t’s a story old as time. You’ve emptied your wallet at the Drawing Room, Good Luck Bar, Hyperion Tavern, 4100 Bar, etc., and now it’s time to stumble home, blessed as you are to live in L.A.’s most walkable neighborhood — call it South Los Feliz, call it North Silverlake, call it East Hollywood. The night is cool, but not cold, the air is clean (or at least you can’t see the smog), you’re not driving drunk, and, hell, you’re even getting some exercise. Good for you. But then you round the corner and see a sight that really sets your pulse to pounding. He’s a partier like you: sleeping late, stepping out around midnight and making the local rounds, dressed fashionably in black with white stripes like a sentient Adidas sneaker, tearing up the town (for grubs). He is Mephitis mephitis — Latin for “bad odor, bad odor”— your annoying neighbor with the stank all over him.

While the area around Franklin Avenue and Cahuenga Boulevard may hold the distinction of most skunk reports filed to L.A. Animal Services, a night on foot in Los Feliz or Silverlake almost guarantees an awkward social encounter with Mephitis, whether it’s bumping into him on the sidewalk, rolling past the striped throngs packed into the skunk grotto on Manzanita, or watching a skunk slip into the crawl space beneath your neighbor’s front step — which naturally abuts your parking spot.

He isn’t big and he isn’t aggressive, but when you’re notorious for shooting a pungent musk from two glands on either side of your anus with remarkable accuracy up to 15 feet — and said musk can be smelled from a mile away — negativity tends to cling to you about as bad as your own stink. Those who encounter Mephitis have a fairly common response: “Get the hell out of my neighborhood!”

But is Mephitis’ glandular problem so great as to make him a truly distinguished social pariah, even amongst the eclectic mix of the East Side?  What of my neighbors who blast mariachi music late into the night/early in the morn? Or those revving their engines, squealing their tires, and blasting their car stereos at all hours? Or the carousers hooting and hollering or shoving rattling rogue Vons shopping carts down the middle of the street at two in the morning? Or the never-ending tinny chorus of “Turkey in the Straw” chiming from the ice cream truck parked directly outside my apartment?  And do we even need to mention our meathead neighbors who seem to be trying to start a rock band upstairs — that is when they’re not preening shirtless on their way to and from the laundry room. (Wait. One more: The youth in the area regularly tag the shit out of pretty much everything in sight, including my front step, sidewalk, and mailbox.) Considering skunks are actually the number one mousers in the city — as well as ridding local gardens of snails, slugs, and various insects — Mephitis’ musk suddenly doesn’t stink quite so bad, especially if you’re a chronic smoker of the dank.

Hmmm… I’m beginning to wonder when my other neighbors are going to start pulling their weight around the ’hood. Still, even accepting Mephitis for what he is, one cannot deny the wrath of his stank and his willingness to deploy.  

Like most social contracts, getting along with skunks is all about boundaries. It’s something we humans haven’t been great at as we keep sprawling urbanity straight up Mother Nature’s ass.

Now for some helpful hints. Say you do have a run-in with a skunk, somehow resist the urge to bolt like a track star and instead slowly walk past and avoid eye contact with your self-conscious, noxious, nocturnal neighbor. If a skunk is ready to blow, beyond simply raising his tail, he’ll also do you the favor of stamping his feet.  But should the human-skunk cultural divide prove impossible to navigate and you do catch a shot of musk, there are solutions. Literally. While many pooh-pooh the traditional tomato juice route, mixing it with vinegar is still the skunk odor neutralizer recommended by Animal Services. There are also products specifically geared to the task, like Nature’s Miracle Skunk Odor Remover, which actually attacks the enzymes in the skunk’s spray, for those vengeful victims not satisfied with simply neutralizing but actually wanting to destroy the stank.

As with all neighborhood gang problems, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Skunks, like drunks with the post-bar munchies, venture out into the night looking to combine minimum effort with maximum grubbage. And while McDonald’s closes at 2 a.m., the skunk fast food banquet of outdoor pet dishes, unsecured trash receptacles, and garden compost piles is open all night. This means you can cut back on skunk encounters by removing these sweet temptations. Besides, feeding predatory animals is now a misdemeanor carrying a minimum $500 fine.

Remember, skunks suck at climbing, so securing your yard with a solid fence, filling any gaps with wire mesh, will make a better neighbor of Mephitis. And though skunks have poor eyesight, their peepers are nonetheless sensitive, so a motion-activated strobe light can send a skunk the message to just keep on walking, pal (although it might be smart to check for nearby cases of Mephitis epilepsy, as nobody needs another Pokemon situation).

    Naturally, here in L.A., city of innovation, skunk deterrents have taken on a unique flair. Local legend tells of one man who set a five-foot-tall, motion-sensing and waving Santa in his yard, shooing skunks off with yuletide cheer. And there was the special-effects guru who rigged a remote-controlled paintball gun to deal with the striped stink bombs, just like in the director’s cut of Aliens!

    Worst case scenario: Should your defenses be breached and Mephitis sets up camp on your property, there are humane, civilized ways to encourage him to leave. It’s not necessary to call Animal Services and demand civic action (for one thing, skunks are far from extinction, so having the city remove one skunk will likely just result in the arrival of its cousins looking to fill the territorial void). Skunks choose crawl spaces and under-porches because they offer dark, quiet refuge from the hustle and bustle of daytime living. So, to send Mephitis packing, simply flip the script and set up a fluorescent light and a blathering radio by the skunk’s den each night. To monitor the skunk’s comings and goings, dust the ground in front of the den’s entrance with flour and check for tracks each morning. Just make sure you don’t try to drive the skunk out during the day, as the nocturnal creatures will be too terrified to trade the den for the blinding sunlight of midday, even when being bombarded by fluorescence and Tom Leykis.

Hopefully these tips will help mitigate the mutual annoyance between man and skunk, creating a hospitable neighborhood for all: black, white, brown, gay, straight, bi, rich, poor, hipster, local, yokel, rocker, banger, slanger, and stinker.

Kumbaya, Mephitis, kumbaya.