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.
