The Hazel Project

A few days ago I found myself taking a walk down the hill to retrieve a 17″ Macintosh monitor someone had put out for reuse. This happens a lot in Echo Park; mostly with couches and bed mattresses.

I passed this guy with wiry white hair and trucker’s cap working on a Nissan Sentra mostly blue but with grey primer on many random spots on the car as if he was covering dings and dents only he could see.

His name is Dave.

He’s told me the same 2 stories over and over before, but he’s nice and has lived in the same house on the top of this hill for over thirty years.

I try to be the friendly neighbor and ask Dave about his car again, knowing he doesn’t remember who I am since I moved one street over.

He says, “yeah, let me tell you something about this car. This is my wifes car right? Well it was having problems so I had a new engine put in it right? So it was brand new, brand new car. Well some bastards stole it and took it for joy ride right. So they start taking out the radio and stealing parts out of the dash as if they fixing up another Sentra.”

I didn’t ask he knew this and let him continue because if I asked too many questions Dave would lose his place and have to start over.

I wish I was making that up.

He says, “What those assholes should’ve done is swap the liscense plates and take off because this car had the brand new engine. That way I could’ve gotten insurance for a new car!”

I think this story is a few years old because he tells it the same each time. And when he gets to this part he says it the same way with a certain bitterness and acceptance.

Dave smokes a lot and was surprised this day to see him without a cigarette. He says, “you got a minute I want to show you something, what were you doing out here anyway.”

I say, “Sure, I have minute. Well yaknow your neighbor has put a computer monitor outside and I need one so I was coming out to pick it up.”

“OHHH yeah, that’s a good one. It still works, that guy is an Electrical Engineer.”

I say “yeah I hope it works, he cut the VGA cable off for some reason.”

He opens the gate to his porch. There’s a bunch of broken furniture in the yard that looks like it came from a mid seventies disco.

He invites me in to his house to show me why he’s stayed here so long. He told me that when he moved onto the street he had a bid to buy the house at auction for $12,000. Then another guy who bid on property up the street raised the bid on his house as well. This really gets Dave agitated, still to this day. He said,

“So, I ended up having to pay $22,000 for this house. Almost double!”

I begin to wonder if he realizes how valuable his property actually is.

He invites me inside and its dark and smells like stale smoke and alcohol. Thirty years of it. There’s old stuff everywhere and no attempt to integrate anything new. DVD player instructions sit on top of a TV that reminds me of the one I use to watch MTV on in High School. You know the console kind that had a veneer on it that was scratch resistant but still had to be dusted.

He sees a fifth of brown liquor on the floor. He picks it up and shows it proudly, “The cork wouldn’t come out so I drilled a hole in it.” Dave says with a big grin.

With that, he tilts the bottle perpindicular to the ceiling and throws his head back to suck the alcohol through the tiny drilled out hole. I was wondering what it was, whiskey, tequila, I couldn’t tell. Whatever it was there was a lot of it. I saw a price mark $1.99 in big red letters on the side.

I hear that sound liquor makes in a fifth bottle being sloshed around. I guess because the bottle’s shaped like a square it sounds like there’s coins in it.

He wipes his mouth on his t shirt and says. “There’s a bunch of saw dust floating around down in there.”

It’s 10:30 in the morning.

Thanks for checking in. I’m trying to break these down into shorter experiences.

Stephen A. Thomas

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 20th, 2006 at 4:05 pm and is filed under on the path, posts & stories . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.