Moving On Up, Down the Road

We’re moving. After nearly three years at our apartment across the street from the cemetery, Laurel and I are changing addresses, traversing 9 ¾ blocks to the north, where the rents are (slightly) higher and the zip code is (one digit) lower. Why? Well, as anyone who has known us in our California incarnation has heard, we live next door to the most dysfunctional family on the Westside. Not immediately next door – our apartment building neighbors are kind neighborly people, despite the British guy’s penchant for speaking into his cell phone at an auctioneer-like volume. No, I’m talking about the people on the other side of the fence, in the house. And I use the word “house” loosely. For their rather large lot has, over many years (they’ve lived there since 1968, as they reminded me one day), been transformed into a shantytown of wooden planks, tree houses, lean-tos, sheds, and lonesome pillars, their yard filled with the discarded furnishings of the entire 1900 block.

In the main house lives the matriarch, a rather short woman with beady eyes and a blood-curdling scream that wakes our cats from their sleep. She’s the sanest one. Between the main house and the first of the in-progress shanty huts lives the patriarch. He is also short, with a long yellow beard. He lives outdoors, sleeping on the grass, smoking a pipe, coughing tubercularly, and listening to a transistor radio. He meets his wife’s rants with demented screams of his own, often before dawn. Also, though he owns (and not rents, as he reminded me that same day) a piece of Santa Monica property that would fetch two million dollars in a weak market, he can often be seen at the Cloverfield off-ramp of the 10 freeway panhandling for change. His sign reads: Homeless. Any little bit will help. He waves at me when I recognize him there.

Now, if it were just the two of them – the angry dwarf and her homeless millionaire husband – I’d be fine with it – an eccentric elderly couple, counting down their days, bickering over why she won’t let him in the house, half-building their half-built shacks. It would all make for fun conversation at parties, for stories to tell when I get to be their age, but with cleaner hair and all of my teeth. I would talk about the time we threw away our cat scratching post because it had been scratched bare by bulimic Seymour and discontent Lily, and how we looked over the fence the next day and saw the scratching post in their yard, acting as a weight for a tarp made of discarded trash bags, protecting other found objects from the rain. But it’s more than just the two if them. They have children – two grown men who have learned the art of screaming and hoarding from their parents. And one of these men owns a towing business. Normally, one can’t operate a loud 24-hour business from the back of a house on a residential street, a business with roaring trucks that often need to be driven in reverse, resulting in the beeping sound that backwards moving trucks make, even at 3 in the morning. And normally one can’t just decide to supplement the towing business with an auto repair “shop” in the alley. But they do it anyway, despite the fact that every relevant city office knows about the illegal businesses. Somewhere, money is changing hands. And the recipient drives a car with the city's logo emblazoned on it. Anyway, I have never longed for the irony of a tow truck towing a tow truck as much as I have these past few months.

So, the noise – the screaming, the towing, the engine overhauling, the screaming again – has become unbearable. Throw in the fact that the neighbors on the other side of the other fence, the side that faces our bedroom, have recently taken to playing the old school slow jams radio station at high volumes (don’t get me wrong – I like Al, Luther, Marvin, and Anita as much as the next guy. I practically discovered Teddy Pendergrass! But 7:30 on a Saturday morning is too early for classic Philly soul. Or even nu soul) and it’s clearly time to go. And not since my childhood home in Buckingham, Pennsylvania, where I lived from age 10 to 18, have I lived anywhere this long (nearly three years at the same address!).

We will be living in the same city, on the same street. Our stakeout last night confirmed that Classic Towing does not have a north-of-Wilshire branch. By July 1, we will no longer live a half-block away from Santa Monica College, with its renowned planetarium and fitness pool. We will no longer live down the street from the Falafel Hut. But we will live a few blocks away from overpriced restaurants and a fine revival movie house, the recently reopened Aero Theater (this month: the films of Massimo Troisi!). And we will sleep in relative silence. Yes, there are no guarantees. But nothing can be worse. Nothing.

Okay, no more complaining. I’ll instead praise the universe for existing, the ocean for delivering, and John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats for writing my second favorite blog.