Maniac on the Floor

OK, say you got the Lexus. Wouldn´t mortgage payments and tax rates still be off the chain? Not if you´re exceptionally resourceful. The hungry realtor suggests renting out the garage. ¨Some guy with a truck would be more than happy to give you five or six hundred dollars a month to use that space!¨ Of course, then there´d be no place to park the Lexus.

Speaking of garages: Tailpipe will sell the family´s sway-back homestead for the best offer above 100 bucks. Buy in the next ten days and get a toaster and $100 in Wannado City scrip.

Love Thy Neighbor (Elsewhere)

Homeless advocate Arnold Abbott has been kicked out of yet another locale. For nearly a year, a few hundred ragtag diners have lined up each Sunday outside Who´s on First, a small deli just east of the main library in downtown Fort Lauderdale. Just before 11 a.m., Abbott´s nonprofit, Love Thy Neighbor, would arrive by van with a hearty feast of salads, stews, and cakes. Volunteers would pass out clothes and toiletries while the patrons ate in quick shifts, four to a table, inside the lively pastel-painted café. Then the Love Thy Neighbor crew would clean up the mess.

But the early lunches are off the menu. The deli´s owner, Washington Salvo, says someone broke in the second week of June. Police think it was a homeless person. ¨They said: It´s your fault because they come in here and see everything,¨ Salvo recounts, glancing ruefully at the homeless crowd gathered outside his glass doors. That was the last Sunday he would host the meal. ¨This hurts a lot. I didn´t deserve this.¨

Abbott, who still dollops out food every Wednesday evening in front of the Bahia Mar on Fort Lauderdale Beach, is feeling persecuted too.

¨We´ll find another place soon,¨ he promises. His followers sure hope so. The wandering diners rattle off a litany of problems, most related to health and money. The government checks don´t go far enough, they complain; rent is expensive, and their families don´t want anything to do with them.

Abbott has been helping the homeless since 1991. ¨If it wasn´t for him, I´d be robbin´ and stealin´ for a meal I´m not kidding,¨ says Robert Brody, 39, who has been homeless for the better part of two years.