He came into our lives as all good things do - in the midst of being evicted from the first floor apartment he shared with a woman I believe was named Faye, or maybe Tammy or Trish. We would see him from time to time, wandering the open courtyard of the apartment complex, circling the rectangular swimming pool, rehearsing choice obscenities for use during future occasions of need. His lazy left eye would sweep the faded green doorways of his former neighbors, doors all closed, all locked, the hospitality of the poor families and even poorer singles dried up like desert flowers. Muttering, he would circle on, a dark moon in steady orbit.
His name was Danny.
I sorta kinda hope he's dead now...
In the fall of 2003 I was living in an apartment in Valley Village, California, on Burbank Avenue, with my friend Dustin. It hadn't been our first choice, or really much of a choice at all, but our lives were such at the time that we were in no position to complain. Valley Village is a nondescript plot of the San Fernando Valley, west of Burbank and just north of Studio City. There wasn't much in the neighborhood - just a laundromat, an El Pollo Loco and a small Jewish market that sold Bazooka Joe bubble gum packs with the comics written in Hebrew, but it was close enough to the 101 and Dustin and I found a good pizza place on the way to North Hollywood. We made due. He was a struggling actor and I was working for a management company in West Los Angeles. Nothing was great and nothing was all that bad.
Then we got a refrigerator.
(The following is an excerpt from an email I wrote, dated November 3rd, 2003):
A few days after moving into our apartment, it occurred to Dustin and me that a refrigerator would be a fantastic way to keep food and beverages nice and cold…and a USED refrigerator purchased anonymously through a cryptic Penny Saver ad would somehow be even better. So, to spare you the details of Dustin and I cruising around Reseda looking for some guy’s apartment for a half an hour before finally realizing that the address we had been given was for a Self-Storage shed, we eventually met some nice Spanish fellows willing to deliver us the Whirlpool Princess Series Refrigerator which now sits proudly in the corner of our kitchen. AND, as an added bonus, they even offered to hose it down before delivery (he even showed me the hose). What could be finer?
So the next day, the Spanish fellows are slowly hefting our brand new used Princess Series up the steps leading to our apartment when a black fellow and his Caucasian lady friend come running over. “Hey!” said the black fellow; “didn’t you see the sign? We got a refrigerator we’re trying to sell! Exact same one! How much did you pay for this? Don’t pay them yet! Come and take a look at our refrigerator!” Now, I’ve never sold major appliances out of my storage shed before, but I would imagine that people actively attempting to undercut you in the middle of a delivery is a fair rarity, and the Spanish fellows seemed to be at a bit of a loss. To be fair, so did Dustin and I. Essentially we were faced with a simple judgment call: which shady refrigerator vendor was slightly less shady? We went with the Spanish guys, and, knowing what I now know about Danny, that may have been the single best decision of my young life. And besides, the Spanish guys gave us a two-month warranty. In WRITING, no less. Almost 40% of which was in English.
The fire sale, it turned out, did not end with major appliances. In the days that followed, Danny would routinely stop me as I came and left my apartment.
"Got a great chair! You need a chair, I bet?"
"No thank you."
"You need a lamp, though, I can tell."
"I have a lamp."
"Yeah, but you need this bathmat I got, man. You don't even know how much you need it."
The extended process of selling his worldly possessions and moving out of the apartment he had apparently long ago stopped paying rent on dragged out for weeks. We accepted this phase of Danny without much complaint because it was, by and large, a harmless smear on the periphery. He was basically a friendly homeless man living inside our apartment complex offering us used spatulas and biodegraded laundry hampers at low low prices.
Then one day Dustin and I came back from the grocery store to find a black trash bag tied to the knob of our door, as if we had been paid a visit by an out-of-season, low-income version of Santa Claus. Except, of course, that the real Santa brings tidings of gladness and joy and both of us were suspecting, in a best case scenario, to find a bag full of human feces. Eventually we (meaning Dustin) worked up the nerve to pull the bag off the doorknob and glance inside.
"Tapes," said Dustin, holding out the open bag. "Two tapes?"
There was no note, just two VHS cassette tapes. Of course we had to see what was on the tapes. And of course it was hardcore pornography.
"What the...fuck?" Dustin glanced back and forth from the TV to the now empty trash bag, as if somewhere in the vapor trail between the two he might find further clues. "Who the hell left this on our door?"
"Maybe it was a mistake?" The picture flickered with blue and green streaks, white points of light like electrical locusts nibbling on the edges of the frame. It was clearly a tape that had been used and re-used multiple times. The porn itself seemed dated, the hair and clothing styles seemed to place it in the late 80s. "Do they do porn delivery here? Is that a thing?"
"No," said Dustin. "Porn delivery is not a thing."
The next day Danny appeared at our door. To put him fully in your mind, as a man and not the mythical creature he'll soon come to resemble, he was middle aged at that time, likely approaching 50, with close cropped black hair and a clean shaven face. His left eye was lazy, constantly pointing at unoccupied corners. His skin was cocoa-colored except for his hands, which were rough and gray, the color and texture of cement.
"Hello, I am so sorry to bother you." If I ever asked him where he was from I've since forgotten that detail. His accent was simultaneously lyrical and staccato, the words catching and holding in his throat in an odd, off-time pattern. In my mind he was the real life deposed Nigerian Prince of spam e-mail fame. "I am moving out, you know, and my girlfriend - why does she do this, I tell her no - my girlfriend turned off the phone too early. I have a phone, but I am out of minutes and I need to make a call. I was wondering if I could use your phone for just a moment?"
One of my failings as a human being is that I have a hard time saying "no" to something if I can't think of a compelling reason in that moment why "no" is the right answer. So while I very much wanted to say "no" to Danny's request and send him on his way I couldn't think of a solid enough reason why "no" was the answer just then. Instead, I just pointed him towards the telephone and sat down on the couch, presuming whatever was about to happen was going to be brief and not require any further interaction from me.
Danny took the phone and made a call. For twenty minutes he stood in the kitchen arguing with an unseen third party, running his chalky hands through his wiry hair, sometimes whispering, sometimes making imploring gestures at Dustin and myself, as if to say "Can you believe this bullshit?" And no - we could not believe this bullshit. Once that was done, he looked up from the phone. "I just need to check my messages, okay?"
And again, the answer I was looking for then and there was "not okay" but why was it not okay? I had no place to be. I had no phone calls to place. So I nodded.
Eventually Danny returned the cordless phone to its base and then turned to face the pair of us, sitting awkwardly in the living room, pretending to watch a baseball game on a 13 inch television. But he wasn't looking at us as if we were two strangers who had courteously (and against better judgment) let him in to use the phone. Something had happened during the course of that phone call - what exactly, I still couldn't tell you. It's like my life is the Nixon White House tapes and there's an 18 and a half minute gap where Danny somehow willed himself into becoming an accepted part of our daily lives.
"This girl," he says, inviting himself to sit down on the couch. "Oh this girl. She leave me three messages! She's a lawyer from New York. Met her at the gas station yesterday. Oooooh, does she want to fuck my brains out! Ooooh this girl is fine. You wouldn't believe it."
To my credit, no, I would not. And there was plenty to not believe. Danny came over almost every night after that one, always asking to check his messages "real quick" and always hanging around after that was done to talk about the cars he owned (but couldn't drive because insurance premiums are unreasonable and also the cops told him he'd be in trouble if they caught him driving without insurance again), the women that wanted to have sex with him (which was a shockingly long list - don't be surprised if you were on there and didn't know it) and how great Jesus Christ is.
"Oh man, God is glorious. I'm so good right now. I couldn't drive man. The tires on my van were all popped. My girlfriend's son, I told him he couldn't smoke pot in my house no more, so he popped all my tires. And now I got four new tires for $40! For my van. I got a Mercedes van. My friend hooked me up. I'm so blessed."
Danny's God was a morally dubious God who always came through in the clutch with discount tires and forged inspection stickers and totally supported Danny's efforts to secretly grow marijuana in his blind mother's backyard. In between saying things like "Let me tell you, she's a lesbian now, but she tell me - all the time she tell me - she gonna come back and I'm gonna be the first guy she does," and "I was married, but I wasn't MARRIED-married, you know?" Danny would dedicate a few minutes each night to trying to bring Dustin to the Lord. (For some reason he never bothered with me, which I can choose to take as a compliment or a massive insult. I'm still undecided on that.)
Listening from the sidelines, I couldn't help but feel like Danny's vision of God sounded a lot like The Great Gazoo from The Flintstones: "He's got powers, man. He can do things. I mean, you don't know what he's gonna do, like, ever, but he can do some things. You just gotta trust in him, man. You need money? He'll get you money. You need girls? He's got it. Nice car? Done. You know, I mean sometimes he does bad stuff, too, and you're like Why the fuck you doin' this to me now, man? but it's all good. Sometimes he gives you a car, sometimes he steals your car. Sometimes he give you a girl, sometimes she's a stupid bitch. Hahahahaha! But you see? He does all that. Glory to God!"
As time went by I became increasingly cool towards Danny. Frankly, I pretty much hated him. He had been evicted months earlier and still saw a need to stop by our apartment to use the phone, to make himself mayonnaise and relish sandwiches, to even use our shower on one spectacularly disturbing occasion. Eventually, I stopped answering the door when he rang. Sensing this growing hostility, he began to shift all of his attention to Dustin.
I came home one night to find Dustin and Danny talking in the kitchen.
"It's not a big deal, but you know how it is," Danny was saying. "I'm too nice. People take advantage of me and now my credit...you know? You wouldn't have to do anything, just sign. I promise, nothing bad. But I need this place. I need some help, man."
I caught Dustin's eye. "Yeah," he said, pulling at his chin and shaking his head. "I just can't. I'm sorry. I just...I just can't."
Danny was asking Dustin to co-sign a lease with him because Danny's credit was less than stellar. In a spasm of guilt-induced insanity, Dustin did agree to let Danny borrow his car to "run a quick errand." When Danny didn't come back that night...or the next day...we both sort of presumed that our joint relationship with Danny had come to it's natural conclusion: with Danny stealing Dustin's '94 GEO Metro. We were wrong though. Two days later Danny resurfaced. He'd been arrested while driving a different car - a stolen car - going where and doing what I don't know. I didn't ask. I was long past the point of caring.
That event more or less marked the end of the Danny Era of our lives. I suspect that people like Danny are highly acute to the flagging tolerance levels of the people whose lives they manage to infiltrate, and I think he understood that those two new kids up on the second floor were just as dried up and wilted as the rest of that desert complex. So he disappeared shortly thereafter. A few months later he called Dustin and claimed to be at a Christian Boot Camp becoming a minister. I know earlier I said that I wished he was dead, but truthfully I hope that the God camp thing worked out for him. And why wouldn't it? God is glorious! He makes new tires out of nothingness and turns lesbians into raging hetero nymphos. He can do some things, man. He can do some things...