DUM DUM Zine would like to welcome Justin Maurer, whose story “Little Armenian Prowler” we’ll be serializing each week in May as the 3rd incarnation of our web serial tradition. You may remember work from our past serials featuring Jessica Garrison’s One Dollar Stories, and more recently, Kristen Felicetti’s radio play, “The New York Crimes.”
Everything in Little Armenia got a little weird after the prowler. I was driving back from a book reading in San Diego. Near the venue was a great little fish taco place. I ate too many and it made me sluggish. I tried to enliven myself with some beer mixed with wine and then a few cans of Coca Cola after that combo didn’t wake me up. It was all free at the reading venue so I kept drinking any liquid I could ingest like a fish. (Do fish drink?) I took a couple beers and a couple Cokes for the road, signed a few books, thanked my gracious host and hit I-5. I thought about spending the night on someone’s couch and going to the beach in the morning but the drive back to Los Angeles through Sunday traffic didn’t seem worth it. Driving by night is romantic and I hadn’t done it in awhile.
I stopped a couple times to piss and to get gas and to slam the Cokes and beers, desperately trying to wake up as my body continued to digest fish and shrimp tacos. The radio sucked. I put on the old country music CD I’ve heard a million times and turned it up as loud as it would go. I rolled down the window and the wind smelling like the sea blew through my hair and I felt sort of alive even if it was the middle of the night and I was in a rush to get home and get into bed. I wish Ephedrine was still legal I thought. I wish someone had given me just a couple lines of coke or speed I thought. I drank the sugary Coca Cola and it made my teeth hurt.
I drove less than 85 miles an hour because that’s the speed where the cops won’t bother to pull you over even if the speed limit is 65. The fine isn’t high enough. So I hovered around 75. Drive 10 over the limit if you don’t want a speeding ticket in Southern California.
Heading north on the I-5 Freeway, Orange County made me feel anxious. I finally crossed the L.A. County line. It felt good to get out of Orange County. Then I was in the city limits and there was traffic. Even at this ungodly hour. I saw the city skyline in the distance and I knew I was about 20 minutes from Hollywood.
I merged from the 5 to the 101 Freeway and things picked up. I passed Rampart and thought of the LAPD scandal. I saw a couple of drunk drivers swerving and driving below the speed limit. Driving below the speed limit on the highway is a dead giveaway that you’re drunk driving in L.A. I flew past them and took the Sunset Boulevard exit. I made an illegal turn and went the shortcut way. I was home but it took me another 10 minutes to find street parking. I jaunted into our place and saw my girlfriend outside the bedroom window shining a flashlight around.
“Oh what now,” I thought. My girlfriend is prone to hearing ghosts and noises and murderers. She shouldn’t have been outside in her underwear in the middle of the night.
“What the hell are you doing,” I asked.
“Look,” she said.
There was a chair pulled up in the alley to give someone a perfect vantage point to look into a crack beneath the blinds on our bedroom window.
“There was a man sitting in that chair watching me,” she said. “And he was touching himself. The dog heard the noises and I looked out the blinds and he ran off. I heard the noises too,” she said.
“Jesus Christ,” I said.
The next day we asked our neighbors about it and Jorge, one of the gay guys who lives upstairs, said that he saw a white guy about 6 feet tall, athletic build, leaving the driveway. Jorge was walking his dog and smoking a cigarette. He said that he had practiced reverse racism.
“Because the guy was white, I just assumed he was someone’s friend, just visiting somebody,” he said. “If the guy was black I would have known he was up to something. But the guy was white.”
I told our other neighbor Roberto what happened. He used to be a Sergeant in the Guatemalan army during the brutal civil war there. One night when he was drunk off Bud Lites he showed me a photo of his army days and told me that he had killed plenty of people during the war. His troops slept in the jungle and used giant palm fronds as umbrellas at night when it was raining. I took him around the side of our apartment and showed him the chair the peeping tom had pulled up.
“Hijo de la chingada,” he said. He told me in Spanish that if the guy showed up again to call him. He would run out and help me beat the guy up. He muttered some more obscenities in Spanish and kicked the dirt in frustration.
I went to the hardware store and bought some things. I wanted to make some booby traps. I kept thinking, What would Kevin in Home Alone do? What kind of booby traps did Kevin set up? I bought some nails, some fishing wire and fishing bells, barbed wire, a few small cacti, a motion sensor light and even found an infrared camera that is triggered by movement and body heat. It was $100 for the camera and I couldn’t afford it but I bought it anyway. My money had almost completely run out but I had stuff to make booby traps.
Underneath some ivy in the alleyway I hid dozens of crushed aluminum cans. The noise would alert me to the prowler. I put a Louisville Slugger baseball bat by the side door and gave my girlfriend a can of mace to put on her bedside table. I unscrewed a table leg and had it like a club on my bedside table in case I needed a second tool for bludgeoning. Across the alley I put strands of taut fishing wire with bells attached. I left the chair in the exact same place and hammered nails through the bottom so that they were barely visible above the surface of the seat cushion. If the peeping tom sat down again he would be in for a surprise. I told my neighbor Roberto about my nail idea and he laughed hysterically slapping me on the back. He liked my nail idea.
I set up the infrared camera. I tested it at night and then plugged it in and saw myself but I didn’t recognize myself. I looked like a blurry dark indistinguishable creature. The damn camera probably wouldn’t work. I later used the camera to film some footage of my girlfriend and I having sex but I didn’t tell her about it. I watched it when she was at work and it wasn’t bad.
I was getting off track. I came home from work and hauled the box of barbed wire to the side alley. Our neighbor had put black plastic garbage bags full of extra gardening mulch all along the alley. No one could get by, they’d be stymied by gardening mulch. Ah, fine with me. I got a beer from the store.