EVEN NEIGHBORS HAVE NEIGHBORS, II
Act Two. A Cowboy in Space.
(Or, Parenting in the Apocalypse, Part Four)
Scene 1) Alien Vandal Sex Truants
My daughter and I were discussing ideal neighborhoods to live in. I suggested the 6th Arrondissement. She suggested the planet Venus. Because there’s more space, silly.
It made me think of our cosmic neighbors, and the Pentagon’s bizarre publicity stunt this year in which it released videos of supposed UFO’s during a global pandemic. Because it’s clearly so relevant to this moment. After all, in the videos, the aliens pop up at a safe social distance of several miles, staying just far away enough from the camera to remain obscure fuzzy dots, before they shoot off at whiplash-inducing speeds. Despite the clear and present danger posed by quickly disappearing fuzzy dots, it raises questions.
Firstly, are aliens just reptilian pranksters? Is E.T. joy-riding through our atmosphere with no object other than to mess with us, one long green middle-finger extended playfully out the window of the space-voyaging equivalent of his dad’s Camaro? And if so…er, why? Don’t they have anything better to do?
Presumably, these aren’t the same aliens who conduct all the experiments on superior beings like David Icke? Or are they? Are these Pentagon videos then filled with drunk alien doctors who have run out of samples and are tired of hitting alien golf balls off the deck into hyperspace while sipping Spiked Gatorade? Dude, get the landing craft, let’s go buzz the Shaved Apes!
Secondly, if these are our cosmic neighbors, one has to ask: are they idiots? Why do such stupid shit? Who goes to the physics-baffling trouble of inventing a spaceship to travel clear across space-time to another civilization only to fuck off really fast when spotted? Did they steal that UFO? Or are they actually all truant teens high on some hallucinogenic interplanetary fauna scraped off of random asteroids?
Perhaps other planets are over-stuffed with boneheaded kids stealing their parents’ spacecraft at midnight and joy-riding thousands of light-years to cruise our atmosphere’s main drag shouting insults. Up YOURS, earthlings! Your evolution SUCKS!! If so, I’m pretty sure some of those reptilian pranksters were masquerading as humans at my high school.
Okay, I admit there may be more purpose to these visitations than that. They may be parking their spacecraft behind the moon and getting it on. Perhaps it was the embarrassment of having seen alien sex-fiends behind our satellite that caused NASA to stop sending us there. Damn, how do we explain this? And if the earth is just a nice view for some alien heavy-petting I’ll bet they’re going to feel really silly when they sneak back to their home planet, prepared to hang up the keys to the UFO on the clothes hook, only to find that their solar system has been devoured in the roaring death-throes of a Red Dwarf.
Anyone who believes we are not alone in this cosmic neighborhood has to explain why the neighbors are so damn quiet. Aside from dot-like apparitions at high altitudes, they are neither seen nor heard. They are the equivalent of old humbugs on Halloween who sit in the dark with the lights out rather than talk to the kids. When we do finally locate intelligent life in the universe, we should do the same to them. Ring the doorbell and run away. Maybe leave a turd on the porch. Payback time, Grandpa.
A more charitable view would be that proposed by David Bowie. That our cosmic neighbors are just really thoughtful and considerate. After all, the last thing anyone would need is a rager taking place on Mars for, like, millennia. Or maybe it did, and the UFO’s we see contain the aliens who didn’t get laid, and now they’re streaking across our front lawn with their balls out and are destined to rush screaming like fools covered in Sharpie-scrawled obscenities into some invisible black hole while lost on their way home.
Ufologists need to explain all this, along with the name Ufologists. But I suspect urologists would have more cogent answers than Ufologists. After all, they’re paid to study the behavior of dicks.
I grew up around psychics and those who were certain that we had neighbors not of this earthly realm. Astral neighbors. Invisible others. These neighbors supposedly inhabit a nebulous realm just beyond this physical one. We can’t see them, and we can’t prove they exist. They don’t talk to us any more than the aliens do, but every now and then we see them getting into the elevator at the end of the metaphysical corridor. Or closing the door to the broom closet. Then we can’t see them again. Which raises more questions.
For example, why exactly would a ghost bother haunting anything? What’s the point of scaring humans shitless, other than for giggles? If they really wanted to impart for some reason that, say, a grisly murder or something had happened somewhere atmospheric, why not just visit during the day with a bunch of flowers and a note? “Hi! Just wanted you to know, there was an ax murder in this bed. It was me, but I’m immaterial now, so it doesn’t matter. Just needed to get that off my phantom chest. Anyway, have a great night!”
Our cosmic neighbors are clearly shy. And quiet. And weird. Like serial killers. Perhaps they are on the run. Or perhaps the apartment building is actually empty, and we’re the only tenants. How are we supposed to know, unless they bloody well speak up? Imagine you lived in a small commune of squatters on the ground floor of an empty apartment building. You never saw anyone else around, but you heard creatures rummaging through the empty rooms above you, and you were told by the wild-eyed Cat Lady that they belonged to other tenants that only she can see. Would you assume she’s right? Or would you just think you might need to get out of the commune before it’s too late?
My aunt was schizophrenic, and most of her neighbors existed in her head. I lived with her when my parents would leave me for periods with my gran in Durban, South Africa. My gran lived in a tall tenement building built around a central column where you could see across concrete balustrades to the neighbors. Sometimes you saw the neighbors being dangled off the balustrades by other neighbors. Once, it even happened to me. And those were just the neighbors you saw.
The unseen neighbors in the apartment were what my gran, who was psychic, called poltergeists. The real neighbors were bikers and chain-smokers and kid-danglers who came over to listen to vinyl disco records that my DJ uncle played before he went to prison, but it was the invisible neighbors who made a racket and kept us up all night. By rearranging the pots in the kitchen.
I don’t know why they did this. No one gave a credible explanation. When I saw Spielberg’s movie of the same name, I realized that they just wanted you to live in the cosmic background radiation of the cathode ray tube, and this made a kind of sense because that’s where people spoke to my aunt from.
Later, I came to believe that the dim nether-realm where poltergeists dwell is filled with frustrated interior decorators who can’t visit revenge upon working-class psychic families that have beads instead of kitchen doors, and so spend all night shuffling kitchenware from one cupboard to another and then rattling the cups to keep them awake out of spite. Then I realized that was just television in general. I’m still looking for answers.
Scene 2) Close Encounters of the Garbage Kind.
I’ve been blessed with colorful neighbors. I’ve had a neighbor try to kill me while high on PCP and a neighbor save my life by smelling a fire. When my wife and I first moved to LA we rented an apartment near the beach in Venice. The guy downstairs wore low-cut skinny jeans and never, ever, a shirt. I mean I actually never once saw him wearing a shirt in an entire calendar year.
Sure, he was shredded, but he overplayed it. I kept forgetting his name, so I called him Asscrack, because it was one of the two memorable things about him. Asscrack was in training for American Idol and came home to practice Poison’s masterpiece ‘Every Rose Has Its Thorn’ on a home karaoke machine at 2AM every night. For hours. Cut it out, Asscrack! I’d yell. We got a baby up in here, man! I could literally have said to him that we had a particle generator for all it meant to him.
When my second daughter was born, I decided we couldn’t spend years here, watching Asscrack’s abs slowly become gelatinous and his toned butt start to bulge over the top of his jeans like icing being squeezed in a pastry bag. I envisaged a bearded, flabby, forty-year-old, shirtless Asscrack singing Every Rose in his living room at 2 AM, and instead of becoming angry, I just became sad. I couldn’t let my daughters see that. It was time to move on.
We’ve lived in the Santa Monica mountains ever since. Now that we all live and study and work at home, those same daughters appear and disappear in the house like stage magicians conjuring trash. They’re really good at it. With more trash than our bins can accommodate, I naturally thought about sneaking some into the neighbor’s bins. Isn’t that why you have neighbors? What else are they for? For God’s sake, there’s a pandemic on. We have to pull together. We’re all in this together, people.
There are three mysterious bins on our road whose origins are obscure, so I planned a lightning strike. I had to hit the ground running, like Operation Entebbe. I pressured the seven-year-old to keep watch. We prepped our excess trash, hand-signaled that it was Go Time, and I rolled out onto the dirt road SAS-style. I found myself staring at a masked man in his sixties with heavily dyed black hair, holding a trash bag. My mouth opened and closed silently.
I’m Barry, he said.
Hi, I said, hoarsely. Jay.
Taken a while, he said.
You could say that again. It’s taken thirteen damn years. It’s taken three presidents, two dogs, and one Apocalypse.
I live on the other side of Dan, he said.
Oh? I said. I guessed someone lived there.
The rest of the landscape is populated by trees, coyotes, and a jogger named Trent who wears very short shorts and no shirt, just like Asscrack didn’t. The main difference is that Trent owns things, including a truck with a bumper sticker declaring him to be a lifetime member of the NRA. He still wants to lock Hillary up, presumably for her crimes against internet servers. What he ignores is his egregious crime against shorts. They didn’t ask for this, and they don’t deserve it. Trent does more harm to male shorts than the 1970’s ever did, and that was a lot.
Barry and I sort of shrugged at each other like chimps. I returned to my daughter, who was looking on with a puzzled expression. Who was that, she asked? That, I said, was Barry. Is he our neighbor? Yes, I said, that’s our neighbor. But we don’t know him, she said. Silly, I said, you don’t know neighbors. They just exist in an abstract neighbor-void of pure potentiality.
But I know Valeria, she said. That’s the new Russian neighbor who moved in next door. That’s different, I said. We bumped into them when they were moving in. That’s how you meet neighbors. By accident. But didn’t her father come over with a fish wrapped in newspaper? she asked. Well, yeah, but who knows? I said. That might have been a threat. Like when you threatened the Easter Bunny? she said. Oh come on, that was just for everyone’s safety, I said. You were sharing chocolate eggs and I had to point out that if the eggs contained Covid-19, the Bunny could technically be arrested for conspiracy to commit an act of bioterrorism. He could get renditioned at midnight to Guantanamo Bay where he would languish in caged limbo in a stress-position for the rest of his life, while his bored captors played Megadeth and kept randomly flicking the light switch and taunting him with carrots. Is that what you want? No? Then no egg-swapping. It’s the neighborly thing to do.
Later that same night of the Trash Convention, my daughter and I went out and looked at the stars together, as we like to do. She can identify the planets, while I can identify the sky. She pointed out Venus. I asked her what exactly made it the perfect neighborhood? Well, it’s nice and bright. It’s nearly one thousand degrees Fahrenheit. It’s got a huge cloud of sulfuric acid around it all the time. And the atmospheric pressure might crush you. That sounds horrible, I said. Yes, she said, but you’d have it all to yourself.
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