Introducing Love Street

By Liz Zuercher

Over the next few months here on Tasty Sauce I'd like to introduce you to some of the people who live on one street in a coastal Southern California new home community.  You've already gotten to know Cassie, who sold them all their homes.  Now it's time to meet some of her customers, starting with Eddie Petrocelli.

Imagine barbells or a baby’s rattle – two orbs connected by a metal rod or a silver cylinder - and you will know what Camino Dos Cortes looks like.  Two cul de sacs connected by a straight line of a street, fourteen new houses sidled up next to each other as closely as the city code will allow until they must curve around the cul de sac.  There the lots fall into pie shapes, with the point of the pie slice at the street flaring back into a large wide back yard. 

One cul de sac is missing the two end homes and instead has a grassy hill up to an adjoining street with a walkway down to Dos Cortes.  The other cul de sac borders California wild land that glows green and yellow in the spring after the winter rains.  That’s the way it was when everyone put down their deposits and signed their contracts.  Now, though, in late September, the hills are gray with brush gone dry from lack of rain. 

One row of houses backs up to a hill with a network of concrete drainage culverts and newly installed landscaping intended to hold and beautify the slope.  So far it has done neither.  The houses here were less expensive than the ones across the street that have expansive views toward the ocean.  You can’t always see the ocean in the distance, but the owners of these homes have paid dearly for the possibility of an ocean view.

It’s been almost a year since the homes on Dos Cortes were completed, people moved in and the neighborhood began to take shape.  Over a period of two months moving vans came and went, sometimes three or four at a time jockeying for position on the street.  Workers’ trucks buzzed around like gnats as last minute adjustments were made to the homes, utilities were connected and buyers turned into homeowners and met their neighbors.  Even though some of them had paid vastly different amounts for their homes, they all had a sense of equality and expansiveness for their new neighbors, people they expected would become fast friends.  It was like the beginning of a marriage, the honeymoon period, where love blinds spouses to their annoying habits and greater failings.

Neighbors met each other for the first time at the mailbox or in the street, shaking hands and making introductions as they unloaded boxes or took out the trash.  Someone organized an open house to get acquainted. The couples with children clustered together as the kids sized each other up.  The moms talked about forming a playgroup.  The dads talked about their jobs, their golf games and surfing Trestles.  There were also two single men and one single woman, one set of grandparents and two newlywed couples who mingled and introduced themselves over guacamole, chips and beer.  Everyone was full of promise for their new neighborhood, expectations high.

The street that led to Camino Dos Cortes was named Via Amor and that prompted Kristen Weber, one of the moms, to suggest that they all lived at the end of Love Street, that this bit of California real estate was where Love Street emptied out, pouring all the love onto their street.  That made their street full of love, she said, and before long they were all saying they lived on Love Street, ignoring the actual name of their street.

“It doesn’t matter what the street is really called,” Kristen told Cassie in the sales office. “We all love each other, so we live on Love Street.  It’s so perfect.”

For a while it was true – all was beautiful on Love Street, except maybe for Eddie Petrocelli.

* * * * *

Eddie Petrocelli stirred things up from the day he moved in, when he put a life-sized plastic alligator in his front yard.  Well, you couldn’t exactly call it a yard yet.  To be honest, it was raked dirt like everyone else’s lot. 

If you came up Via Amor and turned right into the cul de sac, Eddie’s house was the third house on the right, next to the grassy hill.  If you turned left from Via Amor you’d miss seeing Eddie’s house altogether, but when you drove out of the neighborhood you couldn’t miss the house or the alligator.  If you walked the dog or chased the kids or just strolled at dawn or dusk, the alligator seemed to snarl at you as you went by.  Dogs growled at it, then peed on it when it didn’t move.  Babies cried when they saw it, but a few adventurous kids used it as a climbing toy, much to their mothers’ dismay.

Eddie Petrocelli was one of the single men on the block, but no one considered him a “catch”, except maybe Eddie himself.  He was a big boisterous fellow in his late thirties with thick black hair and a barrel chest, who enjoyed telling everyone he encountered how successful he was as a sub prime mortgage broker.

“I make $50,000 a month, man,” he told Dan Christiansen across the street, who hadn’t asked and didn’t care how much Eddie made a month or a year or in his lifetime.  “You should try it.  I can get you a job.  I have my own company and I can hire whoever I want.  You’d make a bundle,” Eddie boasted.  But Dan was happy as a civil engineer and had no desire to work for Eddie, so he said no thanks.  Eddie slapped Dan on the back and said to keep it in mind.

“What I really want to talk to you about is the alligator,” Dan said.

“Isn’t it a hoot?” Eddie said, letting out a guffaw.  “It’s just temporary.  I’ll take it down when I start my landscaping.”

That was another bone of contention the neighbors discussed.  Almost everyone else had done their landscaping, but Eddie still had a dirt yard.  Dan decided to stick to the alligator issue.

“Well, it’s been ten months now and the neighbors aren’t that crazy about it.  Could you maybe move it to the back yard?” Dan had the dubious honor of being the spokesperson for several of the neighbors who’d been talking about this eyesore.  Since Dan was such a mild-mannered guy, they all decided he would be best suited to approach Eddie.

Eddie’s brow furrowed and a dark cloud seemed to cover his face for just a moment before a smile returned to his lips.  “I don’t think so,” he said.  “I like it there.”

Dan thought he’d heard Eddie wrong.  Was the guy really making an issue of this?  “We were hoping to resolve this in a friendly fashion.  No one wants to get pissy about this, but the CC&R’s are pretty clear about lawn ornaments,” Dan said.

“I like the alligator.  The alligator stays.” Eddie said with an intensity that surprised Dan. 

“Oh,” said Dan, shocked by Eddie’s lack of Love Street cooperative spirit.  “I guess we’ll see about that.” 

“I guess we will,” said Eddie.  He stood straight as a sentinel in front of the alligator.

Dan shook his head as he walked back to his house.  That hadn’t gone well, not well at all.

* * * * * 

The next morning when Dan went out to pick up his newspaper, he saw that Eddie had been busy overnight.  Three plastic bunnies and two plastic squirrels cavorted around the alligator, and a wire coat hanger hung from the alligator’s snout.  A foot high redwood picket fence edged the sidewalk in front of Eddie’s house and a wooden picnic table with attached benches sat in the middle of the dirt yard.  On the Juliet balcony above the garage a full-sized carousel horse looked like it was about to leap over the railing.  Dan thought he saw Eddie peeking out from behind the curtain and could swear he was laughing.  

Just like that the honeymoon was over on Love Street.