Jungle Cat Prowls the Village

There are eight million stories in the naked city, but only 8,600 or so in our own sun-soaked jungle, baby. How do I know this? Because I’m your town crier, baby; your chronicler, your truth-teller and tour guide to the dark underbelly of this coiled serpent we call Montecito. Me? You never saw me, you never heard me – you don’t know me and you never will. I’m unknowable, see? But I know all. I’m the eyes scanning the darkness as you delicately spoon swirl your Tre Lune cappuccino. I’m that fleeting reflection in the window you can’t react quickly enough to catch as you revel in your 34oz Wagyu Tomahawk Steak at Lucky’s. Yes, baby. I slink like a sinuous jungle cat under watchful starlight, leaping silently from shadow to shadow in this benighted Byzantium. I’m a suggestion, a tingling sensation at the nape of your neck, an ill-defined presence you feel but will never apprehend with the senses. I lurk just there – at the periphery of your vision. You whip your head around to see me and – *POOF!* – like quicksilver I plow into a metal garbage can, sprawling and yelling in a high-pitched squeal, waving my arms and making a real racket, baby. I’m soaked with garbage juice, baby! You happy? Oh, you just had to see me, didn’t you, baby? Well you can’t! – *POOF!* – I’ve melted back into the shadows! Ow!! OWW! Oh, I’ve bumped my head, baby! Stop trying to see me, baby! [gathers himself] Okay. I’m concealed once again in the cloak of darkness, safe in the arms of my one true love, Mother Night. Yesssss. But you will always sense when I’m near – on account of all the garbage juice I got on me. [poof]. What’s that? Who am I? (tilts heads back to laugh with the street-informed wisdom of the ages and his little hat falls off and is squashed by passing Tesla). Don’t you know? (heh heh heh, and so on) I am……JEFF [quickly whips around into a martial-arts-like crouch, a box of Chiclets® flying off his person and into the street] WING! [whips around again, now facing away from us]. 

This city never sleeps, and I have questions. Are they rhetorical? You decide. Baby. [peels off dime store trench coat and erstwhile Richard Widmark persona. The jungle cat is a paunchy middle-aged man with a lazy eye and hair like the runaway mold that forms on neglected birthday cakes.] This place is a puzzler. Let’s talk! 

1. When did previously cozy restaurants start using those jet engines for atmosphere? You know the ones I’m talking about. They have them outside all the restaurants in the evenings, diners nonchalantly eating and gabbing and gesturing next to what looks like the ass-end of an F-16. Remember candlelight, people?

2. Why the sudden profusion of pampering podiatry? Did I miss something? Did all that pogo dancing at PCDC in the eighties wreak such havoc that an entire generation of regret-hobbled New Wavers need dozens of foot parlors to service their battered Duran Durans? How else to explain it? “You know it’s funny. I’m suddenly taken with the wildest impulse to have a gaggle of kneeling, fleet-fingered strangers surround my marmadukes and touch touch TOUCH THEM!” This is what brought down Rome, approximately.

3. Why do cars roar down the deceptively named Coast Village Circle like they are fleeing mortar fire? I understand that it provides a handy alternative to the sometimes sluggish (or therapeutically pacific) stop-and-go canter of CVR proper. But maybe you needn’t break the sound barrier to make good on your cackling desire to beat the Main Street traffic. Some of your supersonic rides have a dusting of gypsum clinging to the grillwork. If you are plowing through actual homes to beat the CVR traffic crawl… do I really need to finish that thought? Heading to my car after work one day I saw a maroon Maserati streak past me with a panicked sous-chef clinging to the hood in absolute terror, clutching his Le Creuset Pepper Mill and screaming through his Edvard Munch face. Breathe, people. 

4. When the sun goes down, why does the Santa Barbara Courthouse lighting so effectively evoke the “It’s a Small World” ride at Disneyland? As justice is meted out, do we really need to heap on the cruel and unusual suggestion that the perp is about to be incarcerated with 10,000 singing dolls? Surely this inference has resulted in many desperate plea deals.

5. Why are you dear villagers so intensely shampooing your dogs? Yes, these are domesticated and not wild animals. Yes, some of these huggable, unconditionally loving family members are rare breeds, literally. But should any animal look like a fabulously blow-dried and comb-teased Connie Stevens? Remember that however put together your sweet canine companion, you will still be obliged to carry its feces around in a translucent little baggie. Perspective. 

There are eight million stories in the naked city. [shrugs into his cheap knockoff trench coat and re-assumes Raymond Chandler murmur] And in our crazy outpost of hipster madness? Five for now, baby. And counting. You heard it from me! JEFF! [twirls dramatically, loses balance, totters into street and is hurled onto the hood of a speeding Mercedes-Benz E-Class All-Terrain E 450 4MATIC, which bears the pipsqueak away].