Moorpark Palms Letters - 1. Chapter 1

1993

Just Off the Camino Real

I love living in this place: Moorpark Palms. U-shaped. Stucco and stone. Fourteen apartments on two floors. Out back: a kidney-shaped pool. When I moved in, the trim was orange, the courtyard overgrown. New owners painted the doors aqua, razed the jungle and planted petunias. There are now two palms; there may have been more. There's never been more excitement.

My favorite neighbors are Mack, whose name may really be Tommy, and Joni, whose name is probably Jean. Mack, hairy and tattooed, almost never wears a shirt and looks like Old Elvis. Once, he may have resembled Young Elvis, presumably why Joni married him. She was an Elvis groupie twenty-years-and-sixty-pounds ago, but more about that later. MackTommy and JoniJean have two kids: four-year-old screeching Gini (short for Virginia) and eight-year-old, shag-haired Kyle (a ninja child-actor who reportedly supports them all). They also have two dogs: Bordeaux, a white German Shepherd, and Gini (don't ask) a lumbering Basset Hound Joni found and couldn’t “bear to put to sleep.” Instead, she spends much of her time (and ours) calling in the courtyard: “Gini! Gini! Bordeaux! Kyle! They all run free.

Mack’s official profession is Window Cleaner (like Windex). Over their mailbox and on signs attached to their aged black Caddy (more later), it reads: Anderson’s Awning and Window Cleaning. I have no idea who Anderson is. Their last name is Turner (supposedly). When they first moved in they asked Vic – my crazy former neighbor whose last name was also Turner – if they were related. Had he said “Yes,” and if he’d had any, they might have hit him for money. They hit everyone else.

Mack and Joni were originally hired as part-time apartment managers, replacing the angst-prone Bret, a short-order cook and would be chef, who also wore no shirt. (He lived with his wife, Lola, and a tormented, unneutered tomcat. More about them later.) Supposedly, Tommy was Mack and Jean Joni because, in addition to getting free rent in exchange for building maintenance – while probably misusing Kyle’s sporadic acting income – they were also collecting “government benefits,” which is to say welfare. This information came from Donna, who – when she moved into the building – was introduced as Joni’s sister.

“I’m not her sister,” Donna soon told me. “We met twenty years ago, when I was a security guard for Elvis. She was a hanger-on.”
“Elvis?” I asked quietly, not meaning to upset someone’s fantasy. (The front plate on the Turner family Caddy reads “Elvis,” and, supposedly, a plaque on the dashboard – I once heard Kyle bragging about it – reads “Made expressly for you-know-who.” The car’s so bedraggled now I’ve been afraid to look. Besides, I wouldn’t cross Mack. He’s the kind who makes pigs squeal.)
Donna simply nodded at my question. “He was so great, nothing like what you hear. He’d be there, playing Yatzee with us – it was his favorite game – and throwing water balloons off his balcony. People would look up fifteen floors, screaming, not knowing who they’d just been soaked by. Then he’d go on stage and was like this different person, someone I didn’t know at all.”
For six years Donna was one of His Vegas security people. (“I was at his last birthday. It’s all so sad now.”) She’s “Aunt Donna” to Gini and Kyle, and while she lived in the building – she recently moved – occasional companion to Garth.
Garth’s a dark-haired, good-looking rodeo cowboy and stunt man, maybe thirty-two. Donna’s forty-something, with several grown kids. Unlike Joni, she started young. When I first met Garth, he was drunk, naked, and sparring in the courtyard with our newest apartment manager, a twentyish, California blond boy who’d just moved in. The few times I saw Garth after that, he was always friendly, if never fully dressed or sober. He and Donna constantly invited me to dinner, offering thick steaks grilled by the pool. I once gave in, then had an exhausting conversation about race tracks, stunt-flying, and car engines – my favorite subjects. Hearing I was a designer, Garth insisted I paint western scenes for the back windows of his wealthy boss’s pick-up trucks. I never completely convinced him I wasn’t a graphics artist. When we shook hands goodbye, he nearly crushed my fingers in affection.
Donna moved suddenly, in the middle of the night. She’d had a restraining order placed against Mack (“I never liked him.”) and was barely speaking to Joni. The order compelled Mack to stay 50 feet away, though their apartments were less than 20 feet apart. Trouble began when Donna and Garth went to Hawaii, and Joni used her manager’s keys to strip Donna’s kitchen of food. She also ran up the phone bill, blew out the air conditioner, and let the kids trash the place as a playground. (“I love those kids,” Donna told me. “I’d do anything to get them away from that man – especially Gini. Kyle brings in the money so they spoil him rotten, then they treat her like shit.”)

Before Joni and Mack were replaced as managers, they had my odd neighbor Vic evicted. He’d been threatening to go for years anyway, insisting Mack was plotting against him – and Bret before that. (Bret felt Vic always spied on him. “Any time I look up at his window, the curtains move, then he flips me the bird.”) For two years, everything Vic owned was packed in cardboard boxes. He’d even turned off his electricity. Before Mack padlocked the utility box, Vic would turn his power back on as needed. After that, I’d occasionally come home and find an extension cord running under his door and up to the light fixture in the stairwell we shared. As I reached the landing, Vic would crack open his apartment door and from the darkness – sweaty and shirtless – goofily explain, “The lottery’s reached thirteen mil,” or “UCLA’s playing tonight.” Vic’s my age and height, though slightly heavier. He owned a bike, no car, and constantly thumped his Schwinn up and down our steps (“So no one messes with it”). Before he’d been pensioned on disability (“Back problems”) he’d been an aerospace mechanic. (“My boss was a real Mickey Mouse. I keep this logo on my door to remind me.”) (Mickey’s image also guarded Vic’s mailbox.)
As I first moved in, Vic stood in his doorway watching me. “Are you Steve Allen?” he finally asked. I hadn’t heard that question since the early sixties, when subway bums wanted “loose change.”
“No,” I said.
“You his son?”
I smiled and introduced myself.
“Royal?” he misheard.
“Rich,” I repeated.
“Royal would be neater. You should change it.”
I smiled again.
“I went to school with Steve Allen’s son,” he soon went on. “They live near here.” He studied me again. “You’re sure you’re not his son?”

Vic always spooked Bret, though Bret was probably born edgy and further twisted that way. In the year he was part-time manager, he lost maybe a half-dozen restaurant jobs. (“People are real selfish,” he swore. “Always thinking of themselves. Never thinking what I might need.”) When he and Lola fought, their horny cat howled like a battered child. When the cat escaped his apartment-prison, Bret gave chase, waving flashlight and leash, hissing the cat’s name. After Lola ran to a neighbor’s place one night, locking herself in, Bret stood in the courtyard, in pajama bottoms, in the four AM rain, yowling, “Lola! Lola!”

“Stella! Stella!”

Vic’s studio apartment was quickly rented to a pair of college students: a lanky farmer-type and his tattooed Chinese girlfriend. (A large black star graces the side of her neck. I trust it’s not from a cult.) Odd odors occasionally greet me on the landing, a mix of incense and sweat. And there’s screaming, late at night. For a long time, I didn’t connect it to them. I thought it was on TV. Finally, late one night one of their windows smashed out.
“She really lets him have it,” a neighbor – the boy’s brother-in-law – told me. “She’s smart, real smart. All women are.”

The neighbor, Harv, moved in the same week as the college kids. With him came Lorelle, his Police Academy-trainee wife, and their two Village-of-the-Damned-blonde daughters. Joining Gini, Trina and Tara incessantly circle noisy plastic-wheeled trikes ‘round and ‘round our concrete courtyard, aping the kid in The Shining. Harv lays carpet for Lorelle’s father and makes “‘Bout fifty thou per – off the books, natch.” He’s always talkative, always friendly, and rarely wears a shirt. He looks like Mack’s double, with more symmetrical tattoos.
Harv was planning to apply for a job as a school bus driver this fall (“They make sixty grand per – you believe it? And only work forty hour weeks!”) but there were 12,000 other applicants. (“And some of them had experience.”)

Beneath Harv and Lorelle live Annie, Ed, and their also-Gini-aged daughter, Edan. Donna, at first hearing Annie shout for her daughter – everyone shouts around here; it goes with guys not wearing shirts – asked Annie why she’d named her daughter after herself. (“I know men do it with sons, but I’ve never seen it with girls.”)
“Her name’s ‘Edan.’” Annie corrected. “Mine’s Annie.”
“Oh,” Donna said, “I misheard.”
“We made it up from the first letters of my name and Ed’s.”
(A contestant on Wheel of Fortune recently was named Marence – for his mother Marsha and dad Lawrence. He married a woman named Michelle, and they named their daughter Marchelle. This has got to stop.)
Ed’s a traveling salesman (“In “videos”). I hope that’s not literally, though he’s bland enough to be some dim porno star. He and Annie seem nicely ordinary, though moving in, midsummer, they brought a Christmas tree growing in a garbage can. It’s presently dying outside their door. If they fought, it was never in public, though they both frequently brayed “Edan! Edan!” and squabbled loudly with Mack. Still, the other morning everyone woke to hear Ed screaming at the same locked door Bret once faced.
“Annie, let me in, goddamnit! I’m your husband!”
We all quickly found out – as Annie argued fiercely through the locked screen door – that Ed had taken a business trip to Vegas then delayed coming home. We also found out he had a slight gambling problem.
“We thought you were dead!” Annie howled at him. “We called everywhere! Hospitals! Police! The Highway Patrol!”
“I would of called...”
“If you were dead?!”
“What could of happened...”
“I want you out of here!” Annie screamed. “You’re not coming in! I never want to see you again!”
“It was just three days...”
“And borrowing money from your mother! When you know all she does is smoke and live on credit cards!”
This went on for an hour, then ended abruptly, and nothing more was said. They still live here, Ed travels, and Edan plays with Gini, despite their parents’ mutual glares.

Other neighbors:

For part of the summer, we had a woman living here with lots of friends. Male friends. Different male friends. Soon after she arrived, screams tore from her apartment one night. Worse screams than even Bret’s cat’s. Everyone rushed to the courtyard, men especially, ready to prevent murder. Only it seems the woman was entertaining.

Then there’s Lonnie, an accountant – pleasant, mid-twenties, buffed. He often wanders, shirtless of course, through our courtyard. With a python around his neck.

And the two women with different last names and a huge dog who share a one-bedroom apartment and talk to no one. (Can you blame them?)

Luba, a red-haired Russian, who complains she should pay less for her two-bedroom apartment than the families with four people living in them.

Finally, Sally, who moved in when the apartments were new in 1957. She was a dancer, who’d come from Pennsylvania in the 1930's to make movies. Instead, she married, and for a long time she and her husband managed the building, raising three daughters. (“It was all so pretty once. The outdoor lights were pink. There were hanging baskets of flowers.”) One of her daughters died here. (“She planted this jade.” Presumably there’s no connection.) Her husband passed on. Sally outlasted earthquakes, death, and uncaring landlords, but not Mack. He terrified her. When the tires on her little-used Fiat went flat, she blamed him. When her purse vanished, along with a man who’d talked his way into her apartment, claiming to “wash windows for Seniors at discount,” she blamed Mack. (Because he washes windows.) To protect Sally, a great-granddaughter took the adjoining apartment, then mostly busied herself with boys. (“The Irish Virgin,” Vic called Shannon, simultaneously showing interest while admitting defeat.)

When Vic moved on (to a Scientology hotel) Annie started a petition to evict Mack and Joni and quietly get their job. Everyone signed, but Mack and Joni are wily (and still here). Finally, after thirty-six years, Sally moved eight rooms of dark furniture out of her one-bedroom apartment. She now lives with a daughter.

Why do I stay? The rent’s cheaper than other people’s cable. Also, the walls are comforting knotty pine. It looks like Reno in the 1930's or one of my suburban neighbor’s basements in 1955. When it’s quiet, I have everything I need. When the kids wail, I turn on the air conditioner – Haydn, in winter. I think about moving, but I’m in California to save money.

How’s the show doing? Wheel is still # 1, syndicated. (Talk about Elvis sightings.) Do I “love” working on the show? It’s fun. Could I leave California? Quickly, though not for a few more years. Could I face “real” winter again? I ain’t sure.

Am I settled? No. (I’m a bum.) Do I own a couch? Yes, but it’s very small. The thing I like best about this place is the earth could crumble (and might) and I wouldn’t miss a thing.