The Lesson

I’m a terrible person. No, really.

I know, you beg to differ. To you, I’m just the handsomest best friend you could have, wildly funny, an unfairly talented writer, a great listener, a shoulder to cry on, generous to a fault, someone whose name appears in the Thank You/Acknowledgement sections of almost all the books my friends have written, a dependable source of Breaking Bad trivia and a dispenser of sage advice.

The only things I’m not are a ride to the airport, someone who’ll help you move or a guard dog for your laptop at Starbucks.

But despite all my many good qualities, I’ll say it again. I’m a terrible person.

Here’s why, and please pardon the abrupt shift in tone but the situation calls for it.

This past Saturday morning, the wife and I woke up to a fire truck and an ambulance at our neighbor Suzie’s house directly across the street from us. Naturally we were hoping everything was alright, but were curious what was happening.

We didn’t have the kind of relationship with Suzie where we’d be comfortable going over to ask what was going on. She’d moved in about eighteen months ago, and had been redoing her house for that entire time. Contractors coming and going from the house were just something we got used to, as was the shortage of street parking.

We’d met Suzie when she initially moved in, but hadn’t spoken to her hardly at all since. She was noticeably standoffish, not just with us but with other neighbors as well.

The prior owner of the house, Bob, had been a magnificent gardener. The front lawn was always impeccably kept, and beautiful rose buses adorned the yard. Since we looked directly at the house, we appreciated waking up to that view for years.

But since Suzie had bought the place, the front yard had gone to hell. The lawn was overgrown and underwatered, and the rose bushes were being given last rites.

And of course me, who can kill a plant just by being in the same room with it, never missed a chance to comment on her lack of gardening skills or her less than sparkling personality.

The ambulance was there for Suzie. I saw her wheeled out on the gurney, intubated and unconscious. She died a day later.

Yesterday I saw a truck in the driveway, and a woman going in and out of the house. I went across the street, introduced myself and asked what had happened. She told me Suzie had passed. She’d fought cancer for the past twenty-one years, and had been diagnosed with leukemia not that long ago, and was on some industrial strength chemo that apparently was too much for her body to take.

Her friend, who had known her for sixty years, went on to tell me what a welcoming person Suzie was, and how she worried about seeming so standoffish. She didn’t want people too close to her because of the chemo and her weakened immune system.

She also let me know how awful Suzie felt about the appearance of the front yard—how’d she’d wanted it to be beautiful not just for her, but also for the neighbors. She was just too weak to give it the attention it needed.

After a bit more conversation, she told me the house will be sold. In the meantime, the wife and I are going to have our gardner go over there and restore the front yard so it looks presentable and like someone still lives there.

I know it’s a new-agey kind of sentiment usually found on inspirational posters and those square day-at-a-time calendars Barnes & Noble sells at Christmas. And in a world seemingly fueled by judgement and hatred, it seems an impossibly quaint notion.

But none of that makes it any less true. It’s the lesson I have to keep learning. A little more kindness and a lot less judgement would make this world a far better place.

Not to mention me a better person.

Rest in peace Suzie.

Candid camera

A lost episode of COPS? An avant-garde student film? Nope. What your looking at is my driveway, as seen from one of our closed circuit security cameras.

You might be wondering why we've taken the extreme step of installing a security system at our house, especially since the TP'ing ended years ago.

Here's the story.

A few years ago, we started noticing some strange characters coming and going from a house across the street and four down from us. Which was strange because, as far as we could tell, the people who lived there looked like fine, upstanding citizens, perhaps public servants or business professionals.

I'm just funnin' ya. They were strung out meth tweakers. People who visited the house looked like the cast of Oz, without the warmth.

One day, my wife and daughter were driving home and saw one of the tweakers walking down our driveway. They drove slowly and watched him walk back to his house, then they called the police.

Initially the police didn't want to come out to warn the guy about trespassing, but once they did they realized they were dealing with some very bad people. They came back to our house, and let my wife know they had a very long rap sheet that included drug dealing and firearms charges. They also told us to call them anytime if we noticed anything odd going on over there.

The thing is, there was always something odd going on. And as a result, the cops were at the house about twice a week, at all times of the day and night, for over a year. Sometimes it was one police car, and other times it was four or five screaming up to the house, guns drawn. It was very entertaining, and we could almost set our clocks by it.

The house was owned by a sleazy lawyer. We figured out the deal was he got them out of jail when they got busted, and he got a cut of their drug money.

By the way, I forgot to mention that neither our house or our neighbor's house (our former great neighbor and friend Sebastian - come back Sebastian!) was broken into when he was coming out our driveway. We figured the tweaker was probably window shopping both houses, but then heard Max - the world's greatest German Shepherd - start barking up a storm and high-tailed it out of there.

Right after the driveway incident, we got the closed circuit camera system for the house. We have several cameras covering the whole property, and can tune in and watch the show no matter where we are. We have a lot of footage of the FedEx guy delivering packages from Amazon, but so far no more meth heads.

Eventually, the police department called to tell us the sleazy lawyer couldn't afford the house anymore and had decided to sell it. Which, thankfully, turned out to be true.

Now, a nice family with two young kids live there. They've been renovating the house since they moved in over a year ago, and it's looking good. I'm not sure if the renovations included an exorcism, but I think it's worth considering.

As for the closed circuit camera system, together with Max and our alarm system it brings us a great deal of peace of mind.

I just have to remember not to take out the trash in my underwear.

Compound interest

For reasons unknown, I seem to be a magnet for neighbors that are, shall we say, less than ideal. It wasn't always that way. When we first moved into our house, we had great neighbors - and great relationships with them - on both sides of us.

But time and circumstances change. Over the last sixteen years, the house to our left has sold twice, the house to our right five times.

I know what you're thinking - maybe it's us. Trust me, it's not.

I won't go into the all the gory details, but I'll go into a few of them. The neighbors to the left started their relationship by calling the police on us (when I politely asked one of their workers to take his equipment off my property), had their lawyer send us a letter telling us to stop harassing said workers, then served me to appear in small claims court because they didn't believe the property line was where I said it was, so they paid for a survey to find out.

SPOILER ALERT: It was exactly where I said it was. And they dropped the suit, which they were guaranteed to lose for any number of reasons.

Fast forward. The fence they built on their side of the line is great, and while no one's coming to either house for coffee, we now have a cordial smile-and-wave relationship with them.

The neighbors to the right bought the house, spent a year gutting it and redoing the yard and swimming pool. In the process, they cleared all the growth that had blocked our garage on that side, and built a cement deck and attached it to our garage wall. Which they also painted to match their house.

Needless to say, this didn't go over to well with us. We have since come to an agreement, which they've broken twice at last count. Let's just say nothing good comes of building on and painting someone else's property.

However everyone now agrees on the property line, and, with our tenuous agreement in place, we'll use the strategy of waiting them out.

All of this is to explain why I've become a huge fan of the compound way of living. You know, the Kennedy compound? The Bush compound? I'm all for it.

Sure, to some owning your own six-acre piece of oceanfront property with homes that house only friends and family may seem like a rich indulgence. But if you've lived with the neighbors we have, surrounding yourself with people you know and trust seems like, oh, what's the word, oh yes - heaven.

So I'll continue to invest heavily in stocks, bonds and lotto - mostly lotto - and hope that I hit it big one day. Big enough to either buy and build my own compound, or start snapping up the homes on my block as they go up for sale.

Like I pray every day the one on my right will soon.

Pretty woman. OK handwriting.

Here's how it happened.

There was a point in time, when I was younger and she was younger, that I had a little crush on Julia Roberts. This of course was during the Mystic Pizza, Pretty Woman, Steel Magnolias and Sleeping With The Enemy era. It was kind of rekindled during the Notting Hill days, but one too many close-ups and articles about her bitching out her Malibu neighbors and I was done.

Anyway, during the early days, my friend, best man and a fine actor in his own right Scott Thomson was working on The Player with her. He found himself at the craft services table, and, knowing how much I liked her at the time, said "I know this is very uncool. But a friend of mine's a big fan of yours and he's home with the flu. I was wondering if there's any way you could give him an autograph?"

I felt fine.

To almost everyone's surprise, she did - the one you see here. The Player was twenty-one years ago, and I didn't even know I still had this. I just found it cleaning out a drawer.

But it does make me smile, and reminds me of a time when a movie star caught my attention and kept it onscreen and off. Color me old-fashioned, but I'm just a little starstruck and romantic that way.

I wonder what I can get for it on eBay.

Goodbye Epstein

Robert Hegyes died today. He was 60 years old.

Those old enough to remember know him best from the '70's show Welcome Back Kotter, where he played Jewish-Puerto Rican student Juan Epstein.

But that's not where I know him best from.

Robert Hegyes was my neighbor when I lived in Santa Monica. I lived on the 17th floor of twin high-rise towers right at the beach (don't get me started), and Hegyes lived downstairs from me on the 16th floor. I saw him almost daily in the hallways, elevators, laundry room and by the mailboxes.

We spoke often, and he was just a great guy. High energy, always had something going - a pilot, a screenplay, a meeting.

A couple of times I saw him in the elevator with his pal John Travolta (remind me to tell you about the time my roommate brought Travolta to our apartment in Brentwood while I was sleeping and didn't wake me up - it's okay, I'm over it). Anyway it was funny because on those occasions Travolta would just look down at the floor and not say a word, and Hegyes would be just as chatty and personable with me as ever.

He always insisted on being called Bobby, and, despite the fact we weren't really close friends, was always interested in what was going on with me and what I was up to.

I always wanted Bobby to find the kind of success he'd had with Kotter. It seemed to me with all the positive energy he projected out into the world, and the happiness he'd brought so many people in the past, that he deserved it.

Over the fourteen years since we moved from Santa Monica, my wife and I have thought of and talked about him, his wife and his kids many times.

He has always been in our very best thoughts.

Which is exactly where he is tonight.

Stumped again

To paraphrase Joyce Kilmer:

I think that I shall never see

A poem as lovely as my neighbors trash cans

In front of my tree.

Yes, (sigh), those neighbors. There's no reason they can't put their trash cans in front of their house, or for that matter any other house but mine. But then they wouldn't get to annoy the living piss out of me once a week. And what fun would that be.

However as of today, they'll have to find another landmark to situate their cans by.

That beautiful tree in front of my house - the picture doesn't do it justice - has been dying for a long, long time. You can't see the top of it here, but half of it had no leaves, and there was this very unpleasant fungus growing around the bottom.

And I think we all know how painful that can be.

Since it's on our parkway, we called the city to come out and have a look at it. Before the city arborist even closed the door getting out of his car, he said, "Oh yeah, that one's dead. It's gotta come out."

So as of a couple days ago, the tree leaves at the top that we've peered out at for over 13 years through the transom windows in our bedroom are gone.

All that's left is the stump, which the city will come back and grind down in a couple weeks.

Our homeowner's association, which I've dealt with several times (don't get me started), has a rule: if a tree comes out, the homeowner replaces it.

So that's what we'll do. In fact, we've already chosen the variety of tree we want.

It's called a ginkgo. Our neighbor across the street has one in front of his house. Every fall when the kids were younger, we'd take our Christmas card picture with them playing in the yellow leaves that dropped from it around November.

It's a gorgeous tree.

Of course, it'll be a few years before it's filled in and mature enough to start dropping leaves. But once it is, it'll be magnificent.

With or without trash cans in front of it.

What a putts

I don't play golf. I've tried, but I can't. It seems like a monumental waste of time. And land. And money.

Besides, if I want to wear plaid shorts with striped shirts there are plenty of other places I can do it.

The picture to the left is part of the route I take when I'm out walking with my German Sheperd. Have a closer look at it. I'm fortunate to live in a neighborhood with some pretty nice manicured lawns, but even this struck me as a little much. See the cups?

Apparently what my idiot neighbor (and if you've been following this blog you know the place is lousy with them) did was go out and spend money to have a miniature golf course/putting green put on his front lawn.

I know what you're thinking: at least he didn't put flags out. You know what I'm thinking?

Let me direct your attention to exhibit B.

On the lawn immediately in front of his house, he has two holes with flags. I don't know what to make of any of it.

My first thought is I wonder if he followed the same procedure every other resident has to follow and cleared it with the homeowner's association. Come to find out he didn't (which would also explain the dolphin sculpture and the flagpole that aren't pictured here).

On the heels of that I think, well, it's his house and if he wants to he can. Which of course he can't. That's why there's a homeowner's association.

Then I think, wow, at least this guy didn't do something so stupid and boneheaded like putting in a sand trap.

Oh, wait a minute.

Let me direct your attention to exhibit C.

If the guy wanted to put a miniature course on his property, he should have put it on his property. Technically the street-side parkway belongs to the city, and they get really pissy when they don't have a say in what you do to their property. Or when they don't get paid a waiver fee so you can do it.

They're just funny that way.

I have a lot of friends, good friends, intelligent people that I respect that play golf often and enjoy it. But they have the good taste to do it on a course at a club, not on their front lawn.

I think I have to agree with Robin Williams: golf is a giant joke being played on everyone who plays it.

So I'll keep walking my dog past this house, smiling to myself at the idiocy of it all.

And taking a small bit of satisfaction in the fact that even if my dog can't play golf, there are other things he can do on this guy's course.

This clip has language that may not be suitable for the youngsters.