Noise isn't something to which I'm greatly accustomed these days. My adult life has been characterized by quiet reflection, sitting at a computer by myself and thinking thoughts that I try to put down on paper. It's not a very loud process, even though once in a while, I'll try out the lines I'm writing outloud, just to see if they work. Sometimes Russ is around and silently watches me doing this. He's reported that it's fascinating to observe. He says the voice he hears reading is not exactly my voice. It's quiet, but also, he says, commanding in a way that speaks of volume and projection and magnitude. I find this fascinating, too.
And yes, I live in an alley in L.A., which sometimes suffers from way-too-loud Norteño music on Saturday morning or annoying dogs (not mine, of course) that stand at their fences and bark continuously. But a funny thing has happened in the five years that I've lived in my house -- it's gotten oh so much quieter. When I first moved here, I was warned by neighbors that there was a coke-dealing 15-year old druggie that lived adjacent and played the drums at 10:00 at night. The old tenant of my house didn't improve alley relations by grabbing a portable boombox and a Micahel W. Smith CD, then proceeding to hold it over her head and blast it at him inside the garage. Because non-Christian rudeness is significantly different than Christian rudeness.
Oddly enough, though, Mr. Coke didn't play more than a few nights my whole time living here. He never bothered us, though we did see him face down on the alley with police kneeling on his back a few times. Then he and his family moved, as did the family of 15 - 12 of them being children under the age of nine - and just like that, the alley was quiet, serene, had all the makings of a secluded beach resort in Haiti, just with a few less armored cars zooming through.
When I first moved here, there was also a woman named Donnie whose garage faced out toward the alley. She and her husband Mick spent a lot of time in the garage, in what I can only imagine was a little daily weed habit combined with chain smoking, neither of which could be completed in the house with the two children. One day, when Russ and I were outside working in the front yard, we brought out our own boom box (ahh, the days before the Apple revolution) and were playing Ryan Adams' Gold. Donnie hopped over and said that she loved, loved, loved Ryan Adams and she was so excited that there were finally people in the neighborhood who liked him, too. We talked music for a while and then, she invited us to stop by their garage anytime.
But we didn't have to because Donnie was soon in our yard all the time, knocking on the door, asking us to come over and hang out. Giving us old cigar boxes full of CDs and junk from her garage. Talking so fast that you couldn't enter into the hurricane of her words and found yourself being pulled out your door and down the alley behind her. Then, we found out that she was manic-depressive. And that she was in a manic phase. As if we couldn't tell.
Even with the medical knowledge, I was seriously freaked out. I became a refugee in my own house, peeking through the blinds to see if she was outside before darting outside and slipping into my car. I declined to work in the front yard garden. I tucked Ryan Adams and Alison Krauss (her other favorite) away. Even with all my careful planning, she still found me a lot of times. I spent hours sitting in her garage, listening to her talk without taking a breath, jumping from one unrelated subject to the next, asking me questions but rarely requiring an answer. The longer I sat with her, the more I felt nauseated, and the more guilty I felt for being the kind of crook that was nauseated by people with bonafide mental disorders. All I wanted was a little quiet.
That Thanksgiving, Donnie came over and spent over an hour talking while our dinner coagulated on the counter. I thought I was going to cry out of pure rage. It's totally un-P.C. to be mad at someone who's dictated by her imbalances, not her logic, but I somehow managed to ignore correctness. When Mick finally came over, he looked drawn, world-weary, sagging. He pulled Russ and I aside and apologized profusely for not coming sooner, but Donnie had been at the local Vons and had unscrewed all the tops of the shampoo bottles in the beauty aisle. He had taken her home, instructing her to stay inside, and had gone back to help the store workers reattach the caps. But, she - imbalances, not logic - had wandered over to our house.
Then, as quickly as she walked into our yard, she was gone. She no longer came over to chat. She didn't sit in the garage and smoke. Mick explained that she was in a depressive phase and that he had no idea how long it was going to last. She wasn't eating, wasn't smoking, wasn't dressing. Just sitting in her bedroom. A few months later, after some hard January rain and a bad case of mold growing up the walls of their apartment, Donnie and Mick moved a few blocks away.
I would like to have a neat, tidy conclusion to this story, something along the lines of, "Some people might say I taught Donnie--but really, Donnie taught me." But I'm afraid it's just not so. I could probably somehow wrestle a connection between my own troubled relationship with my dad at the time, who was also all imbalances, and say that my response to her was really the transference of feelings I had about him. Which could be true. But it's also not that simple. A few weeks ago, I was walking Tanya and saw Donnie in her driveway. Immediately, all those feelings came back, my tight chest, my heart pounding, my need to find several convenient escape routes. I still worry that I'll see her somewhere in the neighborhood and not be able to run, hide, get away from the noise that she carries with her.
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