THE LOCAL LENS
THOM NICKELS
Let’s consider the empty house on the street where I live.
The house is empty
because the owner, Sammy, a guy about 30, suddenly moved out after living in
the place for 3 years. I remember the day he moved in. He came with his cars
and bikes after his suburban parents bought the house for him. During his first
weeks here some of the neighbors went out of their way to say hello but Sammy
was aloof. He obviously didn’t want to be bothered to get to know the people on
the block.
What Sammy did for
a living was a mystery, but his pattern was to leave the house everyday around noon and return in the early evening.
Sammy could have
been living on a mountain top because he never made eye contact with neighbors.
You could pass Sammy in the street and he’d have one of those Village of the Damned ‘straight on’
stares like he was sleepwalking.
Sammy’s house was a large space with
interesting room patterns. I know because I used to be friends with the couple,
Walter and Betty, who lived there before their move to Washington
State
I wasn’t happy when Walter and Betty announced
that they were moving west. I was getting used to going over there for dinner
and swimming in their pool, and then inviting them over to my place for patio
parties. Friendships like this don’t come easily. You can say hello to
neighbors, even chat with them on the street for years and still never be
invited over to their place.
When Walter and
Betty moved out the house wasn’t empty for long. One day I spotted a suburban
looking couple talking with the realtor. The couple had driven up in a Lexis,
which spelled m-o-n-e-y. A week or two after that a big moving truck appeared,
and Sammy appeared with his bushy black hair and an army of friends. The
friends, all men, were scruffy in a hip way although they all had the same type
of manufactured beard.
They moved in quickly and within days held a
massive outdoor party around Walter’s old pool. Sammy’s friends built a large
bonfire and started a barbecue. The party lasted until the wee hours. Then at 4
or 5 am I was awakened by a suburban
girl, one of Sammy’s party guests, crying under my bedroom window. She was so drunk she found it hard to put together
sentences however I tried to make out what she was saying. In the end, I
couldn’t decipher her drunken valley girl ‘up talk’ although it seemed that
some boy had dumped her.
I was curious
about Sammy for a short time but after a while I stopped caring. There was no
reason to say hello, especially if his response was going to be something like
a smug nod.
Sammy’s outdoor parties were becoming more and
more frequent. Party guests, driving in from the western Main Line ,
were double parking on our tiny street. Sammy acquired strings of Japanese
party lights and strung them along the tree branches so that from my house his
yard looked like a massive house boat in New Orleans .
The parties got progressively louder and wilder yet it was fascinating to see
how every party began as low key events but as the night wore on, and as more
alcohol was consumed, the voices got louder and louder. Eventually the voices became
so pitched it sounded like twenty men screaming at one another.
If the screaming prevented me from falling
asleep, I assumed that many of my neighbors were experiencing the same thing. I’d
turn on the AC or put fans in my bedroom window to muffle the noise but like
the racket from a plague of locusts, the voices would always resurface.
And among these voices there would always be
the sound of a woman crying. .
“That makes 4
crying women in 30 days,” I’d tell friends. ‘What do they do to women over
there?”
Sammy acquired a
succession of roommates to help pay the mortgage. Generally the roommates were
in their twenties and never stayed long. At first the roommates were part of
Sammy’s social circuit but then I noticed a change. They seemed to be living
independently, especially the lost looking Irish guy who seemed to be terrified
of strangers and whose large dog seemed to be his only friend. He would sit
glum faced on Sammy’s stoop staring into space. For a time I thought he was hearing
impaired.
Some of Sammy’s roommates
moved out in the middle of the night although they were very quickly replaced
with new roommates. At one of the parties, the invited guests double and triple
parked on the sidewalk up and down the street, upsetting the neighbors. Somebody called the police, and ten of
Sammy’s party guests got parking tickets.
“These people have
no idea how the city works,” I told a friend.
Sammy acquired so many roommates I lost count
of them. Prohibitive housing and rental costs were really impacting people in
their twenties, and Sammy’s house was proof of this. Nobody could afford to
live on their own. I called Walter and Betty and told them that their former
home had become a gigantic hipster commune complete with dogs, motorcycles,
bonfires, and beautiful white women in long dreadlocks. “It’s a sight to behold
although nobody on the street has made friends with them because they don’t seem to want to get to know anybody.”
I told Walter and
Betty that Sammy had decided to get rid of the pool and chop down the oldest
and grandest tree on the property. Walter and Betty were meticulous home
owners, but very soon Sammy began to let things slip. After all, it really
wasn’t his house. His parents found the house for him. They were the ones who
appreciated the house but they probably had high hopes that Sammy would come to
appreciate it someday.
It wasn’t long
before the house began to look shabby, although all the women who visited or
lived there seemed to be the same type: they were tall and elegant looking with
long beautiful hair. They also dressed like fashion models, mostly in long
flowing dresses. Even if beautiful women are not your thing, no one could deny the
astounding beauty of these creatures. They seemed to go in and out of Sammy’s
house at all hours.
The men, by contrast, were doughy looking with
thick Clark Kent
glasses and hairy necks. “This is proof,” a comedian friend of mine commented,
“that pretty women like money and power.”
For a period of a year, especially in winter
when there were no leaves on the trees, anyone walking on the sidewalk could look
right into Sammy’s front window and see somebody watching Homer Simpson.
The parties
continued, the beer kept flowing, and the male chorus of voices kept getting
louder and louder. Sometimes I could make out what was being said. There were
stories about work but more often than not there was no smooth narrative at
all, just discombobulated half sentences with long pauses as well as the
overuse of the word ‘like’ (let’s not forget beer burps), and finally unexplained
yells as if someone had inadvertently sat on a possum.
“Like…I mean, but like….Yeah, you know. What
the fuck!”
(Repeat 50 times
and you have the party conservation).
A few neighbors,
eager to build bridges, continued to attempt to make contact with Sammy, but to
no avail.
Two weeks ago in a
bizarre replay of 3 years ago, the suburban parents returned in the same Lexis.
Standing in front of the house they whispered to one another before knocking on
Sammy’s door. The parents had to knock a long time before one of the roommates answered
although he didn’t open the door but talked to them through an open slat.
. Some sort of negotiation
seemed to be in progress, but what?
The very next day
at least two of the roommates moved out and the day after that it was Sammy’s
turn. Sammy left on his bike, never to be seen again.
