Neighborhood News

My toothless neighbor had a heart attack. With his blue feet and all, and his chain smoking, one wouldn't say he was in the best of health in the first place.

I got home from work last night and Toothless's wife sidled up and vodka'd in my ear, "Toothless had a heart attack". I was like, "WHAT?!" and then I noticed that she was dressed up (aka out of her house dress), and he had eye makeup on. And she seemed chipper. Hmm, dislike your husband much?

She told me it was a mild heart attack and I was glad for that. As much as I make fun of my neighbors, I do like him. He's a sweet man. He's the man who screams at his wiener dog.

I have new neighbors renting the house just to the south of me. A woman, a man and a stepson. The woman is short, stocky and rough- she looks like she should be smoking a cigar and balling up twine on a schooner. The husband looks like a has-been fashion model. He's tall with hair "wings" that bounce and behave as he lopes around the backyard fixing stuff. He wears odd things. I suspect he shops at the Goodwill but not in an ironic way. Think Dolphin shorts.

The stepson mostly stands around in the backyard with a twig or a rock in his hand. Just stands.

So they're digging this hole. It is right outside my kitchen window. It's big enough for a body right now. They haven't dug in a while. Perhaps it's the rain, or maybe they're done and they're just waiting to kill me.

My kitchen sink faces their living room where they sit on the couch and watch TV. So once a year when I do dishes, I essentially look right in at them. It wouldn't be so unnerving if they could tell that I was doing dishes, but the window doesn't begin until about my mid chest. So, for all they know, I'm just standing at the window, watching them watch TV. Ah well. What are they going to do, call the police? Not with that open grave out back.

Maybe Toothless will be back from the hospital tonight when I get home from work. That would be good. I miss his shouts and yips.

You're Soaking In It

I hate doing dishes probably more than anything in the world. I'd rather get a mammogram. I'd rather pick up dog doo with my bare hands.

So I swore I'd do the dishes this last Sunday, it being Easter and all. I figured, if there was a Jesus, he'd probably want me to do the dishes. So I took a nap, scraped down the hideous oil painting I'd began the night before, swept the floor and did some laundry. Then I took another lie down. This is when the panic attack hit. The damn dishes. The income taxes, the property taxes, the mortgage, and the dishes. I was snowballing. I promised myself that if I ever got the dishes done, I would never use a dish again. I would buy paper plates (sorry trees) and plastic forks (sorry everything).

I got out of bed, walked past my pile of 2006, 2007 and now 2008 taxes, past my mortgage bill, past my phone where there was a message from my dad wondering what I was going to do about my property taxes, and into the kitchen, and out the back door.

My backyard looked okay. Nothing was on fire, to my disappointment. I turned around and headed back into the kitchen. Turn the water on, just turn the water on, I told myself. I turned the water on. Letting the water run (sorry ocean) I put the few dishes away that were on the drying rack from the last time I did dishes, four months earlier. Then I got down to work.

I made a deal with myself. I'd just wash the dishes that lined my counter and that was all. I'd do the rest, the stuff in the sink, another day. Just get through the overflow, that's all I had to do. Jesus would understand.

I did it. I washed those fucking glasses way deep down inside and all over the outside and on the bottoms. I washed four bowls. I did not wash the silverware. The silverware would wait for the next time.

I dried my hands on a paper towel and felt lighter as I watched my neighbor through the kitchen window. This isn't the neighbor with the blue feet, this is the neighbor to the south. A single woman, who smokes cigarettes with her son like he's her lover. But that's a story for another day.

Maybe I'll take a look at my taxes tonight. Right after I do this one thing to my painting...

Shut It

My sweet, blue footed neighbor has a laugh that echoes through the neighborhood like an exotic bird's cackley call. Mostly I hear him at dusk when he's ha haaaaaing over a DVD rental. First comes the surround sound(tm) rumble of some high-tech Hollywood explosion, then comes his roaring laughter, childlike and unfettered.

The same neighbor has a indoor dog and a yard dog. The yard dog is part Chow and is well cared for in a stepdog sort of way- kind of the way Tom Cruise's other children get treated now. What other children. I know. Like that.

The indoor dog lives in the house and the Chow lives in the backyard. The indoor dog is a Wiener Dog. The Wiener Dog is named after a famous brand of hot dog. Let's call him Ball Park. Ball Park gets treats like fried bacon. The Chow gets left over dry cat food bits that have skittered across the deck and into the backyard weeds.

Ball Park and owner, look let's just call him Gary, spend a lot of time out in the front yard shooting the breeze. Sometimes guys pull up in their lifted 4 x 4s to talk to Gary about cars. Gary used to do body work on cars for a living until both shoulders gave out. Now he's on disability. He also has blood clots. I think that's why he doesn't wear shoes. So guys pull up and most of the time, if Gary is in the house, they'll honk. This makes the dogs, inside and outside, go crazy. When the dogs go crazy, Gary gets loud like one of those fake/real locomotive car horns. And it is this that he shouts: "SHUT IT!" "SHUT IT!" "SHUT IT!" "BALL PARK, SHUT IT!" And then the screen door clacks shut and Gary and Ball Park bounce down the steps and across the lawn toward one of their many friends.

Someone says something about tie rods. Gary breaks out in laughter. Ball Park barks. Gary shouts "SHUT IT!". Everything is right in the world.

Toothless Neighbors and Government Cheese

When I chose this town, I wasn't quite in my right mind. I see that now. That, or my realtor slipped ecstasy tabs into my Diet Coke as we drove around the sidewalkless streets that rainy May a year ago. I had looked at other towns; Altadena, Alhambra... all of the places that I could afford, and none of them spoke to me. In retrospect, maybe I should have listened a little harder to what those cities were saying before I slapped my fortune down in good old Tujunga.
I came from a middle class family. My father was a public high school art teacher and my mother was a part time public school teacher. How I became such a locationally confused person, I'll never know. Maybe it has to do with living in such poverty each summer and also constantly living so far beyond our means. There is confusion and hazard inherent in growing up in a household in debt.
I grew up at the beach in the Hollywood Riviera in Redondo Beach. It's not like it sounds. I was pale and freckled and fat. Classmates threw eucalyptus pods at me in disgust and anger while we waited at the bus stop. That's how not user friendly I was. My parents fought about everything. I cried all the time. They stopped their fighting to yell at me for crying. I'm trying to give you the big picture. I'm also trying to figure out how I ended up here in Hillbilly and NeoNazi Heaven. I'm going to trust that pitching this out there will lead me to some sun dappled path's end.
I have a brother. He is older than I am by six years. When I was very young, I used to think he looked like one of the Beatles. It's because he used to wear his hair longish in the front. Everybody did in the early 70's. He used to skateboard all over the place. In 1976 we both, along with my little sister, got our pictures in a skateboard book. We thought we were pretty hot. I skateboarded because my brother did. I did everything he did. I wanted to be around him all of the time. One time I asked him if I could hang out with him and his friend Chris. He said I could if I skateboarded around in the street in only my underwear. I retreated from his bedroom and thought about it for a very long time then I declined his offer. I was completely disappointed in myself.
I have a younger sister. She got shot in the wrist when we were walking home from school one day. I heard the air rifle go off. It sounded like a rubber band being snapped. We hated this hill. It was steep and seemed to never end. It was hot that day. One minute we were walking up our hill and the next minute she was looking at her wrist and blood was starting to pulse out of it. She began to cry. I had a dirty old blue bandanna in my backpack. I found it and tied it around her wrist, more to hide the wound from my eyes than anything else. I held her wrist and we started walking up the hill again. A boy on his bike came riding up alongside us. I knew him from school. He was a few grades older than I was. He said, "What's wrong?" or "What happened?" and I gave him a wicked squint and said "you know". And he did know. That bee bee came straight out of his house on that hill and hit my sister in the arm- traveled right up the vein in her arm and was headed for something important is all I knew.
The detectives came to our house. They asked us what happened. They were dressed nicely. They were young. They would tell us that my sister was shot with an air rifle and the boy who did it hid the rifle in his closet. His mother was very upset. His brother was a quarterback at USC. That was the big deal. That was all my mother talked about. "Your sister got shot by the brother of the quarterback from USC!"
The detectives and my parents kept telling me that I had done a good thing by tying the bandanna around my sister's wrist- that I had created a tourniquet and had helped to stop the bleeding (this was before the tourniquet had fallen out of favor as a means of stopping bleeding). I never intended to do this. My sole intention was to cover the wound so my sister (and I) wouldn't have to see the blood anymore and to probably sop up the blood. But man, I ran with the whole tourniquet thing. I didn't deny it, I just nodded my head and drank it in. And I felt like a heel. To this day I feel guilty for taking credit. I did not create a tourniquet on my sister's arm that day. I just didn't want to see the blood. Case closed.
Or is it. Could my fear and disdain for shady thugs come from that sole incident? Perhaps. Or maybe there's more.