SPARE PARTS

7 June 2003

We live in Davis, California, once recognized by one of the tabloid newspapers as America's weirdest city.

This is the city that gave a woman a costly ticket for snoring too loud. In her own bed. In her own home. Her neighbor insisted her snoring was keeping him awake, and so she was cited. I think the charges were eventually dropped, but she endured nation-wide ridicule as a result of the incident.

This is the city with a (former) mayor who attempted to have potholes in an alleyway declared historic and to prevent the street from being paved over.

This is the city that spent $100,000 to build a tunnel for toads when a new freeway overcrossing meant cars would now drive where the toads once crossed the road. Nobody has ever explained to my satisfaction how the toads were supposed to know that if they went in a dark tunnel they would eventually come out in toad heaven on the other side. Nor has anybody that I know ever seen a toad anywhere near the tunnel.

But I wrote about all of that before.

Yes, Davis is unique. We are a nuclear free zone. We officially support a woman's right to choose, and now we have sent a message to the state legislature that we endorse the freedom to marry for all people, regardless of gender.

Like any city, Davis has its share of characters. I remember the backwards-walking guy who came into the typing service where I worked, pulled a wadded up piece of what looked like papier mache out of his pocket and asked if we could type his manuscript. My boss at the time told him we could not and sent him away.

Turns out he was actually a brilliant guy with severe emotional problems and that wadded up piece of papier mache was actually typed by another service and was even published. I wish I could remember his name now--or the name of his book.

We also had the guy who talked to aliens and wrote a book about his experiences. I even bought that book. Not because it was a good book (it was abominable), but because I had probably typed part of it.   I gave it as a gift to my friend Melody, who had also worked on it. This guy's thesis was that we are being controlled by lasers from outer space and I can't remember why, but he had a particular "thing" about magician Doug Henning, whose magic, he felt, proved his theory.

So anyway, Davis is a weird city.

But we may have reached new heights of weirdness this week.

There is a trailer park. This is not the kind of RV park that people travel to Sun City to meet other RVers. Some of these trailers...and these are trailers...not "mobile homes"... have not seen asphalt since the 1940s. It's dark and haphazard and friends of ours, who used to manage it, say that it's the place where most of the drug deals go down in Davis.

So on Tuesday afternoon, a resident of this trailer park discovered body parts near the dumpster of the trailer park.

"We're treating it as a homicide because we don't know what we have, so we treat it as the worst-case scenario until we determine otherwise," the investigating officer is quoted as saying. I'm trying to think of what other scenario would result in discarded body parts in a dumpster.

Of course the report states that the limbs were " placed on top of several discarded computers, next to the overfilled Dumpster." I've heard of being upset with your typist, but this does seem to go a little bit too far!

But it gets weirder. Now just imagine yourself taking the garbage out on a Monday night for the trash guys to pick up on Tuesday. You get to the dumpster and are greeted with the sight of some arms and legs detached from torsos. What's the first thing you'd do?

Well, I suspect that the first thing you'd do would not be to pack them all up and take them to the city dump and then call the police! But that's what this guy did. He packed them up (neatly, I assume) and took them out to the county landfill.

The investigation continues. They have now determined the body parts may have come from three or four different people, some male, some female. Some parts are mummified.

The residents of the trailer court apparently aren't much affected by the discovery. "If it turned out to be someone's head and someone disappeared last week, then I'd be worried," one resident said. "I'm reserving being creeped out until finding out more."