From a distance the violence in Amherst is not obvious. The violence in Amherst is not separate acts by individuals who could be arrested and prosecuted. The violence in Amherst is a pervasive acceptance of disrespect and vandalism that the police and apparently everyone else in the town expects. When I moved away, the city I moved to had flower beds in front of the hospitals and universities. Those flower beds would never survive in Amherst. The students would rip them out in a day or a week and the beds would never be replanted. When I called to report the theft and vandalism that took place at 143 Fearing Street over the years, the police came to the house but never did anything about it. In fact, in the twenty-five years since I had the radio stolen out of my car on the Hampshire College campus, to the week I left Amherst when someone broke both of the windshield wipers off of my truck, I never had the police call me back and tell me that they had solved any crime. The attitude that the police had was, you live at 143 Fearing Street one block from the UMass campus, what do you expect?
After the first and second set of chairs were stolen off of my front porch, I chained the chairs to the porch for the remaining years I lived at 143 Fearing Street. I instructed every tenant at my house that they needed to lock up their bicycles every time they left them outside. For students who did not lock up their bikes, it would only be a day or so before they were stolen. 143 Fearing Street is located between the bars in downtown Amherst, and the 5500 students who live in the UMass Southwest dormitories. And enough of those students see it as their right and privilege to go shopping at 143 Fearing Street, which makes living in that house intolerable.
The summer that purchased the 143 Fearing Street, the first thing that I did was subscribe to Organic Gardening magazine. I built a raised bed out behind the house from timbers that are safe for plants and I filled it with topsoil. I was happy about my rows of tomatoes, my swiss chard, and my basel. And then one morning I came out and found that someone had destroyed my garden. They had ripped out most of my plants and trampled the others. I do not know why they would do such a thing or what they thought they would gain from this act. But it was the end of the season and I couldn’t replant for that year. In later years I never had the time or spirit to try having a garden again. I just accepted that I could grow vegetables at 143 Fearing Street. I did not renew my subscription.
The next summer I had the opportunity to work in the UMass sculpture studio. A wonderful resource that was offered by the university, before it burned down. The sculpture that I produced expressed my feeling for owning my home in Amherst. It had tall gracefully curved aluminum tubes with flowerlike cones that shifted gently in the wind. It had an arch with fieldstones suspended in meshes of welded steel, each individually shaped to their curves. And it had a reflecting pool of water which was gently swirled as the wind blew. That sculpture survived outside of my home at 143 Fearing Street for less than one week before the aluminum tubes were broken off and the sculptural flowers were left broken and spread around the yard. I made another police report for which there was never a call back. I never had the heart to repair that sculpture after it was damaged. All that was left until I sold the property nineteen years later were the stones left hanging over the reflecting pool and the broken dream that I would own a home with a vegetable garden and a sculpture in the yard.
There was one tenant that I particularly difficult time with. He was a math grad student, and his girlfriend, later to be his wife, were both renting rooms from me at 143 Fearing Street. The girlfriend was from India and I could never keep the house warm enough for her. In the years that she lived in the house, I replaced both the thermostat and the furnace itself. I would turn the heat up until the other tenants would complain and leave their windows open in the winter, but the house was never warm enough for her. And because he was her man, he felt that he had to defend her, and I was the person he needed to defend her against. I did everything I could. I just couldn’t keep my house in wintertime New England as warm as the summer in equatorial Madras.
It just so happened that the week that this tenant moved out was the week that I got my new pickup truck. Although I could not prove it in a court of law, I know that it was this student who vandalized my new truck by carving a swastika into the rear window of the cap. Like in so many other incidents of vandalism, I filed a police report about this incident. At that time I felt it was at least a good idea for there to be a record of what was going on. This was back when I thought the police were actually filing the reports that they took. I gave the police this ex-tenant’s name, and the address I had for his girlfriend in Boston. The officer asked me if I had a local address for this student and I told them that I didn’t. The Amherst officer told me, “Well, we’re not going to call someone in Boston for something that happened here.” I thought that if any vandalism would rise to the level of a police investigation it would be a hate crime, but apparently not in Amherst. If you live at 143 Fearing Street, be prepared to live with no police protection at all.
Before I replaced the rear glass on my pickup truck I told other people about this hate crime. One person that I showed the swastika to was the orthodox rabbi at the Chabad House two blocks away on McClure Street. I thought that he might have the connections and resources to have this hate crime investigated. He didn’t. His discussion with me was about if the insurance covered the replacement cost of the glass, not who should be alerted and mobilized. I later learned learned that this man who calls himself an orthodox rabbi is actually a Scots-Irish guy who converted to being Jewish and has a history of alcohol abuse. The longer that I lived in Amherst, the less enamored I became with the place. The incompetence in Amherst is so prevalent that I am amazed that the entire town does not just fall into disrepair. This reinforced my understanding that there is no enforcement of laws in Amherst Massachusetts, including hate crimes.