pissed on his proverbial grave. I dropped out of his world, and this one.
Eleven and a half months passed before I saw her again.
2
The night death came back to West Adams I wasn’t spying, though it’s true that by then I had developed a habit of watching my neighbors. Sometimes with my naked eye, but more often through the 80mm Zhumell spotting scope I gave Stacey for her twenty-eighth birthday. She had been in a photography phase. I had hoped the Zhumell, which could be used as a telescope or digiscope attached to a camera, would encourage her to turn her gaze skyward when she inevitably tired of taking pictures. Upon presentation, she pretended to be thrilled with her gift. But after a few days of lugging her two Nikons, gear bag, the scope and its folding tripod around the backyard, trying to turn pigeons roosting under Whitey’s gables into urban art, she lost interest.
Playing the role of optimist, I moved the scope and tripod to the second-story balcony and spent fifty bucks on astronomy books. Over the next month, we shut off the TV and pretended the balcony - with its little arched roof, recessed decking and short spindled railing almost hidden in the house’s façade - was our private observatory. We shared bottles of Beaujolais and discussed the possibility of alien life forms. But eventually our lives turned busy, the weather cooled and the entire rig was abandoned.
Architecturally West Adams could be Anytown, USA, which is why so many scenes for movies and television shows are shot there. The banking- and commerce-heavy Koreatown lies north; South Central’s bludgeoned ghettos adjacent, you guessed it, south. The skyline of downtown Los Angeles lies east, the blur of afro-centric Crenshaw and industrial Culver City to the west.
Situated in the middle of them all and cut in half by the ten lanes of infinite traffic that ride the Santa Monica Freeway, West Adams is a roughly ten- by twelve-block enclave of historic homes that varies wildly, a little pocket of a neighborhood where nine-hundred-thousand dollar Victorians were steps away from run-down apartment buildings with diapers on the lawns. The same seventy-foot-tall skinny palm trees swayed in front of squalid one-bedroom crack houses and restored Queen Anne mansions owned by clothing label upstarts. A five-color painted lady might sell for seven hundred and fifty thousand despite her crumbling brick foundation; a plain six-bedroom bungalow two blocks south might be had for three-fifty due to its proximity to the church/liquor store/porn video/fried chicken shack/nail salon strip mall.
We were attracted to the neighborhood because it was on the way up, was being improved by the refinancing Hispanics and blacks who had never left, was being slowly gentrified by the young and upwardly mobile, those self-anointed artists and entrepreneurs like us, the ones who weren’t content with a condo or a ranch home in El Segundo; we wanted character and damn the risk, the gunshots, the gangs . . . those were just rumors.
After the accident, I retreated to the balcony out of respect for Stacey, who didn’t like it when I smoked in the house. The tripod seemed to be waiting for me, beckoning my sozzled eye. After four hours of stargazing, Stacey’s scope had become my scope, and I had my first night of real sleep in months.
I furnished my nest with a lawn chair, a small table for my ashtray and a green metal Coleman cooler my father handed down, to hold my beer. I kept a pair of flip-flops on deck, and mounted a hook under the eave to hold my black windbreaker and one of Stacey’s scarves (the thick purple one of cable-knit cotton), and thus my little self-pity station was complete.
When I wasn’t dreaming of launching rocket-propelled grenades at SUVs on Arlington, I saw remarkable, sometimes unexplainable things in the sky: flashes of green too slow to be comets, a jetliner whose red and green flashers blanked out
Eleven and a half months passed before I saw her again.
2
The night death came back to West Adams I wasn’t spying, though it’s true that by then I had developed a habit of watching my neighbors. Sometimes with my naked eye, but more often through the 80mm Zhumell spotting scope I gave Stacey for her twenty-eighth birthday. She had been in a photography phase. I had hoped the Zhumell, which could be used as a telescope or digiscope attached to a camera, would encourage her to turn her gaze skyward when she inevitably tired of taking pictures. Upon presentation, she pretended to be thrilled with her gift. But after a few days of lugging her two Nikons, gear bag, the scope and its folding tripod around the backyard, trying to turn pigeons roosting under Whitey’s gables into urban art, she lost interest.
Playing the role of optimist, I moved the scope and tripod to the second-story balcony and spent fifty bucks on astronomy books. Over the next month, we shut off the TV and pretended the balcony - with its little arched roof, recessed decking and short spindled railing almost hidden in the house’s façade - was our private observatory. We shared bottles of Beaujolais and discussed the possibility of alien life forms. But eventually our lives turned busy, the weather cooled and the entire rig was abandoned.
Architecturally West Adams could be Anytown, USA, which is why so many scenes for movies and television shows are shot there. The banking- and commerce-heavy Koreatown lies north; South Central’s bludgeoned ghettos adjacent, you guessed it, south. The skyline of downtown Los Angeles lies east, the blur of afro-centric Crenshaw and industrial Culver City to the west.
Situated in the middle of them all and cut in half by the ten lanes of infinite traffic that ride the Santa Monica Freeway, West Adams is a roughly ten- by twelve-block enclave of historic homes that varies wildly, a little pocket of a neighborhood where nine-hundred-thousand dollar Victorians were steps away from run-down apartment buildings with diapers on the lawns. The same seventy-foot-tall skinny palm trees swayed in front of squalid one-bedroom crack houses and restored Queen Anne mansions owned by clothing label upstarts. A five-color painted lady might sell for seven hundred and fifty thousand despite her crumbling brick foundation; a plain six-bedroom bungalow two blocks south might be had for three-fifty due to its proximity to the church/liquor store/porn video/fried chicken shack/nail salon strip mall.
We were attracted to the neighborhood because it was on the way up, was being improved by the refinancing Hispanics and blacks who had never left, was being slowly gentrified by the young and upwardly mobile, those self-anointed artists and entrepreneurs like us, the ones who weren’t content with a condo or a ranch home in El Segundo; we wanted character and damn the risk, the gunshots, the gangs . . . those were just rumors.
After the accident, I retreated to the balcony out of respect for Stacey, who didn’t like it when I smoked in the house. The tripod seemed to be waiting for me, beckoning my sozzled eye. After four hours of stargazing, Stacey’s scope had become my scope, and I had my first night of real sleep in months.
I furnished my nest with a lawn chair, a small table for my ashtray and a green metal Coleman cooler my father handed down, to hold my beer. I kept a pair of flip-flops on deck, and mounted a hook under the eave to hold my black windbreaker and one of Stacey’s scarves (the thick purple one of cable-knit cotton), and thus my little self-pity station was complete.
When I wasn’t dreaming of launching rocket-propelled grenades at SUVs on Arlington, I saw remarkable, sometimes unexplainable things in the sky: flashes of green too slow to be comets, a jetliner whose red and green flashers blanked out
Similar Books
Flirt: The Interviews
Lorna Jackson
Trapped - Mars Born Book One
Arwen Gwyneth Hubbard
To Find a Mountain
Dani Amore
Forgotten Love (Derrien Island Trilogy)
Simmone Thorpe
The Poseidon Initiative
Rick Chesler
Barefoot Summer
Denise Hunter
Touched by a Phoenix
Sophia Byron
Chef's Delight (Stories of Serendipity)
Anne Conley
Scattered Suns
Kevin J. Anderson