Out the Window

Joanie: In my youth, I thought that a great writer had to live somewhere squalid in order to really suffer for their art... guess I'm making up for lost time... I read this at an open mike night at a local art studio last weekend... like the song goes, they all laughed...

Out the Window
Or
Don’t Look Up…

by Joanie Harmon

Having grown up in the suburbs, where one is shag carpeted and mini-malled to death, I longed to feel the grit and grime the big city and live in a place that didn’t feel like it was built 15 minutes ago. So the charming (old) and picturesque (dingy) apartment on Lime Avenue seemed just perfect. The three windows of the corner unit afforded a view of rooftops, telephone poles and palm trees straight out of an Edward Hopper painting. A faux fireplace graced a corner, while the rounded cornered ceiling and arched doorways gave the place a romantic retro feeling.

In the glow of that fall afternoon, I neglected to notice that below the shingled roofs and dormer windows lay an alley. The skyline that I had admired belonged to a series of bungalows and other apartment buildings, which shared two or three dumpsters below, peppering a calm Sunday morning or a quiet weeknight with the slamming of their lids.

Unlike the car chases through alleyways on “The Streets of San Francisco,” where suspension brakes and driving skills are put to the ultimate test, the cars that drive through the alley at all hours of the night are more like an endless stream of shuttlebuses, dropping people off and picking others up. At least, that’s what I assumed at first. Then my inner cynic kicked in and I surmised that the visitors were buying drugs. Or that they were selling and delivering them, through a kind of home shopping enterprise, perhaps with a snappy name like CannabisClub.com or CrackFinders.net.

The most memorable episode featured the loud and inebriated voice of a man who yelled, “Heil, Hitler! Heil, Hitler!” while walking down the alley. Roused from a deep sleep, yet startled by his proximity and volume right under my window, I pictured him wielding a meat cleaver or some such instrument, although the yelling was brutal enough. I’ve been awakened by the screeching of mating cats and neighbors returning home from a night out, their stereos thumping away in the wee hours. This is accompanied by sounds of what is either the release of passengers from every door of the car and the trunk or the passengers exercising what we kids used to call a Chinese fire drill.

One Sunday morning, I saw an elderly woman in a pink jacket sorting bottles and cans into separate plastic shopping bags and hanging the bags neatly on the bar of the dumpster. I assumed this was for her more environmentally minded fellow street dwellers. I imagined her as someone who had perhaps slipped off her meds or had no one to take care of them, which was depressing. But I was heartened by her fastidious method of recycling.

When I finally locked myself out of my apartment last Sunday, leaving my keys on the desk, I went next door to our building’s manager to use his spare. As I waited outside his door for his wife to find it, I found out that the lady in the pink jacket lived across the hall from them. I saw her getting ready for a busy day, packing her bags and donning her pink jacket. I wondered if she went to church or visited anyone before her chores in the alley. I smiled guiltily as she passed me, thinking of the time I “spied” on her. But she had no way of recognizing me. When you’re in the alley, you never look up. I know I don’t when I walk through, keeping my eyes on the ground lest I step on something sharp, gooey or formerly alive.

Spring fever has hit the alley. What I first thought was a pair of amorous felines, turned out to be only one Miss Lonelyhearts of a cat in heat. I am tempted to place a personal ad for her manhunt, as she has been wailing for two weeks straight, with no prospects in sight. I have to admire her tenacity though, and wonder, as do many of my single girlfriends, where are all the men?

On any given night, I can hear sirens announcing the officers who are presumably protecting and serving our fair city, hordes of Roscoe’s diners, sluggish from too much fried food, moving slowly and often noisily toward their cars, and the comings and goings of my building’s residents, many of whom fell compelled to slam the metal screen door out back as hard as they could when they fling themselves into the alley.

But my favorite moment was on New Year’s Eve, when at the stroke of midnight, I had braced myself for a volley of traditional gunshots. This is the LBC, after all. Instead, the amplified chords of “Auld Lang Syne,” played a la Hendrix, twanged out tentatively across the night. I pictured a pimply faced teen, overcome by his abilities, thinking his performance was the ultimate homage to 2008 and the gods of rock. I hoped other people heard it and enjoyed it as much as I did. Evidently, he hoped so too, because he played it again five minutes later. And louder.

I think I’ve had my fill of big city grit and grime and will be a lot more observant when I pick my next apartment. I won’t be seduced so easily by a picturesque view. I can’t help but think that the alley has given me a new appreciation for the tranquility of the suburbs. But I will miss the microcosm of humanity below my window. And hope that my musical neighbor starts a new tradition and continues to greet the New Year with guitars, not gunshots.

- Long Beach, 2/08