The guy next door was a dick. It is an immigrant-heavy, blue collar neighborhood where garages on properties are routinely turned into housing for families. This is not Greg Brady getting the attic, this is mom-dad-five-kids in every available structure with bedsheets as walls if need be. In every house. In every garage. In one of the most densely populated neighborhoods in Los Angeles. So the house next door is maybe 900 square feet and has been divided into a duplex. With this tight squeeze, it is normal for people to use their front yards as storage areas, leaving the neighborhood looking like nobody ever picks up, and this is out of necessity, it ain’t Brentwood, it is home, I can deal with it, people comment on it as a first impression, but that is not trash strewn everywhere, it is the side of each house and most porches doubling as a pubic storage unit.
So the part about everyone being friendly to us. Everyone but the dick next door. He was a first class asshole to me, always commenting on how crappy my yard looked and insisting I hire him to rake the leaves. Mind you, his porch has garbage bags of dirty laundry and his young son’s dresser drawer prominent among other stuff piled up and leaning below what was once a working doorbell. To restate, such chaos does not bug me at all, but the dude is on me about how terrible my yard looks because the leaves fall from the trees. The way that he approached me with a complaint and then an offer to clean up once a week for a hundred bucks was only one of many dickish things this guy did. And I will get to plenty of them in the three thousand words ahead. To piss him off, though, I hired Eddy and Chellay to clean my yard every Sunday. I have always talked to Eddy (age 12 back then) and Chellay (14 when I moved here) like adults except when they were destroying shit with power tools. I paid them $20 each to clean my yard every Sunday. Payment was under one condition – that they would tell the dick neighbor they were making $50 each. I explained why. They understood and relished the opportunity to fuck with the guy they called the Monkey Man.
Eddy and Chellay and their large numbered family (lost count, 10, maybe 11) used to live in the converted garage next door to me, right behind the dick, but they did not call him the dick, they called him Monkey Man. I asked them why. “Look at him,” said Chellay, “he looks like a Monkey. He is dumber than my sister.” Chellay’s sister has some long complicated Honduran name with soft consonants and lots of vowels that is impossible to replicate here. Like every good 14-year old boy, he hates his sister, so this drives his loathing of the dick neighbor home. If the dick were black I would have to give a PC lecture to Eddy and Chellay for calling him “Monkey Man,” as that is where I draw the line. But it is Chellay who has the African features, who has a future of dealing with that bullshit from his Latino peers, my well-meaning but blind white brethren, African Americans who won’t consider him black and Asians who will put up the wall because they do.
Meanwhile Monkey Man looks like he fell off the Tapatio bottle with a baseball cap in lieu of the sombrero he left back in the old country. He is a central casting caricature of a Mexican immigrant, black hair, brown eyes, dark moustache, wife and three kids piling into the van on Sunday to go to church. Big parties a few times a year in the front yard, novena for the Lady of Guadalupe every December complete with a spotlit altar on the side porch. In lieu of interrupting this essay with a pandering White guilt-trip rationalization of why my appreciation of Latin America eases my criticisms of its more dickish members, please allow me to call the dick, the Monkey Man, a piece of shit, even though his anonymous face is being mimicked as an ethnic signifier by a million men in Los Angeles.
There were a few other tales of his dickishness that could be called up in case you are not convinced. The Monkey Man expressed relief that the likelihood of my dogs jumping over to his side of the yard was decreasing when he saw me adding a higher barrier on the wall that separates his property from mine– and rightfully so as my pooches are big and scary and that is by design because, as stated before, it is the hood and the bars on every single window help, but the pit bull and her 80-pound mutt boyfriend stalk the crackheads and the homeboys and the petty thieves as they walk along the chain link fence that separates my yard from their alley; said stalking and occasional barking complement the natural mean looks of my dogs, making the decision to keep walking sooooo much easier for all pedestrians taking this paved road less travelled. So on the other side of the yard that afternoon, the lattices go up but there is a gap in between each of them. The dogs have never jumped over and are less likely to now, but he wants me to finish the job today. He starts to passionately insist (If he was white or my boss I would describe it as him haranguing my ass) that I cover these gaps. He demands his privacy. You know, the privacy he did not have earlier in the day and the whole time he has lived there before I had added on to the height of the fence that morning. So I’m worried about my dogs and he is worried about me seeing into his yard like I could since the day I moved in. I say “Okay,” and don’t cover the gaps.
A few days later, and I still have not gotten around to covering the gaps, he walks up to my fence with his wife and older daughter. The daughter speaks English. She says that her dad wants me to cover the gaps in the wall (and they are four feet off the ground and had been there all the time we had live in harmony until I did a little something about it but not a complete something about it) because my dogs jumped through and scared her. Wait a minute. “They jumped over?” She nods, the father nods, the mother nods. “When?” “Today.” She says it, the father nods, the mother nods. “Did they bite you?” “No.” She says it, the father nods, the mother nods. I went from being worried to being suspicious. “How did they get back over?” The daughter has always been a flat, emotionless zombie. But now she is stunned enough to look at her dad with panic. Monkey Man did not realize what I asked. He is getting a smile. To remind you, he solemnly walked over to break the news that my dogs had figured a way to scale up almost five feet in order to jump into his yard and bark at but not bite his daughter. But he is smiling now that his rehearsed family is dancing as choreographed. I ask in broken Spanish how the dogs jumped back. The mother is looking nervous, far from the confident nods of a minute ago. They meander off.
So he got his wife and daughter to lie. My girlfriend put up chicken wire that night in between the gaps. It did not look great, but hey it is the hood, right? Right.
In the last year I have just worked to avoid a pissing contest. I just avoided the Monkey Man after a while. But then he got two dogs, LuLu, a poodle and Mini, a Chihuahua mix. He never took care of them other than to set a bowl of food out every day. They ran around the neighborhood. No shots, no license, no collars. So one day the poodle was gone. He told everyone it had been stolen. He was a liar. Chellay told me that Monkey Man would lie about things his brothers and sisters had supposedly done in order to get them in trouble. But Chellay’s mother would smile and say thanks and never disciplined them. She knew the Monkey Man was lying. Like Chellay said, dumber than his sister. So of course it was not the Monkey Man’s negligence that caused LuLu the poodle to disappear, it was a thief after something of his because it was so great; great by virtue of being his.
So the months went on and Mini the Chihuahua had two puppies. He bragged that he could make money as a dog breeder to anyone who would listen in the neighborhood. By now, he and I never spoke and looked the other way when we realized that even eye contact might be coming. The girl across the street told me that Monkey Man bred a Maltese with his dog thinking he would get puppies to begin a breeding business. Eddy and Chellay have long moved on and the guy now living in their garage/house tells me the yapping dogs are really bugging him. The older lady in the house that still has the Christmas candy canes hanging up complained to the Monkey Man about Mini the Chihuahu wandering in the middle of the street and she tells me that Monkey Man blamed his daughter for not taking care of her dog. The daughter is to blame for being in school all day while he stays home collecting unemployment or disability or something (the story specifics change depending on the neighbor relaying the dirt). And every night the mother walks the alleys nearby hollering “Mini… Mini” because Monkey Man lets the dog out of the yard to shit so he doesn’t have to clean it up and sends the wife out to find the dog. But he leashes Mini up whenever he leaves during the day. Leashed up because Mini can jump over the corral he built with scrap wooden palettes. The corral might be four feet wide. It goes from my wall to his house – basically a thin sidewalk and a spot of dirt. It is about five feet long. A kennel cage is in the corral with the door open in case it rains. But the puppies too learned how to escape the palette corral, so he locked them in this kennel for hours at a time, and then, just all day and all night. Leashed up mother, two caged puppies. All barking in misery. All day. I debate calling animal control the last week of February. For all his bullshit, the Monkey Man took almost three years to be downright inhumane. I have a moral dilemma about dropping a dime. My philosophical head cerebrally says to live and let live. My gut says that Monkey Man is a terrible pet owner and needs at least a wake up call.
The gut won.
The barking stops a day or two later. Nothing. The wood palette corral, though, is still there. On Sunday, the last day of February, I see the daughter walking down the street alone. She might be 14. Her hair is in two ponytails in the back and she is wearing a nice green blouse and jeans. But most important in this picture is that she is alone. She is walking unescorted away. I just have to watch and wonder. Well I won’t have to wonder for long. Last Thursday, the animal control cops are at Starbucks. They know my dogs. They know I dropped the dime. I don’t even have to ask, the older one stands up and walks over to me in line. He thanks me for looking out for the dogs next door. I had no idea how many violations were taking place in that 4 x 5 wooden prison. He rattles off a list. Leashed dog. Caged dogs. Unspayed dog. On and on. It is still weird for me when the cop is the good guy. He didn’t take the dogs. I tell him there hasn’t been a peep in days.
My brother runs a factory down the alley. The reason I live here is that his wife had triplets in 2006 and they just could not fit into this utilitarian 700 square foot house anymore. So now he commutes to work and I don’t live at the Brewery Art Colony. On my way back from my afternoon visit to Starbucks, a guy who works for my brother tells me that there are cops in front of my house. I see the daughter talking to the police. About an hour later I realize that the cop car is still idling out front. The Monkey Man is out there now. The daughter had been her usual flat, zen self talking to the cop. The Monkey Man is animated. I go back to work. Later on I tell my girlfriend the details and we speculate on many possible scenarios.
So a few days later this dude from down the street is walking by and he tells me that my neighbor has been arrested. “What for?” I ask. He didn’t know. I did not mention dropping a dime on the dogs. The next day the Monkey Man’s landlord stops by; it is a few days past the first of the month and she is knocking on the door for the rent. The Monkey Man saw me chatting with her once and later asked me if I was Jewish. The timing was odd, but he was trying to figure out if I, too, was Jewish. So classic. A paranoid. A control freak. A privacy nut. A rehearser of lies. A demon in the eyes of his pets. And then on Sunday, I found out… in the eyes of his family too….
The oldest daughter, who it turns out is a stepdaughter, had styled her hair and put on a nice green blouse and had gone to her first party, she was 14 and begging for freedom, begging to be allowed to leave the house when she was not in school, and was never allowed, but with her dogs now gone, the Monkey Man finally capitulated. The dictator eased her pain by allowing her to leave his presence for the first time in her life. She could go be a regular girl. About an hour into the party she spilled the beans about some very intimate contact that stepdaddy Monkey Man had allegedly been having with her. Well, her friends took these allegations seriously. They told the school counselors on Monday morning. By the time I got this gossip from a particularly gabby neighbor, the Monkey Man had been in jail since Thursday and social workers had been crawling around the neighborhood for days interviewing every kid around here. The Monkey Man doesn’t have a dime to his name to pay the rent, let alone bail on charges based on allegations of incest.
I am sure it is so much easier for a wealthy man of status to isolate his daughter in a nice big house when evil is in his heart and unspeakable defilement is on his mind. When your stepdaughter sleeps on the couch in the living room across from the two cribs of your own children, though, it takes more than audacity. Perhaps it takes a wife who really believes you are getting up in the middle of the night to go pray.
I don’t know what else to say except that my initial reaction to the guy was that he was a dick, all the evidence that he was a tyrant to his family was there in front of us, his treatment of pets was cruel and irresponsible. If your gut says a guy is a dick, the neighbors say he is a liar and the kids next door call him stupid, there should be no guilt in having dropped a dime that was the heaviest domino to chain react his ass to a hell he created all for himself.
The social worker told a neighbor to call the police if he is spotted, that he is restrained from coming to the house. The mother and daughter have been cleaning up the house. The two young children have been allowed out in the yard and are riding their bikes and laughing each afternoon. There is a factory down the street and at 4 PM there is a stream of guys in blue shirts walking to their cars or to the bus stop. One guy I recognize from sitting on the sidewalk in front of my house under the shade tree on hot days asked me where I buy dog food in the neighborhood. I asked him what kind of dogs he has. “De su besino.” (From your neighbor). “Tres?” “Si.” He says his kids are having fun with the dogs, and they are playing in the yard. I tell him where the PetCo on Alameda is, but warn him it is overpriced.