Don’t Look Now, but It’s High Season for Two-Ply Assaults
It was shortly after midnight when the dog began to bark. That should have been a clue, but we were slow. Also, two days before, she’d yapped at a hummingbird until she about passed out. So we didn’t rouse ourselves right away.
Not to sound defensive, but how were we to know? After so many years without incident, we’d gotten cocky--we thought we were immune. But in this, the Naked Suburb, no one is safe. So let this be a warning: Somehow, someday, someone will sneak up on you and . . . toilet paper your house.
Newcomers to Southern California may ask: What do you mean? It is a good question. I, for one, never heard of toilet papering until I moved here. Back in the boondocks where I came from, kids knocked over outhouses when they felt like having a little fun. Apparently, toilet papering is what happens when progress eliminates a juvenile delinquent’s natural habitat.
Anyway, for the uninitiated, toilet papering a home involves unreeling rolls and rolls of white, two-ply tissue up into the trees and across the shrubbery of someone’s front yard. The idea is to do it by cover of night, so that by the time the homeowner awakens, dew will have caused the tissue to adhere to every leaf, twig and bloom. The mess, if made properly, can last into the next millennium. If you’re really lucky, a little rain will fall by dawn.
And if you’re really, really lucky, you’ll be able to stay awake long enough to actually see the homeowners react to your handiwork, hopping up and down in their bathrobes, steam coming out of their ears. It’s way cool, the way their gray hair sticks up at goofy angles when they first get out of bed, the sort of spectacle that can make a young vandal’s entire year.
Summer, with its balmy weather and lack of school the next day, is high season for T.P. artistes. And in that season, the night that beckons above all is the night of the last day of school. That day was a scorcher this year.
At the middle school down the block, there had been a graduation ceremony for the kids heading off to ninth grade. For more than an hour, parents and grandparents had sat, muttering epithets and fanning themselves in the shimmering, jungle-style heat.
Finally, it was over. The principal dragged himself to the podium and dismissed the class. Hordes of adolescents fanned out to sidewalks and cul-de-sacs. They moved, as is their nature, in roving packs, plotting, planning, buying 12-packs of Great Northern at Ralphs, until, at long last, night fell.
A word about curfews: It appears they are enjoying a renaissance these days. From the meanest ghettos to the gated bastions of the middle class, people are fed up with gun-toting, skateboard-riding, backward-baseball-cap-wearing teenagers hanging out after dark, speaking to one another in monosyllables and laughing uncontrollably at inside jokes. Why, the argument goes, aren’t those kids home reading the classics aloud? There oughta be a law.
Well, we have that law. Our community has had a 10 p.m. curfew for kids under the age of 18 since at least 1966. On the night of the last day of school, besides the four kids who bedecked our ranch-style house, there were at least three other teenagers wandering the streets like Willie Winkie in the wee hours, and that was just in the quiet part of town where everybody’s grandparents live.
There is--we may as well admit it--something irresistible about Southern California on a hot summer night, something in the way the warm wind glides under the moonlight, rustling the eucalyptus and the birds of paradise. There are the fragrances of summer, cut grass and orange trees, the chlorine rising from the electric-blue pools, the way the heat of the day lingers in the asphalt driveway and the concrete walk.
*
And so it was that, in the face of our curfew, compelled by the spell of the last day of school, a band of night-rovers settled on our home, conveniently located a block from the neighborhood middle school, and decided that a certain je ne sais quoi was missing from our front yard.
By the time we roused ourselves, they were putting on the finishing touches--a little confetti on the azalea bed, an extra valance on the box hedge. “Hey!” my husband shouted, and ran onto the front step in his pajamas.
“Run!” he heard them hiss to each other, and off they dashed, some quick on their feet, others lumbering behind. We recognized them, sometime pals of our 13-year-old, but we didn’t bother to chase them because--and this was the surprising part--the lawn was preposterously beautiful.
There, in the black and silver night, we stood surrounded by a wonderland of floating white: streamers, sashes, bunting, drapes. Tissue blossoms quivered on the climbing rosebush; snowy ribbons festooned the olive trees. The warm air lifted them gently, like swaths of silk. We smiled, then chuckled, then laughed out loud.
For a good 10 minutes we just stood there, dazzled. Then my husband said, “The little jerks,” and went to fetch a trash can and a big stick to knock the streamers out of the trees. It took about 20 minutes to clean everything up--it’s easy if you catch the damage before the dew sets in.
And then, what with it being curfew and all, we stood out in our dark front yard and violated the open-beverage ordinance with an ice-cold beer. Crime is rampant in the Naked Suburb. No one, but no one, is safe.
