 selected writings |
||||
 |
There was a wild overgrown garden within 15-foot-high hedges on the adjoining lot. I planted and shifted bulbs, pruned a huge knobby hibiscus bush, smelled the damp moss. Our landlord was a skinny young guy who worked in a machine shop. When we moved in, he and his wife went on a three-week vacation with a rented camper shell on the back of his truck and a cycle on the front. I'd never seen a camper up close before. He and his wife lived in the garage he'd fixed up behind our little house, and he rode an enormous Kawasaki to work. He came around one day to tell me not to go to Mexico because a friend's sister had vanished off the street in TJ and was found abused and demented in a Mexican jail months later. He said his wife had never been down there and he didn't plan to let her. He seemed like a gentle guy and pretty nice. On a Sunday morning a small bulldozer removed the old garden. The landlord explained that he'd decided to expand. He had big plans for the future. Two men came daily in a pickup truck to build a "duplex." In the following weeks I traded pleasantries with them during their breaks. One night I dreamed that one of them had been killed on a motorcycle. A few days later the young landlord told us that one of the carpenters had been riding his cycle out East on a road through the scrubby hills on his day off and had been hit by a car and killed. The other carpenter, his brother, had to finish the framing alone. Lenny and I split up and I took the baby back East to the Lower East Side to an apartment where lead-paint dust filtered through the rooms and hundreds of cockroaches made their home, and the duplex was finished. The plans and a chunk of the finances were provided by an enterprising and jovial contractor and his wife. He worked for the county during the week and she took care of business, and on weekends they both oversaw their projects. They were sure they would get rich, and they had seemed confident and well-fed, proud to show me some of their multiple concrete dwellings surrounded by black asphalt on that very street, alternating with the older single-family houses. The landlord moved into one of the two apartments in the duplex and rented out the other, as well as the house we lived in and the fixed-up garage. His wife was pregnant. Six months later I moved back into the area, to a spot in Pacific Beach hemmed in by Navy housing. A year later I fled up the coast, 25 miles north to Leucadia. I got a tiny cement cottage for $100, at the end of a row of ten wooden garages, in a largely Mexican enclave on a dirt path. In one of the houses was an old Polish widow who used to own all the houses and thought she still did. She baked bread for the man who'd bought them, until she died. A few surfers had an unofficial business making surfboards in some of the garages. My little boy found a best friend, Jose, in one of the houses, and his mother Maria and I became friends. We are the same age. Maria was learning English from the TV. Her husband Pascual worked in a flower growing factory in Solana Beach. Our landlord was a smiling professional of some kind with enlightened liberal opinions; he became a McGovern campaign worker. He had a big house on the cliff facing the ocean and rented out a small apartment in it. My rent was lower than in Pacific Beach, which satisfied the welfare worker, and I liked the place because it was semi-rural and rather peaceful. I stayed on after I got a job and went through grad school. Pascual went to jail for a year for drunken driving. One day a fence was put across the path, separating us from the dirt lot lying between our houses and the paved street where our mailboxes are. We could drive home only through a long narrow dirt alley off 101. The family who came to build the fence, a pinched-looking Anglo woman, a Chicano man and their three kids, told me they'd just bought the lot and would probably put apartments on it soon, when they got financing. The fence stayed for a while but finally one of the surfers ripped it down, maybe me. A chain-link fence was set in cement. My landlord said he was sorry he hadn't bought that lot. He was thinking of putting apartments on the whole plot and was worried about street access. He has regretfully raised my rent 45% in four years. He says houses are uneconomical and ecologically wasteful. He's just repainted the dead widow's house and rented it for triple the rent to a young couple with dogs and a lot of plants. The chain-link fence is still up, and occasionally I see people pacing out the long empty piece of land behind my house. Pascual is out of jail. All kinds of people want to move ahead in Southern California. |
|
|
||
