The Things That Go Bump in the Night Are the Ghosts of a Community

At 3:35 a.m. I heard a sound, just a slight metallic snick, but there was a tension in it that cut through the night. It was the sound of someone trying to be quiet.

In my neighborhood these days, you listen for such things. In the core of Hollywood’s Redevelopment Project, only a block from Hollywood Boulevard, I am living in a dead zone. What was a community less than a year ago has become rootless, abandoned--a no-man’s-land that creates its own disquieting vigilence.

In sleep, the brain gauges the quality of sound--the shattered bottle, the shouted curse. That little snick of metal, so charged and tiny, woke me instantly; it was right next door.

I lifted out of bed and peered through the window. The dark shadow of the house across the drive loomed through the trees. The moonlight fell on the figures of three men running silently across the roof not 30 feet from where I stood. They looked big, all of them, and were moving with coordinated, silent purpose.

I padded to the telephone and dialed 911. A woman answered, and through the roar of my pulse racing in my ears, I gave her the details. In five minutes a patrol car arrived, and two officers, blue uniforms blending into the night, crept through the hedges. In short order they had the men spread-eagled on the ground.

“Are these the men you saw?” a patrolman asked. In truth I hardly recognized them. In the glare of the headlights, the intruders were transformed. One was old and hunched over, another clutched a shopping bag containing, inexplicably, a steam iron. The third was a skinny youth, shivering with the cold. He said, “It’s 4 in the morning, where are we supposed to go?”

The police did not care or question or show the faintest sign of interest. “Go,” they said. “You can’t stay here.” The men, with weary resignation, drifted into the night.

In my neighborhood, in the past year, this scene has happened many times. Sometimes the police are slower and the men are bigger and sometimes they get away. Sometimes the intruders are children on bicycles and often the houses are invaded in the light of day. It does not matter--they are empty anyway.

In my block alone, there are any number of hide-outs from which to choose. They stand in a row, solid, two-story family homes, boarded up, waiting for the wrecking ball--a neighborhood of haunted houses.

For me, this has become the face of redevelopment. In the beginning the homeowners stood together, committed to stay. The first sold from greed, the rest from fear; now almost all are gone. Only a few remain, in houses like mine that, like the rest, will be torn down soon to make room for more apartments.

When householders leave, the transformation happens quickly. A lock is jimmied, a board pried back and a shadow community moves into the vacuum. In the wisps of smoke from a chimney, the sound of low voices behind a garage door, in the flicker of a candle in an upstairs room you can see the haunting. So quickly a sense of surveillance--of watching, and being watched--takes the place of watching out for neighbors.

After the police had left, I took a walk inside the house next door. The walls were smashed, and a river of trash flowed down the stairwell into the living room. Someone had used the kitchen for a toilet. It was hard to believe that barely a month ago, good friends had lived there.

Crises gather, then level off. After a dozen midnight rousings and countless rousts, I stopped calling the police. What was the point?

For a week or so, behind the plywood windows, a homeless family was living in the house next door. They cleaned up the yard a little; the cops left them alone. Then one night, as silently as they had come, they disappeared. I was sorry to see them go. For a time, we had shared an understanding, had become neighbors of a sort.

After all, we are the same. All of us who remain in single-family homes among the proliferating apartment buildings in this area of Hollywood have become transients, occupying haunted houses, waiting for the knock on the door.

I got my eviction notice just the other night. “Go,” said the legal paper, without care or question or the faintest sign of interest. “You can’t stay here.”