Moorpark Palms Letters - 6. Chapter 6

1997

The Ballad Of Cyndi And Tim

Cyndi and Tim went out in a racket of bullets. Well, not exactly. But they coulda. Cyndi kicked Tim out again shortly after New Year’s. She was working at yet one more of the seemingly infinite reception jobs available in LA, land of the temp, home of the slave. Tim hadn’t worked since he quit delivering Humvees, possibly soon after those now-trendy war-flotsam started being manufactured. There had been the usual yowls from below and crashings of cheap black leather furniture as I sat on my own quaking couch. “It’s that Post-Christmas Funk,” sang Lindsay, one of our more astrologically-twisted neighbors, updating “Ol’ Debil Moon.”
“No, it’s not,” Cyndi countered. “He’s a louse. He’s a rat. He’s a druggie. He’s a jerk. He’s a moron. He’s a creep. He’s a...”
I interrupted her Reader’s Digest vocabulary expansion to ask if there were anything I could do.
“Kill him,” she said. “But that would be too easy. Lock him up, and let him scream off the drugs. That might hurt.” She grinned. “But he’s been off drugs before and always goes back, so that can’t hurt enough. I’d say kick in his balls, but you can’t really hurt him sexually, ‘cause he doesn’t really do much sexually, not that there ever was much down there to do much with. Still, as often as he’s flopped on the couch with his hand down his jeans, you’d think he was Tom Cruise in that Risky Something movie – if those rumors in the tabloids aren’t true. I mean the one thing you can say about Tim is he really loved me when he really loved me, which is probably more than you can say about Tom Cruise and his so-called wives.”
Talking – or listening – to Cyndi is always educational, in a dribbly sort of Rosie O’Donnell way. She looks a bit like that Ring Ding talk show hostess, too, though younger – Cyndi’s barely cracked twenty. Tim looks thirteen, even after the frequent supposed self-and medicinal-abuse, though he’s in his early thirties. He has that slight-and-famished look of an upcoming Johnny Depp who might just swerve toward working Sunset Boulevard without ever the chance of being rescued by Richard Gere. Mostly, he’s harmless, bordering on ineffectual, and the drugs Cindy constantly snipes about are over-the-counter pain pills for headaches. Then the moon shifts, Tim grows hair, Cyndi starts to breed, and the Stephen King stuff kicks in. They go through their formula break-ups so often, in the building, we use them to mark seasons. The same way the Aztecs once used captured warriors and young things to celebrate holidays.
“Hear Cyndi and Tim last night?” Quinn asks cheerfully in the parking lot – roaring his newly repainted, matte black former police ‘cycle alongside my timid Geo.
“It was really cool,” Rob chimes in – again bereft of the lovely Birgit, who divorced him after a mere nine months of dance hall bliss (she’d been working part-time as a rhumba instructor for Arthur Murray). Birgit followed her sister, permanently departing for Sweden, where she’s sending film dispatches to The Hollywood Reporter, though our other Swedish ex-pat, Franck, warned her, “The dark season is coming.”
“I liked the part when the cats got so freaked they clawed out the window,” Quinn goes on. “And when Tim threw the flaming halogen lamp! Ya think they did that digitally?”
Who needs Seinfeld? We got We Love Lucifer.
Normally, the Tim-Cyndi outbursts are as short-spanned as sunspots or Santa Ana winds, then all’s quiet till the next flinging of mud. But January was different.
Soon after she first evicted Tim (this long goodbye wobbled on as episodically as Mary Worth – and why hasn’t Angela Lansbury played that perennial octogenarian yet?) Cyndi crudely disassembled Tim’s resonant, five-grand ebony-and-glass entertainment system.
“He didn’t pay for it!” she insisted, viciously yanking cables. Technically, Cyndi didn’t pay for it, either, unless her hard-working, wealthy father has recently retaken control of his sporadically moody daughter’s many credit cards. Tim always insinuated that Dad covered their rent, too, though our landlord’s wife confides that the pastel, cartoon-strewn checks that arrive monthly bear both Cyndi’s gold embossed name and her decoratively calligraphied signature.
“I don’t really know what I’m doing here,” Cyndi went on that evening, hauling Darth Vader stereo components out her door into the January damp. “And there’s all these wires.”
She held up a clipped angel hair mass and a pair of scalloped pinking shears. (Between streams of willful unemployment, she’s also a home-based Martha Stewart acolyte.) Then she cheerfully tossed the wire mess into her car.
Some components she stashed in Annie’s neighboring apartment. “Tim’ll never think of looking there – if he ever thinks at all! Mostly, he uses his head to put drugs in all its holes.”
Other component parts, she crushed into her trunk and back seat – “To take to my parents’ house. They have this big garage and live in a gated community!”
“Why don’t you just return everything?” Annie asked warily. She’s Cyndi’s closest friend in the building, but clearly the two don’t always agree. “I mean, it’s not paid for.”
“I tried,” Cyndi moaned. “No one wants it back – not even at discount! I’ll just have to run ads on the Internet.”
Cyndi’s remarkably adept at web-surfing. A usual evening at home – as reported by those who survived the fevered merriment – “Who can turn them down?” Jonathan, our now lone Israeli and his American girlfriend (they met on a Biblical summer dig) asked. “Tim gets all these great movies!”
An evening consisted of sitting with Tim, watching second hand tapes from the Motion Picture Academy – he has a contact – while nearby in their Snoopy-decked living room (86 varieties), Cyndi explored chat lines and electronic junk sales.
“And they have good popcorn, too!” Bobby added, passing by. After nine-months of post-graduate bachelorhood living alone in an overpriced North Hollywood single, he reclaimed his former bedroom and re-joined college roommate Rob when Birgit returned home. Sadly, generous bowls of overflowing Orville Reddenbacher’s Poppin’ Best ended with Tim’s banishment and electronic dismembering.
“He’s never coming back this time,” Cyndi swore. “Never, never, never, never, never!”
Well, hardly ever it turned out – Tim was back the next morning. “I still have keys,” he twinkled, dangling them teasingly as a sex worker and letting himself in.
“He’s back?” Franck asked, crouched on his customary perch – the low doorstep of his daughter Annie’s apartment. Franck’s often our resident monitor, flicking endless Marlboro Lights into his former Skippy jar, while wheezing.
“Who knows?” I asked.
“Cyndi said she’d call the police. That’s what she told Annie.”
Annie’s Franck’s daughter from his second marriage, but he has two older children with already grown offspring “back in the homeland.” These “kids” were born in Minnesota, but long-ago chose to return to “the other side” with their mother, perhaps for reasons best unquestioned. Annie presently lives with her wild-but-well-funded demon-child, Edan, the wealthy Franck’s primary heir. Annie’s own second husband, Ed, finally lost his end game of cards, denying himself – by terms of his probation – use of both Annie’s bed and weekend tooling privileges in Franck’s ancient Datsun. (Ed wasn’t allowed his own car, nor access to his weekly paycheck, for fear some payday he’d bolt to the land of booze and debauchery – which is exactly what had happened.)
When he was first kicked out, Tim still had his own tarnished roadster – which Cyndi (or her commercial insurance-selling clan) had bought for him. The morning after his latest exile, he drove up accompanied by a buddy, and they crammed heavily-loaded garbage bags into his car’s back seat.
“Only clothes,” he assured the ever-watchful Franck. “Just taking what’s mine.”
“If he took what’s his,” Cyndi growled that evening, “he wouldn’t even have his tattoo! And I’m having mine removed!”
(For those malignantly curious: twin, discreetly-positioned tiny Snoopies. Everything’s revealed by those who wade in the pool.)
In the evening dark, Annie helped Cyndi change the locks on her apartment door. “I’d bar all the windows, too,” Cyndi vowed, “but then the cats couldn’t get out.”
(Now that would be awful. At that point Cyndi still owned a quartet of those mice-whompin’ brawlers, who steadily interrupted our midnights weary with their song.)
“Would you really call the police?” I asked. “If Tim shows up?”
“I tried swearing out a warrant – you know, to keep him like a thousand feet away. But there was too much paperwork.”
“What if he comes back?”
“He can’t get in! He has his clothes! There’s nothing left!”
Nonetheless.
The next day, while restively reading, I heard Tim’s old BMW crunch to a halt in front of our building. His car door slammed, then I listened while he tried his keys. “Freakin’ sleeze!” he soon grouched, I assumed to his scaggy friend. I listened again as they tried the front windows. Locked. The side window. Locked. They moved round the back, and as I watched from above, unseen, Tim popped the bathroom screen and slip-slided on his stomach to the cat-littered floor.
“Why didn’t you do something?” Cyndi yelled at me that evening.
“Like what?”
“Call the cops! Dial 911! That shithead broke into my apartment!”
“What did he take?” Annie asked quietly.
“My big Snoopies!” Cyndi cried. “He knows he can’t sell them – he’s tried before. They’re just for collectors! He only took them to hurt me!”
“You have to lock your windows,” Annie counseled.
“I can’t.”
“I’ll keep your cats...”
“They’ll just fight with yours. They do half the time anyway.”
“Then let them run free a few days. No one really owns a cat.”
Cyndi was persuaded, Annie and I helped her lock all her windows, then she tightly shut her dusty blinds. After that, she divided anything else she thought Tim might steal between Annie’s place and her car.
“I’m not sleeping here anymore,” she told us. “I’m too scared. I’m staying with my parents.”
“That’s not right,” Lindsay – Cyndi’s nearest neighbor – announced. “She shouldn’t be afraid in her own space.” (Lindsay’s soon moving out of “her space” – as soon as she finds somewhere cheaper. “I’m leaving ‘cause there are three guys I’ve had affairs with here, and it depresses me every time I get home.”)
Still, it was nice to hear Lindsay defend Cyndi as, just after Christmas, the two of them had a courtyard screamfest. Lindsay insisted Tim was leading her then musician/boyfriend Justin into drugs (a possibly naive charge). Cyndi howled back that Justin was a thief who nearly got her and Tim arrested when he stole a guitar and had them drive getaway.
“It was my guitar!” Lindsay screeched. “He was taking it in for repairs!”
“Well, he didn’t come out with the same one he took in! And why were people chasing him?”
The third afternoon, Tim was back again. I heard his car shutter to a stop, door slam, then listened as he tried the front, side, and rear windows. “What a creep!” he muttered. “How can she do this to me?”
His car door slammed again, but he didn’t drive off. I listened. Quiet. Maybe he was thinking things out. Then one of Cyndi’s back windows smashed in.
I carefully considered what to do – not intending in any way to get involved with this teenaged Punch ‘n’ Judy. But I also couldn’t have Tim breaking up the place. It was my chosen, if possibly ill-considered, home. Finally, I called the landlord, quickly telling his wife what had happened. She immediately called the police.
Then. Nothing. Happened.
Maybe a half-hour later, I went to check the mail. Only to find two cops – pistols drawn – where the merry mailman should have been.
“Who are you?” the first cop spat.
“M-m-manager,” I almost stuttered, involuntarily invoking my normally unused title.
The officer thumbed me away. Behind this armed pair was another duo – with shouldered rifles. Down the block were four hastily-parked squad cars.
“Who’s in there?” the second cop hissed, his gun now – politely? – aimed at my feet.
I wanted to be somewhere else, somewhere fortified.
“Tim,” I whispered back. “Maybe his friend.”
“Armed?”
I thought for a moment. “Barely fingered.”
“What!”
“Not armed,” I corrected. No time for comedy.
The cop grunted. I started to walk. And kept walking to the end of the block. I wasn’t going to get myself shot for the love of Tim.
“What’s goin’ on?” a man on a balcony called. I quickly explained.
“Wow!” he marveled.
Maybe ten minutes later, our landlord’s car appeared. I signaled. He stopped. “Do you know what’s happening?” I asked.
He knew more than I did: the cops had Cyndi talking with Tim from her phone at work. (That was gonna lose her another cush job.) Our errant boy knew about the lurking cops but wouldn’t come out, fearing police brutality. Besides what he’d learned from movies, it seemed Tim had some personal experience with cops – and a minor criminal record. Not for the expected – drugs. For loitering at 12 near a gay bar.
Still, Cyndi – possibly on that same “too much paperwork” basis – wouldn’t press charges. And Tim insisted – through the magic of telecommunications – that he was merely watching TV in his own bedroom. “My name is on the lease!”
Though he’d never personally paid rent, the landlord couldn’t deny that Tim had wobbily scrawled his name on a legal piece of paper. So after an hour of long-distance trade-offs, Tim jauntily came out his alleged front door – admittedly, hands wide above his head and in Star Wars briefs – then blatantly swaggered to his car and defiantly drove off.
“Too bad,” said the guy from the balcony. He had what looked like a kid’s telescope and a videocam and seemed “that close” to the winning lottery-video that would send him off on a nice vacation.
I waited for the landlord, who was finishing with the police. “Those kids are crazy,” he grumbled, as if this were news. “I’ve got to move them out.”
“No argument here,” I allowed.
He shook his head. “It’s not that easy. The law’s set up to protect the renter. No matter how bongo the bozo.”
Bingo.
“Maybe she’ll move,” I encouraged. “She’s already scared.”
“And maybe I’ll buy the Dodgers.”
Then things got weird – as though up to now it had been Father Knows Best. Cyndi still insisted she didn’t want to see Tim, and she wouldn’t sleep in her apartment ‘cause she was “too afraid of him.” And her parents – or so claimed Annie – swore they’d “cut Cyndi off if she didn’t permanently ditch the runt.” But Cyndi and Tim drove to Las Vegas for a weekend.
“It was so much fun!” I heard her exclaim when she’d stopped at Annie’s to “feed my babies” – the cats.
“What about your parents?” Annie asked patiently.
“Oh – them!” Cyndi laughed. “I’ll think about them tomorrow!” She giggled.
Tim appeared the next afternoon, with keys clearly supplied by Cyndi. “For my tapes,” he pacified Franck.
“He’s going to sell them,” Cyndi explained that evening. “Get money to drive east.”
“What’s east?” I asked innocently, wondering what new scheme Tim’s video-withered brain could devise.
“His mom lives in Pittsburgh.”
Now, abstractly, I knew that Tim had a mom – it was basic science. But somehow, I didn’t figure she’d survived his birth.
“He’s driving that wreck cross-country?” Franck asked.
“I’m amazed it made it to Vegas.”
“Oh, we didn’t drive that there!” Cyndi said, laughing again. “Some car dealer wanted to sell me a Land Rover – I got this letter in the mail. Of course, I didn’t want one – they’re too clunky. But they let me test drive one all weekend.”
I love Capitalism.
On his odyssey east, Tim’s car barely reached Nevada again, dying at a state line casino. While trying to plod out what to do next, he repeatedly rode their world-class roller coaster. Meanwhile, Cyndi moved back in. “Got to show my parents I’m independent, or they’ll stop my monthly checks.”
But she wasn’t happy. Every evening, she moped on her couch, front door open as though awaiting Elijah. Too blue even for home crafts and the Internet, she and Claire – our other semi-dependant – loudly discussed antidepressants across the courtyard. “I hate drugs,” Cyndi insisted. “Tim had pills for every occasion.”
“Take ‘em!” Claire called from her second floor window.
“Or watch TV,” Annie suggested more levelly.
“I can’t. I’ve got this great collection – all these tapes except the ones Tim pawned – and I can’t even play them. They sit in piles.”
Being neighborly, I offered to help reassemble her entertainment system.
“Nah,” she sighed, “it just makes me think of him. How happy we were.”
All night, her lights stayed on. “Keeps away gloom.” Twenty-four hours, her bedroom TV blared. “For company.”
“Could you turn it down, just a bit?” I asked – gently at first. “You know how thin the ceilings are.”
She promised but always forgot.
“And your ceiling fan really squeaks,” I added later. “Mind if I oil it?”
“Sure,” she lisped languidly.
Three-In-One didn’t help nor did rubber washers. I asked if she’d keep the fan off till summer, when open windows and outside noise would drown the vibrations. Again, she promised but forgot that, too. Finally – with her permission – I went in one afternoon to take down the fan while she was at work. It was a good thing, too: as I entered her heap of a heart-torn place, I smelled burning plastic.
The bathroom litter box – more a traveling cage – was pressed against the red-coiled wall heater, seconds from ignition. I shut it off, cooled down the box in the shower, then reported to the landlord.
“She’s has to go!” he shouted. “Now!”
But, again, there was nothing he could legally do.
Later that week, Cyndi’s clock-radio went off at six AM, and was still rockin’ ‘n’ buzzing at nine. I phoned. I heard neighbors whack at her door. When I finally knocked myself, I noticed a nasty letter from Isabelle – our Valkyrie nanny – taped to the screen. “If you don’t care about sleeping,” it threatened, “maybe you should move somewhere else! Some of us work for a living!”
Seeing me, Claire called helpfully from her window. “Did Cyndi overdose?”
I got the passkey and went in. No death, but no Cyndi, either. Just cats. Rampant.
“Guess she stayed at her folks,” I told Claire. “And forgot the alarm.”
And the lights. And the TV. I turned them all off, and – while I was at it – jiggled the handle to stop the running toilet that was threatening to drain the bay.
Two nights later, the TV was so loud, I finally – desperately – phoned Cyndi at four AM. Repeatedly. Without answer. Yet I knew she was there: I’d seen her come in, watched her shift moodily on her couch, and her car was parked outside her door. I was tempted to kill the power – I had that ability – but it was an unauthorized overstep. Besides, with no alarm, she’d probably oversleep and lose yet another job. Who wanted her here every day?
I finally stomped hard, once, on my bedroom floor, just above her TV. The good old New York solution drifting back from childhood days: grandmothers and great-aunts banging broomsticks on water pipes to silence upstairs and downstairs neighbors. My heavy footwork didn’t seem to wake Cyndi, but doing something – anything – relaxed me enough to sleep.
At seven AM, my phone rang. The landlord. “Cyndi just paged me,” he complained. “Hysterical. Said she woke up this morning surrounded by glass. Claims it’s your fault.”
“It probably is,” I said, groggily knowing instantly what had happened. The old light fixture I put back after removing Cyndi’s ceiling fan had a slightly cracked shade. After forty years, my heavy tango was all it took to shatter.
That afternoon, Cyndi’s expensively-dressed, far-slicker-than-God, father knocked on my door. We’d never met. He was clearly my age and worth more than Ted Turner.
“She’s doing so well,” went his plea. “She’s out of our house and has deep-sixed the midget junkie. Couldn’t you just take care of her? Treat her like a younger sister?”
I tried being tactful – an admittedly alien approach. “My kid sister never brought cops to our home. Or – even accidentally – tried to burn the place down. And if you think ‘the junkie’s’ gone, try looking in your daughter’s bedroom. Along the wide headboard, there’s a double row of his framed pictures.”
“He’s never coming back! Cyndi promised!”
Tim was “home” for dinner, grinning triumphantly like Richard Nixon. He’d been holed up in a cheap Hollywood motel, after thumbing in from near Vegas. Waiting.
“I feel so much safer with him around,” Cyndi told Annie. “When Tim’s here, no one’s mean to me.” But even Annie wasn’t buying that.
“He’s not staying!” the landlord swore.
“He’s not staying!” Cyndi’s father howled.
“He’s not staying!” shouted every other tenant – who may’ve missed Tim’s movies but hardly his state of siege.
Franck just sat on his step, smoking.
Can’t live with ‘em. Can’t evict ‘em. It was winter, even in California. We all kind of shut ourselves in.
But somehow this ends happily: Mid-March, Tim and Cyndi suddenly moved out – claiming they “needed more space.” All those Snoopies. All them tapes.
And I suppose the Voodoo figures we’d each been shoving fifty-penny nails into had no effect.