Friends and Pranksters

Illustration by Seth Drenner

Shortly after Jon Lucas and his wife, Erin Walsh, moved into their new home on Flores Street in West Hollywood in early 2003, they met their neighbors. Lucas, a screenwriter, and Walsh, then a corporate attorney, immediately took to P.J. Brill, a restaurateur, and Lauren Scherr, a handbag designer. This only made sense. Both couples were in their late 20s, educated, successful. Both of their houses were accordingly nice, with front and backyards and modest but bubbling fountains (they share a gardener). Lucas and Walsh are tall and fair-skinned, Brill and Scherr are smaller and darker.

So comfortable were the couples together that shortly into their first dinner party, they agreed it would be a good idea to exchange house keys in the event of — well, of something. Brill and Scherr had a security setup with cameras and they gave Lucas and Walsh their code. It seemed neighborly.

Then they had more wine and someone said, Wouldn’t it be funny if we began playing pranks on each other? A narrative man, Lucas ran with it. Conventional stuff was batted around. Then some filthy and truly obstructive possibilities came up. The Iraq war had just begun, and everyone was in a somewhat combative mood. It was agreed the pranking should begin immediately, without any more getting-to-know-you time.

Not long after, the first salvo was launched. It was a late-night attack, unwitnessed. Brill and Scherr walked onto their back porch in their robes, coffee mugs in hand, to find their gardener staring at the fence that separates the two properties — on which, ever so gingerly, hung a hermaphrodite blow-up doll with its various nether-regions and plastic chest hair exposed to the morning breeze. (The doll, which Lucas had kept from his bachelor party, was named Butch.)

A few days passed. Rather than go blue out of the gates, as Lucas and Walsh had done, Brill and Scherr wanted to do something a little more nuanced. They procured 20 pounds of loose carrots and a furry bunny doll. At 2 a.m. they set up a kind of mortar position in their backyard, catapulting the carrots one by one, and finally the bunny, into Lucas and Walsh’s yard. It looked like something out of Peter Rabbit — if the book had a tornado scene.

The next morning, robes donned, coffee mugs in hand, Brill and Scherr went outside and looked over the fence. The carrots were still in the backyard, but now they spelled out, in large letters, "IT’S ON." The bunny formed the apostrophe.

On it was. Nearby there lived an old lady with innumerable badly attended cats. Cat poop dotted the sidewalk. The ASPCA had been called. Brill and Scherr left for a week’s vacation, and when they returned they found a giant banner reading "Cats Welcome" hanging above their front bushes. They went inside to find cat toys littering the floor. In the backyard, there was a sign, "Poop Here," with a bull’s-eye marked on the grass. No cats had yet come, but the message from Lucas and Walsh was clear: If we wanted to, we could infest your entire house with dirty, defecating felines. That is the sort of power we hold over you.

"We decided not to put out the catnip," Lucas recounts, like a general looking back on a moment of strategic restraint. A new threshold of perfidy had been breached, too — Lucas and Walsh had trespassed. This was, technically, illegal. The keys and codes, those tokens of trust, had been used for ill. The sacred marital space had been violated.

Brill and Scherr prepared for the next round. Not knowing when they’d be able to strike, they went to Smart & Final and purchased many, many, many cans of cat food. And then they waited. And waited. Eventually, Lucas and Walsh left for a vacation of their own. As soon as their taxi pulled out of the drive, Brill and Scherr sprang into action. They broke into Lucas and Walsh’s place, removed every item from their double-doored jumbo refrigerator, and packed each shelf, tray and drawer with the cat food. Not only that, but they dug up the surveillance footage from their security camera, located the moment of Lucas and Walsh’s break-in and captured a still of them looking particularly guilty. They then printed WANTED posters featuring the picture, and plastered the neighborhood with them.

While all of this was going on, the neighbors were still going out to dinner together, watching movies at each other’s houses. But every time they returned home, even from a trip to the mall, they were checking around the house, not knowing what they might find. Likewise, every time they went to the other couple’s house, they couldn’t help but look at the rooms like a bombing target map. What if we turned every piece of furniture upside down? How much would it cost to cover every surface in paisley?

Lucas and Walsh had resolved that the next move had to be carried out with unprecedented brazenness. Not only would it involve trespassing, they decided, but it would have to be done, somehow, while either Brill or Scherr were home. How could that be topped? Not to be outdone by the expense and labor of the cat food, they bought out the inflatable beach-ball supply of every store they could find that sold inflatable beach balls (they estimate there were about 100 of them) and over the course of several hours, blew each one up. Enlisting Walsh’s sister to stealthily keep an eye on (through a window) the dangling feet of Scherr, who was reading magazines in a back room, they snuck into the front vestibule, shut the adjoining door leading to the house, and filled the room wall to wall, floor almost to the ceiling, with the beach balls.