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It was very odd that on a weekday morning, I would hear loud ranchero music blaring from an AM station playing in my neighbor’s yard. This same scene would play out every morning for the next three days as a few members of the very inexpensive labor force placed a new roof over my neighbor’s home. I only found this out after my neighbor crossed my lawn to tell me that Mexicans had come over, but they were not all-that-bad Mexicans.
It seemed like such a giant step for suburban neighborhood mankind to have someone in my neighborhood declare Mexicans as not all-that-bad. The times were changing. It would eventually change in tiny bits over the next few years, as a Hispanic family and a Hispanic husband would move into the neighborhood.
My neighborhood has been staunchly conservative and anti-illegal immigration, and it would follow that they imagined every dark skinned person to be Mexican. Yet they all universally employed very inexpensive labor to do their yard, prune their trees, tar their roofs, fix their fences and do all manner of menial job. This might have made them the biggest hypocrites of the highest order, but they do not see it this way in the same way that they turn a blind eye to a great many things.
I do not write much about the town in which I live or its people because my neighbors are not very friendly. In fact, our neighbors in all parts of Southern California do not seem to be very friendly. We once had a neighbor who would literally turn his body towards the wall whenever he saw us pass by him in our old apartment building. It was far different from my life in San Francisco, where I befriended the people who lived upstairs, downstairs and next door.
I am a tried and true child of the city, having grown up in the poor part of town. You learn that people are people. Life in the suburbs, however, is different. There are punishable offenses when you cross the neighbors, especially those whose beliefs run contrary to my own. I learned this after inviting some friends from West LA over for a visit, soon after we moved to this town. They arrived on motorcycles, a small group of gay men. This offense earned me an anonymously delivered Jesus video in my mailbox.
Life cannot be any simpler for the man across the street, a gay man who lives alone. He is very friendly and quite neighborly, pitching in to help the seniors around him. He does not wear leather chaps or wear a bikini when mowing his front lawn, so no one thinks he could be gay. My neighbors continually try to set him up with the perfect woman. My neighbor would politely decline their efforts. Their persistence, however, drove him to engage in one final tactic: he had a female friend park her big SUV in his driveway and spend the night over a few times over the course of two weeks. This stopped the girl search for a bit, but perhaps not to his liking. My neighbor flagged me down not long after to ask what type of woman might appeal to the man across the street, I wanted to say “…one with a penis…” Instead, I opted for the easier “…you will have to ask him…”
The man across the streets knows that I know his secret, and we just nod at each other and wave. There is nothing else we can do in this neighborhood, especially when we are surrounded by people who actively display their anti-gay/anti-illegal immigration hearts on their from lawns. It might be more tolerable and a little less suburban daily death-ish if they were kind people, but most are not.
We are still in a time warp of social progress out here. A former hairdresser out here spent our first session trying to tell me through sign language and innuendos that he was gay. I already knew this fact, and he knew that I knew. He wanted so much to say it, but kept skirting around it as if we were playing “What’s My Line?” He wanted not to bend that unspoken rule of coloring outside the line or rattling chains. I spent my life being a little rebel, but even I would eventually learn as this man did that it is not so easy to go against the tide.
When the neighbors behind us wanted our tall, beautiful trees gone, they harassed us to death, threatening law suit after law suit to get us to pay lots of money to cut down trees. At the same time, the new neighbors next to us sent an unofficial official letter saying that our trees were threatening their well being. It had the potential to crush their house, even though such a feat would take a monumental effort. The probability of the tree crushing them would be comparable to having Mothra fly out of my home to destroy their water fountain.
We had already planned on bringing down the trees as its branches were obscuring the rest of our yard, effectively killing the surrounding foliage. Having lived in places where trees grew out of planned planters, I defended the right of one single very tall and wild looking tree to exist in my backyard. The neighbors threat, however, changed everything. While they had no real legal ground to force us to cut down the trees, that did not stop them from endlessly harassing us with phone calls and visits with an immediacy that was highly inconvenient for us. None of that seemed to matter, because our neighbors deemed that their needs superceded ours. Despite our requests to hold off the tree issue until we could deal with other, far more pressing personal matters that required financial priority, our neighbors never relented.
My husband, a Southerner who has all the manners that would make Emily Post proud, began to respond with great sarcasm and antagonization to their visits and calls. There was no longer a need to be polite to people who subscribed to the one credo that seems to be in play for every NIMBY suburbanite: I am the only person who matters. His responses left them stumbling and stuttering until they finally backed off, reducing their onery visits to rare encounters that left them cowering.
It was only after the trees were removed that we discovered the neighbors behind us and the ones next to us were long time friends. They had devised a mutually beneficial plan of attack but had not planned on our own counterattack. Perhaps they thought I, the lone Asian in the neighborhood who must have been some sort of submissive spouse, would beg my husband to give in to the threats. They had no idea that my husband shot down my every counter move which included a plan to hang the gay flag from the offending tree.
There was a time when I tried to be a good neighbor. I used to bake cookies for my next door neighbors. My husband was vigilant in chasing away egg throwing children who taunted the seniors. We watched our neighbor’s home when asked. We used to let our neighbor come into our yard when we were not at home so that she could pick some avocados. We kept our far more liberal views to ourselves, never placing political placards on our front lawns. Ours would be the ones that would oppose their own candidates and views.
We walk a tenuous line, though, against unwritten rules that seem only to apply to us. We were once sent a note suggesting that we move because our dogs barked in the afternoon. We have been yelled at over our grass being too long or too brown during the drought, because appearances are everything here. A neighbor grilled me for speaking in Japanese on my front lawn to my visiting aunt from Japan and my gardener.
Over the years, we have learned to not tolerate their behavior. My husband has already told two of my neighbors to “fuck off”. Literally. He even went to their front door to do this. He also put up a fence with a lock to prohibit any more free avocados. Our neighbors began to take way too many avocados for the sole purpose of distributing it to others who have nothing better to do than scowl at us. They even stole our picker.
As to our newly open garden space where our large trees once inhabited, we have planted lovely bottleneck trees flush against the fence to our neighbor’s backyard. If you know anything about bottleneck trees, they have these beautiful, bee loving red plants that plop on the ground and leave red marks all over cement. I hope he enjoys these trees, the bees and the red plops onto his poolside and swimming pool. I hope he learns how to clean his pool like so many other pool owners.
The newly open space also has an unfortunate downside for me. My yard, which once looked like a park with its large, overgrown trees, now allowed me to look across long, now empty yard space, over our fence, through his floor to ceiling window and into his bathroom. I can see him peeing or sitting on the toilet seat reading the sports section of the Ventura County Star from my bedroom. Rather than suffer this view, I have just opted to keep my shutters closed. I miss those trees.
There are a few things I do like here, however. I have a neighbor of color that lives a few doors down, and he seems to do anything to please his surrounding. He is very conservative, and even pokes fun at his own race by placing a lawn jockey and black Santa on his lawns for parties. There is also another neighbor who drives ultra slow and sports a Tina Turner fashion wig from the 80’s. There is one other guy from the next block over, a proud supporter of President Barack Obama and UC Berkeley graduate. What’s not to love about that?
This, however, is life in this suburb, a place so void of character that I am continually uninspired to say anything nice about this place. I have lived in crime ridden areas where my car has been stolen, and would much prefer that life. These suburbs were created for families who want to live in a safety. We have no children, however, which makes it simpler to see the crueler underside of life where people seemed to have created safety by practicing intolerance.
I have never spent my life antagonizing my neighbors until I moved here. I sometimes play Tupac at full volume in the daytime. I screamed into the Dodger loving neighborhood when the San Francisco Giants won their first World Series. I cheered for France in the World Cup. The first time I saw someone wear a LA Kings jersey during their first successful Stanley Cup playoff run, I called him a bandwagoner. These are some of my little rebellions.
My other rebellion is to continually write about my hometown San Francisco. I am the original liberal San Franciscan and stick to my roots. Nothing in life will never change that, even as San Francisco slowly becomes a soulless stop for the Google bus. Whatever you do, San Francisco, do not think that all that new money combined with the swift eviction of all your local color will make you better. It will not.
It will only make you more like this place where I live, a postcard pretty place of grand homes, bubbling with intolerance. You do not want that.
(c) 2014 Slow Suburban Death. All rights reserved.
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