HOLLYWOODLAND: DEER DIARY

VANITIES

After CAZZIE DAVID moved into the hunting lodge of an Old Hollywood star, she got in touch with her animal instincts

CAZZIE DAVID

The strikes had just ended. It may or may not have been the end of Hollywood itself. I had just moved into a new house that I was told was once the hunting cabin of a movie star during the golden age of Hollywood. Even though I didn't know anything about the movie star beyond that he was a movie star and, I guess, a hunter, with a hunting cabin in LA.

I had spent almost my entire life here, but all I knew about the ecosystem was that it was fake—an arid climate kept lush by imported water and exotic plants. A lot of lawns, something my mother (an environmental activist) calls "dead zones" and thinks should be illegal. "They do nothing for the bees," she says.

The only wildlife I encountered was the occasional lizard or hummingbird. Once in awhile, we'd turn off Sunset and the beams of our headlights would catch the eyes of a coyote. Thus, the idea that anyone could have hunted here was.. .confusing. The closest anyone in this city got to hunting was making movies and shows about people who hunted. Or dating.

That's the beauty of Hollywood. We live at a comfortable remove from life and death, i.e., from reality, and we like it that way.

I saw them shortly after moving in. Four deer prancing across the hillside. I was amazed—not only because this was LA, but because I'd been enchanted by deer ever since seeing Bambi at six years old.

As they are for all Americans, Disney movies were the foundational cinematic experience of my childhood. Which is to say they completely traumatized me. They were supposed to teach us about life and death. Instead, Bambi taught me that my mother was going to be taken from me at any moment, and I would be left orphaned, trying to survive on magical thinking alone. I was inconsolable for weeks. My mother had to bring me to a hypnotist to erase my newfound knowledge of the reality of life. This is possibly why my takeaway from Bambi was not about the triumph of nature and the circle of life but how deer are the sweetest, cutest, most innocent creatures ever to exist.

The deer surfaced once a month, and when they did I'd rush to the windows and watch for endless stretches of time. Sometimes, whole afternoons went by where I did nothing but look at deer. Occasionally, I'd post a video to Instagram, which is how I discovered what people think about deer.

"Vermin," they replied, as if deer weren't little ballerinas in animal form! "Say goodbye to your flower garden."

I didn't care. I loved them and felt we understood each other. They were scared and I was also scared. But it wasn't enough just to love them. I needed them to love me. I looked for ways to encourage them to spend more time at my house. I wanted them to know that unlike the movie star, who had surely given them some form of ancestral trauma, I would never kill their mother. I, too, was a vulnerable herbivore, basically, with the exception of fish and chicken and red meat, if I'm on my period.

The challenge of trying to gain their affection was similar to my romantic life. The deer is like the avoidant man in that way: Don't make any sudden movements, pretend I don't care, avoid direct eye contact so as not to trigger their fight-or-flight response, and never ever make the first move.

Inspired by Jane Goodall and her chimps, I assigned them names and started by observing them from afar. I put out salt licks and water troughs.

I inched closer to the deer. Months went by. The deer inched closer to me.

Soon, they multiplied and visited each day, all day. They sat on the front porch and lingered by my door. I canceled plans to not disturb them. I'd lose track of time watching them and miss appointments. Every time I'd try to work, I'd see a deer out of the corner of my eye and have to stop. What was I supposed to do? Glance at its majestic purity and move on? I'm not a sociopath....

Friends were growing concerned, the same way they would when I'd date an avoidant man.

"This isn't healthy," they'd scold me. "You need to set boundaries."

Instead, I thought about pivoting careers to make my distraction productive. Deer influencer was off the table, as I was losing followers every time I posted them. Becoming the Jane Goodall of deer was also not an option, as the deer refused to do anything impressive, like make and use tools. Theyjust stood around, munching and munching...and munching.

I learned about Tippi Hedren's lion sanctuary and the former aviary in Beverly Hills built by John Barrymore, where Marlon Brando and Candice Bergen reportedly later lived, and tried to see if I could get certified as a deer sanctuary. But the government didn't have an interest in protecting deer. If anything it was the opposite.

And the government wasn't the only threat. One day as I was watching the deer, I saw a bobcat sauntering across the hill with the perverse smize of a Disney villain. I screamed at the top of my lungs, but the deer were now so comfortable around me, they barely flinched. The bobcat ran off—this time. But what if I hadn't been there?

I installed trail cameras and kept watch for predators like a full-time security guard. In my round-the-clock, I observed the natural habitat around me more closely, which is how I discovered it was hell. In one week I saw a snake eat a mouse whole and a falcon snatch a blue bird out of thin air and crush it beneath its talons. Then mating season began, and I witnessed nearconstant nonconsensual sex! I felt like Werner Herzog in Burden of Dreams, realizing in a thick German accent that the only harmony in the jungle is "the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder."

The brutality of wild LA was too much to bear, but my duty to the deer superseded my desperation to shut my curtains and pretend there was not a fight to the death going on right outside my door. Every cracking twig, every rustling bush filled me with anxiety. I wished the Old Hollywood movie star had left one of his hunting rifles behind.

I wanted to give the deer a proper Hollywood existence. One that is, on the surface, perfect and plastic and (as of the last decade) ageless. I should have known better. If there's anything Hollywood teaches you, it's that the more dreamlike something seems, the more broken it may be.

"What happened here?!" my mom said when she visited in October. "It's a dead zone!"

The native flame-retardant plants— lilac, manzanita, sugar bush—were now skeletons of dried-up bushes and patches of flammable wild yellow grass on the balding dirt. I looked over my shoulder, where 11 deer stood, munching.

"You're ruining the ecosystem." she said. "Deer need to play their role as prey. "

Despite my naive illusion that in a just world, nothing with innocent intentions would ever have to die, this was evidently why deer were a threat to the alreadyendangered oaks, birds, bees. Like the avoidant man, the deer takes and takes until there is nothing left but a barren landscape ready to be set on fire.

Anyways, I'm considering moving to New York.