The Pass.

The Special Kind of Love That Only Comes from Being a Neighbor, in Proximity.

The pass. On the utility porch, where Jack comes to neighbor with me.

Our relationship happens mostly at The Pass.

Jack is my neighbor on the kitchen side of our house. Jack lives in the casita in the backyard next door. Casitas are the small backyard cottages common in this little 1940’s-era settlement called Huntridge. We are in downtown East, Las Vegas Nevada, five minutes off the North End of the iconic Strip. A10-minute brisk walk to the antics of Fremont Street and its only market, known as Murder Mart, complete with its own IG channel. We are just down the road, and underneath the whirling pinwheel of The Strat. A casino so tall and kinetic, we tell our children that if they are lost, they can look for the Strat to help them find their way home.

T, Jack’s daughter, also lives next door. In the main house. She is a school teacher by day and a casino cocktail waitress on the weekends. Casinos are the life blood for people here, the way out and forward. Her work at the casino put her through graduate school. It bought her house, and the ability to have her parents retire in the casita.

Jack, and his wife Kim, aren’t my peers. Jack is a Vietnam vet, so more like my Dad or favorite uncle. And T is a decade or so younger than me. Our lives didn’t perfectly slot. When I had little kids, T didn’t have them at all. Now she has her daughter, LJ, who is five, and my youngest kids are growing into teens. Neighbors come to mean things to each other by their proximity, not how effortlessly they slot into schedules, hobbies and preferences. You are a good neighbor, not as a main player, but in the in-betweens, in the cracks of life. Neighbors and neighborhoods are our living playlists, our murals, our fabrics.

When we moved to Vegas from NYC, we bought the shitty house on our street, an excellent deal, with the leafy front-yard tree, that we would end up cutting down anyhow, because it had a tree disease. The house on the living room side was home to Matt. We were his neighbors for a decade. I wrote about his murder, and how we watched him slowly slide away from the world. I knew more about my neighbor, Matt - about what he ate, what ailed him, how he spent his time, how much bourbon he drank and pot he smoked, and when he stopped cleaning his house - than his own family. More than his friends, who disappeared one by one, as he slipped out of their grasp. But neighbors stay constant.

Because proximity. There is no choice.

Proximity means knowing people on a level of everydayness. You hear their kids melting down. You see them looking like shit, recovering from plastic surgery, or in their underpants moving lawn chairs around. They let out an exaggerated fart in their backyard and you pretend not to hear it. You know they smoke pot in the backyard every night. Or they have taken up ax throwing underneath their olive tree. You hear them fight with their mother on the phone. You see how they live everyday. How they handle tricky things.

They also see us for who we are. Sometimes, they hold our lives as a kind of secret that they keep for us. Sometimes they stand at the wall in their yards, or over their fences, or through our windows, and tell us things they can’t tell anyone else, just because we happen to be there - proximity - at the very moment they need to say it out loud to someone. You can tell the world on social media that you are happy as hell, and your life is a perfect mirage, but you can’t lie to your neighbors, not really. They know. They live with you.

A few years after they moved in, I walked down the side porch. Saw Jack on his patio. How’s Kim? I yelled over the wall, cheerfully. She had breast cancer and she had looked thinner lately. More frail.

She’s gone, Jack said.

I looked through the wood slats on top of the cement wall to see my neighbors bearing the loss of the most important person in their lives. Between the slats, he told me how she left them. Jack is tough. Bushy mustache. Clean leather for skin. Full head of silver hair. Vietnam stickers on his truck. Walked just slightly bow-legged, like he might live in a Western. A fully locked and stocked gun cabinet. An unapologetic chain smoker. He built a separate casita for his tools and building supplies. He is a gifted builder and contractor. He reminded me of my dad. And since my dad passed, I found a comfort having Jack next door.

Our relationship shifted ever so slightly after Kim died. I didn’t feel like I was pulling him away from something anymore. T had a full life of work and child raising and school. He was always up to meet me at the pass, a small square window cut into the slats for the community cats. Huntridge loves its feral, and outdoor cats. Lots of neighbors put out food, water and shelter for them. The Pass was designed so the cats could walk the walls, come in and out, hide in the vines, move around the neighborhood. In the summer, I put out cold water and ice packs. Our walls don’t just make good neighbors, they make a highway system and refuge for the night time prowlers and the day time nappers.

The pass became the place where I left plates of lamb and potatoes when T was away and wanted to make sure he ate. Jack put leftover wood scraps from his projects in the pass, free wood for our fires. Jack came to the pass to tell me when LJ was born. I stored T’s extra breast milk in my big freezer when they ran out of room. When he got meds from the VA and wasn’t around to pick them up, I sent Raffi over to get them. We left them in the pass. When they weren’t off to Disney with LJ, they popped in for the holidays. Living next door, made proximity a solid holiday draw. Hot pot for Christmas, Yakitori Thanksgiving, hot dogs in the street with Indian Rez fire works, on July 4th.

Fourth of July neighborhood fireworks set-up.

We were good neighbors to each other, respectful. When we built the wood slats to give more privacy to them and us, we consulted with Jack on the build. When our orange jubilee hung heavy against his truck, he asked if he could cut them before doing it. We had the wild house and I was always woried about it spilling onto them. Our kids and chickens and turkeys, foster kids in and out, all kinds of noise and bother, might’ve triggered another neighbor. Jack took it in stride.

“You sure that rooster crowing every morning isn’t driving you crazy?“ I asked him at the pass. “I’m up crowing before that rooster is” he snapped back.

When a water pipe busted, while David was traveling, and our yard filled with rushing water, Jack not only noticed before me, but threw some tools into the pass and fixed it. When I found my father’s Marine Corp casket flag in my mother’s effects, I knew I didn’t have the kind of house and storage to keep it safe. I called Jack to the pass. He had a Vietnam buddy who flew the flags of deceased veterans. I handed my father’s perfectly folded casket flag through the pass into Jacks hands. I never saw it again, but I know wherever it is, it went to the right hands.

We are blessed with our neighbors. The young couple, with the two kids, across the street have let me borrow salt, blessed us with extra flats of bacon and homemade gumbo, and shown up with their happy kids for nearly every holiday and celebration. Again location. There’s the Eygptian author who takes walks with his small daughter and smiles and waves when he walks by. The journalist down the street who has been a constant friend and colleague. We watch each other’s dogs when we go out-of-town. The Guatemalans down the street who helped me care for, and stock the fridge and pantry during the pandemic. When Lucy was learning to drive, and hit their son’s car, they let us pay cash for the repairs, instead of hitting her insurance. There’s the neighbor who lost her daughter to a drunk driver and now raises her severly disabled grandaughter, and the single woman across the street who took in her pregnant sister and her two toddlers, while she escaped a terrifying domestic violence situation. The neighbors report to a text chain about any suspicious cars that might be parked on the street. There’s the older gentlemen, who admitted he was lonely, even though he lived with his daughter, so we invite him to everything now. I can’t remember his name, and I’m sure he doesn’t know mine. There’s Jim, kitty corner to us who I know two things about: 1) he works nights and 2) he keeps an eye on the street. But I also know now, that if you knock on his door at 2am, he will help you carry a dying man into a truck so he can get to the hospital.

The intimacy of being a neighbor isn’t based on knowing someone’s favorite food or color, or what TV show they are watching religously, who they voted for, or the date of their birthday. It lies, instead, in being in proximity. To know someone who is their most themselves, simply because they are home, and you are too.

Jack, with LJ his grandaughter, E. who lives across the street from us, and our youngest, Desi.

Jack has lung cancer. A month ago, he and T found out it was terminal, advanced. Everywhere in his organs and bones, his spine. This week, he’s been living with feet in two worlds, still here among the living and yet, leaving. T thought she had more time. She had radiation appointments on the calendar. She was still making long trips to the banks and various agencies to transfer this and that, to order things he needed. She was preparing for the end and hadn’t quite realized it had already arrived.

On Monday, she left LJ with Jack in the casita for a quick appointment that turned lengthy. I went over. Jack could only speak in a whisper. She said he had been restless lately, pulling out his oxygen tube. Unable to sleep. He stopped eating. Signs of dying she didn’t want to see. I could see it, how close he was to leaving. I had the distance. He’s not my dad. He’s my neighbor. Close in proximity, but not in all the other family ways.

LJ, a talkative, expressive kid, told me this story about how Jack, her Papa fell in love with her Grandma Kim, and her Grandma already had a baby and that baby was her Mommy, T.

Papa asked Mommy if he could be her daddy and Mommy said yes, she wanted him to be her daddy so much, and that’s how they got each other, she explained to me, very seriously.

Oh, that’s the two of them, T said later, smiling, when I mentioned her daughter’s sweet story. He must’ve told her that story. I’ve never mentioned it to her. They have their own thing.

The night Jack died, Tuesday, T came and asked me to watch LJ. It was after midnight, LJ was asleep in the casita. While Tonna got herself ready to leave with Jack, and while we waited for Jim, across the street, to come help us move him into the truck, I got to be with Jack in his wheelchair in the drive way for a few quiet minutes alone. I thought he might fall out of the chair, so I stood behind him, my hands on both his shoulders. I had taken an edible before T came and got me. It kicked in. I was calm and mellow. Younger me would’ve felt the need to say something to Jack. To fill the space. But there was nothing to say.

It was a cool, post-midnight morning. Air tepid and pleasant. Spring in Vegas. I listened to his breath. It reminded me of when my dad was dying, the way his breath rasped, his chest fell up and down, then stopped. Nothing for the longest time, then started again. Those last few minutes were church.

Jack died in his truck, next to his daughter, on the way to the VA.

This is just a few of the texts where we met at the pass. Over food, over news, over little generous neighborly gestures and gifts.

I’ve been thinking about that period of dying where you are still here and also mostly gone.

I wonder if it’s like the hypnagogic space, those minutes where you are still awake, but also falling into sleep. I love that period. High, viewing slo-mo ideas in my head. I write things, like a ticker, that never make it to paper or screen. My ideas are so good and then dissolve away. Like art that has to be destroyed. I love being here and not here. I wonder if there are moments like that while dying? I wonder if it’s hallucinegenic bliss, or pain and discomfort? All of it? Just like life itself?

Jack had an undeniably good life, even though I knew such a small part of it. I think I remember him telling me once he had other children that were no longer in his life. Maybe from a first marriage? I really knew so little about him, while also knowing so much of what made him Jack.

The neighbor relationship is a weird shape-shifter. It becomes what it needs to be. Like the in-between-ness of hypnagogia, the inbetweenenss of active dying, neighbors are close and not close, one foot in, one foot out.

In the driveway, when I had my hands on his shoulders, I thought about what a gift this guy had been to us and how I wanted to celebrate a good life, well-lived, instead of being sad for the few more years he didn’t get. I plan to do that a lot for Jack. No pity. No tears. No Poor Jack. Because that betrays the intense generosity that he brought into public and private life everyday. Jack lived every hour, every minute with as much bull-headed joy and rigor and love as possible, without proselytizing about it, or hosting a pocast about it, or telling everyone what he’s done. He just showed the fuck up, over and over. In the in-betweens, the cracks of life.

Give your neighbors a little love today. Tell ‘em it’s for Jack.

Thank you, as always, for reading. xo Kim

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