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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\u2019s yard.\u00a0 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\u2019s home.\u00a0\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
It seemed like such a giant step for suburban neighborhood mankind to have someone in my neighborhood declare Mexicans as not all-that-bad.\u00a0 The times were changing.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
My neighborhood has been staunchly conservative and anti-illegal immigration, and it would follow that they imagined every dark skinned person to be Mexican.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
I do not write much about the town in which I live or its people because my neighbors are not very friendly.\u00a0 In fact, our neighbors in all parts of Southern California do not seem to be very friendly.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 It was far different from my life in San Francisco, where I befriended the people who lived upstairs, downstairs and next door.<\/p>\n
I am a tried and true child of the city, having grown up in the poor part of town.\u00a0 You learn that people are people.\u00a0 Life in the suburbs, however, is different.\u00a0 There are punishable offenses when you cross the neighbors, especially those whose beliefs run contrary to my own.\u00a0 I learned this after inviting some friends from West LA over for a visit, soon after we moved to this town.\u00a0 They arrived on motorcycles, a small group of gay men.\u00a0 This offense earned me an anonymously delivered Jesus video in my mailbox.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 He does not wear leather chaps or wear a bikini when mowing his front lawn, so no one thinks he could be gay.\u00a0 My neighbors continually try to set him up with the perfect woman.\u00a0 My neighbor would politely decline their efforts.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 This stopped the girl search for a bit, but perhaps not to his liking.\u00a0\u00a0 My neighbor flagged me down not long after\u00a0 to ask what type of woman might appeal to the man across the street,\u00a0 I wanted to say \u201c…one with a penis…\u201d\u00a0 Instead, I opted for the easier \u201c…you will have to ask him…\u201d<\/p>\n
The man across the streets knows that I know his secret, and we just nod at each other and wave.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 It might be more tolerable and a little less suburban daily death-ish if they were kind people, but most are not.<\/p>\n
We are still in a time warp of social progress out here.\u00a0 A former hairdresser out here spent our first session trying to tell me through sign language and innuendos that he was gay.\u00a0 I already knew this fact, and he knew that I knew.\u00a0 He wanted so much to say it, but kept skirting around it as if we were playing \u201cWhat\u2019s My Line?\u201d\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 He wanted not to bend that unspoken rule of coloring outside the line or rattling chains.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0\u00a0 At the same time, the new neighbors next to us sent an unofficial official letter saying that our trees were threatening their well being.\u00a0 It had the potential to crush their house, even though such a feat would take a monumental effort.\u00a0 The probability of the tree crushing them would be comparable to having Mothra fly out of my home to destroy their water fountain.<\/p>\n
We had already planned on bringing down the trees as its branches were obscuring the rest of our yard, effectively killing the surrounding foliage.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The neighbors threat, however, changed everything.\u00a0\u00a0 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.\u00a0 None of that seemed to matter, because our neighbors deemed that their needs superceded ours.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 His responses left them stumbling and stuttering until they finally backed off, reducing their onery visits to rare encounters that left them cowering.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 They had devised a mutually beneficial plan of attack but had not\u00a0 planned on our own counterattack.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
There was a time when I tried to be a good neighbor.\u00a0 I used to bake cookies for my next door neighbors.\u00a0 My husband was vigilant in chasing away egg throwing children who taunted the seniors.\u00a0 We watched our neighbor\u2019s home when asked.\u00a0 We used to let our neighbor come into our yard when we were not at home so that she could pick some avocados.\u00a0 We kept our far more liberal views to ourselves, never placing political placards on our front lawns.\u00a0 Ours would be the ones that would oppose their own candidates and views.<\/p>\n
We walk a tenuous line, though, against unwritten rules that seem only to apply to us.\u00a0 We were once sent a note suggesting that we move because our dogs barked in the afternoon.\u00a0\u00a0 We have been yelled at over our grass being too long or too brown during the drought, because appearances are everything here.\u00a0 A neighbor grilled me for speaking in Japanese on my front lawn to my visiting aunt from Japan and my gardener.<\/p>\n
Over the years, we have learned to not tolerate their behavior.\u00a0 My husband has already told two of my neighbors to \u201cfuck off\u201d.\u00a0 Literally.\u00a0 He even went to their front door to do this.\u00a0 He also put up a fence with a lock to prohibit any more free avocados.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 They even stole our picker.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s backyard.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I hope he enjoys these trees, the bees and the red plops onto his poolside and swimming pool.\u00a0 I hope he learns how to clean his pool like so many other pool owners.<\/p>\n
The newly open space also has an unfortunate downside for me.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I can see him peeing or sitting on the toilet seat reading the sports section of the Ventura County Star from my bedroom.\u00a0 Rather than suffer this view, I have just opted to keep my shutters closed.\u00a0 I miss those trees.<\/p>\n
There are a few things I do like here, however.\u00a0 I have a neighbor of color that lives a few doors down, and he seems to do anything to please his surrounding.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 There is also another neighbor who drives ultra slow and sports a Tina Turner fashion wig from the 80’s.\u00a0 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?<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 I have lived in crime ridden areas where my car has been stolen, and would much prefer that life.\u00a0 These suburbs were created for families who want to live in a safety.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
I have never spent my life antagonizing my neighbors until I moved here.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I cheered for France in the World Cup.\u00a0 The first time I saw someone wear a LA Kings jersey during their first successful Stanley Cup playoff run, I called him a bandwagoner.\u00a0 These are some of my little rebellions.<\/p>\n
My other rebellion is to continually write about my hometown San Francisco.\u00a0 I am the original liberal San Franciscan and stick to my roots.\u00a0\u00a0 Nothing in life\u00a0 will never change that, even as San Francisco slowly becomes a soulless stop for the Google bus.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 It will not.<\/p>\n
It will only make you more like this place where I live, a postcard pretty place of grand homes,\u00a0 bubbling with intolerance.\u00a0 You do not want that.<\/p>\n
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(c) 2014 Slow Suburban Death.\u00a0 All rights reserved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
http:\/\/keithklassen.files.wordpress.com\/2013\/06\/monoploy-houses.jpg It was very odd that on a weekday morning, I would hear loud ranchero music blaring from an AM station playing in my neighbor\u2019s<\/p>\n