Writing

Former War Zone

MY APARTMENT IN VENICE IS LARGER THAN A SHOEBOX. Where outside is seemingly a city submerged in excess, one may find the mere adequateness inside to be precisely refreshing. Clean, fragrant, and calming, but all only barely so, standards depending. Over my first few months here, a rule has developed—first slowly, then all at once—that barring extraordinary circumstances no one would be enthusiastically welcomed in. The seating arrangement could theoretically accommodate one more person (two if they are slender), but if they were so much as to linger their gaze on the clutter, my dog and I would at once begin to suffocate.

A few doors down, a woman lived in a black Peugeot cabriolet. Otherwise, all dwellings here are valued starting at two million dollars. She and her dog would lay on the road verge outside her car, the only stretch of dirt from here to the Pacific that would be barren. She was only as polite and kind as the world had been to her. The days she was here, the California sun was less voluptuous. Everything she owned fit in her small black car; sometimes she would take off in an Uber. One time, her dog suffered from a severe infection that deformed its face. A week later, she would lay alone on the barren dirt. The neighbors on a parallel street said her name might have been “Patty”. Rumors circulated that Patty’s dog too succumbed to the socioeconomic cruelty of our time and had been laid to eternal rest inside of the black Peugeot. A few days had passed before a hostile ticket maid reported Patty to animal services, which came to collect the decomposing dog. Patty’s road verge became muddy when all else here was dry. Then one day still she and the Peugeot were gone.

Terry says he used to be a nurse in the California health system and now spends the daytime at the end of my block; at night he goes across the street to the library parking lot. Distinctly, he wears a white wrinkled plastic bag on his head, covers his hands with candy blue nitrile medical gloves, and on colder days he wraps aluminum foil on his arms. His oversized shopping cart is never without disinfectant and wet wipes. You would always find him on a straw mat reading, sometimes a religious volume, other times a science fiction. Terry is an old man well-spoken and largely coherent—that is, until he tells you about his enemies who drove him onto the streets. “The California system is broken,” as a matter of fact, “and if you try to withdraw money from the bank they won’t actually have it to give you. Go try it yourself, you’ll see.” Terry wanted the train schedule to Arizona, said there was nothing left in California for a good man. He also wanted me to call the U.S. Supreme Court for a copy of his case that would have the authorities release his assets back to him.

“The Supreme Court of the United States? In Washington, DC, you mean?”

“Yeah. My case already made it all the way to Washington and won. If you could help me get a copy of the order, I will get my assets back and live comfortably. My enemies have been keeping me from getting it.”

I promised if he managed to pin down his case name or docket number, for him I would search through the docket system of the United States Supreme Court.

I later met the two men who live in the rent-controlled house in front of which was Patty’s dirt. Scott is only here for a few months and is crashing with a friend. Scott grew up in Venice when “this used to be a gang war zone, right here.” He comes off quite articulate and used to be a member of a Venice skater gang. He finds me “obnoxiously happy” and flags me down for a conversation with much eagerness as my dog and I walk by every day. Before he was priced out of Venice in what he calls the “Purge” that quadrupled housing cost in the area, rent for an arguably habitable room on the beach was four hundred dollars, plus an assumption of the risk of being shot dead on the boardwalk. He recounted how unpleasant Patty was. “I’ve had to live in my car too—just be quiet and respectful. In Venice everyone lets you be.” Regrettably, quiet and respectful, Patty was not. She yelled insolent things at Scott and his friend and hysterically screamed every night at 3 am; until one night, when Scott had finally had enough of it, he began hosing Patty’s dirt and car down with his friend’s garden hose whenever she provoked him. “Every time she came outside she would track all the mud back into her car. Her car didn’t have windows either, so all her things would get wet,” he said with audible satisfaction. I asked if that was perhaps a bit unnecessarily vicious. “I’m a gangster. And she didn’t need to be so verbally abusive either. Someone more respectful could be living here.” He makes a much sweeter friend than enemy.

These three squared miles amount to a paradise should you revel in chaos as I lovingly do; a glamorous city by the beach that is filled with opulent indulgence long as you avert your eyes from the squalor and grime that are everywhere. Disorder slushes and swirls around me and it rests at my front door. Inside, when the lights are dimmed and the sage is burnt, mayhem is mine alone to wreak.