Lions & Tigers & Bears

Lions and Tigers and Bears.
That was the local scuttlebutt. The guy up the hill who owned a soft drink company had his living room set up to hold large cats. Like at the zoo. He supposedly brought them home on weekends. I had almost forgotten about the whole thing when one of his company trucks rumbled past our house. It was something to behold. A brand new Dodge stretch pickup with double rear axles and what sounded like glass packs. It was totally tricked out in his company’s colors done in pearl-flaked electric metal pastels tastefully accented by three or four square yards of chrome. A large chrome-plated cage and padlock sat in the bed of the truck. It was empty.
Lions and Tigers and Bears.

Now that I had actually seen evidence of the possibility of large carnivores spending their weekends in the neighborhood, I hoped that Raymar of the canyon had his security down pat. I could just imagine our neighbors going down to their garden to pick some Walla berries and finding a Siberian tiger wallowing in the catnip, but nothing happened.
A week later we had some friends over for dinner. They were terminally trendy Melrose Avenue flatlanders not into the rusticness of Laurel Canyon.
“I don’t know how you can stay up here all the time,” said Gavin. “It’s so, so — quiet.”
“Yup,” I nodded my head.
“I mean we’ve been here for almost an hour and nothing interesting has happened.”
“Precisely. That’s why we like it up here.”
He turned and smiled smarmily, “That may be fine for you, but I need a minimum of one major bizarre occurrence a day or I’m not a happy camper. You just can’t find that here, too quiet.”
“It has its moments,” I said.
We walked out to the carport to fire up the old Weber. Gavin was going on about no matter how beautiful it was up here, it was too darn dull.
“Tell me, just for the record. Does anything ever happen up here?”
I was getting a tad tired of Gavin’s canyon knocking, good-natured as it was. I was just about to zap him with a rapier-like canyonesque retort when the canyon itself answered him — right on cue.
Lions and Tigers and Bears.
You could feel the throb of the big engine through your feet and see the glare from the chrome all the way up from Grandview. A long snout poked out from behind the Hibiscus bushes and started to make the turn. Gavin stopped in mid-sentence and stared. I stopped and stared. It was a large metal-flake blue shark’s nose. Apparently Raymar had more than one kind of truck. In addition to being tricked out, this one was built in the shape of a twenty foot bluish shark. Right behind the dorsal fin was a big chrome cage. There was a large black panther pacing back and forth in the cage. The shark finished its turn and rumbled majestically past the carport. The panther stared directly into Gavin’s eyes, curled back its lips and snarled — ten feet from his face. The carport reverberated. Then it was gone. Shark, cage and panther disappearing in a cloud of dust on their way down the hill.
Gavin turned around, his eyes as big as the panther’s. “D-D-Did you see that?”
“See what?” I was enjoying this immensely.
“The Lion!”
“Panther,” I said. I could tell that Gavin hadn’t been a cat person before this but he was now.
“Does this happen very often?”
“Just weekends and holidays.”
“Does anything else like this ever happen?””” he asked, the look of epiphnized amazement still on his face.
“You’d be surprised. Light the charcoal will you? I’m going in and marinate the chicken.”
As I walked into the kitchen Gavin yelled, “So you think there might be any places for rent around here? We have to move in September. Maybe we’ll check out some places in Laurel Canyon.”
“I know what you mean.” I could tell that Gavin hadn’t been a canyon person before, but he was now,
Lion and Tigers and Bears.
And Laurel Canyon.