San Diego Noir

I have nothing against dogs. I have nothing against animals of any kind, except rats (for which I am sure I can be forgiven) and panda bears (for which I most assuredly cannot). And actually, it isn’t that I harbor any sort of deep-seated hatred toward panda bears—I merely think we spend too much of our animal-protection resources on these rather lame and maladaptive creatures simply because they are cute. The San Diego Zoo is so enamored with its “guest” panda bears, in fact, that it has installed a “panda cam” whose feed you can watch on the Internet twenty-four hours a day. Ridiculous.

Again, I am not an animal hater. I neither own nor eat animals, which, I think, actually makes me an animal lover of sorts. But I cannot stand a yipping, yapping dog. Two yipping, yapping dogs constitute sheer torture. So when our next door neighbor, Vida, brought home those wretched little toy dogs last June, Sheila and I knew there were going to be issues. Well, I knew there were going to be issues—it didn’t bother Sheila until later. They were miniature terriers of some kind, or perhaps a mix. Yes, definitely a mix and not a good one. The few glimpses I caught of them (they were confined almost exclusively to the house; I have no idea when Vida walked them because I never saw it) weren’t particularly pleasing—grayish, brownish, not very clean. But the problem wasn’t their appearance, it was the nearly incessant barking that started the very minute she brought those animals into her home.

Now, you’d think such small dogs would be impossible to hear, especially downtown where we live. You see, all of downtown is pretty much directly in the flight path of planes coming in and out of Lindbergh Field. One can practically see the passengers inside them (who are doubtless horrified to be hovering so close to the ground) as they make their descent into America’s Finest City. There has been endless discussion about moving the airport to a more “suitable” location (although Tijuana was suggested as well, which, although less than twenty miles from here, is anything but suitable), but nothing has come of it. Who is going to approve putting an airport in their backyard? So here we are, occupying some of the priciest real estate in the country (recession be damned!) and watching the dirty undersides of 747s as they roar above our heads.

When we first moved in, Sheila and I used to live in fear that one of them would accidentally dump that royal blue toilet ice in our backyard on the way in—and that was not a totally unfounded fear. It’s not like it hasn’t happened before. In California. But we got over that (mostly) and also managed somehow to integrate the sound into our lives. When an airplane went over our heads we just spoke a little louder without even noticing it. This is why we did hear the dogs. Also, at a certain point, the planes stopped flying for the night. The dogs were ceaseless.

“I think I should go talk to her,” I told Sheila one night over dinner.

Sheila picked at her asparagus and gave me an impatient look. Her hair was tied back with a yellow ribbon and she seemed tired. “Talk to who? About what?”

“Vida.” I gestured toward the other condo. “About those dogs.”

“Are you sure her name is Vida?”

“What’s that got to do with it, Sheila?”

“I just don’t remember her introducing herself as Vida. I think you might have made that name up.” I didn’t dignify the comment with a response. She sighed. “Anyway, what about the dogs?”

“They bark all the time. It doesn’t bother you?”

Sheila shrugged. “Not really.”

“Well, I haven’t been able to sleep at night.”

“I don’t think your insomnia is caused by the dogs,” Sheila said.

“Well, I’m going to talk to her.”

“I wish you wouldn’t.”

Sheila hated making waves of any kind, which was admirable on one level, but also, frankly, sometimes a little annoying. I understood that she didn’t want any kind of ugly scene with our neighbor, but I had to say something. The dogs were driving me mad. And I would have—I had even planned which words to use—if not for the fact that on the very afternoon I had chosen to go next door, Vida brought home a human guest and, well, I just couldn’t.

I was at my kitchen window when I saw them pull up in front of our condos. Residents are not allowed to park here. Because of space constraints and the desire to maintain property values, we are all assigned single parking spaces in a covered lot around the back of our buildings. So right away I knew she was up to something. Then I saw the blue “handicapped” tag hanging off her rearview mirror and was even more intrigued.

Vida got out first. She was smiling and looked almost deranged with happiness. The flowery muumuu she was wearing only added to that slightly nutty look. I don’t know which sadistic designer first came up with the idea of the muumuu but he (for it really has to be a “he,” no self-respecting woman would ever design such a garment) deserves a special place in fashion hell. Vida is not a heavy woman, but the muumuu, festooned with bright, badly painted hibiscus flowers, made her look like she weighed three hundred pounds.

She walked around to the passenger side of her car and, after a bit of effort which I couldn’t see because it was obscured by Vida’s sail of a dress, helped another woman out. The “new girl,” as I immediately began thinking of her, was small, blond, and very pretty. She was also an amputee—and a recent one by the look of it. Her left leg ended at the knee and was bandaged in what appeared to be a haphazard manner. The dressing didn’t look all that clean, either, and there were bloodstains at the bottom.

New Girl put her arm around Vida’s shoulder and with much awkwardness they hopped and dragged their way up the drive-way to Vida’s condo. They had no crutches and no wheelchair. It was altogether most peculiar—as if they had both come directly from the scene of an accident. Needless to say, I couldn’t go over there at that moment and complain about the dogs. It would have been rude.

We didn’t see either one of them for a few days after that, though they were clearly at home. The lights were on and there was plenty of noise. There were the dogs, of course, yapping and squealing as if their miserable doggy lives depended on it, but there were other sounds as well. I’d never heard music coming from Vida’s place before, but soon after New Girl’s arrival, we were treated to the sound of thrashing guitars on a daily basis. Apparently, New Girl was very fond of death metal and loved to listen to it near an open window. We also heard construction— hammering, drilling, and several suspicious crashes. It wasn’t until I saw Vida hauling canvases and easels up her driveway that I realized she—they—must have been building some kind of art studio in there.

“What do you think they’re up to next door?” I asked Sheila one evening.

“I suppose they’re just living like the rest of us,” Sheila answered. She was sitting under a thin blanket on the couch watching Law & Order, a show she’d recently become addicted to, and she