lay afterward in a pleasant exhaustion, she said: “Aw, man. Your shoes are fucked.” Actually, they were masticated. Her dog had chewed the left heel and the right tongue off of my leather Red Wing loafers, which were sent by my grandmother and had become the sole possession on which I always relied.

The dog and I have made amends. I didn’t know—still don’t know—why jealousy took my shoes in its jaws. But I knew I couldn’t go around in those mangled excuses for loafers. So I bought a cheap pair of Mossimo slip-ons. One day I was trying to learn what sort of shoes they were, and a friend thought he had it. “Those are boat shoes,” he said.

“Really?”

“Totally.”

Since he attended Georgetown and should know, I took his opinion. My buddies were trying to get a houseboat at that time, and yes, I could imagine myself on deck, leaning into the dusk wind that sprang off the Potomac.

Then my girlfriend expressed a more sober thought. “Those are prison shoes,” she said.

“No, they’re not!”

But if she said so, they probably were. I walked through the city ashamed, afraid that an inspector was tracking my movements, or that some derelict would remember that I was his comrade in chains. The restlessness continued through this week, when I determined not to play Jean Valjean any longer: I bought new black-and-white Chucks in the middle of the workday.

Good shoes should bring good fortune. For two days, I enjoyed more esteem from my friends, more success in the office, more confidence in bed. But this morning, I’m sad to report, some low-minded cur left a mess in my path, and some snotty owner didn’t scoop it. I tried napkins, I tore paper towels, I covered the sole in heavy-duty cleaner and scrubbed it down hard with a dish pad. The stench remains.

Dear dogs, what did I ever do to you? Why do you have it out for my shoes?

Until last fall, condom-buyers at many CVS locations were required to ask a grumbling attendant to leave the counter, trudge to the back aisle, and take out a selection from a locked case. Public health students at George Washington University didn’t think anyone should endure that, especially since D.C. has the highest AIDS rates in the country. Last October, they confronted CVS management with a survey showing that the 20 stores with locked displays were in the neighborhoods with the most cases of AIDS.

The drugstore chain promised a change and responded by installing displays called “power wings,” which let a customer take out one package at a time. CVS has also installed displays that dispense a package when you pull a lever.

But that hasn’t satisfied the students—they claim that the people and the rubbers are still being kept apart. “We’re saying that, having power wing or no power wing, it doesn’t work,” says Shumaya Ali, a health communications graduate student. “CVS has a mission that says it will be the easiest pharmacy retailer for people to use…and it just contradicts everything they are doing with locking condoms.”

Ali’s group, Save Lives: Free the Condoms, argues that the one-package dispensers—which hold a limited selection of brands—are inadequate. “People still want other brands, and they have to go and ask,” says Carolyn Watson, a public health graduate student. “They just have to grin and bear it, so to speak.” The group also found in April that 11 stores were still locking their inventory. CVS spokesperson Mike DeAngelis says that isn’t the case now. “There are no CVS stores where condoms are completely behind a locked display,” he says.

On Sunday I was riding back from Philadelphia. I was on a Chinatown bus, the little boy in front of me was trying his best to become a monkey, and the young man beside me was explaining his medical history. It was an epic history, full of terrible surgeries in distant places, and colored with the most minute descriptions of pain that I have ever heard.

After two hours between the zoo and the hospital bed, I began to see Northeast D.C. passing by the windows. There were withered lots, high fences, crumbling houses, basketball courts. A woman exclaimed: “This is D.C.? This looks just like Philadelphia.”

Don’t tear down MLK, the D.C. Historic Preservation Review Board said on Thursday.

The board granted historic-landmark status to the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library, giving the deteriorating glass-and-steel building a legal protection against getting demolished.

Former Mayor Anthony A. Williams broached a plan last year to sell the building and build a new central library on the old Convention Center site. The board’s decision came a day after the Washington Examiner reported the Adrian Fenty administration’s decision to shelve Williams’ plans.

Now, thanks to the efforts of former D.C. Public Library trustee Alex Padro, the library has been protected as D.C.’s most notable example of modernist architecture; Ludwig Mies van der Rohe designed it in 1972. It is also the only downtown edifice that bears King’s name.

The city supported the historic-landmark application, something that Padro says could not have happened when Williams was mayor. “For years there was this battle raging between Williams and the library preservation and advocacy community,” Padro says. “Finally, [now] that we have a new administration, and Williams is out of the way…we get the board to approve it.”

Chief Librarian Ginnie Cooper says there are no plans yet for any relocation of the library’s services. As for the building, the board will now have to approve any change to the first floor or the exterior. “We don’t know at this point that [MLK] will not always be the library,” Cooper says. “We also don’t know at this point that [it] will always be the library.”

Late on Saturday night, I searched YouTube for clips of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. This famous PBS series molded me as much as television could. With no sarcasm and no hidden meanings, it tried to explain life: How trumpets are made, or how it feels to be angry, or what it means to have a friend. As I watched again, I wondered how Fred Rogers found such candor. He spoke to all five-year-olds as Rilke spoke to all 20-year-olds. He needed no punch line. The world was serious. One’s feelings were serious, even if one was very small.

I thought over these things while I sipped wine in the empty house. The dark summer air was quiet, and I felt like part of it: I was an agent of this peace, one neighbor on a block where everyone knew each other, where there were barbeques and talks over the fence, where someone would come over if something was wrong.

Then the kids started shooting.

The first shot rang right in front of the house. The next five came from the neighbors on the next block. Having hit the floor, I reached for a phone and called the cops. “Several callers have already alerted us,” the dispatcher said. “We’re sending the next available unit.” No, they weren’t. No sirens reached G Street till about 20 minutes later, when I was in bed, wondering if Mister Rogers was wrong. Maybe we shouldn’t make friends. Maybe we shouldn’t talk about our feelings. Maybe we shouldn’t play the piano when we get mad.

Maybe we should buy a nine and cap the next mofo who gets in our way.

Discovered on an Orange Line Metro train on Thursday:

Joe Eaton recorded a remarkable account of the motives behind street harassment. One question I wish he had explored, though, is how to dismiss a harasser. Some women play along, some get angry, and some pay no attention, but what works best?

The most impressive dismissals I’ve seen were back in college. The storefronts across from the University of Texas were usually crowded with unemployed men, while the sidewalk was full of young female students. Drooling attention was dispensed by the bucket; most women just seemed to take it. But I dated one girl who didn’t. Every time some ne’er-do-well pulled the kissy face, the catcall, or the whistle on her, she would shout, “Get a sex life!” Though she didn’t cow them, she was loud enough to stun them.

Is yelling back the best way? How do you fend off the creeps?

D.C. police Chief Cathy Lanier will postpone a decision that might “decentralize” the award-winning Gay and Lesbian Liaison Unit, as well as the department’s Latino Liason Unit.

According to police spokesperson Traci Hughes, the decision won’t go into effect until Lanier meets with gay and Latino activists “just to make sure their needs are addressed. But the decentralization is still planned.”

Hughes emphasized that the move will not eliminate the units, just spread their personnel around the city. “The units will still exist. It’s inaccurate to refer to the action of the chief as disbanding the unit,” she says. “They’ll still be working on the issues that are relevant to the gay and lesbian units.”

The meeting with community members is scheduled for Wednesday, June 20. Hughes could not comment on where or when it would be, or if the meeting will be open to the public.

EDITOR’S NOTE, 5:04 P.M.: To avoid confusion with the headline, the same goes for the Latino Liason Unit as well: The department is holding off making any changes until it consults with Latino community members. No, we didn’t confuse Latinos with lesbians.

Petworth resident Tasha Harris wanted some extra cash, so the 35-year-old Freddie Mac manager decided to turn her basement into a rental unit. She hired Alex Shekhtman, a Gaithersburg contractor who agreed not to charge more than $100,000 for the work. Harris put down $4,000 for the plans and $5,000 for the deposit. After Shekhtman’s estimate increased by $28,000, Harris says, she decided to cancel the job, but the contractor kept the money. He believed she wanted to scam him by using his plans with another contractor. She believed he wanted to scam her, because he wouldn’t let go of the money. “I feel being taken advantage of,” Shekhtman says. “She probably feels the same way.”

While this sounds like a case for the watchdogs at the D.C. Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs, it wasn’t that simple either. After two mediation sessions failed to reach a settlement, DCRA said it couldn’t do anything more. That’s because Harris was trying to become a landlord—i.e., trying to set up a business. That meant she isn’t a “consumer” in the DCRA’s eyes. “Consumer protection complaints in the District do not include specific review of ‘business to business’ relationships,” writes Bob Harris (no relation), manager of the office of consumer protection.

Expanding on that, agency spokesperson Karyn-Siobhan Robinson writes in an e-mail that as a landlord, Harris “is not covered under the Consumer Protection Procedures Act,” which “defines a consumer purchase as one that is for personal, family or household use.”

Tasha Harris still doesn’t have a converted basement. “I had no idea that just because you renovate your basement it just means that you don’t get any protection,” she says. She’s hired Jim Delgado, a former DCRA building inspector, to review the contract and offer advice.

“They’re treating her as a business,” Delgado says. “I don’t think, I don’t believe, that [the] city council intended for that to happen.”

Two of my friends want to live on a houseboat next year. The plan strikes me as an extreme reaction to housing costs in the District, but it also fits them. Two young Texas men who want to hold on to their mid-20s should live on a boat. Hanging off a pier in Southwest, their little floating place will represent the freedom that is theirs if they want it, and keep them close to the ground that provides employment and society. Some other landlubbers have frowned on their notion; not me. I say houseboat all the way.

But like Mr. Toad in The Wind In the Willows, neither friend is content to sit on a good impractical scheme. He must do something about it, and, by God, do it right away. So after telling me their plan, they took the Green Line to the waterfront and spent Sunday afternoon looking at boats. They were lucky enough to run into a couple who had just bought their boat. These kind people took my friends around the decks, showing them what is necessary and what is dispensible for running a good houseboat. The young men received so much education in so little time that they needed a break after that. They passed the next hours at Cantina Marina, gulping bottles of Shiner by the fistful.

At the same time that they were receiving their tour of a houseboat, I was about to receive my own sort of tour. At the laundromat up 11th Street SE from my house, a tiny room full of hand-lettered signs (”No Beer,” for instance), I prayed to my clothes to dry: If three quarters won’t do it, how about three more? Now? How about two after that? Two more? I can only give so much. The faithful can only give so much. Will you please hurry up please and get dry so I can join my friends at Cantina Marina? This was when the laundromat manager came in. His expression showed that I had offended someone in power, displeased the forces at work, or offered the wrong sacrifice.

He pointed to the dryer beside mine. “Next time,” he said, “Use that one. It’s the hottest one here.” Then he walked around the store, patting each dryer as if it were an old friend: “This one and this one are good. That one’s OK, sometimes. Never use this one. Something’s wrong with it.” With 15 years of experience, he was showing me how the place worked, and I absorbed these lessons with the same humility that my friends displayed as they learned about houseboats.

All of which calls to mind the words of Hung Tzu-ch’eng: “Straying from Enlightenment, a man finds a happy land to be a sea of suffering, as water is frozen into ice; but awakening to Enlightenment, he discovers a sea of suffering to be a happy land, as ice is melted into water.”

To all the people I hit in the face while throwing Frisbees for City Paper in the Capital Pride Parade: I’m sorry. I was aiming for your hands. I really was. But it was impossible to control those little discs. If you don’t believe me, try throwing one from your own moving vehicle; I swear you won’t hit what you aim for.

To all the people who deserved a Frisbee but didn’t get one: I’m sorry. Don’t take it personally. Yes, I was trying to throw at a diverse cross-section of readers, but we all have our faults. Mine was that I usually threw to pretty girls.

To all the people who bucked the police line, dashed toward the wheels, or otherwise endangered their lives to grab a Frisbee: You make me uneasy about the human condition.