by Nina Revoyr
Over the years, my relationship with Raina became a watered-down version of what it already was—a complicated friendship where the stakes were not clearly defined, where the same events held different and undetermined significance for each of the people involved. Raina and I would go out for drinks when we came home for Christmas—at least on the years when we didn't bring our lovers—and she'd tell me, in one sitting, a year's worth of her thoughts on her girlfriend, her job, and the state of the world. Then, with this unloaded, she'd step back into her life. It wasn't even close to enough.
What I could never tell Raina during our Christmas talks was how much I missed her, and how much her absence had affected my life. Without her around to compete against, I simply don't demand as much of myself as I used to. Raina pushed herself relentlessly because that was the only way she knew how to live, but I lacked that kind of engagement, that expansiveness of spirit; I needed her presence to spur me on to excellence. Raina did occasionally compete against people, but she didn't really need them; her struggle was with herself, and not with others. And unlike me, who cringed at the possibility of failure, Raina used each of her failures to make herself stronger. Seeing this showed me that I had been right all along; that Raina was purer and better than me. I could never live up to her, and in beating her once, I'd only given her the impetus to try harder. If Raina were still as much a part of my life as she had been in high school, the sheer proximity of her commitment and will might reawaken some of my own. But we move in separate worlds now, which never converge. There is no one else I really care to impress.
I miss the way I felt for Raina when we were teenagers. It was a clear, consuming, unequivocal passion, the kind which may only be possible at that age. I never let her know about my feelings, though, because I couldn't face the possibility of rejection. And I also thought, stupidly, that if I ever told Raina about my love for her, it would somehow touch the feeling, and change it, the way that light distorts cells beneath a microscope. It seemed like the better thing to do, the more noble thing, was not to mention it at all, but I know now that I should have told her. I should have told her a lot of things.
When Raina sat down at the table in the club that night, I was sure she had forsaken me. I was sure she had made the choice she did so that I would not be able to follow. But then she gave Toni the most angry, piercing look I'd ever seen from her, and turned back to me with a pained expression on her face.
"I had to sign with Michigan, Nancy," she said. "I kept waitin for you to make up your mind, and then Virginia and Washington both filled their guard spots with other people."
I just stared at her. I couldn't believe it. And when the significance of this information finally began to sink in, I felt my heart clench up as painfully as my calves had a few weeks before.
"Well, have you decided where you're goin?" Raina asked, voice high and distressed. "Where you gonna go?"
"Washington," I said.
"Have you talked to the coach already? When did you make up your mind?"
"About three weeks ago," I said, and I was almost crying now.
Raina looked at me, and in her face I saw all the hurt and betrayal that must have been in my own face just moments before. "Nancy," she said, "why didn't you tell me?"
Her voice was thick, and filled with loss, and it seemed that she wasn't just asking this in relation to my decision about school, but also about me, about us, about my feelings for her. And the answer, although I never explained this to her, was that I was afraid—afraid in the same way that I'd been afraid to pick a college. In the darkest corners of my mind, I feared that I didn't really have what it took for success in any realm; that I had tricked everyone, including myself, into thinking I was more than I was. Holding back had become the only thing I knew how to do. And I saw now that I had always hovered at the periphery of experience—everyone's, including my own. If I didn't try, I couldn't fail, and in the potential future, anything is possible. But what I realized as we sat there, with music pulsing all around us and Raina's soon-to-be-former girlfriend being mercifully, unusually silent, was that not trying had been a failure in itself. I should have at least made the attempt to see what opportunities might exist; I should have acted in terms of the things that really mattered to me—Raina, college, my friendships, my 'hood, and so many other things in my life since then. But I failed to engage these situations for fear that they would vanish, or that somehow, by stepping into them, I'd ruin everything. And sitting there, with the distance between Raina and me increasing already, I knew that I had lost her. In that one moment she'd become a part of my past. I felt betrayed by my own choices, as if I'd been waiting for something monumental to come along but had closed my eyes for a moment, and it was then that it had passed in front of me, unseen. I wondered what Raina was thinking, just then, as she stared at me across the table. I know what I was thinking. I was thinking of how strange it was, the love I felt for her, how odd that it could so easily alter the shape of that room, my life, the entire world, as if it had existed first, and all else after. And as I stared back at her I wondered, with the kind of questioning that is its own answer, if I'd ever care like that about anything again.
The End
Afterword
In the early 1990s, when I was just out of college, I went back to my Los Angeles–area high school to play in an alumni basketball game. I’d been a serious player—all-California Interscholastic Federation, recruited by a number of colleges—but had stopped playing after a year at Yale due to injury and the need to make money. It had been years since I’d hung out with my old high school pals, so I wasn’t prepared to learn what they’d gone through while I was living back east. With few exceptions, they had hit hard times. They’d had babies young, dropped out of school, run afoul of the law. Some of them were working dead-end jobs; some weren’t working at all. I was the only one who’d graduated from college. Away from the structure of school and sports, my friends’ lives had quickly veered off track.
I was not the smartest or most talented of my crew, but I had advantages my friends didn’t: teachers who kicked my butt but also gave me support; a single parent, yes, but one who was constant and caring; little in material comforts but a lot in expectation; and my twin loves of writing and basketball, which gave me a view of the larger world. There was also the undeniable factor of race: I was hapa, Japanese and white, while most of my friends were African American and Latino, in a country where it was—and still is—a tougher place to be if you’re black or brown.
At the alumni game, I was acutely aware of my good fortune—There but for the grace of God. I remembered how intense everything had felt those last years of high school—how each win or loss seemed like life or death; how friendships were as vital as water or air; how love both pierced and expanded us. And I suddenly realized that this intensity had stemmed in part from the fact that so much of the future had been uncertain—that at sixteen, seventeen, we knew our lives would change in ways we couldn’t imagine.
When I started to write what was to become my first novel, I tried to capture that sense of possibility and fear, when everything still lies ahead. The Necessary Hunger follows Nancy Takahiro and Raina Webber—both basketball stars—through their last year of high school in Inglewood, California, as they navigate dangerous streets, blended families, and college recruiters. It’s also a love story—the story of Nancy and Raina, and of their parents, Wendell and Claudia; a love letter to Los Angeles at the height of the gang-controlled eighties; and a ballad, of course, to basketball itself.
The Necessary Hunger was originally published in 1997. That was the year of Ellen DeGeneres’s coming-out episode, an event so notable it garnered the cover of Time. It was also a year after the start of the WNBA, which had a number of gay players—and many fans—but tried to pretend it didn’t. In that era, it was almost unheard of for a mainstream publisher to launch a book with a gay or lesbian protagonist. But thankfully one did, and the book found its readers—includi
ng people of color, and athletes, and LGBT folks who didn’t see themselves reflected often enough in books.
Perhaps one marker of progress is that for people reading the book today, Nancy, Raina, and their friends—gay and straight—are just kids, just ballers, whose lives and loves are no longer surprising. I am gratified that readers are still finding this story—and now, thanks to Akashic Books, it will be more readily available. But while I’m thrilled that the characters’ sexual orientation is no longer news, much less progress has been made in the state of our neighborhoods. Kids in Inglewood and South LA are still struggling with violence, poverty, and limited opportunity. Maybe in another twenty years that will change too.
Nina Revoyr
Los Angeles
January 2019
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the many people who helped me with this book: Donald Faulkner, for his support, his beer, and his patience when I was just starting out; Jane Dystel, my agent, for taking a chance on a young unknown; Ken McClane, for his energy, his faith, and his stories about Mr. Baldwin; Maureen McCoy, Lamar Herrin, Jason Brown, Karen Brown, Mike Chen, Julie Hilden, Kirsten Major, and Linda Myers, for their generosity and their criticism; Sarah Pinckney, my editor, for her advice, her prodding, and her enthusiastic conversations about books and basketball; Dan McCall, for his stubborn insistence that this story was really a novel; Alison Lurie, for the use of her office; and last but not least, special thanks to Stephanie Vaughn, for her eyebrows, and for never being satisfied.
I would also like to acknowledge my debt to the movie Hoop Dreams, and to Darcy Frey’s brilliant nonfiction book The Last Shot. Had it not been for these two works, and the interest and discussion they generated, my manuscript might have languished forever in the bottom of my desk drawer.
If I have forgotten to thank anyone, I apologize. I have been moved by the support and encouragement that people have given me, and I owe everyone a tremendous debt.
NINA REVOYR is the author of six novels, including The Age of Dreaming, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Southland, a Los Angeles Times best seller and “Best Book” of 2003; Wingshooters, which won an Indie Booksellers’ Choice Award and was selected by O, The Oprah Magazine as one of “10 Titles to Pick Up Now;” and A Student of History, available on March 5, 2019 from Akashic Books. Revoyr lives and works in Los Angeles.
Photograph by Monica Almeida
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PROLOGUE
NOW, THE old neighborhood is feared and avoided, even by the people who live there. Although stores wait for customers right down on the Boulevard, people drive to the South Bay, or even over to the Westside, to see a movie or to do their weekly shopping. The local places sell third-rate furniture and last year’s clothes, and despite the promises of city leaders in the months after the riots, no bigger businesses, or schools, are on their way. A few traces of that other time remain—a time when people not only lived in the neighborhood, but never chose to leave it. And if some outsider looked closely, some driver who’d taken a wrong turn and ended up on the run-down streets, if that driver looked past the weather-worn lettering and cracked or broken windows, he’d have a sense of what the neighborhood once was. The grand old library’s still there, and the first public school, with a fireplace in each of the classrooms. The Holiday Bowl’s still open—although it closes now at dusk—where men came in from factory swing shifts and bowled until dawn. There are places where old train tracks still lie hidden beneath the weeds, and if the visitor knelt and pressed his ear against the dulled metal, he might hear the slow rumble of the train that used to run from downtown all the way to the ocean.
Now, the children feel trapped in that part of the city, and because they’ve learned, from watching their parents’ lives, the limits of their futures, they smash whatever they can, which is usually each other. But then, in that different time—the neighborhood even had a different name—Angeles Mesa was a children’s paradise. It was table land, flat and fertile, and the fields of wheat and barley made perfect places for young children to hide. The older children borrowed their fathers’ guns and hunted rabbits and squirrels, because the Mesa was part of the growing city only in name; everybody knew it was country.
The children’s parents loved the neighborhood, too. The ones who grew up in cities—either there in California, or in the dark, damp states of the Midwest and East—loved the space of the Mesa, and the fresh air that carried the scent of jasmine in spring and oleanders in the summer. The ones from the South couldn’t believe they’d found a place with the ease and openness of home, but only a train ride away from their downtown jobs. It was a train that had brought them in the first place. The Chamber of Commerce sent an exhibit train to tour around the country, passing out oranges and pictures of palm trees to anyone who’d take them. Hopeful newlyweds, coughing factory workers, old sharecroppers with hands hardened by years of labor, all bit into the sweet juicy oranges and thought they tasted heaven. And the oranges were magical, because instead of quenching people’s appetites, they fed them. That yearning and anticipation started out in their taste buds, and worked down into their hearts and stomachs until they grew teary-eyed with want. In Ohio, Mississippi, in Delaware and Georgia, you could see people trailing “California on Wheels,” stumbling down the track after the slow-moving train as if they’d follow it all the way across the country. And they did. Maybe not that day, not that season, not that year, but they did. Packed up their things and arranged for someone else to send them on. Gathered the family and headed out to California.
Some of them went to Long Beach, seeking work in the bustling shipyards, or to Ventura, to draw their livings from the sea. Some went to San Fernando to be closer to the oranges that first seduced them, and some to the Central Valley to pick lettuce or grapes. And a few of them, after living someplace else for a year or several, after starting out in Little Tokyo or South Central or following the crops around the state, bought a plot of land in Angeles Mesa. The price was good, and what you got for it!—rich land nestled by wild hills. And if their neighbors spoke a different language, wore a different color skin, here—and only here—it didn’t matter. Whatever feelings or apprehensions people had when they came, they learned to put them aside. Because their children played together, sat beside each other at the 52nd Street School. Because it was impossible to walk through the neighborhood without seeing someone different from you.
Now, even the All Are Welcome Church has steel bars over its windows, and half the storefronts stand empty and deserted. The strawberry fields and orchards are all buried under concrete, and lifelong residents won’t leave their houses after dark. Those with the money but not the heart to leave the neighborhood completely cross the Boulevard and move into the hills. They never come down now, never stop at Mama’s Chicken and Waffles or Otis’s Barber Shop, which is closing, in its fortieth year, for lack of business. But then, in that other time, which wasn’t really so long ago, the corner market could not keep its shelves stocked, or the Kyoto Grill cook enough food, or the Love Lifted Me Church on Crenshaw (which is actually on Stocker) make enough space to accommodate the faithful. And even as the area changed and grew—even as the Boulevard burst with commerce and people— the flavor of the Mesa didn’t change. It was always country-in-the-city, but with a central place to gather. And since the Mesa had everything—food, bowling, church, and friends; not to mention trees, game, and a backdrop of hills—there was never any reason to leave. If a visitor had come through in 1958, he might have closed his eyes, and, listening to the voices around him, thought he’d taken a wrong turn and ended up in Texas. He might have walked into Harry’s Noodle Shop and mistaken the town for Little Tokyo. He might see a group of men just released fro
m the Goodyear plant, crowded around a radio and listening to a ball game. They’d be sitting on milk crates in front of a market owned by a young Japanese man, a veteran, who’d worked there since he was a teenager; who hired local boys himself; and who’d heard so many of his customers’ stories he could almost forget his own.
The people who lived there, the people who laughed and drank and listened to the Dodgers, didn’t know they were unusual. They didn’t know that their disregard for rules observed outside the Mesa made them exceptions, and their example did not stand.
Now, if that lost driver went through certain parts of the neighborhood, he would still see a few of the elderly residents— Japanese and black—in a place the rest of the city dismisses as ghetto. But their children and grandchildren, and their friends’ children, too, have moved elsewhere to build their own lives. In the city where history is useless and the future reinvented every day, no one has any need for game you hunted and cooked yourself; for berries stolen off the vine; for neighbors in pairs and threesomes sitting on stoops with cups of coffee, faces lifted to accept the morning sun. No one thinks about the neighborhood, its little corner market. No one, including the children of the people who lived there.
CHAPTER ONE
1994
TEN DAYS after her grandfather died, Jackie Ishida pulled into the entrance of the Tara Estates, the apartment complex where he’d lived with her aunt and uncle. It was eleven a.m. on a Saturday, February, 1994. Normally at this time she’d be studying already—she was in her third year of law school at UCLA—but Lois had called the night before, voice rough with cigarettes and tears, and asked her to come over this morning. And since her aunt Lois was, hands down, her favorite person in the family, she’d decided that the library could wait. It was a beautiful day, she noticed, but Los Angeles always looked best in winter—free of smog, crisp and green, cradled by the mountains. She stared out the window at the snow-capped peaks and waited for the security guard to write her a guest pass, wondering, as always, why she had to complete this particular formality. The two shootings and numerous hold-ups that had scared the residents lately had all occurred within the Estates, not outside of them, so she didn’t see why the guards were so concerned with visitors. Jackie, who’d grown up on the quiet, tree-lined streets of Torrance, could never get used to this haphazard clump of dingy, tan, threatening buildings. Some clever developer had named the complex after Scarlett O’Hara’s plantation—which was, it turned out, not in Georgia at all, but instead had been built right there in Culver City, on the old RKO Studios lot just a mile away.