"I'm going to the nut shop where it's fun!"

So there's this grocery store in my neighborhood.  I used to drive past it every morning when I worked in Century City.  It's on a stretch of Pico Blvd. that houses mostly kosher shops and restaurants.  It also happens to be next to an establishment called the Nut House, which is I think what captured my attention in the first place.  Also, the Nut House looks like this:

Nuts, candy, ice cream and wine???  This place must be heaven.  And it always makes me think of You've Got Mail when Steve Zahn's character says, "This place is a tomb.  I'm going to the nut shop where it's fun."  For years I've wondered, what nut shop?  Why is it fun?  What do they do there? I guess this would be the answer.

Anyway, it's really the grocery store next to the Nut House that has intrigued me for a while.  The grocery is called Elat Market.  It was rumored to be this magical land full of the freshest of fresh and the cheapest of cheap produce and meats.  It supposedly housed all sorts of Middle Eastern delights and spices.  I'd read about it on food blogs.  I'd stalked its page on Yelp.  And now that I live about 5 blocks away from it, you might ask why I haven't ventured in yet.  Well, just like every hero must have a weakness, this shop supposedly has crowds of cutthroat old ladies with big carts.  I'd read horror stories of people stealing out of each other's carts, arguments erupting in Farsi, and customers elbowing each other in the face over iceberg lettuce.  Let's just say I've been psyching myself up to visit for a lonnnnng time. 

Suddenly, my intrepid roommate decided that today was the day that she would venture to the Elat Market.  She returned about 45 minutes later, eyes wide and veins pulsing with bloodlust.  No, I'm just kidding.  She loved it.  She took a detour to the Nut House and made friends with Amir who worked there.  Then she skipped into Elat and bought sugarplums.  I'm not even kidding.  In case you needed further proof:  Coward = Me.

A Poem, on the Supposition of an Advertisement Appearing in a Morning Paper, of the Publication of a Volume of Poems, by a Servant-Maid

The tea-kettle bubbled, the tea things were set,
The candles were lighted, the ladies were met;
The how d’ye’s were over, and entering bustle,
The company seated, and silks ceased to rustle:
The great Mrs. Consequence opened her fan,
And thus the discourse in an instant began
(All affected reserve and formality scorning):
“I suppose you all saw in the paper this morning
A volume of Poems advertised—’tis said
They’re produced by the pen of a poor servant-maid.”
“A servant write verses!” says Madam Du Bloom:
“Pray what is the subject—a Mop, or a Broom?”
“He, he, he,” says Miss Flounce: “I suppose we shall see
An ode on a Dishclout—what else can it be?”
Says Miss Coquettilla, “Why, ladies, so tart?
Perhaps Tom the footman has fired her heart;
And she’ll tell us how charming he looks in new clothes,
And how nimble his hand moves in brushing the shoes;
Or how, the last time that he went to May Fair,
He bought her some sweethearts of gingerbread ware.”
“For my part I think,” says old Lady Marr-joy,
“A servant might find herself other employ:
Was she mine I’d employ her as long as ’twas light,
And send her to bed without candle at night.”
“Why so?” says Miss Rhymer, displeased: “I protest
’Tis pity a genius should be so depressed!”
“What ideas can such low-bred creatures conceive?”
Says Mrs. Noworthy, and laughed in her sleeve.
Says old Miss Prudella, “If servants can tell
How to write to their mothers, to say they are well,
And read of a Sunday The Duty of Man,
Which is more I believe than one half of them can;
I think ’tis much properer they should rest there,
Than be reaching at things so much out of their sphere.”
Says old Mrs. Candour, “I’ve now got a maid
That’s the plague of my life—a young gossiping jade;
There’s no end of the people that after her come,
And whenever I’m out, she is never at home;
I’d rather ten times she would sit down and write,
Than gossip all over the town every night.”
“Some whimsical trollop most like,” says Miss Prim,
“Has been scribbling of nonsense, just out of a whim,
And, conscious it neither is witty nor pretty,
Conceals her true name, and ascribes it to Betty.”
“I once had a servant myself,” says Miss Pines,
“That wrote on a wedding some very good lines.”
Says Mrs. Domestic, “And when they were done,
I can’t see for my part what use they were on;
Had she wrote a receipt, to’ve instructed you how
To warm a cold breast of veal, like a ragout,
Or to make cowslip wine, that would pass for Champagne,
It might have been useful, again and again.”
On the sofa was old Lady Pedigree placed;
She owned that for poetry she had no taste,
That the study of heraldry was more in fashion,
And boasted she knew all the crests in the nation.
Says Mrs. Routella, “Tom, take out the urn,
And stir up the fire, you see it don’t burn.”
The tea-things removed, and the tea-table gone,
The card-tables brought, and the cards laid thereon,
The ladies, ambitious for each other’s crown,
Like courtiers contending for honours, sat down.

-Elizabeth Hands

When I was little, I wanted to live in a tree.

That still sounds like a pretty good option.  Mainly, I'm wondering if this is the only way to avoid aggressively crazy neighbors.  Before it was the harpy woman; now it's the pushy dog lady.  Always it's the long-term renters who've been around for the better part of a decade. 

Dog Lady seemed all right to begin with.  I mean, she had a dog.  I love dogs.  She offered to let us play with it any time we want.  Fun, great.  What I didn't realize was that by saying I like dogs I was agreeing to a verbal contract to somehow be responsible for the dog when she's not around.  She gave us a set of her keys.  Naively, I assumed she was just asking us to be good neighbors and keep an eye on her place, keep a set of keys in case anything ever happened.  Then the phone calls started.  The day I was waiting for the cable guy to show up and install service, Dog Lady called me and asked if I had her dog.  I said no, and she got all huffy saying, "I thought you were going to take him."  Well, I explained that the cable man had just arrived and I didn't think it would be a good idea to have the dog running around while he's trying to install things.  That seemed to calm her.  I later felt guilty (why??) and played with the dog in the afternoon.  After that it turned into a game of surprise, here's my dog! 

Whenever my roommate or I got home and were standing there unlocking our door, her dog would be barking and going nuts.  (It's one of those little white yippy dogs.)  So Dog Lady yells out, "Who's that? Is that Omi?"  And she would open her door, which is across from ours, and send the dog out.  She coaxes it saying, "Go on, Baby, go see the girls."  Then she shuts her door and yells for us to send him back when we're done.  The dog is so badly trained, he bolts into our apartment and jumps on the couch. 

Now it's gotten to the point where both my roommate and I park on the street as often as possible so it doesn't look like we're home.  We have done speed tests to see how quickly we can unlock the front door.  We keep the drapes drawn and pretty much hide out when we're here.  I make sure to be out when she pops home for lunch every day.  I'm not proud of this.  I know I should confront this woman, but we've only been here about a month and a half and I didn't want to cause trouble right off the bat like we did with the harpy neighbor.  But I know I need to give her her keys back and tell her I can't worry about her dog. 

. . . Or do I?  Yesterday something interesting happened.  I was working at the dining room table and Dog Lady arrived back early for lunch.  Damn, I thought.  I was in the middle of doing laundry and now she was going to know I was home.  But then something amazing happened.  I heard the building manager outside (let's call her Rose) and Dog Lady said to her, "Rose, I think your son wants me out of the building."  Dog Lady was spitting nails she was so mad.  Rose's son is our landlord.  Rose said something I couldn't make out.  Then Dog Lady (whose nasal voice carries like a smoke alarm) said that the landlord had sent her an email saying he was going to take action with an attorney.  Something about her not paying rent on time!  Then Rose said something about the "young people" being able to do it, and Dog Lady replied, "Well, I told him I can only do what I can do."  Then I heard a door slam and the dog was barking his head off and the gardeners were working so that was the end of that. 

So maybe she won't be our neighbor much longer?  I know that's a pretty terrible thing to hope for.  I don't wish her ill or anything but having the issue resolve itself would be fantastic.  (Yes, I am a coward.)

In the Waiting Room

In Worcester, Massachusetts,
I went with Aunt Consuelo
to keep her dentist's appointment
and sat and waited for her
in the dentist's waiting room.
It was winter. It got dark
early. The waiting room
was full of grown-up people,
arctics and overcoats,
lamps and magazines.
My aunt was inside
what seemed like a long time
and while I waited I read
the National Geographic
(I could read) and carefully
studied the photographs:
the inside of a volcano,
black, and full of ashes;
then it was spilling over
in rivulets of fire.
Osa and Martin Johnson
dressed in riding breeches,
laced boots, and pith helmets.
A dead man slung on a pole
--"Long Pig," the caption said.
Babies with pointed heads
wound round and round with string;
black, naked women with necks
wound round and round with wire
like the necks of light bulbs.
Their breasts were horrifying.
I read it right straight through.
I was too shy to stop.
And then I looked at the cover:
the yellow margins, the date.
Suddenly, from inside,
came an oh! of pain
--Aunt Consuelo's voice--
not very loud or long.
I wasn't at all surprised;
even then I knew she was
a foolish, timid woman.
I might have been embarrassed,
but wasn't. What took me
completely by surprise
was that it was me:
my voice, in my mouth.
Without thinking at all
I was my foolish aunt,
I--we--were falling, falling,
our eyes glued to the cover
of the National Geographic,
February, 1918.

I said to myself: three days
and you'll be seven years old.
I was saying it to stop
the sensation of falling off
the round, turning world.
into cold, blue-black space.
But I felt: you are an I,
you are an Elizabeth,
you are one of them.
Why should you be one, too?
I scarcely dared to look
to see what it was I was.
I gave a sidelong glance
--I couldn't look any higher--
at shadowy gray knees,
trousers and skirts and boots
and different pairs of hands
lying under the lamps.
I knew that nothing stranger
had ever happened, that nothing
stranger could ever happen.

Why should I be my aunt,
or me, or anyone?
What similarities--
boots, hands, the family voice
I felt in my throat, or even
the National Geographic
and those awful hanging breasts--
held us all together
or made us all just one?
How--I didn't know any
word for it--how "unlikely". . .
How had I come to be here,
like them, and overhear
a cry of pain that could have
got loud and worse but hadn't?

The waiting room was bright
and too hot. It was sliding
beneath a big black wave,
another, and another.

Then I was back in it.
The War was on. Outside,
in Worcester, Massachusetts,
were night and slush and cold,
and it was still the fifth
of February, 1918.

-Elizabeth Bishop

Harpy! Harpy! burning bright

For some people, the world exists only to complain about it.  The woman downstairs is one of those people.  In Greek mythological circles she might be termed a harpy. She is constantly trying to snatch everything good and reasonable out of the air.

First she complained she could hear us talking too loudly with the windows open.  Valid.  We shut the windows. Then we were stomping around too hard on the floor when we walked.  She called my roommate Lady Minotaur, spitting the words at us as if they were some great insult.  Can you imagine what it would be like if we actually wore our shoes indoors?  Then her issue was with the fan my roommate had set up in her bedroom during one hot week of summer.  Apparently it was shaking her walls.  Our apartment is on the top floor and has so many windows it's like a greenhouse up in here.  My roommate tried all sorts of ways to rig the fan so that it was cushioned from the floor.  That wasn't enough.  The harpy demanded that the landlord install a ceiling fan.  He did but also suggested that maybe apartment living isn't for her. 

Now it's effing cold and I have a space heater turned on during the hour or so before I go to bed.  I close the door and my room becomes a hotbox and then I turn it off until the morning (fear of electrical fire).  This teeny tiny heater sits on a portable table on top of a rug.  Guess what.  It's causing a "humming sound" that's disturbing her highness.  The landlord sent me an email today with the subject line "Help."  He asked if I would mind putting a pillow underneath the heater or something.  Because I like him and don't want to cause him trouble, I said sure.  But what I really wanted to say was to tell the wicked witch that I'm only living here for 8 more days, so suck it up.  Better yet, tell her to come up and ask me herself.

There is a happy ending to this story.  I call it divine justice.  The landlord informed me that our apartment has been rented by some very nice people.  A family.  With two kids.  God, I hope those kids wrestle and scream and jump up and down on the floor.  What can you say?  They're just kids.

A Poison Tree

by William Blake

I was angry with my friend.
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe.
I told it not, my wrath did grow;

And I water'd it in fears,
Night and morning with my tears;
And I sunned it with smiles,
And with soft deceitful wiles;

And it grew both day and night
Till it bore an apple bright,
And my foe beheld it shine,
And he knew that it was mine,

And into my garden stole
When the night had veil'd the pole.
In the morning glad I see
My foe outstretched beneath the tree.

I'm just saying.

When you live in an apartment building, it's not uncommon for you to get other people's mail.  Sometimes your neighbor's mail finds its way into your box, sometimes it's an envelope addressed to a previous resident, and now there's apparently a third scenario in which you start receiving a subscription to Entertainment Weekly under someone else's name.  This is my current situation.  The magazine is addressed to my apartment, but there is no one in the building who has the name on the subscription.  To my knowledge, there's never been anyone called Marcus Mungiole in our apartment, and we've been here for 3 1/2 years, so it's a little strange that these magazines just started coming a few weeks ago. 

I'm not complaining.  If anyone can appreciate a free subscription to an entertainment magazine, it's us, but it does seem highly suspect coming straight out of the blue like this.  Somewhere there have to be strings attached.  It doesn't seem like it could be a mistake because we have a very distinct address and the building only has 4 units. 

Who are you, Marcus Mungiole?  Reveal yourself and I will turn over back issues of the magazine you ordered.  Also, maybe look into getting a facebook page because a google search of your name revealed nothing.

This Is Just To Say

by William Carlos Williams

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

Meanwhile an engine revved, the neighbors yelled, rap music played, a horn honked, and the taco truck passed by.

I drove down to visit my grandmother on Saturday.  Say what you will about the suburbs, but the thing that immediately strikes me when I go there is the quietness of the neighborhood.  Her backyard feels like an oasis.  Actually, it reminds me of the secret garden.  Not that it's not well-maintained, but that it's stuck in a time long past.

My grandfather loved fountains and he put two of them in the backyard way back in the '70s.  One is a lion's head on the far back wall that used to spout water into a ceramic pool.  The other is much larger and looks to me like a chess piece.  The bottom part where the water used to flow is surrounded by a short wall.  When I was little and we would come out to visit my grandparents, I liked to play by that fountain and pretend that the wall was the gazebo in The Sound of Music.  I would skip around on it singing "You Are Sixteen Going on Seventeen."  Sixteen seemed to be a magical age, full of possibility.

This past visit, I was in the backyard looking at those fountains sitting thirsty.  They are surrounded by enormous lemon and orange trees that are currently bursting with fruit.  Those trees, as old as the fountains, made for a nice paradox.

While I can still recall the sound of water spilling through the fountains-- a calm yet lively sound-- these days I can also appreciate the silence.

Shark's Teeth

Everything contains some
silence.  Noise gets
its zest from the
small shark's-tooth
shaped fragments
of rest angled
in it.  An hour
of city holds maybe
a minute of these
remnants of a time
when silence reigned,
compact and dangerous
as a shark.  Sometimes
a bit of a tail
or fin can still
be sensed in parks.

-Kay Ryan

Am I becoming a misanthrope?

It all started last Thursday around 6:30 pm.  I was in my bedroom getting ready to go out and meet some friends for dinner when I heard five rapid gunshots.  No one else was around, so I took a moment to think.  First, were those really gunshots?  Sometimes the neighborhood kids set off fireworks, and the two can sound remarkably similar.  But I didn't hear any other fireworks.  Second, where did the sound come from?  I went to the living room window that looks onto the street and peeked out.  I didn't see anything.  I went back to my room upon the realization that if they were gunshots, maybe I shouldn't be standing next to the window.

About five minutes later I started to hear police sirens and a helicopter.  It's not that unusual to hear those sounds in my 'hood.  In fact, almost nightly I shout at my ceiling at passing helicopters to hurry up and find the perp already because their noise is drowning out my TV (this is either misanthropy sign #1 or a sign that I'm turning into an old person).  So upon hearing these sounds, I said to myself, if the cops drive past and the sirens fade away, then I'm going to assume it was fireworks.  But they didn't drive past.  The sirens stopped at the southern end of my block.  Great.

It was at that point I wished that my intrepidly curious downstairs neighbor was around.  He would have gone outside with me to see what was going down.  I was too scared to go alone in case some gang war was taking place.  About a half hour later, I had to leave the house anyway to meet my friends.  I saw cars coming up from that end of the block, so I decided to drive that way.  When I got to the cross street, there was a cop car blocking the way and one entire corner was roped off with police tape.  Yikes.  I turned around and drove in a different direction, but that shook me up.

My roommates always tease me because it's actually kind of common for me to think I hear gunshots.  One time I was so sure that I made everyone get down on the ground and belly crawl, but that one turned out to be just a firework.  This was real.

I thought back to the walk I had taken to the bank the day before.  There had been some MS-13 tagging I passed along the way.  Was it new?  We always joke about our neighborhood being up-and-coming (at least for the last 3 years since we moved here), but what if it had suddenly gone the other direction?  This was the first time I had ever felt unsafe.

Cut to this morning when I was working on some writing and someone buzzed the doorbell three times.  I peeped out the peep hole.  No one inside the building (meaning it wasn't maintenance or my landlord).  I looked outside.  If it was UPS or FedEx, I would see a truck.  No truck.  The doorbell rang another three times.  Well, who the hell could that be?  None of my neighbors were home.  My imagination was running away with me.  I thought back to a news story in Memphis when I lived there about a local DJ being shot in the head just because she opened her apartment door to a stranger.  Again the buzzer rang three times.  I decided not to answer it.  What calm and logical solution did I come up with instead?  I turned on the shower.  And then I decided to get in.  There.  That was my excuse for not answering the door.  If anyone asked later, it was because I was in the shower.

Later I had to go to the police station to take care of a traffic violation, but while I was there I decided to get some serious info.  I told the very friendly desk officer that I had heard gun shots on my street but I couldn't find anything about what had happened.  Was there a shooting on my street?  He looked at me and said, "Probably."  Probably?!  According to him, "It happens a lot.  You're at home and you hear something and you think, was that a gun?  In this neighborhood, chances are it was."

Well, that's just dandy.  I am going to become like Emily Dickinson and never leave my house and never answer the door.  I already rarely answer my phone (that's another story), so this won't be that big of a leap for me.

I never hear the word "escape"

I never hear the word "escape"
Without a quicker blood,
A sudden expectation,
A flying attitude.

I never hear of prisons broad
By soldiers battered down,
But I tug childish at my bars, --
Only to fail again!

-Emily Dickinson

No animals were harmed in the making of this poem.

There is a car outside my window that needs to be dealt with.  Whenever it gets turned on, it makes a horrible ear-piercing screech.  The sound doesn't end.  It goes on for ten minutes.  What is the driver doing?  Is he checking to see if the sound will go away?  It's not going away, sir!  I keep sitting here at my desk/dining room table waiting for the car to drive off and leave me and everyone in a five-block radius in peace.

It has been three weeks since I first heard the sound.  At first I thought maybe it was someone visiting our across-the-street neighbors, the ever popular alleged drug dealers.  Those lovable thugs, they get so many visitors.  I'm sure every neighborhood has its own variety.  Ours take themselves literally in every sense of the word.  They are content to blast music but not just any music.  If it's Sunday morning, they will blast Easy Like Sunday Morning.  On repeat.

Anyway, it wasn't them.  I know this because last week I ran to the window after a particularly long session of acoustic bombardment.  I was intent on discovering which car it was and . . . after that I'm not sure what my next step would have been.  My downstairs neighbor once confronted a woman a few houses down who was laying on her horn for a good 15 minutes.  This was because she was too lazy to get out of the car and ring the doorbell for her friend/boyfriend/kid/whatever.  They got into a pretty good fight that nearly came to blows but luckily didn't since my friend is a dude.  The moral of the story is, think twice before you pick a fight in da hood.  So I ran to the window just in time to see the offending vehicle pull away from the curb.  Aha! I thought.  I've got your number.

The next time that car started up, I was ready.  I feel it's necessary to give you some sense of what it sounded like:

Imagine a bird, perhaps a canary.
Singing its sweet little song,
it gets to the trilling of a particularly
complex arpeggio when
an evil child plucks the bird
right out of the cage, mid-note.
The child holds the bird
in such a way that it can only tweet
the same note
in terror
over and over and over again until
the sadistic youth
swaps the birdcage for an electric fan.
The bird is dropped in its new prison,
the fan turned on so that now
the bird is shrieking
two variations of the same note
back and forth, back and forth
while the fan blades batter
its poor little organ.
The evil child then extracts
a cricket
from the depths of his pocket.
The poor thing clearly
has been through the ringer,
but it's not over yet
because now
the devil child
feverishly rubs together the cricket's wings,
chirping faster, faster
as if making fire.*
The bird and the cricket,
trilling and chirping,
shrieking and burning.
That is what this car sounds like.

My roommate happened to be around when the car screamed to life.  "Why doesn't he get that flippin' car fixed?"  "I know," I said.  "Let's see if he drives away."  Five minutes . . . six minutes . . . seven minutes . . . "ARGGGGGGHHHHHH I WILL CALL TRIPLE A MYSELF IF IT WILL TOW YOUR ASS OUT OF HERE!"

We ran to the window.  There it was, rattling, heaving.  The hood was up.  The driver stood before it, trying to solve the puzzle.  He tinkered.  He got back into the car.  He shut it off.

"Huh," I said to my roommate.  "I guess he's aware of the problem."


*I do not condone the torture of animals.  Do NOT try this at home.

The Waste Land

I mentioned the other day that my neighborhood sometimes resembles the Gaza Strip.

Exhibit A:

Exhibit B:

 

But then if I stand on my roof and turn slightly to the left, I see this:

 

And if I turn even further and tilt my head up I see this 

I was thinking about perspectives.  When I'm up on the roof, you can usually tell how I'm feeling about things/life at that moment by which direction I'm facing.

The urban palm tree view makes me feel inconsequential when I look out there and think about how many people are in this city.  Then I realize that I can't see any of them from where I stand so I imagine it's a post-apocalyptic neighborhood.  No matter how bad a problem I might be facing at the moment, there could always be zombies or flesh eating viruses that wipe us out.  Things are looking up! 

If I have writer's block, I like to sit on the top of the steps that lead to the roof and face the Hollywood sign.  I try to get past the horrible conventionalism of it and focus on the idea behind the sign.  Then I immediately flash to Pretty Woman where the guy in the street is yelling, "Everybody who comes to Hollywood's got a dream.  What's your dream?" Then I wish that I could write Pretty Woman.

If it's just a really gorgeous day out like most days in LA, I might take a beach chair up and face the sun.  I will open the latest issue of Bon Appetit magazine and I will plot ways to cook an enormous green tomato. 

Today, well, you're getting a limerick so guess which direction I'm facing.

Ode to the Spider I Killed Last Night

You're the second one I've seen so far.
As big as the freakin' Death Star.
Though your game was well-played,
you were foiled with Raid.
Yet I still wonder where all your friends are.

Best case scenario

In the middle of the afternoon yesterday, somewhere in the labyrinth of crumbling concrete parking areas and Gaza Strip stand-ins outside, I heard someone shout with genuine enthusiasm, "Yippee!"  I couldn't hear whatever else followed, but it made me realize that I don't think I've ever heard someone use the word "yippee" in its intended context.  A lot of the time people use it wryly, but rarely do they use it to express "wild excitement or delight" as defined in the dictionary.  I can think of a lot of words I would go to first if I won the lottery before I would get to "yippee."  It got me wondering what this person was so excited about.  I couldn't tell if it was a child or a maybe a teenager.  What would make them so happy?  As I left the house to run errands, I thought about it.  For some reason I was channeling Shel Silverstein:

The ice cream truck broke down- yippee!
The ice cream truck broke, it sputtered and choked,
Now it's free choco tacos and free frozen cokes,
Hurry, you'll get first pick out of the smoke.
It's all melting and the man canceled the fee.
Yippee!
Yippee!

In other news, I have just discovered a recipe for choco tacos.  Oh dear.