You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy.™
Living over a diabolical, dirt filled alley run by a Mexican street gang.
The gang called itself the Harpy’s.
I never heard of the Harpy before I moved to Scarff Street and I have never heard of them since.
I guess they were a neighborhood gang that stayed close to home. Maybe they liked momma’s cooking. Maybe they just liked stealing local. Who knows? Either way they were trouble.
Unlike other more well known gangs like the Bloods and Crips, the Harpy’s seemed less inclined to want to kill you, and more excited about stealing from you.
1985 Geroux riding my motorcycle in the alley
But trust me, when you are losing a battery a week, a car radio a month, sleep every night, bullets flying is almost preferable.
As you know by now, we took over the rear apartment, so far from the main street, that you almost needed a police escort to get to your front door.
If Scarff Street was off the grid, then the alley behind Scarff Street was visible only by CIA spy satellite.
If Scarff Street was scary at the front of the building, where normal people picked up their mail, it was Mr. toads wild ride on crack where we lived.
That’s because we inhabited the apartment over the alley, where we were subjected to rocks thrown at our windows constantly. Once, I’m certain, a gun shot was fired from down below. I never did find a bullet in the ceiling or Mr. Ed, but I’m positive it happened. I believe the bullet richochetted off one of the metal security bars.
The alley was a war zone where the Harpy’s were the home team and we were tresspassing on their turf.
Back in this alley it was the United States of Chop Shop America where cars came and went and LAPD never once surfaced.
The Harpy’s, like a dog with a fire hydrant, stained their mark on everything not nailed down back here. HARPY’S was spray painted on cinder block walls and across wooden sheds. HARPY’S was tagged on dumpsters and old cars.
As luck would have it, our apartment came with 2 parking spots. Of course both were in the car port below our home, accessible to the alley and all miscreants who roamed here.
It created a sense of isolation that was both frightening, but also exilerating.
The alley was dusty and dirt filled. Grass grew between cracks in what little asphalt there was.
Like a voyuer, I often found myself staring out the kitchen window to see the odd array of ghetto life that this concrete terrarium contained.
In the stench of this palpable lawlessness, I would see transients poke through dumpsters and miscreants checking car doors to see if they were locked. I once saw two bag women with no teeth fighting each other. The only reason the brawl ended is because one of the old hags bent over to vomit.
Buildings lined the alley like a 2 story canyon in the wild west. Papers blew like tumbleweeds and sound resonated eerily off the facade. There was a nauseating stillness in the alley because it was closed on all sides by barriers. Even air didn’t want to be back here for fear of getting jacked.
I remember looking down the alley one day, and the shell of a Corvette was rocking uneasily in the breeze. No engine, no wheels, no seats. Just a fiberglass Corvette, that had been literally cut in half. The front and back of the car had been scooped out like a hyena sucks the marrow out of a bone. The only thing left was the fiberglass casing of a car stolen from who knows where and dumped behind our home.
Days later the shell of the car would be replaced with another vehicle. Sometimes it was on blocks, sometimes there wasn’t enough car left to jack up.
The Harpy’s were a mostly invisible group of parasites who quickly came to dislike the crazy college boys in the end apartment.
Gilmore and I had motorcycles. Mine was an XL 500 Enduro. It was basically a street legal dirt bike. It was tall and had knobby tires. It was a terrible motorcyle for most of the L.A. highway system, but it was perfect for this wild west alley.
I would ride the bike up and down the alley trying to do wheelies, to let the Harpy’s know that this alley, much to their chagrin was in America and we, unlike them, were citizens. I made sure the bike was secured with a logging chain to the stairwell.
As I’ve mentioned we use to wait up late at night, to try and catch the Harpy’s in the act. You learn a lot about yourself in the dark of night, whispering, clutching a beer and a baseball bat.
We quickly learned to take precautions. The next time you pull into your driveway, think about this. Instead of just going into your house, imagine, popping the hood, disconnecting the battery cables and carrying your battery inside.
I could always tell who was home based on the coffee table, where at any given time, there might be fouir large car batteries.
The alley and the rear apartment afforded us solitude to do things you couldn’t dream about.
I came home one day and Toby, a USC cinema major from the Delta Chi house was shooting a movie in our apartment. Toby was off his rocker. Even cold sober he was crazy like a kid with tourette syndrom who was on mushrooms.
Check out the photo below. I walked into some crazy movie scene from Toby’s mind. Here you see Geroux dressed as the sheriff and some guy named Carl dressed up like a fairy. Another guy named Steuber was dressed like a punk rock dude. If there was a script, I sure don’t know what the hell it was about.
I had a great surprise the other day. My phone rings and guess who? It’s Geroux. I hadn’t heard his voice for 25 years. The last time I spoke to him was the day I graduated. We went to Gladstones in Malibu. The next morning, like the wind in the Scarff Street alley, he was gone. 25 years later he calls me out of the blue.
We both laughed out loud as the memories washed over us. I brought up this scene and he said he actually told me has the movie and he watches it every now and then. I sure would like to see it.
Especially the part where the gun fires in slow motion.
Yes, you heard right. Toby needed a close up of a gun firing. So Gilmore, the closest thing we have to a cowboy, I guess because he once lived in Albuquerque as a juvenile was assigned the task of firing the gun.
Talk about safety violations.
Gilmore takes aim at 2 thick yellow page directories stacked against the kitchen wall under my favoritie window.
The idea is the yellow pages would catch the bullet and there would be no issue. SURE!
Toby trains his movie camera on the gun barrel and then shouts “ACTION”
Gilmore pulls the trigger.
“BLAM”
There is smoke and fire and a major recoil.
Toby screams; “Damn it! I missed the shot.”
That’s not all we missed. Gilmore ran to the window and found a 50 cent piece sized hole in the kitchen wall.
“Gun sites are off,” he mutters.
“Do it again,” Toby hollers.
Gilmore reloads and takes aim.
“Action.”
BLAM
Fire and smoke and recoil fill the moment.
“Got it,” Toby screams.
Through the smoke and haze, Gilmore walks to the window.
Suddenly a ray of sunshine pours in through the floating dust molecules. The sunshine is not coming in through the window, it is coming in through the new hole in our kitchen wall.
Yep. Gilmore missed exactly in the same place. The 2nd bullet went through the hole created by the first bullet and with nothing to slow it down, it blew out the side of the building. I am talking it blew a hole right though the side of the apartment building.
1985 Gilmore shrugs. “I missed. What do you wanna me to do about it.”
Yes, we lived with that hole for another two years as well.
We hung a dish towel out the window for 2 years.
How Mr. Garcia didn’t notice a hole in the side of his building for 2 years I can’t tell you.
And yes we patched the outside of a stucco apartment building in L.A. when we moved out.
Not everyone can say they have patched the OUTSIDE of an apartment building.
1985 Scarff Street
Then again, not many people can say they did a lot of the things we did at Scarff Street.
I sure had fun writing about Scarff Street and the Derelicts this week. I hope you had fun reading about them.
I have rekindled a friendship with Geroux and Gilmore.
And you know the funny thing.
