Eavesdropping on the Lost and Naked
by Maria Hummel
Soon after I moved into my Hollywood neighborhood, one serene morning was broken by a high-pitched male rant, full of expletives, coming from somewhere to the east. Like the newcomer I was, I immediately trotted outside and peered around at our gently swaying palms, the clay rooftops of our courtyard. Nothing. No one else seemed the slightest bit surprised. My neighbor fiddled with his car keys. An actress dragged her panting, pale-eyed Weimaraner. The rant cut off as abruptly as it began. I pretended to be interested in the hedge for a while and slunk back inside.
The following week my brother came to stay with us. "I heard your neighbor yelling at the birds this morning," he grumped over breakfast.
I told a couple of longtime residents of Los Angeles about Rant Man and they nodded wisely. "Sounds like Where-Was-You," one said, and explained about a woman they had once nicknamed for her habit of bawling out her errant husband at night.
For months we lived with the mysterious outbursts and I began to pick up on other noises. Not hot enough to crank the air conditioning and not cool enough to shut the windows, for most of the year Hollywood is a city of drifting conversations and audible daydreams. There was the neighbor with operatic aspirations, the neighbor who hacked up a chunky-style soup of lung every day, the neighbor who practiced the gruff staccato lines of his minor role on a cop show.
One afternoon I hiked up Runyon Canyon and heard a piercing scream comwfrom far below. It was like watching a knife rise and fall on a passing subway car, prompting more questions than answers—where did it come from? Was it real? Did my ears trick me? I peered down over the lavish gardens and swimming pools, searching futilely for signs of violence.
Sound travels along strange trade routes in the hills of Los Angeles, coasting up and down canyon walls, over fake brooks and fountains, through stucco alleys. Wind and trees cavort with it, amplifying some echoes, masking others, adding to the city's sense of dislocation and dreaminess. I couldn't find the screamer, but I stood for a while, listening for more. I was becoming an Angelino, an eavesdropper on a hundred aural spectacles a day.
In my junior high school newspaper, they used to publish an addictive little section called "The Big Ear." Inside the clumsily sketched organ, someone regularly updated the initials of current couples:"T.H. + S.N." and so on. I thought of this nosy bit of entertainment when I began polling my friends about their own neighborhoods. Sprawling, cloaked with trees and deliberately overgrown hedges, Los Angeles doesn't hold much for the stereotypical window-peeping voyeur, but it breeds Big Ears.
"For me it's the hiss of the hibachi," said a pal from Culver City. "All those Southeast Asian immigrants frying meat on their balconies." My friend in Solano Canyon talked about screeching tires, thudding bass: "It's kind of like ringing the doorbell in my neighborhood," she explained. A third spoke about hearing conversations in other four other languages where he waits for the bus on Beverly. "I counted them one day," he said, ticking off his fingers. "Guatemalan Spanish, Mexican Spanish, Southeast L.A. Spanglish, and a teenage Chicano dialect I call Yo-lé."
Hearing, by its very nature, is less discriminating than seeing. To shut the eyes requires a brief tensing of muscles. To shut the ears, you must raise both hands to the sides of your heads, and even then the sensitive organs go on picking up vibrations. You really can't help becoming a Big Ear in Los Angeles—it takes more effort to block things out than to let them in, and besides, eavesdropping is intellectually wholesome, one of the last refuges of the imagination in the amused-to-death city. As a hazier sense than sight, sound inspires the storytellers, the gossipers and exaggerators in each of us. I learned this one warm summer night in our courtyard.
It started as a voice in my dream asking me my name. "Why are you here? Do you have any identification on you?" She had the firm, kind tone we associate with motherly authority and my mind muttered a few guilty replies before a flashing light outside my window woke me.
I went to my usual slat in the blinds. A cop stood, hands on her hips, staring at the brightly lit steps to my neighbor's house. Because of a burly bougainvillea, I couldn't see the object of her interest.
"You live here, sir?" she repeated skeptically. "What's your name?" and she went through the whole litany of questions again.
His answers were too low to hear, so I imagined them. He used to live here and it was the happiest time of his life. He had a wife and a Welsh corgi and then he lost them both in a car accident and fell on hard times. He just wanted to touch the building again. He just wanted to open the door but it was locked.
About twenty minutes later two men in orange suits sprinted across the yard, lugging something bulky between them. I caught a brief glimpse of a wheelchair and the mysterious visitor, a buck-naked man who flopped feebly on the seat before he was swaddled in a blanket and carted off. The cop trailed after, murmuring on her walkie-talkie. My neighbor's light stayed on all night.
The next day, several of us chatted in the courtyard about the visitation. We had all heard the cop, but few had caught sight of the man. Everyone had their own impression of who he was: a crack head, a mugging victim, a former tenant, a 70-year-old, a 40-year-old, bearded, clean-shaven, balding, hairy fellow.
I'm content not to know for sure, because recently I found out the identity of Rant Man, whom I had concluded was either a movie villain's voice coach or a sufferer from some kind of defenestrating Tourrette's.
While parking the car one night, I finally spotted him on a high-rise balcony in mid-yell at the neighbor above. He was accusing her of working as a whore and blasting the music to cover it. "I know what you're doing," he cried and let loose a string of invective.
At first I was relieved, then disappointed. Like watching a magician reveal his secrets, identifying the true object of your voyeuristic ear is ultimately a letdown. All the imagined worlds outside your window fade, replaced by ordinary afternoons. My dear stranger, the man I have guessed about for months, is only an uptight tenant, pissed at his neighbor's illegal lifestyle.
Then again, he doesn't really know what she's doing up there. She could be a pop star in training, or a spy, or an astronaut's daughter rebelling because her father's up in space. I'll have to listen harder next time.
|
