The Little House Across The Street

I couldn't really find a picture of a house that did it justice, but it looked a lot like this except it was stucco. We called them the yelling family. A single mom lived there with a bunch of other people that came and went. She had a little child that was a little older than our twins. She would take her for walks and continually scream at her. When we advertised for a nanny, she called to apply for the job. My wife recognized her voice on the phone. We didn't interview her. Anyway, there were drunken parties that spilled out on to the street. And the cops were called. Tires were slashed, There was a yelling match between our next door neighbor and one of them one night that I was sure was going to lead to a shooting. I ended up across the street on the curb getting drunk with one of them, because I didn't want them firebombing the house during the day while we were at work and the nanny was there with the kids.

During the riots and the curfews, they all came out of the house with ski masks and drove off.

In Los Angeles, the DA's office can threaten to take a property away from it's owner if it receives too many complaints to the police and bad police filings. We called every chance we could. We had a neighborhood watch group that was attended by one of the women in the house. LAPD came and told us we were lucky that the rival gangs had not realized the house was there, or we might have a shooting war.

It was about this time, I found out that LAPD Pacific division had one car on duty during the night for all of Venice. The only way you could get them to show up, was to call and say you saw a gun.

I called one night without leaving my name and address and they came across the street to knock on my door after talking to them. I was pissed. Why not just give them my name?

The parties came and went by how much the owner was threatened by the DA's office and the court. At one point I wanted to buy a crossbow and climb up on my roof and shoot a flaming arrow on their roof in the hopes of burning the house down. Never did it. My wife suggested that the little girl might get injured.

One election, the older lady that lived in the house got certified as a polling place, so if you wanted to vote you had to enter the place and tread carefully across the stained threadbare carpet, avoiding the cockroaches and punch your ballot. Don't know if those ballots actually were counted that year. Thankfully she didn't do it again. Maybe someone complained.

Noise and more noise every night. We finally sold the house and moved, mostly because we needed more room for growing kids. I drove out a couple of different nights to check out the new house at night, to make sure we weren't just moving into the same old same old. The folks across the street at the old house robbed us before we moved (see previous post). 

We moved and suddenly the nights were quiet and peaceful. You could hear crickets. And the whole thing sort of dissipated. I can remember being angry about them for at least a year.

Six months after we moved, the DA's office took possession of the house and evicted them all. The house sat, looking like this for awhile.