So we moved. Moving is a chore and a half. My girlfriend moved her art studio into my loft – so that is now our job site – she has her art studio, I have my publishing offices and writing desk.
But home is where the clean underwear is, and our cleanies are out our HOUSE. Yes we have moved in together into a house.
Okay, the house is Huntington Park, which is near or in (depending on who you talk to) South Central L.A.
HP is its own city. It is 95-99% Latino, tilting heavily toward the immigrant side of the scale in that regard.
The house we live in was built in 1902. It is 850 sq. feet, has a separate garage. We have a patio and a large front yard with many shade trees.
We have a chain link fence and an automatic garage door opener for our one-car garage. We inherited two dogs from the previous homeowner – my younger brother, who couldn’t live here another day as his triplets are growing and growing. It is a tight squeeze, neither of us can figure how Joe, his wife, their 6-yr old son and their almost 1-yr old triplets managed. My girlfriend had a 1800 sq ft loft at the Brewery Art Colony and she downsized to 400 of my loft’s 1000 sq feet.
So I know nothing about owning a pet, but these dogs crap everywhere. So today the little boy next door asks me if I need any help around the yard. I tell him I will give him $5 if he cleans up the dog poop in the front yard. The kid gets his brother and they go to work – they pick up all the trash (We are adjacent an alley and some of the neighbors think throwing trash over the fence here suffices as “not littering”) in the yard and scoop all the dog poop and rake all the leaves – they work for like an hour, do a great job, the yard looks amazing. So I give them each four bucks. They look at the money like it is ten thousand dollars. Their younger brothers and sisters are looking over the fence hollering “Mateo, give me money”. You can buy popularity. 8 kids in the smaller house next door. Next to their house a sweatshop with 40 employees on each of 3 shifts sewing stuff.
So the 2 kids run off with the money, leaving me to relax in my front yard with my 2 dogs and the ballgame on the television. So what did they buy with their $4. Well, i want to say ice cream and I want to say Cheetos, but they came running back shooting their newly-purchased cap guns at each other. They were in ecstasy, they finally had a gun! There was no room for a lecture here, they will run out of caps soon enough.
So we are going on our 3rd night here and will get up Sunday morning and drive into work – I will be working on the next issue of the magazine and my girlfriend will be working on her art. That will be weird, commuting to a creative job. We will probably take a break and go see the Dan Flavin show at LACMA in the mid-afternoon. We’ll see – this is still so new to both if us that it is hard to make concrete plans beyond making sure the dogs got fed.