HOA
by Ferdinand Folk
One would assume that a home—particularly one chosen for privacy—would be left alone.
One would assume that easy access, quiet neighbors, and no gates would signal a lack of interest in surveillance.
One would be wrong.
The condo was not purchased as a lifestyle flex. It was acquired as distance—and inheritance-adjacent. I was living, quite literally, in a dead man’s house.
The former owner was a Palm Springs socialite of a certain era: martinis, dinner parties, men with nicknames, and a houseboy who inherited everything except the appetite to live in it. The arrangement was simple. I could rent the place cheaply if I helped sell off the antiques, disperse the estate, and slowly empty a life that had already concluded.
It was aging Palm Springs in miniature—rooms built for entertaining no longer fashionable, artifacts from a social world that had outlived its guests. Three thousand square feet. Open access. No gates. No guards. Just cameras at the entrances, because privacy sometimes requires documentation.
It was designed for in-and-out discretion, not spectacle.
A fortress of plants, quiet, and yes—a discreet glory hole—because modest deviance behind closed doors is no one’s business, and because adults are allowed to configure their homes for how they actually live.
The problem was not what happened inside.
The problem was that one stayed.
At the time, I was in my early thirties—whatever that means now—financially independent, self-sustaining, and largely uninterested in narrating myself for the comfort of strangers. In a twenty-two-unit complex populated almost entirely by retirees, widows, and permanently paired men, staying home during the day registered as suspicious.
In this environment, productivity is proven by absence.
Cars leave. Cars return.
Days are meant to show evidence.
Mine did not.
People came by.
Different people.
Different ages.
Different bodies.
Different rhythms.
This was enough.
Things escalated when the couple next door arrived.
They were gay. Married. Identical. Same height, same build, same haircut, same glasses. One worked at Meta—always “working,” never visibly working. The other was in real estate—always evaluating, never satisfied. They moved through the world as a matched set, accompanied by matching dogs large enough to suggest authority.
Their confusion was immediate.
There was, they decided, no way someone like me could have friends of all ages, shapes, and sizes coming and going throughout the day. Gay life, as they understood it, was curated. Carbon-copied. Predictable.
It did not include my best friend—a 58-year-old stubby Mexican man.
It did not include a 300-pound heavyset guy my own age who happens to be one of my closest confidants.
Not all gays marry their reflection.
Some of us collect people.
The couple began watching. Walking too close. Pausing. Listening. Logging activity like unpaid interns. Eventually, they took their concerns to the HOA board and floated the theory—carefully, responsibly—that I might be a prostitute or a drug dealer.
This was flattering in theory but wildly impractical in reality.
I do not have the bandwidth to be either.
HOA logic, however, does not require feasibility.
Only suspicion.
The board itself was a census of affluence with time.
The president was a Canadian househusband on a visa who maintained a small personal motorcade: a Lincoln Continental for dignity, a vintage Rolls-Royce for nostalgia, and another car whose sole function appeared to be reminding everyone he had options. Despite this, my interest in a beat-up truck was denied on the grounds of “aesthetics.”
Another board member was a real-estate woman married to a man who walked his cat in a stroller.
Another had inherited his unit, never worked a day in his life, and organized his entire existence around a dog that could not interact with other dogs. The dog ran the schedule. We complied.
The former HOA president lived directly behind me—mean, bitter, and widely disliked. Her husband did not speak. He followed her like punctuation.
And then there was the couple who went through everyone’s trash. Literally. They were bull dykes with a strong sense of civic duty and no sense of boundaries, auditing garbage like archaeologists of suspicion.
Before anything official happened, the HOA did what it always does: it let the rumor circulate.
Smiles shifted. Pauses stretched. Politeness thinned. The retired women recalibrated their warmth. No one asked questions. Silence did the work.
Meanwhile, the list of HOA irritations grew:
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An American flag in my private courtyard because it can insinuate political affiliation
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Rose bushes peeking over the fence even though rose bushes grew adjacent outside my wall
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A pumpkin carved for Halloween because it’s not uniform—everyone would have to have one
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A pirate flag hung beside it, apparently signaling moral collapse (what does Pirates of the Caribbean have to do with anything?)
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The hypothetical presence of a truck that never even arrived
All of this, while the president polished his Rolls-Royce.
Eventually, the twins began packing.
I approached them a few times toward the end—pleasantly, smugly—because they couldn’t tell if I was serious or joking, and that ambiguity seemed important. It’s always useful to let people sit in uncertainty they helped create.
As they walked past my front door one last time, I popped out and said, very cheerfully:
“It’s such a shame you’re moving. I’m having an orgy this weekend. Drug-fueled. Everyone in the complex is invited. Shame you’ll miss it.”
They did not stop walking.
They moved anyway.
The complex exhaled. Property values rose. The HOA—without irony—thanked me for increasing the desirability of the neighborhood. Atop that, I was a stellar neighbor: run across the street for your dog that gets loose, help unload your groceries, climb on your roof to check your A/C, repaint your door because Gladys Kravitz says it’s chipped. I did all that. It was COVID.
This is how these stories always end.
HOAs don’t admit they were wrong.
They just wait to see who leaves first.
If you stay, you win by default.
The plants thrived. The old women waved again. The cameras kept watching the right things.
HOAs don’t hate chaos.
They hate people they can’t read.
And nothing unsettles a quiet neighborhood faster than a man who lives comfortably, hosts freely, and refuses to explain himself.
Which, apparently, is the real nuisance.