The SoCal Years 5: Meditation On An Unlocked Door

The Riveting Adventures of A Filipina-American Actor-Girl in the Southern California Jungle

The SoCal Years hubs comprise a series of narrative essays from the late 1990s, pre-9/11, immediately after grad school when, knowing she would run screaming back to the East Coast in the end, a young-ish Pinay New Yorker, armed with her new Drama MFA, decided nonetheless to dip her toes into the Hollywood swamp.

My housemate leaves the front door unlocked.

She'd told me one day that the people who used to live next door were drug dealers—the police came around one time and got them out. Used to be about 12 of them living there, not all blood-related. One had been sleeping on a bedroll in the laundry closet.

I used to come home after dark, suddenly look over and see the glow of a cigarette from their porch, startling in the stillness.

That she leaves the front door unlocked, coming in or out, is therefore something of a mystery, and causing a bit of stress. One day this spring I woke at eight in the morning to an insistent knocking on my bedroom door. Thought it was her, got up sleepily and opened it. Three strange men in white. They'd come in the unlocked front door, walked upstairs and knocked. Russian, didn't speak hardly a word of English. Turned out to be three perfectly nice painters I never knew were coming.

It's a frequent occurrence, this habit of having service people come to the house with no one to meet them, usually surprising me. And it's generally her parents who do the scheduling, and either fail to tell her, or trust, unfortunately, that she'll tell me. It is, however, impossible to be angry with her. She's the sweetest, albeit almost the densest, human being I've ever met. A talented artist. Holds down two jobs. Recently found Jesus.

(I told a friend who asked, "Oh, was He missing?")

• • • • • • • • • • • •

She was devastated and apologetic. I got gifts every day until I begged her to stop. She promised to lock the front door from then on. Well, her intentions were good.

One day this month I came downstairs and found another painter (who'd been doing the outside of the units in the complex), painting our wide-open front door. Chinese, didn't speak a word of English. He mimed that he'd rung the bell. I didn't want to assume that he had a key to the house, so I assumed that he'd just unlatched an unlocked front door.

One morning last week I got up, butt-nekid (on hot California summer nights it's insane to sleep with anything unnecessary touching one's moist skin, and I'm not a big fan of sleeping in air-conditioning), and there his little face was, at my second-story windowpane, pretending not to look in.

• • • • • • • • • • • •

I don't know that I'm unduly modest. Heck, as a concert dancer a couple of years back, when dressing room space was at a premium, the women used to take care of personal hygiene matters in front of the straight men in the company. I'm sure the difference is that I like to choose when to reveal my private parts and to whom.

A bit bizarre I suppose to admit that I, with my Taurus moon, who love all things sensual (food, sex, music, creature comforts) can be such a prude, depending on who the object of my prudishness might be. Go figure. ◊

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