(cop stories ages 6-16)

when i turned 6, my family moved to a middle class neighborhood in the valleys of san diego called allied gardens. a white suburb. there was a japanese lady who lived down the street but she was married to an ex-marine named dick agler who owned 2 big german shepherds so she was actually white, according to my parents.

the first couple weeks passed, quiet and uneventful. we met our neighbors on one side, the daubs: an astronomer and a child psychologist who had 2 boys my older brother's age. john and doug. john was a monstrosity of unfortunate physical traits. tall like andre the giant with greasy hair stringing across a rather protuberant forehead. everyone called him lurch. his menagerie of snakes and rats just added to the mystique. doug was nearly opposite of his brother. gregarious, outgoing and entrepreneurial. at one point he converted his bedroom into a general store and put all his possesions up for sale. when he realized no one was buying anything, he started charging an entrance fee. in the near future, the four of us would form a neighborhood posse called the "66 spies" where our primary duty was to spy on neighbors with high power binoculars. our secret password was "yoy." my mother signed me and my brother up for piano lessons, and we got ready for the next school semester . i plastered my school folder with "yoy," over and over in different shades of ballpoint ink. incidentally, the neighbors on the other side of us were mormons who also owned 2 german shepherds named hansel and gretchen.

one night after we'd grown bored watching the hicksons (john and doug's elderly neighbors) pluck figs from their yard through our high power binoculars, we wandered around in search of more interesting game. john and doug pointed out tu tuna's house. tu tuna lived in a rundown spanish style bungalow around the corner about 2 blocks down the street from us. the rumor was he made meth in his bathtub and if you were a girl, he'd let you have some for free. that's also how he got his name. he had a habit of asking girls if they liked tttu-tuna. i didn't find out til i was 12 that tuna meant pussy. we knocked on his door to see if he'd let me in, but no one answered. we rambled further into the valley where john and doug pointed out another house. "don't ever ever EVER go near there!" they warned. the occupant was a vietnam vet who lived with his dogs and chased kids off his property with a shotgun, randomly shooting in any direction. i never believed this story until years later, when i did acid for the first time and found myself being chased through the park that bordered this man's house, hellhounds yewling like starved demons behind me, infamous shotgun convulsing in his white fist. i saw god that night.

while the four of us beat the bushes of our fair neighborhood, i noticed a particular graffiti everywhere: scrawled on garage doors, apartment gates, asphalt, white buildings...ALLIED GARDENS NAZIS, usually circled around a messy swastika. john being the oldest tried to explain what a nazi was..."blap blap blap blap." i didn't get it. but nazis were creepy motherfuckers. i developed an intense nazi paranoia. afraid to get up in the middle of the night to pee, afraid to sleep alone. in one short evening, my world became a bloodswarm of nazis and ku klux klansmen cavorting in an unholy union of orgiastic proportions, phantomly chasing me through my real and sleeping hours. instead of "yoy" i started drawing swastikas with x's through them. the attacks began less than a week later.

we awoke one morning to discover our family room, which was really a converted garage, ransacked like a band of pirates had stayed the night. the intruders annihilated everything--down stuffing from scourged pillows rested in the air like dumb birds, cans of busch oozed all over the new carpeting, broken glass from family pictures stood frozen on their pointed shards--and in the corner, the most ominous remnant of all: ALLIED GARDENS NAZIS, still dribbling down the wall.

the attacks persisted almost every night for the next week. after that first incident my mother, brother and i stayed over at john and doug's house while my father stayed home alone despite my pleading him not to. he worked the graveyard shift as a donut baker and most of the break-ins occurred after he'd already left for work. i was scared shitless anyway and started wetting my bed. i also had a reoccuring nightmare in which we were beseiged by the nazis/kkk and my father would be fending them off with a baseball bat but the gruesome inevitable horror was always interrupted by me screaming myself awake with pee all over. my mother was horribly embarrassed that i was pissing on other people's furniture so she urged my dad to get the police involved which he had been reluctant to do. in retrospect, i think he might have enjoyed the time alone.

The night of the last attack, john and doug's mom made us meatloaf for dinner. this was the first time i'd ever eaten whitey food aside from the occasional mcdonald's hamburger. i didn't know how to eat it so i poured ketchup all over it. boy i loved ketchup! then doug tried to seduce me into eating dog chow. they had a pet shnauzer named pepper. he even ate a nugget himself to prove how yummy it was. but i didn't go for it. something about his wanting me so badly to do it made me suspicious. when my mother tucked me into bed, she told me not to worry about peeing because she'd laid down some extra sheets and a layer of plastic. this embarrassed me because for some reason, i thought nobody knew. as i lay in bed, garbage bag rustling under me, a concentrated rage slowly devoured me. i prayed and prayed vicious prayers so that my body was paralyzed from my own imagination. i prayed and prayed that the allied gardens nazis would DIEDIEDIE!!!!

i dreamt a wonderful dream that night. it started the same way as my reoccurring nightmare except this time, when the nazis/kkk broke into our home, i discovered that i possessed a super power capability of shrinking into a miniature person. and that i could turn my whole family into miniature people. so while the invaders ravaged our home, tearing it apart in search of us, we hid in teensy weensy nooks and crevices. i woke up the next morning and devoured apple slices with peanut butter slathered all over them.

a few days later when it was safe for us to come back, the cops paid us a visit. they knew who the pirates were. it was a group of teenage boys led by a kid who lived down the street from us named mike kelly. mike kelly's younger sister was in my brother's class. they found out because mike kelly had just died the night before in a motorcycle accident prompting his buddies to spill their guts--maybe relieved that they could blame everything on the dead guy. when i heard he was dead, i felt a surge go through me, something that resembled THE MOST SUPREME OMNIPOWER. when one of the cops tried to chitchat with me, i looked him in the eye choked with this ultimate power and said, "i did it. i killed him." he looked at me and said to the other cop, "this kid's nuts." they walked away and flaming bat-like wings sprouted from my shoulders as i waved. adieu.

- Camilla Ha