I spent almost seventeen years living beneath the palm trees and near the stars on the sidewalk. My slumlord was a witch. She didn’t cast spells or anything, or she did. I didn’t pay enough attention. But she would scold me every time I broke the garbage disposal. Apparently, I wasn’t supposed to dump a pound of grease down there. Oh well. I lived and learned.

“You run the disposal every day for one minute,” she said. She grabbed my bottle of dish soap and poured it down there. “And you do this.” Her cigarette hung from her mouth as she told me. “Don’t be an idiot.”

I couldn’t make sense out of it. I couldn’t throw anything down there: no celery, no stringy meat, no grease. So I ended up not using it at all. I was in my twenties, and I drank beer every night alone in my little castle, a studio apartment near the Hollywood/Highland shopping mall. My parents were afraid to see me because the traffic was too hairy.

The witch kicked me out of the garage one day because I’d broken the garage door for the second time. The garage door, as it was designed, was a steel gate that slid across a track sideways with a piece sticking out at the end. My car clipped it twice.

“You idiot,” she said. “You park on the street.”

I had to pay for a parking permit every six months. It was about sixty dollars each time.

I could park on my street except for the mornings when the street sweeper came, which was Monday and Tuesday between nine and noon. I never knew when it would come between those hours, but it didn’t matter. If I parked there, the parking enforcer would write tickets as if he were writing holiday cards. In other words, it gave him something to do.

And those were lucky times when I could find a space on my street. When I came home from my delivery job late at night, around ten o’clock, usually every space was filled. I would have to park on someone else’s street on a steep hill. Sometimes I would have to park a mile away from my apartment building. Sometimes it would rain. Those were times when I thought about bad things happening to that witch. She had to go. She may have cast spells, but I cast fantasies. I hoped for the day when I would make it big in Hollywood and move out of there, where it was less than a thousand a month to rent. But that never happened.

Instead, I had to live in the same building as her, and she made sure my life was miserable. She had the ugliest dog. It was gray with bloodshot eyes, the size of a Doberman but uglier. Every time I saw that dog, it would chase after me as I checked the mail.

I would fantasize about moving to the Hollywood Hills. That would’ve been great. My studio apartment in Hollywood would become just a memory. It’s a memory now, but the Hollywood Hills never came to be.

I remember the day when I moved out of the slum. The movers showed up and packed all of my furniture into a moving truck. They would drive it down to Culver City. My slumlord and her husband, with his shirt off and his belly hanging out, watched me move out from where they stood on the lawn. There came the moment when I handed her the keys. I didn’t even say “thank you” or “have a nice life.” I just dropped the keys in her hands and walked away.