Termite and vine Bequeathed to the dirty kids !!!
TERMITE IS OURS !!!
ALMOST
TODAY, AFTER POSSESSING TERMITE FOR 21 MONTHS, I FINALLY MET THE FAMILY OF THE FORMER OWNER
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IN 2005, i was living in Pitt city pencilvania. i moved to pitt to move in with my friend mary-belle K. whose an underground community health care activist whose been bottomlining an absurdly multitiered campaign to radicalise the crack heads for the last 4 years. May-be k. introduced me to serious long term squatting in early 003 when i met her living in the squatted punk ass town of beelen west virginia. i worked on a crappy attempt to save beelen when the feds were trying to bust up the dirty kid enclave of subversive foodnotbombs cooking and arty colledge punks turning scumfuck. its a long story but we lost.
in 2005 me and may-be K. ran in to eachother again and she had since aquired herself coldlake, a 4 story 8 unit apaprtment building squat with a 2000 sq foot warehouse in the basement . i quit my job resizing jpgs for a porn site and moved out of the rooming house i was living in to go help her remodel the building with consent of the owner and promise of a 2 bedroom appartment all to myself next door to hers. 24 hours before my freind mike was to drive me and my 5 garbage bags of personal possessions to Pitt city, somebuddy burnt down the coldlake.
me and may-be relocated to Liberty just outside of Pitt and started working on renovating some abandoned farm houses we were "given" by the collective farm next door in exchange for turning on theri electricity. hers was a gutted building called "the barn" and mine was a giant structurally sound 3 palace story called "the white house". the white house came fully furnished with tons of clothes and paper work and junk in it and everything had been molding from the endless bleak rain of Pitt for 15 years. i spent 2 weeks shovelling revolting black mold cover crap through holes i cut in the floor untill i got so sick that i was laid out in bed for 2 days with May-be having to constantly supervise me to make sure i didnt stop breathing though my colapsed bronchiols.
ever since then i have been completely imune to breathing black mold. which came in handy cuz as soon as i recovered the debaucherous port city of morteville, swamp parish, was obliverated by a great flood (as engineered by the government). may-be spent 2 days at some nice wealthy burning man hippies house glued to the internet downloading pictures of people on top of their houses shooting at helicopters and rowing arround in anything that floated trying to loot food and we imediately decided to take a 2 week break from the farm and go visit the appocalypse to act as a renegade search and rescue first aid team. What actually happened after we were smuggled in to the city in a truck load of emergency equipment was that we got stationed in algeirs LA moving boxes arround at the emergency free clinic.
in late september i took asignment to go work in the middle of the pumped out neighbourhood of 7 ward, working at a distro center giving out food and bleach to anyone who'd managed to perceveer the great flood and susequent attempts of the national guard to round up survivors and force them in to camps. i spent 2 months living in a tent next to a pile of generators and doing the bidding of a famously volitile gun toting black panther aligned activist woman who barbequed alot. by mid november i was complely burnt out mostly cuz our boss was an OCD neat freak and , y'know, the city was destroyed and thus really filthy and she kept freaking me out.
but it was on november 5th, 3 days after the voodoo holiday of day of the dead, that may-be came by to visit and attempt to drag me to some bar (bullets) that had stayed open through the flood and was the only bar for 3 miles arround the muddy electricty less street. well may-be got us completly lost as we crossed abuch of triangular streets and i was all depressed over getting dumped by this guy on tree cutting crew whom i'd been seeing and we were wandering aimless when we both simultaniously spotted this big rotten house completey devoured by vines and we imediatly ran up its stairs to hide out on it porch and rest and talk shit.
shortly, may-be popped the broken lock on the door with her leatherman and we went in to look arround an i imediatly fell through the rotten termite eaten floor. we spent the next 2 hours playing arround smashing holes in the floor and climbing up and down and arround in the junk piles.
"hey" said may-be, "you should squat this place!"
"fuck no !" i replied, "this place is about to fall down. this place SUCKS"
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and thus was the birth of TERMITE and VINE !!!
history of the vintur family
Before 1925 there was nothing here. termites neighbourhood of 7 ward, north of the I-10 expressway was swamp untill the end of the 19th century when it finally got filled in with mortevilles garbage and a few inches of dirt over top. today if you dig a foot down in termites yard you are rewarded with earth that is about %20 sea shells and %10 broken glass. in the middle of summer sometimes termites yard has 6" of brown water on top of it. in 1909 the neighbourhood was divided in to square lots but there were no buildings for a while other than a sprawling 10 acre factory were dead horses and shit were processed in to fertilizer.
(see the stanford 1909 land survey, plate 98)in 1925 termites completely empty block, square 1581, municipal district 3, was sold with several other to b. lewis. i cant figure out who the fuck b.lewis is but he seems to have contracted the construction of half the houses in my neighbourhood. 1n 1927 TERMITE was completed and its first resident, James L. Dean moved in, buying the house for $1700. it was also in july 1927 that the newly settled northern part of morteville was fucked up by a flood. cuz its built on a swamp filled in with garbage.
james L. dean sold the place to frank panzer in 1932. and may 1941 Carlo Vintur and his wife lucy bought the place to be theri rental property.
carlo vintur has been a strange ghost to me for the last 21 months. he hasnt paid termites taxes in 28 years. he sometimes appears on differnt documents with slight aliases like carlos vinter. he owns my house, the store across the street, a vacant lot near were the dead horse factory used to be and one other dead house a mile from here. he was born in 1915 and died in 2005 and owes the louissianna government about a million dollars in unpaid taxes. neighbours tell me all sorts of things like they used to do odd jobs for him or that he was mafia. I've had to write his name on dozens of documents since trying to possess my house but he was a mystery ghost untill today when i finally tracked down his next of kin; carlo's son joe vintur, age 62.
i found joe with a combination of dillegent obituary searches at the library and dozens of phone calls. Joe had never realised we had taken his fathers property as he's only been to our neighbourhood once in the last 10 yeasr to sell his brothers house (our next door neighbour). however Joe was DELIGHTED to hear from me. he said that the in his fathers later years, he couldnt maintain the properties, the rental market was poor, and his 4 houses slipped away from him untill he gave up on them and moved in to a small house in the eastern suburbs and gradually went completely broke. the family was sad to loose the properties but couldnt nearly afford the hundreds of thousands in taxes nor pay for renovations to the very decayed structures. they'd long since resigned themselves that the houses would be taken by the city and demolished, but had quietly hoped that somehow the buildings might get saved.
joe's story of the vintur real estate is like this: carlo's father came here from italy in the early 1900. he worked selling coal and vegetables out of a cart. in 1939 he bought his 24 year old son the grocery store across the street from termite. carlo and his wife lucy lived in the back of the store and raised 3 children there and owned 2 houses next door as rental properties. joe spoke nostalgicly of how his father built additions on the back of the store and in 1941 aquired the big house across the street, TERMITE, as a rental property. the house on tonti was another rental property. the vacant lot on frenchman was a neighbourhood bar.
in 1950 sumthing, the grocery store was refitted in to a ceramics buissiness for carlos oldest son Nick, and carlo moved to a fancier house near the shallow lake ponchetraine. Nick's ceramics store specialised in ornamental molding but his hobby was making porceline dolls (a few parts of which are still in there on dusty shelves). years went by tho and the frenchman bar went out of buissiness, carlo couldnt pay for it so let it fall in to decay untill the city tore it down in the 80s. carlo's finances never went on the up again and they lost all their properties before the end of the century.
Joe was greatly enthused that we're taking over Termite and more so that i told him I'd like to eventually aquire the store he grew up in also and convert it in to my workshop, property management general contracting office, super world control base.
i promised him i'd file my claim this fall if developers dont steal it before then. and maybe give it a coat of paint. i invited joe to coe see termite as it is now, but he had to decline as he's recovering from bypass surgery. he might drop by in the fall.
SO i am in a very good mood right now cuz the Vintur family practically just gave me all their fathers property. and joe Vintur is really nice and we talked on the phone for 45 minutes. hopefully he'll still like us in the fall when he finds out what a bunch of wierd little dirty kids we are.
TERMITE AND VINE IN COURT ON WEDNESSDAY
I've had to stay in morteville untill now to fight another part of termites case, that of passing the hurricane clean up inspection. the city code office demands that all houses that were in the flood must be gutted and secured and neat in appearence. citations are being given our randomly. the city code inspectors dont return your calls to tell you whats the problem is after you get a violation notice. the city is having trouble right now cuz they promised 2500 properties to developers as part of a federally funded rebuild grant and they're a few hundred short. so the city eager to reposses a bunch of houses ASAP.
TERMITE and our sister house APPARATUS will be attending the hearings at the morteville redevelopemnt authority on wednessday morning 9 fucking AM. Termite and apparatus are the hub of the morteville squatocray and have the distinction of being, asside from miss jane's ranch, the only two serious long term squats in town under control of the dirty kids. all the court date really required of us is to present a convincing series of photographs of our houses demonstrating that we've fullfilled the absolute minimum requirments of clean up and renovation (removal of flood junk, bording up broken windows). the main hurdle we have to face is that the actual definition of how cleaned up is enoguh is vauge and arbitrary. another major difficulty is that niether of us actually "own" our property. here Termite has a slight advantage in that we have a deed of corporeal possession (an obscure kind of deed that most city employees loook at funny). apparatus kicks termite's ass in the renovated department tho cuz termite is about to cave in and is propped up with a bunch of wood we found in an abandoned ship yard.
probable outcome of wednessday:
%70 they'll look at our photo albums and we'll walk.
%10 they'll notice our dubious possession statuses and we'll fast talk our way out of it.
%10 our houses will get offered to developers who wont want them cuz they's decrepit.
%05 our houses will get offered to developers who wont want them cuz we'll throw bricks at them if they come anywere near
%05 we burn down the city attornys office. the city is ours
the city attornys office is 11 stories high so it would be an impressive fire. it'd be a shame tho cuz the building is full of lovely old books of court papers and maps.
Termite and apparatus have sworn that if either of us loose, we're gonna bolt the two houses together forming TERMAPPERATINEUSITE and it will be a summer of old school squatty baricades and booby traps and phone trees and moltovs and me u-locking my neck to a rotten floor joist and shit.
my houses owners son gave me this fucking house. any asshole who tries to take it from me is gonna get a brick in the teeth.
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