Mario and the Coyotes

The first time I considered buying a gun I was walking my small dog through the fashionable Los Angeles neighborhood of Silver Lake. A coyote crossed the street ahead, unhurried, because it belonged there. When I glanced to the side, another slid quietly from behind a parked car, watching us closely.

My elderly neighbor had mentioned coyotes once.

“They’re only dangerous in packs,” he’d said, raising an umbrella and gripping it tightly, shoulders tense as if expecting rain.

But there was no rain. The umbrella was imaginary, an invisible club or shield against remembered packs of coyotes eyeing the beloved and dead dog he used to walk without a gun.

The ants were worse, but a gun would do nothing against those. The water bugs were worse, and they didn’t belong, which made them more horrifying. They came into the house for water, which is the most unsettling reason for a creature to enter your home. And water bugs are the most unsettling bugs—long brown cockroaches with wide, shameless eyes, bold and indecent in their presence, as if daring you to look away.

As if daring you: Kill me and I’ll go everywhere. Kill me, and I’ll ruin your hand towel—the one you found me on, the same brown color that I am, which revolted you when you reached for it and for me. I deserve death, but I am too horrible for you to kill. You’ve killed other bugs for far less, but you will let me go, fling me out on the hand towel onto the strip of concrete that separates your house from its converted garage. Then remember me ten years later when you write about your move from Los Angeles, where it is warm, to Portland, where it is cold and wet even in June. You will remember every detail of my shell and wings and horrible twitching antennae there. And you will fear forgetting so many things about Los Angeles, so you will write an essay—an essay that will begin with me.

The second time I considered buying a gun, I was bored in my basement. I had spent too much money on small, ridiculous instruments, or parts of instruments, bought after watching videos about them and wishing I were making music instead of working. I would buy them, feel guilty, then work harder to make up for it. And then, bored again, I’d watch more videos—this time about things I would never buy, like guns.

If I were to buy a gun, thinking ahead to our move, what would it say about me? What kind of Oregon man should I become? A new man, born at forty? Would I load it with blackout rounds—slow bullets that prefer to tumble inside bodies rather than through them. That lodge in the intruder, or drywall. Not through the drywall and into a child. I’d choose a round that stays. Something that ends things cleanly, violently, only where it should.

This home, my new home, will be a home where nothing moves. A home my children will stop being children in, then bring their children to see me here. This is the house I will most likely die in—or start the process of dying in, before the people who decide where one should die find a more appropriate place for me to do it.

I know myself well enough in middle age not to buy a gun. Or a motorcycle. My vas deferens are cut, stitched closed, and sealed with glue.

I own a large home now, large enough to have complex problems—problems I must solve without the proximity of neighbors linked through shared walls. In Los Angeles, they fended off coyotes with umbrellas. Here, they have chainsaws.

I met my first Los Angeles roommates in Altadena while the city was on fire. My car was packed with everything I owned—all of it fitting into one Honda Accord. A policeman pulled me over, thinking I was looting the evacuated homes nearby. He looked at me skeptically. I said I was moving in, not stealing. Then he saw the kind of things I had packed. It was clear I wasn’t a looter—or at least not a competent one.

That home, and most of the city around it, would burn down ten years later. But none of us knew that then.

The house was a mansion once. Now it was a maze. Bedrooms turned into more bedrooms. Doors added where there should have been walls. The owner, a prolific and enthusiastic contractor, used the place to try out every molding, fixture, and finish he couldn’t convince a client to accept. Madcap, uneven, the opposite of builder-grade.

I met the property manager—if you could call him that—when he came out to help me unload the car. He had a shovel in one hand and flip-flops on his feet. He was older than my father. His name was John. He would become my best friend. But I didn’t know that then.

He was LA’s best cabinetmaker, or close to it. Built wine cellars for mansions in the hills. A devoted socialist with a perfectly sunny temperament. He built the wine cellars because rich people wanted his work, and John wanted to work. I assume more wanted than needed. He lived on almost nothing. He knew everything about art. His room was stacked floor to ceiling with art history books. And he had read them all.

Next door, a family lived with a young child—the first child I’d lived with since being a child myself. He was a soccer savant. The Korean students who had lived in my room before me had taught him how to play. He became obsessed. His kicks became too powerful. The odd moldings were the first casualties, then the targets.

The neighbor on the other wall had loud sex. Loud enough and long enough that, while recording a voiceover for class, I had to crouch in my shower the next morning, whispering to the mic, half-ashamed, half-amused.

A green swarm of parrots lived nearby—whatever the word is when parrots don’t live but instead scream in at five-thirty every morning. John told me I could call the county. They’d take them away if they bothered me. They did bother me. But I also loved them. Which is often the way with neighbors.

The morning after I cowered in my shower, I woke to find a parrot staring at me. One beady black slick eye bulged with a white iris—an impossibly clean, impossibly perfect circle. I wondered what it saw. Out of one eye: my room, messy with art school paper scraps and spray glue. Out of the other: the tree it loved.

When that house burned eleven years later, the newspaper said John stood outside with the whole mountainside on fire, wetting down the home with a garden hose. I hoped the parrots still had the tree. But it was, as the woman texted me, “all gone.” Just the stone wall, and little piles of ash, like some enormous, flattened, burnt offering.

“Can we get out of the car, Daddy?” my son asked as we toured the devastation before driving on to his friend’s sixth birthday party.

“No, buddy. The ash is poison,” my wife replied.

“What’s ash?” he asked.

Six months later, we moved into a house built on the bones of another. The last one burned. Sometimes I still find ash—folded into gravel, caught under the new dirt, weeds, and blackberries. Charred splinters rise through the soil like knuckles, like something buried trying to remember what shape it once had. They smell like old smoke and something sweet that burned slowly.

After I graduated and got a job, I rented a room on the lower floor of an enormous estate on the eastern fringe of Los Angeles. The sprawling home had a marble-floored foyer, two living rooms, and views of farmland. The owner, Alex, had retired suddenly and moved there with his wife Yuki. They took in roommates out of boredom—and, I realized later, likely to protect Yuki from Alex’s manic bouts.

Yuki was a career Japanese-to-English translator. I could ask her anything about Japan—why flat objects and three-dimensional objects are counted differently, for instance—and she would make it make total sense, in a way that made me think English was simply missing something, not that Japanese was strange. She answered these questions in the enormous, quiet house they had bought when their daughter moved out, because they were lonely.

One night I lay awake while Alex and Yuki screamed at each other through the walls. At some point Yuki asked if he wanted to kill her. He said: if you were holding a deadly weapon, yes. I stayed awake in case I needed to call the police. In case I needed to escape. In case I needed to save her. The next morning on my way to work, I glanced toward the living room I wasn’t supposed to enter—the one with the decorative samurai sword—and filed that information away.

In the morning the sword was gone.

A few days later I saw Alex at around six in the morning as I left for work. He was lying in the front yard in his bathrobe, grinning, waving at me, as the sprinklers went off. Flocks of bunnies—I am completely serious—bounded out from the bushes and dashed into the street, which was lined on both sides by half-finished McMansions. I waved back. I had just come from living with John and all the parrots. At twenty-six, the whole world seemed odd.

Nobody ever acknowledged what had happened. I sent Alex and Yuki an email a few days later telling them I was moving out. My girlfriend—now my wife—had been spending a lot of time there, and I didn’t want her around any of that.

My next neighbor was a therapist named Fran who rented me her back room, which shared a wall with the space where she saw patients. The room was a half-thought-through addition on an eighth-acre lot, overlooking a wild garden through a glass door—charming, but full of spiders. The bathroom was a bizarre conversion: one wall of the shower was a wood-framed glass window covered by a curtain, overlooking the house’s central courtyard. Bright Mexican tiles covered everything. The spiders came in through the glass door. One bit me square in the face and I had to go to urgent care because of the fever. I didn’t tell Fran about the spiders. I didn’t want to lose the deal on rent.

I could hear through the wall, which I’m sure was some kind of violation, though I tried not to. The only thing I remember hearing was Fran reassuring a girl she wasn’t fat—that she was a real girl. I put in my headphones. The conversations that leaked through were mundane, the low ambient hum of people trying to sort themselves out.

Fran once asked if I was running a business out of my room, because I’d had some things shipped from my parents’ house. She was worried—her rentals and her psychology practice weren’t registered to the address. The whole arrangement was a kind of mutual looking away.

Her husband, an Iranian man, did all the handiwork. One evening, while fixing the lock that always broke, he told me he was leaving for Iran to check on his parents during bombing raids. He left me a locksmith’s number. When I called that locksmith later, he told me the actor who played Half-Sack on Sons of Anarchy had died in a murder-suicide. I thought he meant on the show, but he meant in real life.

Simi Valley itself was an endless sea of brown—brown grass, brown houses, brown rocky cliffs creeping up to a sky that faded from dust to blue in a slow gradient. It was so quiet, especially coming from the city. In Moorpark there had been animals making noise constantly. Here there was almost nothing. This should have been unsettling and it wasn’t. My girlfriend was becoming, with increasing clarity, the person I needed to spend the rest of my life with. After a literally mentally ill landlord and a vanishing sword, the brown silence felt like home.

My next neighbor was a man in his forties, covered in gang tattoos, who lived in a sprawling apartment complex—the kind of place that looks like a half-finished open-world video game, brown and white stucco units copy-pasted across a hillside. He had roaring shouting matches with his girlfriend.

This was the first place my girlfriend and I lived together. We had the only apartment with a lock that actually worked, a real keyed deadbolt, which meant we were also the only ones who could be properly locked out. One night we were. I knocked on my neighbor’s door and asked to cross his balcony to get into mine. Inside, his apartment was immaculate—like a set from Frasier. I didn’t say anything. He didn’t explain. I crossed the balcony and that was that. Some images you carry without a frame.

I had a Mustang. I had a whole room just for making music. The kitchen was new and we cooked there, and we cooked on the balcony too, and nobody gave us any hassle. We got our first animal—a cat named Eugene, after the city in Oregon where I grew up. We didn’t know yet how far Eugene would travel with us. At the time he was just a cat, and we were just people with a balcony and a good lock and money we hadn’t figured out how to worry about yet.

The job that paid for all of it had begun to rot from the inside. I needed to specialize in digital product design. I couldn’t keep bouncing between websites and logos and packaging, designing surfaces for objects I did not understand and would not have to live inside.

My next neighbor was an eccentric Brazilian woman convinced she had an agreement with my landlord—my father-in-law—to rent the garage beneath our apartment. She recorded it daily with her jewel-encrusted phone case, building evidence for a court case that never came. My father-in-law didn’t like that lady either.

The place was faded. He was the kind of landlord who couldn’t be bothered to remove the light switch plates before repainting, so the paint just globbed around the edges—technically done, not really done. The apartment was smaller than Woodland Hills. I had to move my music equipment to the garage, which was awful.

But my wife was happy there. She had grown up around many of these tenants. Her brother had lived in our unit for a while. She was in her element, surrounded by people and places she already knew, in a building that already had her history in it. We were there to save money, and when a steady freelance gig fell through, the deal on rent was the thing that kept us upright. We saved. We waited. We got ready.

My next neighbor was an elderly Japanese woman who filled her yard with gray gravel and tended to half a dozen perfectly conical bushes.

We had bought a house. Our first house. It sat on a narrow strip of land that, if you looked at a map of the actual city of Los Angeles, connected all the way down to Long Beach. The city motto was literally The Freeway City. It bordered Compton, and Mongols Motorcycle Club members rode through regularly. The houses were nice, though.

Another neighbor, connected somehow to glass deliveries for Sony Studios, had his home robbed in broad daylight the same month there were six shootings in the neighborhood. Certain neighbors ran two casinos. A piano-themed hostess bar operated nearby. None of this was connected. None of it was mine. I had a two-hour daily commute. I had a cute backyard. I liked my neighbors.

One night my wife and I got dinner and afterward I saw a little bar with live music and thought it looked charming. I had never heard of a hostess bar. My wife had. To her they were as unremarkable as McDonald’s. The pianist invited me to play the vintage Gibson ES-335 left behind by a drunken Japanese businessman who had trusted the club to keep it safe until his next trip from Tokyo.

I played a sixty-four-bar solo over Johnny B. Goode. My wife and I were probably the only people in the room who spoke English. Everyone thought it was weird and wonderful. It is one of my favorite memories.

I was proud of the house, in the dumb and honest way you are proud of something that has punished you financially but still belongs to you. We had saved for it in a faded apartment while a woman with a bedazzled phone documented her phantom legal case one floor below us. The paint was clean. The yard was cute. The freeway was close. The danger was distributed evenly enough that it could almost pass for atmosphere.

Mario wasn’t my neighbor, but he moved all our things from Los Angeles to Portland, Oregon, which made him something more intimate than a neighbor for three days. A neighbor sees what you carry through the door. Mario saw all of it weighed, wrapped, numbered, and lifted.

Fourteen thousand, eight hundred pounds. That was the number. Not the emotional number, the actual one. My family had become freight.

In Los Angeles, our possessions had been dispersed through rooms, closets, garages, crawl spaces, under beds, behind doors. In the truck they achieved unity. The cat tree, the crib, the guitar amps, the dishes, the couch, the boxes of baby clothes, the framed prints, the ugly lamp I still somehow owned, the small ridiculous instruments I had bought while bored and guilty and wishing I were a different person—all of it entered the same dark container and crossed the country together.

When the truck arrived in Oregon, Mario and I stood on the porch above the same yard where the old house still surfaced in black splinters.

Mario looked out at the land.

“Is all this yours?” he asked.

For an Angeleno, land is not space. Land is an event. Land is something that has happened to you, probably through error or inheritance or some temporary failure of the market to notice itself.

“Yes,” I said.

I heard pride in my voice and disliked it immediately.

Then Mario left.

The truck pulled away, and with it went the last official instrument of Los Angeles. There was no ceremony. No coyote crossed the street. No parrot screamed from a tree. No water bug clung to a towel and promised to haunt me. There was only the new house, the burned house underneath it, the wet air, the yard, the boxes, the children somewhere inside, and the sudden understanding that nobody nearby knew who I had been.

In Los Angeles, I had lived through walls. A woman told a girl she was real. A couple screamed beneath a vanished sword. A gangster with a perfect apartment let me climb across his balcony. John read art history in a room stacked to the ceiling with books and later stood before a burning mountain with a garden hose. Parrots screamed at dawn with one white eye fixed on the room and the other fixed on the tree. A hostess bar kept a drunk businessman’s Gibson safe until his next trip from Tokyo. I played sixty-four bars over Johnny B. Goode for a roomful of people who seemed willing, for reasons I still don’t understand, to accept me as the evening’s temporary problem.

In Oregon, the neighbors had chainsaws.

This seemed at first like a decline in mystery. It was not.

One man knew how to drop a tree so it would fall where he said it would fall. Another owned three different ladders for three different kinds of roofline. Someone had a pressure washer. Someone knew drainage. Someone knew which blackberry roots would come back if you left even a thumb-length of them underground. They spoke of gutters, slopes, rot, joists, permits, frost, raccoons, and the correct way to sharpen a chain.

They were not less strange than my Los Angeles neighbors. They were strange in the way of people who had made agreements with matter.

In Los Angeles, danger had often felt theatrical. A sword in the living room. Coyotes in Silver Lake. Casinos on the block. A motorcycle club passing through a neighborhood with a freeway for a spine. A woman below us recording the garage with her jeweled phone. The danger was real, but it also loved staging. It arranged itself near neon, stucco, bougainvillea, hand towels, parrots, hostess bars, and locked balconies.

Here, danger is quieter and more structural. Trees rot from the inside. Water enters where it should not. A slope fails. A blackberry cane reaches through a fence. Ash rises from beneath new soil. A house can stand completed and still be full of the house that burned before it.

I had thought about buying a gun because I wanted an object that could end the uncertainty of animals, intruders, fatherhood, aging, distance, the large house, the dark yard, the fantasy that a man should be ready. But the longer I live here, the more the gun seems like the wrong object. Too dramatic. Too clean. Too interested in a single moment.

No sword. No parrots. No gangster balcony. No Gibson in the hostess bar. Just rain, ash, blackberry cane, and men with chainsaws.

The neighbors have chainsaws. They know how to use them.

That is something.