If you want to bring a neighborhood down a peg in terms of attractiveness, livability and property values, nothing beats a run-down Winnebago.
It is like a giant billboard for shabbiness. The sides are high, blocking the view when it is parked in front of your house. The engine is loud, and throws off some intense, oily smoke. And because of the street cleaners, it moves around in the middle of the night, seemingly on its own, a quantum distribution pattern that, over time, resembles a fly buzzing around a turd. Or in this case, the turd is the one buzzing around.
And no matter how rusted, pitted and stained the outside is, you have to imagine the interior is worse. One imagines it to be like a bookmobile, a traveling lending library of mildew and seething biphenyl emissions that combine with fluorocarbons from its ancient rooftop air conditioner, rising into the atmosphere and jabbing holes in the ozone layer, while ruining the view down here.
The view, by the way, right in front of my house.
When it first showed up, my next door neighbor Mike and I met up by his driveway and gave the beast the once-over. The scratches on the bumper seemed to come from a troupe of baboons from a safari park, who, after they brutally humped the poor RV, were themselves attacked by some kind of large, predatory cat. The rear window was frosted out by hand, no longer clear but deeply scratched by steel wool or a wire brush, making visibility to the rear impossible. Then again, why would you want to see behind you when driving this thing? All you’d get would be a 16 by 9 view of angry homeowners, running into the street and shaking their fists, chasing you a short distance to be sure you weren’t going to try and park.
But parked it was, so Mike and I decided some homeless guy had moved in, and the bottle-and-can trade in our neighborhood would be slim pickings for a while.
Then we found out it belonged to our neighbor.
This is the same neighbor with the mean dog. The picket fence that’s loosely roped into position. The one who leaves an old toilet on the curb every six or eight months, that nobody picks up for at least three weeks. What the hell are they doing in the bathroom that they go through toilets like that?
I don’t want to name any names for fear of lawsuits (even though this article is completely factually accurate and any litigation would be thrown out of court), so for now, we’ll just call this neighbor S___. If the Winnebago is still here by Christmas, then I’ll tell everybody it’s Stuart and take my chances, but until then, let’s give him the benefit of the doubt.
Soon, S___ could be seen briskly walking to the Winnie and moving it. He does it often enough that the oil leak never creates a stain larger than, say, the vehicle’s shadow. My wish is that these gallons of sludge will find their way down into the La Brea oil yield before they hit the groundwater or drain into the ocean. Here’s hoping.
And so we adapted. Our jaw muscles developed nicely as we gritted our teeth every time we walked the dog. Worn things have the tendency to blend in after a while, and in the right light, sometimes it hardly resembled a crystal meth lab at all. And it was fun waking up in the middle of the night to the sound of the beast’s explosive backfire, imagining that it was really a gunshot and S___’s brains were slowly dripping down the insides of that frosted back window. Did I mention that it takes about ten minutes to warm up? On a hot summer evening, with the windows open, it’s a 96 decibel white noise generator, akin to trying to get to sleep with an idling chainsaw under your pillow.
Then, mysteriously, bit by bit, the Winnebago began to change. A rusty-looking color bookwormed up the sides, uneven, strange. One day it was up to the door handles, then next it was overhead. Could this be? Were our prayers being answered? Was this hideous blot on the Miracle Mile disintegrating before our eyes?
Of course not, dammit, it was only getting worse: S___ had painted it gold.
Gilt-y as charged
Some of the spraycans contained shiny paint, some matte. None of it makes sense. Maybe he did it so he could inhale the paint fumes. Maybe he thought it would increase the thing’s resale value to, I don’t know, fifteen dollars. Theories abound, but no one has thought to ask him why. The answer has a very good chance of being incredibly stupid.
So the next time your neighbor sculpts a topiary of Angelina Jolie as Laura Crofft, or paints their house chartreuse, or puts a John McCain yard sign at eye level outside your kitchen window, take a breath. Get into your car and drive down to the Miracle Mile. And worship at the Temple of the Golden Eyesore.
