November 2000
The Western Tanager calls Central America home, but during its annual migration observant bird-watchers can spot this little beauty in the most unlikely locations—even in the densely populated hills rising above the industrial cacophony of Sunset Boulevard, in Hollywood, California. You don’t have to be an expert ornithologist to notice the Tanager. It’s canary yellow, with a brilliant red head that looks like the logo on the helmet of the Phoenix Cardinals. It has a black back, like the home jerseys of the Jacksonville Jaguars. And one white and one yellow wing bar, a design that no NFL team has yet co-opted. When it’s not breeding, it lacks the glowing cap, and the bird books say that in this state it’s common to mistake the Tanager for a male American Goldfinch or a female Bullock’s Oriole—which is what I must have done, I tell myself. It’s nearly Thanksgiving; any Tanagers that once nested here in the palms of Los Angeles must be currently enjoying the tropical sun down in Costa Rica, where, along with dozens of species of tree frogs, butterflies, and serpents, many of the world’s biggest bookmakers permanently reside.
Still, the flash of yellow and orange outside my living room window catches my eye, and that’s not easy to do when football is on the television. The antics of the brightly colored gladiators, heavily muscled warriors outfitted as gaudily as macaws, seem to matter to me more than to the average sports fan. Actually, at this point in my life I no longer care about the interstitial running around and tackling, the passing and catching, the playing of the game. I’m concerned only with the little box in the corner of the screen, the one that shows the score.
I brush aside a pile of papers on the coffee table, a stack of spreadsheets with numbers on them that I barely understand, and I grab my binoculars. I use them to spot the green parrots (pants of the Miami Dolphins) and Western Scrub Jays (Minnesota Vikings), and the dozens of hummingbirds and finches that flit around the gardens of my house. I’m not really a “birder.” I don’t maintain a life list or spend my vacations in Louisiana swamps searching for rare species of woodpecker. But I do enjoy looking at the winged creatures around the neighborhood. Observing their grace and beauty gives me a sense of peacefulness, a calm, that most of my waking hours sorely lack. When I pick up my field glasses, I’m momentarily transported to a tranquil sanctuary, where some of Hollywood’s biggest movie stars aren’t calling me to scream about their “investments.” Where no one cares about the supercomputer I’ve got stashed in a Massachusetts apartment. Where it doesn’t matter what legendary gambler is on my speed-dial.
If an uninitiated visitor wandered into my living room, he would observe what seems to be domestic normality: the dog asleep underneath the piano, the TV flickering in the corner, the late-afternoon sunlight streaming through the large picture window, the man in his thirties attired in a sweatshirt with cold pizza stains on the sleeve. Few would guess that this modest Hollywood bungalow is the home of a serious professional gambler. I’m the owner of the house and I can’t believe it. Just three years earlier I was an earnest middle-class American, a writer searching for a good story.
I found it.
It was hidden between the lines, enmeshed among the Las Vegas point spreads and betting odds, like a sparrow camouflaged in bougainvillea vines, almost invisible until you look more closely, with a telescopic visual aid or an expert teacher.
The New York Giants and their 4-point lead over the Washington Redskins can wait; I’m determined to positively identify the wayward Tanager I think I’ve seen streaking past my window. I raise the binoculars to my eyes and scan the trees across the street. It’s all an emerald blur. I focus. The individual branches come into view, but no birds. Wait, there’s something! Oh, just a dove. No sign of the lurid yellows and oranges that signal toxicity to predators but look so fine to our human eye.
I put down the glasses and scan the street with naked eye, hoping for a burst of color, some frantic movement. Everything is static. I see houses built on granite bedrock, noble firs unruffled by wind, parked cars. Nothing animated.
Then a glint of light twinkles from across the way. I bring the lenses back to my eyes and look for something moving. Slowly, like the establishing shot in an epic western, I pan from the left side of my quiet residential street to the right. Stalks of bamboo. A cypress tree. Pink impatiens. The pavement on my neighbor’s driveway. A white picket fence. A Buick.
A Buick with a balding man slouched low behind the steering wheel. Looking straight at my front window. Through binoculars.
I pull the magnifiers from my eyes to see the big picture from a normal perspective, because, surely, the pressure of the past year has started to get to me and I must be seeing strange and troubling things.
Before I can get another peek at the Buick’s occupant, the car roars away, its tires screeching like a flock of parakeets.
I run out my front door, down the steps, and out to the sidewalk. I look up the street. Nothing. He’s gone.
None of the neighbors seems to be around, and if any are, they’re staying inside their home with the shades drawn, safe from spying interlopers. I feel alone, as though I’m the only living person in a ghost town, with only my dog and a tangle of increasingly frightening thoughts to keep me company. My impulse is to lock myself inside the house and phone my mentor and protector. But before I make the call, I entertain an even more disturbing notion: perhaps he’s the one having me watched.
I trudge back to the living room. The Giants have widened their lead to 7 points. My famous colleague Captain Beefcake, who ought to be worrying about the box office numbers of his new thriller and not the score of a meaningless NFL game, has left what is probably an irate message on my voicemail. And the birds, the ones I’ve seen and the ones I suppose I’m only imagining, have left the feeders and returned to their nests. The only creature to watch, it seems, is me.
I close the curtains and double-bolt the door. Then I squeeze into a corner of the couch, cover myself with a wool blanket, and wait to see if Washington can make a late score.