San Diego Noir

I suppose most people have some trouble with their neighbors at some point or other. It isn’t possible to get along all the time, after all, especially not with strangers with whom you live cheek by jowl. People have such peculiar habits and inclinations—so evident when there are common alleys and kitchen windows without shades. Still, my policy has always been live and let live as long as nobody gets hurt. But sometimes the definition of “hurt” becomes a little murky. And sometimes people are just plain rude. There is no excuse for rudeness. It almost always leads to trouble.

Our particular trouble began last summer—in June, to be exact. The jacarandas were in fresh bloom and it was beginning to get warm. Not too warm, mind you. San Diego never really reaches a full boil until late August and into September. We’re always lulled into a false sense of security by then because the weather’s been so pleasant; warm enough to complain about all the tourists glutting the beaches but not hot enough to consider joining them there. And then, every year, there are two or three scorching weeks in the late summer and we all start falling apart like melting ice-cream sandwiches. By the time those bone-dry, fire-starting Santa Ana winds blow through here in October, we can’t even remember what it was like to grumble about the marine layer making things too gloomy. But last June was lovely—bright, sunny, and sparkling—the kind of climate that makes you happy to be alive. And we were, Sheila and I. Until the dogs were installed in the condo next door.

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?”