I was puttering around the house on a day of summer vacation last Friday when I hear someone outside shout something like "Get your hands up! Hands behind your back! Now!" or some such barked order as one would hear on a typical episode of Cops. So, like any curious housewife, I peer through the curtains and look out the window. Across the street, there are men in black shirts that seem to say "police" or "security" or something in large, official white letters on the back. I think, "Wow, someone got pulled over and is being arrested in front of our house. Must be serious by the number of cops." and look around for the cop car that has pulled him over, but I see none. I keep looking and see someone holding a large boom mic and someone else with a hand-held video camera filming it all. So I return to whatever it was I was doing. I hear the same dialogue two more times, as in multiple "takes," so I know it's a film crew, though clearly low-budget and probably unpermitted.
A few minutes later, I hear a helicopter—not at all unusual for L.A., and after two years of living on one of the busiest boulevards in the area, I've gotten used to blocking out the loud traffic and sounds of life and the rif-raf of humanity outside. Then I realize that I've heard that helicopter for longer than usual (it should've flown away by now), and in fact, I hear it circling. Being the product of a neighborhood in which this sort of thing was known to happen, I recognize the sound as circling directly over our house. So I go out into the backyard, curious busybody that I am, and see it is in fact a police helicopter and not a "Traffic 7 Newscopter" (we also live within 100 yards of the freeway, so I thought it could've been getting a closer look at the perpetually gridlocked 10 freeway). As I squint through the sun at the copter and wonder why it's circling, I realize that the last time I saw a helicopter circling like this, the cops were chasing a burglary suspect through the backyards of the neighborhood I grew up in, and another time it was right before they busted a neighbor (on the same street) for his blatantly healthy six-foot-high pot plants. So discretion being the better part of valor, I head indoors as I don't want to meet up with the sort of fellow who might be jumping back fences to get away from the cops, even if it is my own back yard. Just as I do, I am addressed by the helicopter over a bullhorn.
"Lady in the back yard…" I look around. That must be me. "I need you to go to the front yard." What? I look to the front yard. I can't get there with the fence locked from the front. So I head back indoors.
"Lady in the back yard of the gray house…" Yep. That's me. "I need you to go to the front of the house." Shit. OK, now I know some fugitive must be on the loose near my house. "Wave if you can hear me." I wave one skinny arm out of the door that I'm closing.
Inside, I peer out of the front window again, only this time, I see real cops, one with a helmet and a rifle, crouching behind my next-door neighbors' hedge, looking at my house. Huhn, I think. That's peculiar. And they must see me looking out the window at them. OK, man with large gun in front yard.
Just to be safe, I make sure all the doors are deadbolted, peek out at the cops again (still there, still looking at my house) and sit down out of view to wait for the police action to stop. I decide not to close the curtains. That would look suspicious. The helicopter is still circling. It addresses me again, "23 South Bundy. Come out of the front of the house." It takes a surprisingly long minute to realize that I'm being addressed by a police helicopter while I'm inside my house, and all of the neighbors can hear it calling me out. So, despite being uncomfortably braless in public, I make sure the front door is unlocked and come out. Lucy, our fearless champion birdcatcher, is in panicky wide-eyed stealth-crouch, crawling away from the front yard, headed to the back for safety. Outside, I look incredulously again at the helmeted rifleman to my left, and then look the opposite direction to see three cops crouching behind a parked car to my right, two of whom have their pistols drawn and pointed in the air. I motion to the crouched cops in a questioning pantomime asking where I should go. There are men with guns drawn on both sides of me, and frankly, I'd rather go back in my house, lock the doors and crawl under my bed till this all blows over. The cops behind the car wave me over and tell me to go to the left toward the corner, so I do, and the cop behind the rifleman motions me to go toward him. I walk. When the rifleman beckons faster, I run and get behind them.
"What is going on?" I ask the cop without a gun.
"We got a call from a passerby on a cell phone that said she saw a heavily armed man go into a house on this street." Having grown up on a diet of action movies like Rambo, my image of "heavily armed" is rather striking. "Where? Next door to me?" I've always been prejudiced against the apparently shiftless young guy who lives in the guest house next door and who takes more interest in his fly car than in his child and doesn't seem to mind leaving the kid to the care of his elderly (I'm assuming) father. "I need you to move back behind the patrol cars, here" and the cop in charge motions me down the block away from my house. "Do you have your keys?" "I left the front door unlocked." I say. "What's going on?" Now I'm starting to get a little worried. "The caller said she saw some armed men dressed all in black go into a blue-gray house on the west side of Bundy." I look at my blue-gray house on the west side of Bundy. I look back at the cop. (Now it's more than one man?) "I've been in there all day with the doors locked, just me and my cat. No one is in there." Or is there? I think. Lucy has a way of looking up suddenly from a catnap with a paranoid expression of "What was THAT??" but I usually ignore it. She had done that earlier today, and I heard what I assumed was the neighbor moving his garbage cans in the back yard. After some more standing around by the cop cars, I see that they have all the lanes of this very busy boulevard shut down in both directions a block on either side of my house during the beginning of rush hour. Traffic is being diverted around the block. They also have patrol cars blocking entrance to the street behind my house. About this time, I notice that I'm standing directly behind the afore-mentioned helmeted rifleman, so that were said "heavily armed" intruder to shoot at the rifleman, I'm in the direct line of fire. Shouldn't someone tell me to move? So I move back behind a truck a few houses down, peering over the tailgate. At which point, the officer in charge tells another to get my personal information. We get about as far as my full name when another comrade tells this guy to put on his helmet and "get going." I ask the nice man who was interviewing me, "Are you going into my house?" When he says yes, I inform him that my front door is open, but that the back door is deadbolted and you can open it from the inside. (I do want to make sure an armed killer isn't in there, but I don't want them to break anything, either.) I then watch a line of helmeted policemen (one woman) crouch with guns raised and start to enter my house, SWAT-team style just like on TV. Only it's not TV, it's my house. I hope they don't get jumpy and shoot my cat. After an interminable, tense silence, they all come out calmly and slowly, guns lowered. No one addresses me. I tell a couple passersby not to pass by as there is a police action happening. (Again, shouldn't there be someone besides me to stop pedestrians from walking into the line of fire?) After a few moments, I saunter over to the man in charge who asks me if I've ever seen that car parked in front of my house. No. I don't think so anyway. Come to think of it, it is a shifty looking old Oldsmobile, clearly a criminal's car. The officer then asks me what I know, and I tell him this story form the beginning, from the film crew, to being called out of my house by the helicopter. About this time, the supervisor tells me the caller had the wrong direction: it's the blue-gray house on the east side of the street. OK, I think, and look at the house he pointed to, but that house isn't really gray. The team reassembles in front of the house across the street where the film crew had been, commences with the full-on cop-show maneuvers and enters the house, guns drawn. I tell the officer that is where I saw the film crew who were probably unpermitted since they didn't have any professional looking equipment or any barricades to seal off the area. Sure enough, the cops come out of the second house, nothing to report. After a few moments, I notice traffic is moving down the street again. I ask, "Is it all clear? Is there anyone with any gun around? Can I go back in my house?" I am assured there is no intruder or madman with a gun. The kid next door is not wielding a weapon in a custody dispute over the screaming child next door, nor is any daytime robber or fugitive running through the backyards of Bundy Drive. The area is secure, as they say. It must have been a mistaken caller who saw the unlicensed film crew. After the cops finally let them come out of their house, I explain the whole debacle to my elderly next-door neighbors (just to make sure they don't think Frankie and I are the sort to commonly cause police action) and get an awkward introduction to another neighbor. I am safe to go back into my house and put on a bra, in case anything like this should happen again. All in all, a very L.A. way to get to know my neighbors.
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