This morning around 4 a.m., I was nudged awake by a constant parade of screaming fire trucks barreling down Gaston Avenue.
This is not unusual as early morning sirens on Gaston are about common as Britney Spears' careless pregnancies. Most often, the fire trucks get called out for extremely non-emergency matters. I used to call ambulances and fire trucks the HMO plan for the stupid because when I was a police reporter, more than half of all emergency response calls I listened to on my handheld scanner were for entirely stupid reasons. For example, one time a drunk guy who wanted to get a ride across town called 911 and claimed he'd just been shot in the head. The ambulance showed up, found no bullet wound in his noggin and told him: "No, we will not give you a free ride. Thanks for wasting our time."
But this morning was different because there were just too many firetrucks rolling down my street to benefit one stupid drunk guy.
Turns out, the Villas at Gaston were getting really crispy courtesy of a raging inferno. Yay!
This is great news because nobody lived in the apartments, so one would assume no one got hurt. The apartments were boarded up and had been for sale forever. Gaston is littered with crap 1950's and 1960's era apartments that get worse with every successive owner. The clientele goes from steadily from urban hipsters, then to working class decent people, then to jobless knuckleheads who hang out on Gaston Avenue all day long and look for trouble. That cycle just ended for this complex. For now, until another complex goes up in its place.
