It Takes a Village

A friend of mine has three small children, and as it turns out, soon I will too. [See PSA.] He shared that the best strategy with three, in his experience, is simply to pass the crankiest child to the closest complete stranger than you can find. In Venice there are probably all sorts of people who could help you out, he said.

This is certainly true, I said. We live a block from Abbot Kinney, where, in addition to the transients screaming obscenities down at the boardwalk, the following nurturing types are always mulling about:

--the local cocaine dealers down the street

--the new Snapchat millionaire bros drinking $14 charcoal lemonades

--the confused tourists teaching themselves how to ride a bicycle on our sidewalks

--the would-be models striking poses in our alleyways

--our van neighbor

Most of these are self-explanatory but I will explain Terrence, our van neighbor. According to neighborhood rumors, Terrence used to live in an apartment across the street from us until he was accused and convicted of peeping on a fellow tenant. He went to jail for several years. Upon his release, he returned to Venice only to find that his old apartment had been torn down and in its place was an immense, concrete, single-family home built by an architect from Singapore.

When you chat with him, Terrence mentions none of this. He simply says that he “got out of the apartment game and never looked back.”

For our first few years in Venice, Terrence made a point of parking his curtained, dilapidated van within several yards of our house. This was still his neighborhood, his van seemed to say. But Terrence had an enemy—Frances, who lives just across our street. Frances is a sturdy pet-groomer with a heart of gold and an anger problem. She is particularly territorial about the street parking surrounding her house, and after years of circling the block and receiving countless parking tickets, I am starting to understand why.

“I f*@king hate that guy,” she often said.

Sometimes I would hear her screaming at Terrence, from the driver’s seat of her own van, to park somewhere else. I had to admit that Terrence was a bit annoying. Anytime he saw my husband at Abbot’s Habit, he either flat-out asked him for cash or tried to sell him weird drugs.

I had also heard a rumor that Terrence had gone to prison not for being a peeping Terrence, but for something closer to assault. This gave me pause.

Finally, one day, I noticed that Terrence was gone. His van was parked a few streets over. I asked Frances about it and she said, “Well yeah, I threw dog shit at his van until he left.”

Frances herself is a decent caretaker and a protective aunty type.  One time, though, she gave my son a large foam puzzle with an under-the-sea design. It looked a bit worn to me, but my son quickly adopted it as one of his favorite toys. Not until years later did Frances clarify a small detail about the puzzle. It used to be her bathmat.

It takes a village, they say. But that village is probably not Venice.