This morning I groggily awoke to the sound of someone beating the living heck out of something in the lot behind our apartment.
Who thinks: “Hey, it’s 7 am—time to go outside and beat the crap out of something in my backyard.”?
People who steal cars, that’s who. They’ve got a deadline to get the goods out of the vehicles before the ghetto birds (read: police helicopters) fly overhead and spot the vehicles.
This is my theory, anyway. On our palm-lined street there are lovely houses with high hedges (as I’ve noted before) as well as dumpy apartment complexes someone spackled together with super glue and gave to the Section 8 people. It’s a pity, really. Because most of the crime (the SWAT Team has our street on speed dial) actually comes from the high hedged houses and not the tenement housing like people seem to think. In fact, the house across the street is operating as either a brothel for the wealthy or a drug den for the elite. Every morning extremely nice cars (that wouldn’t be caught dead on our street at any other time) are parked out front of it for up to an hour at most. They go in. They go out. They don’t stay long.
But then there are these lots—quite large, actually--- BEHIND the spackled buildings. These lots are overgrown with bamboo or high grass or trash, probably a cannabis farm or two, or in the case of the lot behind us---odd vehicles.
Odd because they appear and disappear almost as frequently as the band of middle-aged men who sit outside near the cars at one in the morning, blasting mariachi music and drinking themselves into a rousing chorus of something choked out through the junk food they stuff in their mouths.
If I were younger, back in my school-girl days, I would be so intrigued by this lot behind my house that I would have faked being sick so that I could stay home an entire day to observe what I would assume were dangerous and sneaky criminals (not simply car thieves, like they probably are). I would probably assume there was some form of buried treasure back there, a mystery that needed to be solved, a murder that needed to be witnessed and then reported, or some other imaginative but exciting plot line. Why?
Because I was tainted by Trixie Belden and had a massively unhealthy imagination, that’s why.
Trixie Belden was the tom-boy, farm-girl, middle-class equivalent to Nancy Drew. I didn’t like Nancy Drew. She was blonde and her dad adored her and she figured out every mystery just as smoothly as her little skirted suits hung over her perfect figure.
Trixie, on the other hand, was always in trouble (kindred spirit), had freckles and red hair (don’t I know what THAT’S about), was always messy and dirty (pitter patter my heart) and had a fantastic group of friends—one of which included a girl with raven black hair and violet eyes (could there BE anything more beautiful?). Unlike Nancy Drew (whose book covers were that ghastly green sometimes—or painful yellow) Trixie would make dinner, take care of her little brother, tend the garden and placate her parents and STILL manage to get out of the house, solve a mystery, save the day and be back before bedtime.
I, however, could only manage the….hmm..none of the above.
Anyway—if I were back in my Trixie days I would definitely fake being sick. This would involve burning my head on a lightbulb, sticking a white lipstick tube (yeah they had those in the eighties) down my throat to see if I couldn’t make it look like strep throat, screaming into my pillow at night so that in the morning I had a hoarse throat or better yet—no voice at all, or somehow making myself throw up so that I could stay away from the place where they made you sit still for hours and hours on end. I.E. – School. I liked the socializing part for sure—my friends were the best. It was the sitting still and doing one thing part that got under my fingernails.
But if now were then, I would stay home, and I would spy through our bamboo on whatever is going on behind our apartment, and then I would anonymously call the police (we don’t want them to track us down and kill us) when the car-stealers remove parts from one of the lovely BMW’s parked out front whilst its driver commits his crime across the street. The police would fail at their job, for sure, and I would have to sneak over the fence, pull some risky, impressive maneuver, steal a gun from a beat-up cop, hold the people at gun point and then…and then…..do something else ridiculously amazing before the scenario was resolved peacefully and no one got hurt.
And afterwards I would make myself some lemonade—Trixie always had lemonade—sit back and congratulate myself on keeping our street a little safer for vehicles. Granted, Trixie would have drunk lemonade while looking out over her farm and I would drink it while looking at the graffiti on our fence—but we would still be one in spirit.
But then I would have to do this again the next day for the drug dealers next door and the prostitution ring on the other side of that building…and then there’s the domestic violence issue on the upper side of the….
Perhaps it is better that I went to work today. In my neighborhood I’d have to be a full-time Trixie and that would never do…..sigh…
Who thinks: “Hey, it’s 7 am—time to go outside and beat the crap out of something in my backyard.”?
People who steal cars, that’s who. They’ve got a deadline to get the goods out of the vehicles before the ghetto birds (read: police helicopters) fly overhead and spot the vehicles.
This is my theory, anyway. On our palm-lined street there are lovely houses with high hedges (as I’ve noted before) as well as dumpy apartment complexes someone spackled together with super glue and gave to the Section 8 people. It’s a pity, really. Because most of the crime (the SWAT Team has our street on speed dial) actually comes from the high hedged houses and not the tenement housing like people seem to think. In fact, the house across the street is operating as either a brothel for the wealthy or a drug den for the elite. Every morning extremely nice cars (that wouldn’t be caught dead on our street at any other time) are parked out front of it for up to an hour at most. They go in. They go out. They don’t stay long.
But then there are these lots—quite large, actually--- BEHIND the spackled buildings. These lots are overgrown with bamboo or high grass or trash, probably a cannabis farm or two, or in the case of the lot behind us---odd vehicles.
Odd because they appear and disappear almost as frequently as the band of middle-aged men who sit outside near the cars at one in the morning, blasting mariachi music and drinking themselves into a rousing chorus of something choked out through the junk food they stuff in their mouths.
If I were younger, back in my school-girl days, I would be so intrigued by this lot behind my house that I would have faked being sick so that I could stay home an entire day to observe what I would assume were dangerous and sneaky criminals (not simply car thieves, like they probably are). I would probably assume there was some form of buried treasure back there, a mystery that needed to be solved, a murder that needed to be witnessed and then reported, or some other imaginative but exciting plot line. Why?
Because I was tainted by Trixie Belden and had a massively unhealthy imagination, that’s why.
Trixie Belden was the tom-boy, farm-girl, middle-class equivalent to Nancy Drew. I didn’t like Nancy Drew. She was blonde and her dad adored her and she figured out every mystery just as smoothly as her little skirted suits hung over her perfect figure.
Trixie, on the other hand, was always in trouble (kindred spirit), had freckles and red hair (don’t I know what THAT’S about), was always messy and dirty (pitter patter my heart) and had a fantastic group of friends—one of which included a girl with raven black hair and violet eyes (could there BE anything more beautiful?). Unlike Nancy Drew (whose book covers were that ghastly green sometimes—or painful yellow) Trixie would make dinner, take care of her little brother, tend the garden and placate her parents and STILL manage to get out of the house, solve a mystery, save the day and be back before bedtime.
I, however, could only manage the….hmm..none of the above.
Anyway—if I were back in my Trixie days I would definitely fake being sick. This would involve burning my head on a lightbulb, sticking a white lipstick tube (yeah they had those in the eighties) down my throat to see if I couldn’t make it look like strep throat, screaming into my pillow at night so that in the morning I had a hoarse throat or better yet—no voice at all, or somehow making myself throw up so that I could stay away from the place where they made you sit still for hours and hours on end. I.E. – School. I liked the socializing part for sure—my friends were the best. It was the sitting still and doing one thing part that got under my fingernails.
But if now were then, I would stay home, and I would spy through our bamboo on whatever is going on behind our apartment, and then I would anonymously call the police (we don’t want them to track us down and kill us) when the car-stealers remove parts from one of the lovely BMW’s parked out front whilst its driver commits his crime across the street. The police would fail at their job, for sure, and I would have to sneak over the fence, pull some risky, impressive maneuver, steal a gun from a beat-up cop, hold the people at gun point and then…and then…..do something else ridiculously amazing before the scenario was resolved peacefully and no one got hurt.
And afterwards I would make myself some lemonade—Trixie always had lemonade—sit back and congratulate myself on keeping our street a little safer for vehicles. Granted, Trixie would have drunk lemonade while looking out over her farm and I would drink it while looking at the graffiti on our fence—but we would still be one in spirit.
But then I would have to do this again the next day for the drug dealers next door and the prostitution ring on the other side of that building…and then there’s the domestic violence issue on the upper side of the….
Perhaps it is better that I went to work today. In my neighborhood I’d have to be a full-time Trixie and that would never do…..sigh…
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