Moorpark Palms - 13. Chapter 13

Our first newest neighbors took Apartment 5 – the two-bedroom. Apparently, the building owners – quickly learning from their bout with Younger Brother and the band – felt it again wise to offer half the higher rent to get “experienced managers.” That was the phrase used in their latest letter.
“I hate seeing these letters on our doors,” Sally told us. “I’m always sure the next one will evict us.”
“We’re under lease,” Vic reminded her. “Though not if they pay us off.” That rainbow promise still seemed to please him.
“You earnestly wait for that to happen,” I tried to joke, hoping to distract Sally.
“It’s gonna,” he predicted.
“That’s what I mean,” Sally went on. “And I don’t want to move.”
“It won’t be that bad,” Vic assured her. But he hadn’t lived in the same place for thirty years.
“I wonder who puts up these letters?” I asked. “They’re always so early.”
“Better to seem omnipotent,” counseled Vic.
In any case, we tore them up and moved on.
The new managers – Joni and Mack – along with their “experience,” brought two kids. “Am I gonna wish the band was back?” Claire wondered, maybe the first time she heard the shrill four- and seven-year-olds. It was a Saturday morning, and we were both headed out.
“How do you feel about dogs?” Vic asked, hauling his bike down the steps behind us.
“Shep’s bad enough,” Claire said.
“Who’s Shep?” I asked.
“Her latest boyfriend,” Vic cracked.
Claire ignored him. “He’s the four-legged pest who lives next door.” Claire shared a landing with the Hungarian women.
“I never knew his name,” I admitted.
“That’s dumb,” Vic pointed out. “He’s not even a Shepherd.”
“They’re not German,” I volleyed, and Sally – who’d come to her screen door – at least laughed.
“Shep’s not his real name,” Claire allowed. “After three years, I don’t even know their first names. Just what’s on their mailbox.”
“Kasner/Szabo,” read Vic.
“Which one’s which?”
No one knew.
“They’re hard to talk with,” Sally acknowledged.
I’d failed, too.
And Vic.
“I just call the dog ‘Shep,’” Claire finished up.
“Why?”
Vic had to push. Claire resisted, but Sally and I were also curious.
“After The Three Stooges,” Claire said, laughing. “He stinks up the stairway, and I want to poke out his eyes.”
We all laughed. Then Claire went toward the parking lot, and Sally went back inside.
“Actually, it’s a cat,” Vic told me, as the two of us headed towards the street. “It pees on her doormat.”
I considered. “Doesn’t ‘cat’ smell stronger than ‘dog’?”
He stared at me like I was the pervert.
“A cat,” he said, flatly.
“Which one?”
“Who cares? I’d like to murder them all.”
Our new managers and their dervish spawn took some getting used to. The seven-year-old was a shag-haired, sit-com-cute boy named Kyle. The screeching four-year-old was Gini.
“Her full name’s ‘Virginia,’” her mother, Joni, volunteered. “That’s where she was conceived.”
Their dog, an albino coyote, was called Bordeaux. Conception unknown.
The husband, Mack, looked like Old Elvis, though hairy and tattooed. He must have worn a shirt for their job interview, but we haven’t seen much of it since. His official profession’s “Window Cleaner.” On their mailbox – and on magnetic signs sometimes attached to the doors of their aged Caddy – it read: “Anderson’s Awning and Window Cleaning.” We had no idea who “Anderson” was. Their last name was “Turner.”
As they moved in, they asked Vic – whose last name coincidently 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 soon hit everyone else.
Two weeks after they arrived, Joni’s sister – “Aunt Donna” – took Apartment 10. “I’m not her sister,” Donna immediately corrected. “We met twenty-years ago when I was guarding Elvis. She was a groupie.”
“Elvis?” I asked quietly, not meaning to upset someone’s fantasy.
“Yeah.” Donna grinned. “Don’t you see something familiar about Tommy?”
“Who’s Tommy?”
“Sorry. Mack.”
Was she telling me my new apartment manager was the former King? This was more fun than a “Barry” sighting.
“I see some kind of resemblance.”
“There was more before he got fat.” (Elvis or Mack?) “That’s why Jean married him.”
“Jean?”
“Joni.”
So we weren’t dealing with the actual King. Just his body-guard, a former groupie, and a stocky look-alike.
“Peek inside the Caddy someday,” Donna went on. “On the dashboard, there’s a brass plaque – pretty scratched up by now. It starts: ‘Made expressly for...’”
“You’re kidding!”
“His car.”
Its plates were personalized “Elvis.”
“Wanna go look?”
She was ready to lead. I stalled. The car was so bedraggled, who knew what I’d catch? Besides, Mack was the kind who made pigs squeal.
“He was great, you know,” Donna told me, and it took a moment to realize she was praising Elvis not Mack. “Nothing like what you hear. He’d be in his suite with us, playing Yatzee – it was his favorite game – and throwing water balloons off the balcony. Then he’d go on stage and was like this different person. Someone we didn’t know.”
For six years, Donna was one of His Vegas security people.
“I was at his last birthday,”she said. “It’s all so sad now.”
Donna was once, “Sixty-five pounds lighter – hard to believe the damage I’ve done to myself ” Jean was now Joni and Tommy Mack because – in addition to gaining half-rent as managers – while simultaneously juggling Kyle’s sporadic acting income (that was the ninja-child’s profession) – they were also collecting welfare.
“Kyle’s an actor?” I asked Donna.
“He started doing commercials in diapers.”
I wondered if a kid that cute would turn into his father.
Sally immediately mistrusted Mack, though she felt less anxious about Joni. “After all, she is a mother.”
So was Madame Defarge, I thought.
“Mack frightens me,” Luba – the Russian seamstress – seconded. “More than anyone in Kiev.”
“He’s glares at me,” Vic complained. “Whenever I look out my window.”
“And the way he ‘undresses’ the girls!” said Claire. “He’s not even sly about it.” She smiled awkwardly at Vic.
“Maybe they won’t last,” Sally sighed.
“Maybe their dog will eat them,” echoed Vic.
As if the Turner tykes weren’t bad enough, they were quickly joined by a pair of Village Of The Damned towheads when their parents rented Apartment 7. Lonnie couldn’t find a roommate.
“It’s never been like this,” he explained. “I’ve got lots of friends.”
“Members of The Reptile League?” I joked.
“Nah. Yuck doesn’t bother them. One of my buddies keeps toads.”
I flinched.
“But all the guys now look at my place and go, ‘Don’t you have more furniture?’” he went on. “Like that’s important!”
With Dale gone, Lonnie mainly owned a bed, a couch, a TV, and some milk crates.
“Have you advertised?” I asked.
“I thought about it. But part of me feels I’m past roommates – except those you can sleep with.” He grinned then adjusted himself, in case I missed his point.
Lonnie’s “roommate solution” finally involved his moving – alone – into the one-bedroom Apartment 14 after Eric and Sue finished their house.
“Should we give them a party?” Sally wondered. “They’ve been here for years.”
“And they have always been quiet,” seconded Claire. That was her highest praise.
“How much would it cost?” asked Vic.
That killed that plan as fast as it scotched sending Lisa and Dale a group wedding present. “It’s not like we were invited to the party,” Claire pointed out.
“They eloped,” I said. “Couldn’t afford more.”
“To Death Valley?”
“They thought it would be a hoot.”
“At least, they didn’t take the baby.”
Apartment 7's new tenants – the blond twins’ parents – were also friends of Joni and Mack. “That’s how we saw the place,” they said.
“Mack’s getting a voting block,” Vic groused, as though he were planning a rent strike.
Harv and Lorelle drove matching jeeps, painted flat-grey. “Got ‘em at the Postal auction,” Harv boasted. Lorelle was a Police Academy cadet. Harv laid carpet for her dad.
“We shouldn’t really be living here,” he told me. “I make fifty thou per – off the books, natch. But the twins really like Gini. They have the same... what do you call ‘em?... kid doctor.”
“Pediatrician.” I supplied.
“That’s it. I’m stupid with big words.”
But he was adept with small ones. He was always talkative, always friendly, and – once home from work – rarely wore a shirt. He looked like Mack’s genial brother, with more symmetrical tattoos.
“Know what I did today?” he soon asked – we were throwing out garbage. “Applied as a school bus driver! They make sixty-thou per – can you believe that! And only work forty-hour weeks!”
“Good benefits, too,” I said.
He nodded. “But we don’t need them. That’s why Lorelle’s becoming a pig.” Almost reflexively, he glanced around – a tic I hadn’t seen since Gabe and Dorothy left. “Don’t let her hear that!”
A week later, Harv glumly admitted he hadn’t gotten the job. “There were 12,000 applicants! And some had experience!”
“Can you try again?”
“What’s the point?”
A big problem with our courtyard, especially since the “replanting,” was sound – there was nothing to break it up. The building was mainly stucco, with wide, picture windows. When you cranked out their flanking casements, the glass quickly channeled noise inside. Shortly after he and Lorelle moved in, I had to drag Harv up to my apartment, to prove his TV was louder in my living room than in his.
“It’s not your fault,” I explained. “The courtyard has strange acoustics.”
“They suck,” he evaluated professionally. But he did promise to be careful. “Still... you know kids.”
We had little choice but to learn. Mack had partly lured his friends to our building by hawking the dead-end street as “the perfect place to play!” Even safer, he claimed, was the largely enclosed courtyard.
“My daughters played there, too,” Sally admitted.
“They didn’t have Click Trikes then,” Helen – the nurse – replied. “My sons threatened to kill me if I bought them for my grandkids.”
Kyle and Gini and Trina and Tara – Harv and Lorelle’s blonde twins – spent almost all day circling their clattering bikes. Going ‘round and ‘round and ‘round and ‘round. Making their own quadrasound dub of The Shining.
“I hate this!” Claire stormed. “They’re ruining my life!”
“Some stretch,” Vic muttered.
“We gotta do something! Complain!” she insisted.
“What else do you do?” Vic snapped
He possibly refused just not to agree with Claire. They’d been sniping again. And lately, I’d noticed, he was bumping his bike down our steps even earlier than usual.
“Does he have a job?” Sheila – the saleswoman who lived just below him – asked. “I hear him pacing all the time.”
“He’s retired,” was the nicest thing I could say.
“Where does he go every day?” I questioned Sally, not really expecting she’d know. She was almost always home, and her sun-bleached Fiat sat out front on nearly-flat tires.
“I saw him in the mall once,” she told me. “Eating popcorn and watching girls.”
“Big surprise.” The two of us laughed. “But can he do that all day?”
“It’s harmless,” she pointed out. “At least they can see his hands.”
“Sally!”
We laughed again.
“What did the owners say about the noise?” I later asked Claire.
She made a gargoyle face. “I never get past their machine. Though I’ve left polite messages every day. They must think I’m the nut.”
Fortunately, by the time I got home, the kids were usually asleep. Even weekends, when I had a rare hour free, there was no reason to stay in my apartment. And if the kids didn’t wake me, our resident crows might. A huge family of them had made the ivy-covered, chain link fence near our pool into a motel.
Sally and Vic left messages for the owners, too. “But we’re probably dismissed as ‘the old lady and the bum,’” Vic said. Luba, trying to sew quietly in her spare bedroom, also got no response.
“How often have you’ve tried?” I asked.
“Several times. I don’t count. Nothing changes.”
“We were all kids once,” Helen gently reminded us.
Perspective helps, though not when you’re trying to relax, and space aliens are sacking your courtyard. Going ‘round and ‘round and ‘round and ‘round. The longer people protested, the longer nothing happened. So things only got worse.