On My Street
Living inside the random alarm clock
(cover line: Gimme Noise: The life and times of a Hollywood block)
By Greg Burk
L.A. Weekly cover story, February 1, 1991
"Where's the gun? We know you got a gun," one of them said as he wrapped up my hands and feet behind my back real untidy with an extension cord. Least he could do was let me answer him. When I turned my head to tell him no gun, though, he slugged me in the eye and stuck his gun in my ear. "Don't look at me," was his advice. Okay. The other two were hauling whatever out the door. "No gun," I said. "All I have is beer."
He kept asking about the gun, didn't want a beer, changed the subject. "Why you listen to that loud shit?" he wanted to know.
That seemed like a good question. Rhetorical. I was kind of embarrassed about that loud shit. When the three bad dudes came to the door asking where Joe (you know, "Joe") lived, I opened right up like a Salvation Army mission so they could push on in and get friendly, my crappy stereo blaring. The sound was how they had decided to hit on my apartment out of the thousands of treasure troves they had to choose from ("Door number 206, Monty!") in this old-Hollywood neighborhood of people who wanted to move somewhere else. And it wasn't the loudness that embarrassed me, it was what was playing loud: the fucking Runaways. It was 1978, and I had their third album on. I borrowed it, honest. I was curious, so shoot me.
Anyway . . . Dusty, my ol' pard and music lender: you can have the record jacket back, but there goes my $59 turntable out the door with your stinko Runaways platter on it, followed by my tuner ($125), my cassette deck that plays too fast ($69), my speakers ($50 the pair and they suck), my reel-to-reel tape recorder ($350 used, but it never worked right, and you'll be lucky to get half a sawbuck for it, suckheads), my typewriter ($60 used) and my guitar (the neck's cracked, you'll soon discover, dipshits).
The phone rang. One of the hard guys answered! (Don't know which, 'cause by now I was cured of looking.) "Hello. No, Greg's not here. He went out for beer... Okay." Klunk.
Very good! Later, punks. Gotta get unbound and call the cops now. Got everything? Come by some other time for that beer, okay?
Sometime after this robbery-type action, on the occasion of my laundry being stolen out of the building's dryer, I wrote a song called "On My Street." It was all minor chords, I believe:
On my street the cars have all got flats on 'em On my street they try to steal your socks
The mailman's selling pills
And someone's always getting killed
Thank God I don't live in the real world.
I have lived on this street for 13 years now. In the '30s, it was a row of hotels-to-the-starlets, half a mile down from the Hollywood sign, within armpit-dampening walking distance of Paramount Studios. ("Well, it was a lovely morning, so I just thought I'd leave the Stutz with Hawkins and stroll over. Need any extras today?") Bertolt Brecht is said to have lived here at some point. There's a big apartment building with Cecil B. De Mille's name on it. Cecil hasn't been there in a while.
I like this street. Yes, it's true, things get stolen: instruments, radios, bicycles. And there's no lack of other crime in rich variety. And it's loud, and often weird. What has this place ever given me other than two months' worth of indelible eyeshadow? I don't know. But I'll think about it. By the way -- when someone knocks, ask who it is.
* * *
The thinking didn't take too long. I just remembered one thing this place has given me: a no-expenses-paid vacation from the blessings of white culture. As soon as I exhausted my opportunities (e.g., dishwashing, staring into the void) in the state of Washington (where everyone wants to move now, the stats say), I burned rubber south. I needed to get away from the rain. You become rain in Wonderful Western Washington. It drizzles behind your eyeballs, it dribbles from your nose, and the permanent clammy squeak in your joints makes you constantly think of meat lockers. And the whiteness. Believe it or not, there can come a time when you grow a touch weary of savoring whitepeople stuff: watching "Sea Hunt" after school, getting worked up over high-school basketball, checking out the workmen's progress on the latest mega-mall, sniffing the cold, fresh, piny air of nothingness. Just makes you want to fall asleep, with your Sunset magazine heaving peaceful on your gut, and dream of electric can openers, and die, and have a nice funeral with a lot of umbrellas (no Jews, please). On my Hollywood street, you have a riotous, fun-filled 24-hour multicultural selection: black (15 percent), Asian (5 per cent), Central and South American (55 percent) and white (25 percent). Carol Burnett cowers in the corner, and the white people who live here ain't modeling for no cereal boxes.
Like Baby, who inhabited the cubicle across the hall from me when I was robbed. She was 4 feet tall, and hooked a little. The slumette next door with the drugdozing eyes hooked a little, too. In fact, I think the apartment manager was disappointed that I rented the lace-curtained corner apartment - I later found out he was known to prefer professional female services in lieu of rent. Weekends at 3 a.m., if I happened to be awake and took the pillow off my head and the toilet paper out of my ears, I could just hear, no louder than a riveting gun, irate and passionate men in the hall, yelling in blown voices, kicking with big feet on 1928 doors, which broke. Picture this: someone comes to visit me, raps on my door. Baby, thinking it's her customer, flings her door open, modeling black lace briefs (that's it). No problem. She gives with the neighborly teeth, squeaks hello, maybe bums a cigarette. This is a running gag for my callers. She eventually moves. People move a lot on my street.
You might have caught the Costume Lady Show. The Costume Lady lives on my street, hasn't moved in a long time, but you've probably seen her on Hollywood Boulevard, which is her main stage. How old? Don't know. Her face glows like an Eskimo's, which isn't because she's cold. The face is all you can see -- no hair, no arms. The rest is covered with the Costume. There is probably a basic garment in tasteful organdy: you can't really tell, because it's overdraped: scarves, wraps, gloves, flowing accessories in bulk. There are 951 shiny things pinned on, and headgear out of Sir Walter Scott. The Costume Lady's got an image to worry about, like all Hollywood stars; still, she displays beaucoup of warmth, especially on those pleasant 90-degree afternoons when she strolls, slowly and with indifferent awareness of the impression created by her chartreuse-and-vermilion-gauzed presence, down to the Street of Dreams to be seen, each day in a different wrapping. She is pleased to accept compliments, but does not give interviews. You want to stare, but you don't want to stare. She is, after all, a neighbor.
The Cat Lady passed away a couple years back. Another woman feeds the stray cats now, but lacks the dedication and personality and all-around spite of the original. The Cat Lady was 80, as wide as the broomstick she rode in on, with orange-rouged pits where cheeks used to be, hair dyed the color of ripe persimmons, and glasses sporting corners sharp enough to scrape out your old bathtub grout. And she was stooped, shaped like a question mark. Maybe she wasn't stooped before she made it her life's work to feed the cats. You have to stoop to feed cats. Not just "cats," but all the cats, owned, unowned, pre-owned, hundreds daily. The cats knew her step, knew her voice, knew her routine, smelled her coming, trotted out from under the bushes and dumpsters and cars, from the garages and alleys, not begging with cat plaints, just expecting, because they knew they would be fed without having to beg. The Cat Lady had 20 stops in the neighborhood, and at each stop she deposited cat food, wet from cans and also the dry-pellet kind, on foil squares and little paper plates. It must have cost her 50 bucks a day. The cats would crowd around and eat it, half a dozen at a time. Old, broken-eared, one-eyed alley cats; multispotted year-old mother cats with their stumbling, big-headed, bony litters; nervous, round-eyed, wild cats darting in for a grab; fat cats with collars, getting fatter. The Cat Lady preferred cats to people. ("Cats are better," she said. "They don't do what people do.") She knew the cats were going to die young, through disease or auto-flattening, but she was going to feed them till they did.
She hated people, and showed it. She would lean out her apartment window, screaming "Shut up" at stereo-blaring idiots until she was voiceless. Kids howling and banging around her building would get her standard apoplectic oration: "What's the matter with you? I hate you! You're all going to hell!" The kids would stand in a circle under her window and yell "Fuck you!" in Latinate accents. The Cat Lady was not beloved of apartment managers, because they felt that she was helping detonate the cat explosion, symptoms of which are cat shit killing the plants, cats in loud cat-amour all night, and skunks easing down from the hills attracted by the cat-food foil and confronting other animals and stinking up everything. The Cat Lady did not care what humans objected to. She died angry.
The preceding three non-boring people are white. And crazy. White folks who are sane don't remain on my street long. The street mainly functions as a place for Latin American immigrants to stay for a couple months upon arriving from across the border. Most of these immigrants live in the four-story tenement next door to my (mostly white/crazy) apartment building. I call the tenement the Greater Latin America Dwelling (GLAD). It is a place of great joy and sorrow.
* * *
You can drive into some neighborhoods, even some not too far away from here, that are more on the flatlands of Hollywood (my street is on a 1-percent grade and so sometimes gets called "Hollywood Hills" in enthusiastic apartment-for-rent ads), and get hit, in less time than it takes to smell the roach spray, by the dead slap of despair. It feels like the blood was let out of your heart. It feels like a big warm kiss from Satan. Dirty kids, fear-eyed women, seething men. My street isn't like that. People enjoy the sunshine here. On De Spair Drive, though, they see sunshine as an unwanted spotlight. A spotlight on a boil. A lot of the people who live on the despair streets lived on my street a year ago. When they lived here, baby, they were ready to go. Just got outta El Salvador! The squads got my brother and my uncle, but they ain't gonna get me! Gonna get a job and a car and a lady and a place and do it! But just for now... Live with five other guys in a 10-by-12 room? No problema! Eat beans and tortillas, solamente, every day for months? Muy bueno! Didn't even have that back home. Here you can do anything! Soon, many will achieve all of the above, in considerably less measure than they thought, and find themselves with a wife and four kids on that other street, with Satan's lips on them. Meanwhile ... viva everything!
* * *
Life, some say, is change. Some say it's struggle. But what it really is, is noise.
Noise becomes a way of knowing you are alive. Maybe you have to look at L.A. from an airplane to get any real idea of how big it is; the lights at night are crushing, inconceivable. (Yes, twinkling things can crush.) But even if you've never even flown a paper Stealth, vou know that L.A. is big, and you are very, very small. And the Great Referee will diminish your size by half if you only speak Spanish, and half again if you have no education, and half again if you have no money or connections. On my street, there's a 90-percent chance you fall into at least one of these categories (likely all three). You find yourself wondering not just mundane things like "Does my vote mean anything?" or "How can I leave my mark?" The questions are more like "If I really concentrate, can I move my little finger?" and "Is it okay if I breathe?" And another question. The question that always creeps in on you first when it's quiet. Then when you turn on the lights and the roaches make patterns like a fireworks burst. Then, after a while, when the roaches no longer bother scattering at all. Then when the bus doesn't stop for you. Then when the dimbulb at the burger stand takes the order of the guy who's standing behind you. Pretty soon, the question is beating away inside your head every minute you're awake, and floating in the empty chasms of your dreams as you sleep. "You"? "I"? Who, who the hell is that? Who am I? Do I exist? DO I FUCKING EXIST? This is where you find solace in philosophy. Descartes said it, you thank him, and you agree: I MAKE A GUT-BLOWING, BRAIN-SHREDDING, APOCALYPTIC RACKET AT 4 A.M., THEREFORE I AM.
Those who have no philosophy, hearing this, do not understand. They lie in bed, amazed. They shriek curses out their windows. They call the police. (The police, who have much philosophy, do not come.) They take it personally.
They shouldn't. The din, my brothers, is the expression of souls who ache with doubt over their own existence, amen, and it would be a seven-league stride, a double-axel-and-a-half-gainer into a Mickey's Bigmouth, for them to acknowledge anyone else's. Go, therefore, to their doors; ask for noise abatement. Once, my brothers, twice, yea, three times. The souls, faces blank, may apologize, or they may say bad words. But they are only a few limping steps down the long path toward knowledge of self-being, and they will assume only that they have seen a phantasm. Phantasms have baggy eyes, and wear bathrobes. Noise is real.
There is a symphony of life and existence on my street, for those who have ears to hear it and who don't need much sleep. The literal "music" part is only 10 percent of the score, but it's the definitive part. There are many music lovers here. They love their music so much, and they love you, their neighbor, so much, that they want you to hear it too, because if you hear it, you will love it as much as they do. And they know that, sometimes, it takes just the right mixture of surprise and volume to make a new convert.
You say you never much cared for Queen? Yeah, "Bohemian Rhapsody," cool; "We Will Rock You," great for sporting events; but you don't think you'd want Freddie Mercury to be your main reason for getting up each day. Well, what about getting up each night? Suppose, at 2:31 every a.m., you were exposed, just for purposes of introduction, to three full hours of uninterrupted Greatest Hits, strained at max volume through a pair of secondhand K-Mart speakers? I guarantee, you would see the matter differently.
Or how about mariachi music? Can't beat it when we take Dad to El Cholo for his birthday, right? But you haven't experienced the full charm of those yearning south-of-the-border ballads till you've heard the freeform, fully lubricated versions the mariachis perform when they get home. In full Surroundsound, and lasting all night, they will treat you to an accordion and two guitars (in assorted avant-garde tunings), accompanying the lusty voices of the four mariachis and three busboys (all of whom live in a room just wide enough to open a copy of La Opinión), spiced up with the merry crash of bottles dropped from fourth-story windows, and the kind of yipping, howling and swearing you may have only heard previously in 1956 cartoons. And let's not leave out the recorded versions, which, whether emanating from a late-night party or a 6 a.m. family sing-along, are constant, loud and definitely proud. Carpers may cavil that it all sounds alike. So what? That's what they used to say about rock & roll. And, say what you will, it definitely takes your mind off your troubles.
If you have any doubt that hip-hop is the music of the street, hang on my street for 30 or 40 seconds, any time of the day or night, and bring a spare pair of eardrums. You know those pickup trucks, the beds of which are fully taken up with subwoofing 300-watt-driven speakers? Talk about low-end response - feel the beat, homey, it's herel And it's illegal! But so's crack, they tell me.
All the music lovers here aren't just listeners, either. Many are actual cogs in the wheel (not to say "grist for the mill" or "doormats for the feet") of the local music industry: rock musicians. I know - I too have been known to drag my guitar out to this city's various places of musical self-flagellation and install myself for my own examination. I look upon it as a kind of penance. Rock/pop/punk/etc. musicians are widely perceived as performers. This is sometimes true. But the real reasons God in his providence put them on Earth are two: 1) Loading equipment. 2) Unloading equipment. They spend much, much more time doing these two things than they will ever spend onstage. As the sun goes down, you'll see them on the street: young, pimply men with long, dyed-blue-black hair; older, destroyed-looking men with long, bleached-blond hair (dark roots showing); wasted, pasty-faced women with long, bleached-blond hair (missed blue spots showing); all wearing tight, faded black apparel. They are in transit from their jobs (as messengers) to rehearsal halls, the rent for which will cost them two to five times as much as they make performing. They are loading amps and axes into much-abused pickup trucks with Pure Rock KNAC bumper stickers and Ozzy window decals. Sometimes they will even get a gig. Then, if you happen to be coming home at 3 a.m., you will find them unloading, panting, struggling with huge cabinets, with faces that speak of nearness to death. Weekend afternoons, the desperate sounds of their unaccompanied guitar solos wail from windows. I love these people. God does not.
Neither do the older people who live on my street. The sounds of 100-watt-amplified Hendrixian self-expression do not blend well with the blather of a TV quiz show or the ra-ta-ta of a show tune on a 1961 console phonograph. Most of the older people here live in a six-story tower on the corner, the lobby of which is the block's polling place. Vera, an attractive, sparkling, well-dressed former actress and painter who used to be married to a top-name '40s bandleader, has a good attitude about the noise and the crime, but wonders why people keep leaping off the roof of her abode. Most of the tower's residents aren't as active as she is. (She drives her '66 Mustang somewhere every day.) You tend to encounter them mostly as traffic obstacles, shuffling verrry slowly across the street to the minimarket to get milk. They keep to themselves a lot. But guess what? So does most everyone else on my street, except for the occasions when they need to yell at each other. Interaction among these distinct groups is near nil. Not so much suspicion or hostility, just ... distance. That's the city for ya.
* * *
Leave us not give the impression that this ain't a family kind of neighborhood. Many have discovered, through careful consideration or lack of any practical alternative, that my street is A Nice Place To Raise Your Kids Up. The togetherness factor's certainly there, as evidenced by the situation in the GLAD, where several families of four, five and even six share domestic bliss in apartments of one bedroom and less. Needless to say, this adds to the tonal palette of the street symphony. Babies, ignored for hours, wail to each other (there are more in the spring) and to the world. The ambulatory offspring run like packs of dogs, with sticks and plastic tricycles, ravaging everything in their path, so that the GLAD halls, a week after being painted and carpeted, resemble 1945 Dresden. The landlords (who succeed each other in sync with the seasons) soon learn not to bother. The shouts and sobs of domestic violence, as in every place in the world where there's much general blame and not much room, rise up to heaven, mixing with the spiraling sirens of prowl cars, fire trucks and ambulances (all present daily) and the beating blades of police helicopters (nightly), whose spotlights sweep the alleys and courtyards for this hour's car thief and drug fugitive. The ice-cream truck blares a badly spliced loop of the "Theme From Love Story." The horn of the vegetable truck (essential to neighborhood culture and nutrition - please don't ban those trucks) plays "La Cucaracha." The apartment dwellers, driven from their lairs by the proximity of sweating bodies, pour out onto the streets, drinking beer, playing soccer, singing, talking, punching each other playfully, punching each other not-so-playfully. Is this loud, or what? Is this life, or what? Christ, there's nothing like poverty and misery and blind hope to make a street throb.
And the cars. The cars aren't too sure if they exist, either, and accordingly, for purposes of self-reassurance, produce a full range of bangs, clatters and wheezes for your delectation. Some cars know they exist, but, being immobile, are not sure what they exist as: automobile or metal sculpture. Sides bashed in, windows crashed in, bald-tired, smoking, backfiring, mufflerless and unregistered. Any time the city needs a few bucks, it just sends someone up my street at night to check the license numbers, and the next morning's sun will shine down upon a dozen Denver Boots, in a festive shade of orange, affixed to the wheels of cars that probably can't move anyway. That's when rents go unpaid and petty thefts escalate.
Weekends are the time for working on cars. It's a social thing. All up and down the street, every Saturday and Sunday from dawn until far into the night (We Work by Flashlight), the do-it-yourself mechanics are applying chewing gum against the inevitable, while a bunch of their friends stand around the car drinking beer, and a 3-year-old sits behind the wheel and honks the horn. The mechanics whang on dents with hammers, they scrape their knuckles raw on undercarriages, they race engines as tailpipes vomit huge doomsday clouds of blue smoke. Most of the cars have alarms, which are wailing more than they're waiting.
The cars get so much attention because they're important. Gotta have a car, man. Not just for transportation, but they're somewhere to go, even if you can't afford gas. The kids are bawling, the wife's complaining; better go in the other room and shut the door. Wait a minute; there is no other room. So you step down to the street and sit in the car. Just sit there. Maybe this need to be alone is the reason for the phenomenon of 6 a.m. engine idling. The wisdom on my street is that every car must have its engine idled and raced - VROOM, VROOM (cough, BACKFIRE), vroom, VROOM - for 20 minutes each morning before going to work, awakening everyone with a streetside bedroom who's just managed to fall asleep after the previous night's Armageddon. A sunken-socketed friend who visited me described this as "the Olympic Engine-Idling Trials" - 10 cars in simultaneous carbon-monoxide frenzy. The Trials would be more easily explainable if there were snow on the ground, but this is SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA. Isolation plus aggression equals 5,000 rpm at zero mph? I don't know.
Speaking of aggression, it seems as if some of the evil edge of my street has been blunted lately. A couple of years back, a neighborhood-watch group was formed in response to the crime situation, which has been an ever-evolving panorama here. When I first came, it was prostitution and robbery. A thriving community of self-employed female entrepreneurs worked the adjacent main drag, and waited at patient lines at the bank of phones by the corner minimart. A Hollywood police purge cut back on their action, and they moved to the next hot spot. Knock-on-the-door robberies, like the one I was chosen for, were common.
Then it was drugs, and a few years ago the narcotics traffic got to a stage of competition that approached the comic. Down on a side street, a knot of dealers wore out their arches shifting their weight from one foot to the other, asking any driver who accidentally made eye contact, "Hey, man, you want some?" The ones who were the most fun to watch were a team: a tall white guy and a tall white guy. One took one side of the street, the other one took the other. Whenever a car drove slowly enough down the avenue, the assigned salesman would run alongside it, dangling his wares and all but climbing up on the hood. They had it covered.
After a while, though, the comedy turned to Act V of a Shakespearean tragedy - you know, the act where everybody dies. There had always been gunshots at night from time to time, but now the event became a regular quiz show: "Guess That Caliber." "That was a .32, like mine." "Naw, .38." "Firecracker." "Sem-automatic." "Menendez's Toyota." Some mornings you would walk out and realize within a few steps that you were following a trail of blood. Drip. Drip. Drip. Splash. Drip. Maybe a big smear at the end. Hope not. I walked into the minimarket, and they were just mopping a pink puddle off the floor. "A guy came in here and bought a six-pack. He was bleeding all over the place. He had a pair of scissors sticking out of his thigh. Said something about his girlfriend. He almost made it home."
The neighbors got fed up and started an anti-crime network. And the landlords made an effort to give the rundown Spanish-styles facelifts. "It's not a slum now," explained one of them. "It's got awnings." I woke up one morning to the sounds of civic-minded enthusiasm from a P.A. - City Councilman Mike Woo had targeted my street for a cleanup. There was loud taped music. There was a clown and a breakdancer. Mike's representative was giving away green "Filthbusters" T-shirts to whatever kids would grab a broom and sweep up some broken Bud bottles and dogshit. There were pep talks and speeches till I was almost ready to shit on the sidewalk myself. But it's nice to know somebody cares. If six hours of fun-kay hype is the price we have to pay, that's cool.
* * *
The authorities aren't always so helpful. Yes, they take an interest. They even took an interest in me one time. I was having a few guys over for a Super Bowl party, Super Bowl XX, January 1986. Patriots and Bears. I made guacamole. I made chicken tacos. Every cubic inch of the refrigerator was packed with beer. I was ready. The guys came by with even more beer. Heyyyyyyyy! Debbie stopped by to say hi and then absent herself from the impending debacle. She looked at my taco fixings. Tomatoes. Onions. Lettuce. Olives. "Where's the cilantro? You can't have tacos without cilantro. I'll go get some." Okay. She came back 10 minutes later with the cilantro. Great. Thanks. Bye.
Then . . . she was back. "Uh, can you come down for a minute?" Her car was there, double-parked. A black-and-white cop car and two cops were there too. "This car is parked illegally. Its registration is expired. This woman's license is expired. She has warrants. This car has to be moved, but she can't do it." I said I'd do it. "May we see your license?" Sure.
Then, just because it was my street, just because it was Super Bowl Sunday, just because the sky is blue, they decided to run a computer check on me, too. One cop was looking at the neat little TV screen they had in their police vehicle. He did a take. He called the other cop over, and they both looked at the screen. They looked at each other. Then one cop walked over to me, and the other cop walked over to Debbie, and, smooth as Grand Central pickpockets, they cuffed our hands behind our backs.
"You're going to have to come with us."
"Why?"
"Well, Mr. Burk, your birthdate and your description match those of a certain Natividad Barazzo, a wanted fugitive."
"What? What's he wanted for?" "Homicide. And interstate flight."
I argued. Debbie screamed. But they had their man. I called up to the guys, who weren't paying much attention to all this. "Hey!" I said. "Just, er, go ahead with out me. I'll be, uh, back in a while."
The cops took us to the Wilcox station. One of them was glowing like the champion of a fourth-grade spelling bee, already figuring what neighborhood he could move to on a lieutenant's salary. The other one didn't look so sure.
They fingerprinted us and took us to separate holding tanks. There was a used condom on the floor of mine. They said they had to run a check on my prints to find out whether I was Natividad or me. Through the window of my cell, I could see, across the hall in the coffee lounge, a television. It was pointed away from me. From the sound, I could faintly detect that it was tuned to a football game.
Two hours later, a cop came and let me out. He said I wasn't Natividad. I was glad. At the desk, they gave me back my wallet and said I could go. No apologies. These things happen, I guess.
"What about Debbie?"
"She has warrants totaling $330. She can leave when she pays. Please bring exact change."
The guys at my Super Bowl party were happy to cough up what I couldn't get out of my bank-teller machine (limit $200). I went back and bailed her out.
When I finally got back to my party, the game was over. My friends said, "What the hell, you didn't miss much in jail." Turned out to be a lousy Super Bowl (Bears 46, Patriots 10), but a pretty good party. We had a lot to laugh about. Ha, ha.
* * *
This probably could have happened somewhere else in L.A., but right now I can't think of where. One way or the other, though, my street is real. It's a place worth living. It's ridiculous. I don't care. I love it, even more now than when I first saw the For Rent sign, and I'm not moving. Hell, all I'd have to do is go get a new job that pays twice as much, and then I could live somewhere where they call the police when they see someone they don't recognize on the street. Where just the fact that he's walking is enough to make him suspect. But then I wouldn't have the opportunity to be reminded, every hour of every day by hundreds of different people, of what it's really all about. In that prospective new neighborhood, at night, I would look up at the same sky, but it wouldn't seem the same as the sky that I look up at when I walk across the open courtyard of my apartment building after being out somewhere, and the smell of the flower bush mixes with the smell of enchiladas and the harsh, bracing odor of skunk in the cool air. The sky here is smaller, framed by GLAD on one side and the second-floor apartment of the guys who play AC/DC all the time on the other, but the moon is brightly defiant, and the stars are fierce. They actually look like something to shoot for.