The Neighbors : The Stories Behind the Doors

WHAT MAKES A NEIGHBORhood? Drive down any residential block in Los Angeles and the dominant impression is one of closed doors and windows. The anonymity of cars in driveways, the similarly manicured lawns and bushes, the hum of air conditioners. But what goes on inside the houses? The Times chose one block, notable perhaps only for its middle-class homes and its variety of ages and ethnic groups, and asked its occupants to open their doors. What makes a neighborhood is the people behind the doors. Here are the stories of the people on one block of North Beachwood Drive.

HIAM BARSOM IS 27 AND A PALESTINIAN IMMIGRANT FROM Jerusalem. “At first, it was difficult,” she says. “I can’t understand most of the people.” But she has her family. She lives with her in-laws, husband and three children directly across the street from her brother-in-law and his family.

In fact, her family arranged Hiam’s marriage. She came to this country, in 1980, as a virgin. She had never seen her prospective bridegroom. “But I liked him,” she says, smiling. She has had three children in seven years, and her work at home is unrelenting. Hiam often has up to 30 people for the family Sunday dinner. A few weeks back, her sister-in-law gave a party. “Three days we were cooking,” says Hiam. “I manage.” She laughs. “This is our life.” And she does it all with an ease and dignity that puts less effort to shame.

Hiam is aware of the attractions and dangers of American culture for her children. “It’s very hard here. We’re always worried about our kids. This is a drug culture. Everything is open. You can even call the police here on your mom and dad.” As her children squabble over chocolate, she says, “We don’t like them to go and date. Our people, they like to get married from each other. You have to live with your family until you are married.”

Sometimes, across the street, her brother-in-law locks his doors to keep his daughters inside. They hang on the barred door and look out at America.

ELENA CHICAS IS 51, SINGLE, FROM EL SALvador and the mother of four grown children. She did not marry their father because he was “always thinking of other women.” She lives most of the week in a converted garage behind the house where she works as a housekeeper but spends the other two days in East Los Angeles. “At my other place, there is much traffic. Here, there is little. At my place, there is always much music. All night long. From all the apartments. Here it is very quiet.”

The trees and birds on the block remind her of her native land. “I find the garden charming. I don’t have a garden at my other house. For me this is a very calm place. I feel safe to walk.” She does wish she could be closer to people on the block. “I am lonely,” she says, because most of the neighbors don’t speak Spanish. But many wave and smile; she says she knows they want to talk, but can’t.

“To have a good life, it is necessary to have work,” she says. “Without money, there is nothing but sadness and bad thoughts. And the faith in God is necessary. All goes well when we have faith.”

JOHN FLEISCHER HAS GROWN A FOREST. (His daughter, Kristina, 7, is at left.) He has a giant Sequoia; a Bishop pine; several kinds of cedars, including Italian and Alaskan; a redwood; acacias; a Norfolk Island pine; Alberta spruce, and a Douglas fir, not to name them all. To help the rarer species thrive, he keeps the environment moist, though he thinks himself lucky because the alluvial plain keeps the water table pretty high. He hates the “hot, dry winds” that killed his blueberries. Fleischer, who is 40, seems gratified by the fact that he has created this almost secret environment for himself. “My background is,” he says, “the individual goes off alone.”

He puts out 40 pounds of acorns at a time for the fox squirrels. Inside his house, he has a raccoon hat, a cowhide on the bed to keep him warm--his wife won’t use it--and Herman the Elkhead, who presides over the bed. One year he burned coal in his fireplace just to see if he could do it. He courted his wife, Georgia, by bringing her a practical gift--a piece of rope. It was, he says, a “nest token,” like a bird brings to its prospective mate.

JIM KELLER, A FIREMAN, IS TRYING TO TURN his old house, which he doesn’t like, into a new one. Keller, who always goes by his last name, has installed dropped ceilings so that he can have forced-air heating; he has added bathrooms and painted everything that is paintable. He’s always carrying furniture in and out because he’s painting. He and his wife want to move. But because of all Keller’s projects, it might take us “another five or 10 years,” she says.

“I’m very, very, very conservative,” he says.

“Redneck, right-wing,” says his wife. She looks at him fondly.

“Basically the salad bowl is pushing me out of my birthplace,” he says. “I’m not living in the city by choice, I’m living in the city for convenience. This street, it’s nice, but you’re surrounded. There’s a cancer out there, and it’s going to take over. From here to the freeway you got to go through Thailand, Korea, Guatemala and whatever else you run into.”

At one time Keller and his wife spent up to $500 a weekend to party on their boat. Now they are saving for a move to Thousand Oaks or even farther afield.

“I MYSELF AM HEAVEN AND HELL,”GORDON GOLDSTONEquotes his own slightly altered version of “The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.” Gordon, 64, has been confined to a wheelchair ever since he had spinal surgery. His legs are “not paralyzed,” he snorts. “They just don’t work too good.” His face is pasty from lack of sun. He often falls out of his wheelchair and is unable to get back in because his upper-body strength has deteriorated. “I die a little every time I look at my chair.” Before, he had to be strong “because it helps when you move a half-ton of equipment across the floor.” Gordon was a boiler mechanic and “pretty macho. I didn’t take any lip.” And he hates accepting assistance from his female neighbor. “Nah,” he says, “I’ll get a man.” And he does.

Miriam, who is 63, and Gordon recently celebrated their 39th wedding anniversary. “It’s a toss-up which of us it’s hardest for,” Miriam says. Other than for an occasional weekend in Las Vegas, she is scared to leave Gordie alone. “He used to be able to do so many things,” she sighs, then smiles ruefully. “Just when we were coming to these wonderful years.”

JOYCE SUNILA, A WRITER, IS 43; CRAIG HOLT, a film editor, is 36. They met through one of Joyce’s contacts in the movie business. Moving onto this block represents a lot of firsts for them: his first movie, their first house and, a few months later, their first baby, Paige.

They didn’t know a soul when they moved to the neighborhood, but everyone was immediately friendly. They like it because, Joyce says, it is “not too yuppie. It’s really an immigrant block.” Some of the young girls from Hiam’s extended family down the block came over one day and turned everything upside down. They were “darling with the baby,” says Joyce. “They stopped short of looking in the laundry hamper,” adds Craig. The couple also like the age mixture on the block. A nearby 90-year-old woman plays with their baby. Though, eventually they may move to a bigger house, “emotionally” they want to stay.

A DRAINPIPE HANGS ASKEW FROM THEWHITES’ TWO-STORY FRAME HOUSE. Inside, piles of books and papers lie everywhere, chaotic evidence of a rampant intellectual curiosity. In the space of two minutes, her words tumbling over one another, Susan White (above), a paralegal in her 40s, mentions an Isabel Allende book, various articles from The New Yorker and her imminent departure to the hairdresser. Her hands flutter over her hairdo. “I just melted in the rain yesterday.”

Her husband, Peter, is a transportation engineer for the City of Los Angeles, plotting out bike paths and the like. He sits at the dining room table, his hair wildly spiky, his face florid, his eyes bloodshot. His gaze is fixed on the TV, but he is not amused. Sometime before, when Peter was asked how he was, he answered with a twisted smile, his manner touchingly febrile. “Terrible, just terrible,” he said.

Two days later, Susan calls. The voice is choked, the tears explosive. “It’s all a sham,” she gasps. “I can’t talk in front of him. We can’t talk to each other. It’s all been a horrible mistake. We read. Oh, we read. But we never talk.”

Their son, Michael, 17, who tests as gifted, once placed an animal skull on his neighbor’s fence, then watched to see the reaction. He spied on his parents’ garden parties with a telescope from an upstairs window. Yet he has a sweet smile and cried when his cat was hit by a car.

“We were a tight triumvirate,” says Susan.

Susan loves the neighborhood, “but I’ve never liked the house.” It is situated right over an old creek. When it rains, the basement fills and puts out the pilot light. Then a sump pump is necessary to get rid of the water. “I’m going to be the one who has to leave. Peter will never leave. They’ll have to drag him out.”

Soon after, Susan filed for divorce and Peter moved out. She quotes Carlos Fuentes: “Loneliness is an absence of time.” “To me,” she says, “that means time not shared.”REBECCA GREENBERG IS 5. SHE DOES NOT remember anything but this neighborhood. At 1, she toddled in diapers down past the Palestinian families’ houses and made friends with them. At 2 she went trick-or-treating; Eleanor Bell gave her a quarter. At 3 she slipped valentines under Virginia Mann’s door. At 5 she takes her 1-year-old neighbor for a walk, rides her scooter and longingly watches the older kids play. This is what she says about her neighborhood: “It’s a pretty one. And there’s a lot of nice people. I think it’s great!”

STATISTICS SHOW THAT MORE AND MORE AMERICANS ARE living alone. This block belies that fact, and Eleanor Bell, 74, belies another statistic as well. Her son, George, 37, lives with her. So does another adult, Victoria Haupenthal, 33, who once, back in the ‘50s, was the 5-year-old who lived next door. She had stayed in touch all those years and now chooses to live with the Bells.

Eleanor used to be on an oxygen tank day and night. Above the plastic tube on her face, her eyes were frightened. But now her health has improved. “George has been so wonderful with her,” says a neighbor.

Their house is immaculate, the kitchen counters uncluttered. In contrast, George is all sloppiness and impulse. When his van was recently broken into, his curses resounded through the neighborhood. He smokes, but because of Eleanor’s health, he is careful to do so only in his room or outdoors. Yet he interrupts Eleanor’s stories with a dismissive gesture, reminiscent of Marlee Matlin’s most violent scenes in “Children of a Lesser God.” Vickireacts to his differences with good humor. “He’s weird. But we all enjoy each other’s company. We each have our own interests; we respect each other’s privacy.”

George is the neighbor on whom Gordon relies most often to haul him off the floor and into his wheelchair.

“I’M JUST FANATIC ABOUT MY KIDS,”IRENE HANSEN FERNANdez says. “I love them to pieces.” Irene has brought up her sons--16-year-old Shane and 10-year-old Duane--to have values. Irene believes in God, in living one day at a time and in the importance of listening to her children. She is Danish and married to a Filipino. They chose Los Angeles as a compromise between their native cultures. Now, after many years of marriage, he has returned to the Philippines, suffering, Irene says, from a mid-life crisis.

The skin around her eyes looks collapsed, but her voice has a calm, self-contained quality. “We had all these plans. Oh God, it’s so hard.” When he first left, she was depressed. “Finally Shane said he couldn’t handle it. I started turning my life around again because I didn’t like it either.” She cocks her head and smiles as she listens to the birds cooing in her backyard. “Sometimes it’s like a musical.”

Irene thought she wanted to live in the country. Last year she stayed for a while in a mining town in West Virginia. She got phobias; she “could not wait to get out.” It was like “ ‘Peyton Place.’ This whole town knew each others’ business.” She laughs. “I couldn’t wait to get back to L.A.” Her house is her retreat. “Here,” she says, “I don’t have to go around and talk.”

And yet she can also say of her home: “The people next door, they were like grandparents to my boys.”

CHRIS MACH, 18, LEFT, IS STUDYING PHYSICS at Cal State Northridge. “The physics capital of the world!” he jokes. When told that an article was being written about the block, he said: “A cure for insomnia!” Shane Fernandez has been his childhood friend. They rode bikes, they went camping, and though their interests are taking them in different directions--Shane wants to be a motocross expert; Chris studies the stars through a telescope--they have remained close.

Nothing beats the bond of getting into trouble together. For a while they were into slingshots; they shot berries at passing cars and even broke one of the 1920s lampposts in front of a neighbor’s house. But this was mischief, not delinquency. In fact, Shane is being ostracized at school because he has resisted his friends’ offers of drugs and alcohol. “My whole group’s against me now,” he says. “I have more fun riding my bike. I don’t care what my friends think of me.” He has a 3.7 grade point average and would like to be a psychologist so he can figure out why criminals act the way they do.

VIRGINIA MANN IS A CLUB LADY. SHE’S A MEMBER OF THE AMERican Assn. of University Women, a bridge group, the local Episcopal church, the American Assn. of Retired Persons and her college sorority. She reveres curiosity. “If I hear of anything, I’ll try it.” She was born on the last day of 1900.

She collects cats: porcelain ones, real ones, rug ones and mug ones, all kinds of cats. She has traveled everywhere in the United States but never to Europe. She took a plane once, but “I hardly moved. I was afraid I’d upset the plane.” She covers her mouth when she laughs.

Though the block meets most of her criteria for the perfect neighborhood--it has a library, buses, a church and a grocery--she misses her native Missouri. “Back in the Midwest, the women went out to lunch. I thought it very strange here that you seldom heard of people giving luncheons. I hate Los Angeles. Always have. I’m here under protest.”

But, she says of the block, “I do feel the support.” The year her husband died, her next-door neighbors not only asked her for Christmas dinner, but went with her to the hospital on the night he lapsed into a final coma.

Virginia has lived on the block since 1952, when she and her husband bought their house for $16,500.

AMY VANGSGARD, 31, IS AN ASSEMBLAGE ARTist. She calls her haunting images of Hollywood goddesses a bastard art form because they fall between sculpture and collage. “Creatively,” says Amy, “I’m off as far as you can go, but beneath that, I’m very traditional.” She and her husband, Charles Klasky, 38, an Emmy-winning maker of educational films, were new to the block when Dawn, Amy’s 8-year-old daughter by a previous marriage, was attacked by a dog.

Screams filled the air. “Like someone was getting stabbed,” says one neighbor. “She came,” says Amy. “Flesh hanging out. . . . I heard this ‘Aaaahh’--I can’t even make the sound. Everyone came running out. I scooped her up.” A neighbor rushed them to Cedars-Sinai. Other neighbors locked up her house. Another couldn’t sleep and was at Amy’s house at 7 a.m. the next day to ask, “How is the little girl?”

“I almost hate to say it,” says Amy, “but if I had to do it over again, I think the bite was worth it.” Dawn and her new stepfather developed a closeness that they had not had before. And Amy felt a real bond with the neighbors. “It made this wonderful unit.”