If it wasn’t for the dogs, Carlos and I would have been good neighbors. He kept three little yippers on his first floor back porch, two doors to my left, during the afternoon. The off ramp from the Bay Bridge swept around Guy Place just above the printing company on Folsom Street ; the cars pumped downtown, but if you bent an ear, you could hear and then see the little yipper dogs spinning around their tails on the narrow wood porch, or just standing with their noses pointed and their yappers yipping to beat Jesus. It drove me crazy.

I met Carlos the day I began digging my garden in the empty lot next to his house. Carlos poked around in his nice, fat garden with a grapevine you could walk under. He watched me. It took me three days to dig a four-by-five plot into the steep pitch of the hill, what with the tin cans and wire and refuse tangled under the nine inch grass. I planted chives and carrots and parsley and zucchini, which grows almost anywhere in San Francisco. I tried tomato plants, which didn’t work because of the lack of water. That’s how I came to talk to Carlos.

He’d been in this country fifteen years. He didn’t smile unless you complimented his garden. Another Filipino guy, James is what they called him, lived upstairs on the third floor over Carlos. The guy on the second floor ran the Star Lunch Bar around the corner on First, until he dropped dead. His upstairs wife had a bad time after he croaked. I worked in the restaurant until three in the morning then. One night, just about when I got home at 4 a.m., I heard a shot right next to my head.

The wife had flipped her bipper and fired a pistol into the backyard, but by the time I ran out back and peeked over the big wooden fence, she was gone. They hauled her off that morning, and she was replaced by friends of herdead husband, who kept Muscovey ducks and fighting cocks.

Back to Carlos. I needed to water the garden. I’d been hauling plastic buckets up to the hill, which were never enough, so I asked Carlos if I could hook my hose to his and run my hose up to the garden. I’d pay for the water, which he thought was reasonable and I thought a pretty good deal. Two days later he said it had to stop because the landlord said I couldn’t use the water. I offered to pay for the water again, but the little guy just lifted his black horned-rimmed glasses, closed his eyes and wiped the mild perspiration off his forehead. I didn’t blame him, but my garden never did get off the ground.

Around Thanksgiving somebody sneaked over the fence next door and swiped one of the Muscovey ducks. I didn’t mind the ducks because Muscoveys aren’t real ducks in the sense of being what you might call a “True Duck.” Tthey don’t quack; they sort of hiss like they need to blow their nose. Now, Lenny Reyes (no relation to Carlos) kept his fighting cocks back there as well and I thought sure as hell if somebody comes after the cocks, there’ll be a war. He was always out there fitting different sets of spurs to his champion, Killer Red.

Now the dogs were barking.

Carlos took to keeping his yippers on his back porch day and night and they yipped, my god they yipped. They drove me crazy and Kate couldn’t understand why. She said she couldn’t hear them. I slipped it nicely to Carlos one day when he was poking around under his grape trellis. He said he’d see what he could do, which turned out to be nothing.

In the meantime, Show-Show, the Malaysian drag queen washed dishes over on Fillmore and Union and saved his money for hair transplants in L.A, He showed me the little patches around the top of his head,which had me reassessing my own pattern baldness for about a day. He’d been bringing home the strange lately. I looked out the window one night and there stood a guy with a long beard and a green paisley skirt in Show-Show’s living room. Show- Show’s head was under the skirt. Later I heard a scream (I was watching “Revenge of the Cat People” on TV). I jumped to the window. This guy in the paisley skirt was running down three flights of stairs with Show Show swiping at him with a pitchfork yelling, “Sadist. Sadist.“ He plunged the pitchfork into the wall halfway down the last landing and it stuck, allowing the guy in the skirt to escape down Guy Place. I went back to my movie and now that I think about it, I remember it was the same night the guy who lived over Carlos started using his CB radio.The radiohad a bad habit of interfering with his TV. This guy had a thirty foot antenna on the roof, so at any hour, mostly after two in the morning, my TV would say, “Trucker Trucker, this is Big Bear calling. Big Bear here. Come In, Come in.” There’d be a snap of static; my picture went bazooey for a few seconds while he spit out, “ACCIDENT ON OFF RAMP to Main Street. Traffic backed up.”

Anyhow, the dogs got worse, so I got my tape recorder and taped the dogs. I leaned out my back window with the tape recorder and waited for the dogs. Now the law is, the dogs have to bark for five consecutive minutes before they can be considered a public nuisance. That posed a problem because when I decided to record they decided to stop barking. So I had to taunt them into barking, which didn’t take much, but when I played it back all I heard was the traffic rush and a faint, ghostly yipping. Not to be deterred, I took the tape down to the police station at 7th and Bryant and showed it to the desk sergeant in charge of noise at the back of the building on the ground floor. He looked at me like I was crazy. I tried to give him the tape and he threw me out of the station. By this time I was going crazy.

Kate threatened to leave because I was so obsessed with the noise. Like I said, I worked nights so we weren’t seeing enough of each other, but I tried.

One night I walked in the bedroom in my underwear with the earplug from the TV in my ear, (it was a long cord) and I proposed marriage, which woke her up. She rolled over and snorted.

Just before Christmas, on my night off, I stopped to have a few beers at the Wagon Wheel down by the Terminal. I got home about ten-thirty and the dogs were barking to beat hell. I shoved my head out the window and screamed, “ENUUFFFFFFF!” Nothing. The dogs keep right at it. Kate covered her head with a pillow and I stomped down the stairs and over to his place and stood under his bedroom window and barked.

I barked and I barked and I barked. I changed pitch in case he couldn’t hear me. I yipped, I yelped, I woofed, I wumpfrhed, and I yapped. I barked until he opened the front door in his wire rimmed glasses and his light colored pajamas. By this time my bark had turned to a throaty rasp and I heard myself frothing, “I’m gonna kill you dawwwwgs if you don’t stop the barking. I’m GONNA KILLL YOUR DAWWWWWGS!” It was almost a whisper. I felt like some winged loony dark man who dropped off a roof. Carlos closed the door and the dogs stopped temporarily.

The next night, the apartment manager at Guy Place had enough of the guy with the CB. Turns out it the signal was interfering with his radio, too. He heard me barking at Carlos’ bedroom window, so he stomped over to put a cabatch on the CB. He was a big guy, but on the mild side. He rang the upstairs buzzer.The CB guy opened the door holding a loaded crossbow. The manager didn’t stick around for tea, but the next day Show-Show told me about the crossbow. He heard I’d been too heavy on Carlos which made me feel pretty cool and slightly guilty given the circumstances. After all, if nobody else could hear the dogs, maybe I was crazy, which I wasn’t about to own.

I had the day before Christmas off. I waited until mid-afternoon. Kate was workinguntil nine. I was going up to Gino and Carlos restaurant for their annual Christmas venison and spaghetti. I took a shower, shaved and dressed. I hopped down the front stairs and opened the front door to a cop with a shotgun, who told me to get back inside. Another cop stepped up in the doorway and the two of them crouched in the shadow.

I watched from inside. I heard yelling. A small wave of cops swept past the door and the two cops followed. I stepped outside. A TV crew waited by First Street. One of the cops walked back in my direction and I asked him what’s going on.

He told me some guy stole a baby and ran out in the street with the kid and a gun. He’d then fired the gun, which was why they called the cops. We waited a half hour. News filtered out that Carlos’ son-in-law stopped over and that Carlos, who had a snoot full for whatever reason, snatched the baby from his daughter and ran out the front door. He held the baby in one arm and the pistol in his right hand and he fired into the sky five times: whap whap whap whap whap. Then he ran back into the house with the baby. We waited. I stood on the step and the cops stood, rifles ready, in front of me. The son-in-law tried to get Carlos to tell the cops where the gun was and Carlos said there wasn’t any gun. I could hear them yelling back and forth in Tagolog and English. This went on for another half hour. The son-in-law stepped out on the porch. He was a heavy-set young Filipino with a mop of hair. He shook his head and went back in.

Then, out of nowhere, a woman reporter from the TV station snuck up behind me with a microphone and wanted to know what was going on. The whole Guy Place neighborhood was in the street including Show-Show, the apartment manager, Louis Reyes of the Muscovey and fighting cocks, and a handful of men from the other printing company down our block. I whipped a fish eye down at the reporter and said,” Why don’t you go home? This is our neighborhood and it’s none of you god-damn business what we do here.”

She looked at me like I was dirt and jammed her mike through the small crowd, but nobody talked to her. God it felt good to see she wasn’t going to get anything out of us. The camera trailed behind her, and we pressed close to each other to keep the TV world out of our neighborhood. It worked, because– just about that time– the front door opened and two cops came out with Carlos between them. His brother-in-law had punched him out.

His face was a bloody mess. The cops dragged him up the block. He seemed so small and helpless. They pulled him along like a rag doll, his toes scraping the pavement, his head bowed and his horned-rimmed glasses gone. His daughter appeared on the front steps with the baby. The son-in-law stood next to her.

Two weeks later, Carlos, wearing a blue suit, tie and Panama hat rolled the pram with the baby down Guy Place. He marched tight-lipped, looking straight ahead. He nodded. He rolled the pram down to the end of Guy Place and turned around. He marched back, crossed the street and walked that side. He was doing penance. The whole neighborhood bore witness. But Carlos and I never spoke again.

I moved to the third floor and a year or so later, they sold our building. The daughter of the new owner moved right under me with an old drinking buddy. They brought their own dog that yapped all night while they drank. The woman in my old apartment in the basement took to sleeping with an on-duty cop who parked his 003 squad car out front and left his cap and gun on a stand by the back window. It got too crazy. I moved to North Beach.

Once in awhile I go back to Guy Place. The building manager across the way is still there. He bought a new yellow Volkswagen. It’s always squeaky clean. One day I ran into him and asked if there were any apartments available in his building. He said not ordinarily, but he’d take my number. The front of my old place had been painted barn red, so I assumed it was resold. The curtains on the first floor looked expensive.

I walked up to my old garden . I could barely see the indentation. Carlos still had his garden, but he didn’t grow as much of it as he used to. The freeway above was more crowded, especially the on-ramp to the Bay Bridge. Way down to my right I heard barking. I squinted. I couldn’t quite see Carlo’ porch. It was hard to imagine the dogs lived that long.

I smiled. They barely made any noise at all.