Moreover, there were nervous suspicions that the bracelet wearer made extra money by allowing pornographers to film in his house. These fears were apparently confirmed when two movie stars performed on his front porch, subjecting a helmet-wearing kid to a special kind of class unlikely to be taught in the Los Angeles school system.
After this happened, the tinderbox that was Shady Lane blew up. On a dark, dreary night, one of the cul-de-sac denizens tried to steal a neighbor's car, so that we heard tires screeching, and a woman screaming, and a man hollering something about a gun, and then came the long-awaited calamitous howl of the Middles emerging from their homes and descending upon the dead-end like the Furies. My neighbors, reading this, might perhaps say that I exaggerate when I describe this rout. Yet I still remember the wail of police sirens and the shrieking and the silky terriers' yodeling, and the LAPD helicopter hammering the air with its propeller and beaming its searchlights into our windows as it hunted after the armed suspect.
In the days that followed, the more organized of us Middles laid siege upon the Renters, by calling lawyers and having voluble discussions about Temporary Restraining Orders in earshot of the cul-de-sac, and otherwise expressing our litigious desire to live on a violence-free Shady Lane.
So then the Renters did move out en masse.
And coinciding with this exodus was a sudden spike in Studio City property values: All these rich people from Hollywood started moving in.
In these Upper Classers came, with their new-home construction and amazing film credits and surreally beautiful wives. Some of the shabbier charms of Shady Lane, in the forms of dented Fords and scraggly begonias, soon evaporated; replacing the idiosyncratic pedaling of the intoxicated Renter were the incursions of candy-bright Porsches and astonishing SUVs. Still, all seemed pleasant and peaceful and vertically mobile; despite the jealous turnings of my bowels (my Toyota suddenly looked disgusting), I didn't hear one word of Middle Class rancor.
But after a few months of serenity, one of the most majestic of the new Uppers hosted a momentous Winter Holiday party. That evening, silken ladies and their gents appeared in our midst and shimmered into the biggest house on the block. Canapes were served; soft rock music floated out of the windows like a benediction. The party ended late at night. Now dozens of alien Uppers stood out on the street, waiting for their cars to be picked up by the valet service employees who ran all about Shady Lane. The Mids could not drive down their own street! The Ups had colonized the block!
