Kenwood Archives · Terry Danuser

The Back Stairs

Fri, 12 Nov 2021 18:53:19 +0000

If I close the door at the bottom of the steep service stairs that lead from the bedrooms to the kitchen, it blocks out the distant light from the Gaffers and Sattler stove, making the stairwell itself a pitch-black downward tunnel. The last thing I do before I corral the dogs into the bedroom is to close the top door to that staircase, the lip of that first stair just a toe’s length away from a very bumpy and painful decline. You’ll never know what hit you.

I may not hear you coming up the front stairs, even with that broken oak plank of the fourth tread just before the landing. My bedroom door will be closed, the air conditioner on, the TV at a soft volume, but once that Klonopin kicks in, I won’t hear you creeping up those front stairs. You’ll be disoriented, anyway. It’s going to be dark.

Say you make it to the top without tripping. You’ll look around the dark hallway and see all of the upstairs doors closed. Which one am I in? You won’t know. Your first instinct might be to your right, but that’ll only lead you into the upstairs living room and with its deep dark blue paint, you’ll fumble around.

I still won’t hear you.

You’ll back out of that room and head toward the other end of the hallway. You’ll try the next door, but it only opens to a large bedroom, and the bed will be empty. No luck, buddy. Now you have a choice—one door leads to me lying asleep in my bed, and the other guarantees you, at the very least, a lifetime in a wheelchair.

Which one are you going to choose?

I’d bet my next paycheck you reach for the knob across the hall. Stupid move, sucker.You’re standing close to the door, your ears tuned for any movement, but the timer I set for the TV has already done its job and no matter how hard you try you’ll not hear anything. Not a peep. Your hand grips the worn brass knob and you slowly move forward.

You didn’t have a prayer. Your hands flail to grab onto something and one of them might even make it to the rickety handrail, but your feet are out from under you and it won’t matter if your butt hits the first or the second stair or if you’ve managed a comical swandive, because you’ll end up at the same point—at the bottom of the eleventh step, right where it takes a ninety-degree turn.

I hear the commotion, sit up in bed, shake my head, and laugh. Caught another one. Steve is barking and I’ll tell him to hush up, open my door, and walk across the hall. I’ll switch on that bare bulb that you didn’t know about, and stare down at your wreckage. Are you still conscious? I can’t really tell and I don’t much care. I just see you’re not moving.

Maybe I’ll call the police, maybe I won’t. One thing’s for sure, though. You’re going to be there for a while, so you just make that twisted body of yours comfortable.

Shit, you’d have gotten through the DMV line quicker than I’ll help you out.

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The Miata

Thu, 04 Nov 2021 13:40:52 +0000

There’s a black Miata parked right in front of my house taking up prime parking real estate underneath the bird-shit factory, an enormous fichus tree that must’ve escaped someone’s living room in the Twenties and laid its roots by the curb. The little car has a broken convertible top so its owner secures Saran Wrap over it with two-liter soda pop bottles filled with water.

When I pulled into my driveway on Thursday evening, it was dusk, and I saw an older Black man in a chocolate velveteen jacket with a bucket of soapy water and a sponge. He was scraping white dollops of poo from the black paint. Steve was pulling on his leash in a desperate need to be near some random vine on the fence, but then Steven’s always desperate to be somewhere where he’s not already, and I was trying to balance his water dish, my few books from work, and a sack of groceries that held nothing more than cookies and a twelve-pack of caffeine-free Diet Coke.

As I undid the front gate of my yard, I turned to the man, awkwardly because I still was navigating the desperate Steven, and I said, “Those birds sure do a number on your car, huh?” I knew this from experience. My black car had been violently speckled more than once in the past few months.

He looked up from his soapiness. “I lost my neutron detector.” I thought I heard him right and I thought he was making an odd and possibly funny joke about birds and their defecating habits, so I laughed because that’s what I do when I don’t understand something. I’m a friendly guy, though, so I thought it might be good to ask for clarification.

“What?” I was still smiling.

“I’m a physicist.”

I laughed again, still not in on the joke, but maybe it was going somewhere familiar, a place where the two dots could connect and my laugh might turn into something genuine.

“And you’re a carp.” He said this with such authority that at that moment, I didn’t have any doubt that I was a goldfish looking for my plastic castle. “I work in physics and I lost my neutron detector,” he stated for the record, again.

Slowly closing my gate, making sure its clasp was firmly in place, I fished around my mailbox and walked up to the porch.

Not wanting to be rude, I waved after I opened the front door and wished him well on washing his car. “And I hope you find your detector,” I added. I didn’t want him to think me insensitive.

Written 05/05/2006

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Selling Kenwood

Sun, 25 Apr 2021 22:44:01 +0000

I always called it Kenwood, my own post-war Tara in a “transitional” neighborhood. Not a terribly clever name, really, given it was simply the name of the street. And to me, Kenwood was that older stout woman with too much jewelry alone at a diner for the early bird special.

It was the first house I bought.

I just sold it. My hand was forced. I made the purchase in a panic at the height of the housing boom with one of those pretzel loans that Margot Robbie deliciously explained in “The Big Short.” The house fell upside down (lingo for owing more on it that it was worth) about six months after I moved in. I’d hoped the market would adjust, and it did for most of LA, but not for the depressed pocket where my large lady had plopped herself in 1902 when gas still lit homes and oil fields filled the land west of downtown LA.

The house served me well, though. Two friends shot their first feature films there, plus there were the two porn shoots. Cleaning up after those was a challenge, you bet. Kenwood had its own agent and every once in a while, she’d be hired out for a TV show or commercial.

Stephen, Eddie, and Jim called it home, where they kept tally of everyone who walked down the sidewalk, twelve legs of neighborhood watch.

The attached one-bedroom guesthouse offered instant company in a giant creaky house. The first tenant was an impossibly handsome Indian student going for his Master’s degree at USC. When he moved out after a year, I found 150 headphones, each one with the left cup opened and something surgically removed. Sleeper cell? I’ll never know.

Damn, I know I’m going to get this order wrong, but I think next in was Scott, one of my closest friends. Having him right there was a gift. He stayed longer than anyone, but finally decided to move back to Toronto to be closer to his family.

Next up was Dave, a great guy who I’d met a few times through mutual friends. He fell in love while there. Off he went to nest with his new partner.

Along came Jimmey with his sweet puppy Chance. My guys loved having another friend, and since I’d known Jimmey for thirty some years, I loved having him there, too. Last up was Dennis, another lucky find through mutual friends.

Dennis had an amazing eye for design. Suddenly, there were vintage plaid curtains, period colors, flair with care. Sadly and suddenly, Dennis just passed away.

When I took the job in NYC, I had to rent the place out. Unfortunately, a couple of filthy hoarders with untrained dogs moved in, systematically destroying my home, dog piles everywhere you stepped. They lived like animals, but then that gives animals a bad name. I pity the next fool who rents to them.

I almost have to thank them, though. They made it easier to let go of my emotional ties to Kenwood, to feel relief that it’s off my books. I saw the rehabbed house listed on Zillow a few weeks ago. The woman who bought it sunk a boatload of cash into it.

I forwarded the Zillow link to Scott, who immediately wrote “God we were trashy,” to which I replied, “Were?”

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