The Partridge Family

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We’re moving. We’re out of Recoleta, out of a building that doesn’t want our dog. Out of a building of angry faces – and into something better.

We hope.

We’d anticipated the expulsion from our apartment in Recoleta. The building’s bylaws say no dogs. We rented on the understanding that our dog, an obedient yet large and lovable mass of fur, was accepted.

Handshakes were made, money paid. And then the neighbors gave our canine the thumbs down and banded together to orchestrate our ouster. We thought of fighting. But in the end we decided that living with rich old fogies is like having your teeth drilled. Not fun. Not amusing. And not our game.

So months ago we started to search for a new pad. And luck would have it we found and settled on a promising place only days ago – a house in Colegiales. It is quieter and less snooty than Recoleta. It’s mostly houses. And ours has a garage to boot.

I love garages. My parents’ house in West Los Angeles has a big garage chockablock with stuff from decades of my parents’ travels and from their homelands in Argentina and England. When we were kids it was a den for many of the major changes in the lives of us five children, helped in a way by its nature. Garages are neither clean nor organized. You need space to build your own skateboard? Shift that chest over, line the bikes up over there and presto, you’ve got space. I built a skateboard so big it was like a moveable sidewalk. Oh the looks from the neighbors!

The garage became headquarters for my eldest brother’s ice cream business (and me and my other brother’s gluttonous raids of the freezer when he was out on his rounds) and later it was for his independent music label that produced Southern California punk bands. My dad at one point turned it into his architecture studio, and I played music in it. We all did in our attempts at punk rock. I tried my hand as a DIY bike and car mechanic. I moved a desk into the garage to write my university final on Shakespeare and then to take my first stab at journalism and fiction writing within its four unheated walls full of old furniture and boxes in the rafters packed with papers and photos from years before, my mother as a stage actress and my sisters living in southern England.

And now we have our very own garage. Yippee!

I’ll put my office in it at one end and leave the rest for the kids to play in, to roam and to dream. They’re already plotting to form their own band – the eldest girl on guitar and the middle boy on drums. The youngest girl wants to play the drums, too. Maybe she’ll go for the tambourine, what with her still only being two years old and all. Maybe they’ll make something of their band. Maybe they’ll become the new Partridge family? Well, not quite. We’re shy by two to make up a five-some and my wife is too shy to take on the part of the singer-keyboards-tambourine-percussionist mother Shirley Partridge. But that big multi-colored bus would sure be ace for traveling around Argentina. Maybe from concert hall to outdoor venue to Luna Park. Together and having a ball!

The Clash

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Is it time to move out of swanky Buenos Aires?

I’m not sure but my neighbors in my apartment building in upper-scale Recoleta are meeting downstairs to decide if we should stay or go. The reason? We have a dog and the building’s bylaws say no pets. Of course, if it were only our cat then nobody would be bitching. Or a bird, a fish, a mouse, a turtle. Even a snake. They’re all passable. But not a dog. That’s taking it too far.

Well, it’s running late and the doorman has come up to say that the discussion is heated. [continue reading…]

Third Time a Kill?

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I didn’t hear the full story until this year, about an event that shocked my mum at the time. It happened about 25 years ago when a neighbor in my hometown of Brentwood Glen, West L.A. decided he’d had enough of my two older brothers and me and the rest of our friends who with us ran wild (according to him) up and down our street. He threatened to take us out. It now sounds sort of cool to have been so bad that we drove a man to consider such extremes. A death threat! And him the hitman!

We didn’t get up to anything worse than most kids back then. Those were days when children still ran in the streets and didn’t get ferried by mom and dad to a full schedule of extracurricular activities in the safety of clubs, homes and schools. For us, the streets were our education and our playground. And our house and in particular our garage had become a choice place to hang out when we came in off the streets. My parents were extremely lax. We knew few boundaries other than to call home if you weren’t coming back at a reasonable hour. For the most part we were good. Yet for some reason we drove a man livid to the point of canvassing for our expulsion from the neighborhood. And then the death threat. It may have been the bonfires we made of leftover fireworks. Or the paper airplanes we lit on fire and threw off our roof. It may have been the half-pipe we put in front of our house for skateboarding. Or it may have been our attempts to make music, me on bass and my brothers on drums and vocals. It was punk. Other kids joined and we played fast and hard (and probably rather poorly, even though some of the kids did go on to make something out of it). My eldest brother turned the garage into the headquarters for his independent music label Upstart Records, producing Southern California punk bands like Red Scare, Circle One, Shattered Faith, Stalag 13, Hated Principles and Killroy. We filled the garage with a huge wooden stage that went concert to concert and then back to the garage and our jam sessions. Bands would spend the night at our house after concerts and my mum would make them scrambled eggs in the morning.

All this pissed off one man.

I can’t recall what happened to him and his threats. I think he finally moved away.

The episode is now back in my mind because it is to an extent repeating itself. The entire apartment building where I live in Buenos Aires seems to have it out for my family. The threat isn’t death. It’s eviction.

I have figured out that there are three or maybe four families in this posh building in this posh neighborhood – Recoleta – that want rid of us. The circumstances are not the same as my childhood. This time it is because we own a dog. She’s a lump of fur that does little more than sleep and hang out with the kids. She rarely barks and rarely moves, except when she greets us or anybody else at the door. Or when a crumb falls to the floor. Then she’s quicker than lightening. But a dog’s a dog and the building’s bylaws ban dogs and say that’s grounds for eviction.

Should we fight? Or should we just call it quits and let the boring and stuffy folk live with their own and keep to their own?

We’ve been through this once before, at our previous apartment where we lived after leaving our quiet home on the coast, our pine tree paradise. A woman of power, i.e. an oversized and rude lawyer, saw me and my dog – aka four-ton – enter the building when we moved in. She called the administration who called the doorman to verify the size. “Yeah, it’s big,” the doorman said. So the oversized lawyer called me and gave me 30 days to get rid of four-ton or move out. The reasons: dogs are mucky and belong in the countryside. I tried to point out that dogs are man’s best friend and have lived with them in harmony for centuries, except a smattering of pit bulls and a few other breeds. She didn’t listen and pressed for the dog’s ouster. I decided to investigate her claims and went to check out the bylaws. Sure enough, it said nothing admissible in court. The laws on dog possession were so nebulous that I chuckled and left even as the building manager said, “Yeah, but…” The dog population soon grew at the building and the oversized lawyer sought other ways to complain including by suing for emotional damage or something.

We left to enter a bigger battle.

Should we leave again?