I grew up on Garden View from the time I was four through eleven years old, in an apartment building owned by my grandparents. My mother had remarried so I lived with her and my new stepfather. My uncle who had just graduated high school, lived in the last apartment with my grandparents. There was a total of four apartments, each two stories with a small planter box outside the front door. Bedrooms were upstairs with a restroom, and downstairs was the living room, kitchen, and another half bath.
The neighbors on the right were a Latino family from Mexico living in a baby blue house with white trim. They had a large backyard spotted with fruit trees and a double clothes line. There was the father, mother, and two kids, a boy and a girl, Anaste, who we called Zisi. She was right around my age. The boy was older by about 4 years so he never played with me. A long paved driveway with a beige brick wall separated the two residences.
To the left was another single family dwelling that had two teenage boys. They moved around the time I turned 7. I never forgot this time period, not because they moved, but rather because what happened next door at Zisi’s.
If you grow up in Los Angeles, or the LA area, you don’t really have extreme weather conditions, like say Green Bay, Wisconsin in the winter, or Houston, Texas in the summer. Nevertheless, it still gets hot enough. For a Los Angelican, 95 is pretty hot and if the nighttime is still hovering around 80, its pretty warm. Growing up in South Gate, which is a suburb of LA, there were no air conditioning units I recall in the nearby houses or our own. This meant windows were opened at night. In the mid 70′s, South Gate was still a place you could have a window open at night and count on only the cool air to enter.
On a particularly warm night, windows were unlatched, a slight breeze managed to stir but the night remained heavy with warmth. I finally managed to get to sleep after tossing and turning, trying to become comfortable in my bed. I’d throw the covers off only to retrieve them because I had sweated and was now cold. Sleep came only to be interrupted.
Screams. Blood curdling. Dreaming? Waking? Not sure. I had watched a scary movie the night before with my uncle who absolutely loved horror movies. It was eerily silent, then I heard soft scraping, a door creaking. I was awake now. Should I check the door. I could pad over in my bare feet on the carpet, no one would hear me. If someone came in, I could jump behind the dresser really fast. I was quick, I thought to myself. I heard some whispering and waited by the door, still unsure whether to open it. The whispers faded, I heard creaking from the stairs and the front door being opened. I couldn’t wait any longer, I had to know what was happening. It was still pitch dark out and there were no lights, except from the street to see what hour it was and I had no clock in my room.
I cracked open the door and peeked out. My eyes were pretty adjusted by now, but it was darker in the hallway. I could make out a shadow against the door.
“Why are you up?”, came the voice of my mother.
It startled me as my imagination had dreamed up some huge monster at the door.
“I thought I heard a noise”, I replied.
“Go back to bed”, she said.
I said nothing, and started to close the door. I could see another figure come through the doorway. I knew it was my stepfather because I could hear him and my mother speaking in hushed voices. I ran softly to their bedroom and looked out the window. Nothing, couldn’t see anything. Wait, there was a light on next door, at Zisi’s. There were more voices. I could hear someone coming up our stairs so I tiptoed quickly out the door and made my way to the bathroom.
“You’re still up?” , she asked.
“I have to go potty.”
Just a look, a stare, quite weird actually. Something wasn’t right about the look on my mother’s face but I didn’t know why or what it meant. She passed me and went on to her bedroom.
I don’t know how much time passed, it couldn’t have been more than a couple of minutes, I heard the sound of sirens. Both of my parents went outside and I followed, in my Spiderman pajamas and green fabric slippers. An ambulance had pulled up, two men hurried towards the front door. Another rescue truck pulled up and out jumped another set of emergency workers. Voices led them around to the back. Suddenly a rolling tray with a curtain draped over a hump was bouncing and clacking from the driveway to the sidewalk. The four men made some motions and the tray went up, down, the wheels disappeared and the whole gurney was swallowed up by the ambulance. Lights and sirens going, it tore off down the street.
It was such a bizarre scene to me. Life had been relatively quiet, minus the car accident I experienced with my mom a couple of years before. Nothing really happened on our street. My mother would warn me not to go far or I could be kidnapped. My grandmother watched Eyewitness News on Channel 7 every night. I saw the crazy things that could happen but I didn’t know they could happen right on our block.
Daybreak finally came and it was fearfully quiet around the house. I went over to see if Zisi could come out and play, but no one was home. Where was my friend? Where was her family? I asked my mom, but she wouldn’t say anything, just mumbled distractedly. Morning wore on to afternoon. Afternoon turned into night and still no Zisi.
The next day I went over to my grandparents to see my uncle. He played in a band as a drummer and I wanted to be just like him. He taught me how to tie my shoes, gave me all my Hot Wheels cars, and was just plain cool. Richard, uncle Richard, he would tell me what happened.
“Uncle, do you know where my friend Zisi is?” I asked him after he managed to give me a big noogee.
“Well kid, I’m not sure you want to know”, he answered very seriously.
“What do you mean? Is it because I’m just a kid?”, I asked as inquisitively as ever. “What were all those noises? Did you hear that scream?”
He looked at me as if a cow had just sprouted wings and started flying, his face blank as if he didn’t know what to say or do. After several moments of silence and a couple of false starts, his jaw and voice box started working properly.
“Jr”, he started, “something terrible happened last night. Your mom told me not to say anything, so you have to swear not say I told you.”
“Ok, I swear to keep it our secret”, I said.
“Last night, a burglar broke into Zisi’s house. The burglar hurt Zisi’s mom and they’re at the hospital. We think she’s going to be ok.”
I didn’t know what to make of his reply. I couldn’t imagine what kind of hurt he meant. It would be a couple of weeks before I learned that the intruder had tried to slit her throat and had narrowly missed her jugular vein. Apparently the master bedroom was splattered in blood, the sheets soaked in it, the family distraught, and everyone’s life changed instantly, including mine.
I remember going over and wanting to look at the bedroom. There was a big stain on the wall where someone had cleaned up a dark liquid that had splashed on the wall. Brown spots were smudged in the carpet. My friend really didn’t want to talk much about it. I, on the other hand, was grotesquely intrigued. But I had to force myself to ignore what had happened because Zisi was my friend and she was not intrigued.
Shortly thereafter, about two months later, the family moved. Zisi’s mother survived the attack. There were rumors that the father had assaulted the mother, that it was friend of the father’s, that the father really wanted to kill her, he was a drunk, and so on. I never learned if any of this was true. My friend and her family moved from Los Angeles to Imperial Valley and I never heard from her again.
My life changed after that night. I knew now that even though my uncle and I liked to watch monster movies, monsters were real. Maybe they didn’t look like Dracula or The Werewolf, maybe they looked like you and me, but they were real. They went bump in the night, and they could slice you open like a package of bacon.
I still leave my window open some nights, but not many. Nowadays an air conditioner works way better than mother nature.
Leave a Comment
No comments yet.
Comments RSS TrackBack Identifier URI
