by Jodi Compton
I don’t know when Serena got the idea to turn oil of chronic into a business sideline—a boutique drug trade—but there was no question she’d found a niche. Her clientele was small and select, most of them entertainment-industry people. Though marijuana was nearly as available as Wrigley’s gum in Los Angeles, these were people who ate at Spago. They weren’t going to pass around a slimy joint like it was 1973. Serena understood this, and she gave them the same quality control they expected in their cabernet sauvignon or sparkling water. Serena dealt with only one supplier of high-quality marijuana, a grower hidden deep in a national forest in Northern California. She bottled her product tastefully in small shaker bottles that she bought at a kitchen-supply outlet. And she didn’t actively seek new customers, just let word of mouth do its work.
A lot of people would say, With a product like that, why stay small? Why not go big and watch the money roll in?
Serena knew better. A larger operation would draw the attention of the big fish in La Eme, who’d take over, and then Serena would be an employee in her own operation, making only a small cut, and that couldn’t be allowed. She’d paid her dues for years on her prescription-drug heists, just as the guys of Trece did on the cocaine and grass they moved in the neighborhood. But the oil-of-chronic sideline, that was Serena’s endgame, her retirement plan.
Serena went over to peer into the vat, as if she were inspecting the work of a sous-chef. Then she went to the refrigerator and pulled out a bottle of Corona, looking questioningly at me.
“Just one,” I said. “I gotta drive.”
“You can sleep here,” she said.
The bedroom was lived in and messy, with mismatched furniture and a thirteen-inch TV perched on the dresser.
“Where does Diana sleep?” I asked.
“She sleeps on the couch when I spend the night.”
“But there’s got to be other people living here.”
“No, just her.”
That was odd. In the barrio—not just in gang life—crowded homes were the rule. A whole apartment for one teenage girl, no matter how small—that was almost unheard of.
Serena said, “I’ve been helping her pay the rent here.”
“What about her family?”
“Dad’s in prison, Mom’s a flake with a meth habit. Good times.”
That wasn’t an uncommon story; many of the sucias came from broken homes. Serena had often made room for them in her old house, but I’d never known her to pay rent for any of them. “You must like her.”
“Like I said, she has a lot of potential.” Serena set her bottle down and reached into her jacket, taking out the roll of bills she’d brought from the storage unit. She peeled several off the top. “Here,” she said, handing them to me.
“Thanks.” I didn’t count them. We didn’t negotiate my pay for riding with her; we didn’t even talk about it. It was understood that when times were good for her, financially, they were good for me. She opened the top drawer of the dresser and put the rest of the money inside. Then she flipped on the TV set atop the dresser. The audio began right away, hip-hop music, but the picture tube was slow to warm up.
“Look,” I said, “if Diana’s so different, if she’s got a lot of brains and potential, why not steer her in a different direction, like toward college?”
This was sensitive territory. It didn’t matter that I was now as morally compromised as anyone in Serena’s OC underworld; I was still white and college-educated, and she was quick to get hot about anything like preaching on my part.
But she calmly said, “Let me put it in terms you’ll understand: Virtus laudatur et alget.”
“ ‘Virtue is praised and made to freeze’?”
“ ‘Virtue is praised and left to freeze,’ ” she corrected. “That’s what happens to good girls around here. The nice boys, some of them get a football scholarship or something, but the girls? There’s nothing for them. Diana could study and work and study some more, and then she’d get killed in a drive-by anyway, or shot by accident by the cops, and the neighborhood do-gooders would light a few candles, and then they’d forget her. It woulda happened to me, if I hadn’t gotten ganged up and learned to look out for myself.” She repeated herself: “Virtue is praised and left to freeze—you’re living proof of that.”
“Me?”
“Look what happened to you at West Point. You worked your ass off to become what they wanted, and then they hosed you off the back steps because of something that’s gonna make you sick someday in the future?”
“It wasn’t like that. The tumor raised a question of whether my judgment would be sound enough for me to serve as an officer.”
“Yeah, but what did they do to help you, after your whole life went down the drain? They gave you, what, a ride to New York City to catch the Greyhound home? Great.”
I shrugged, not wanting to argue the point anymore. Serena didn’t, either, changing the subject. “Hey, who’d have thought I’d be schooling you in Latin?”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “Pretty good.”
She walked into the bathroom, and I heard the shower start running. She’d left the TV on, and now it was playing a hip-hop video, standard scenes of ghetto fabulousness, booties shaking in a packed nightclub. The logo at the bottom corner of the screen was that of a late-Friday-night video program, one that came on after the network talk shows were over.
I sat down on the bed and began unlacing my boots.
“Hey, y’all,” the host of the program said, “did you see, at the beginning, the guy coming out of the club as Nia and her girls are going in? A long drink of water with reddish hair? That’s none other than Nia’s producer, Cletus Mooney, making a cameo. I wouldn’t kick that boy outta bed, ’cept maybe to do him on the floor, know what I’m saying? Up next—”
I got up and snapped off the TV set. Then, barefoot, I opened the sliding glass door and walked out onto the little balcony. Balcony was too romantic a word; this was a boxy platform seven feet long by four feet deep, mostly for smokers to be herded onto so they could indulge their vice. Concrete dividing walls came all the way out to the railing on both sides, a security measure, so that no one could infiltrate from a neighboring deck who wasn’t ready to take a serious risk climbing over with his ass hanging out above the street.
I put one leg over the railing and straddled it, then shifted around to sit with both legs over the railing, on the outside, heels resting gently against the bars. The sidewalk, three stories below, would be hard as iron if I fell, but the breeze was cool on my face, so I leaned out a little, looking up at the night sky.
For God’s sake, I hadn’t even seen CJ’s image on-screen, I thought, exhaling. I’d only had to hear the host talking about him, and the picture had sprung immediately to my mind’s eye: my beautiful cousin, holding the door for a flirtatious pack of clubgoing girls. CJ loved women, and they loved him back. He went in for variety rather than long-term relationships, dating a steady stream of cocktail waitresses, Laker girls, and backup dancers, but his ex-girlfriends never seemed to have hard feelings after things were over. Back when I was spending more time in his circle of friends, one of them had tried to engage me in some us-girls talk, saying, “Man, Cletus just gives himself to you in bed,” before I’d managed to cut her off, feeling heat in my port-wine birthmark, the part of my face that still blushed.
The thing was, when I’d first met him, CJ had had almost none of the things women saw in him now. Or rather, everything was there, but in a raw, early form that the other kids in the halls of junior high school couldn’t recognize. His musical gifts had been pretty well hidden. He’d picked up the piano almost faster than his mother could teach him, but he’d never played in public. His hair, worn shorter than now, was almost kinky, and he couldn’t put on weight and muscle fast enough to keep up with his height. His accent, to Californian kids, was comical, the sound of backwoods unsophistication.
Those were the days when CJ and I had been each other’s closest compani
on. It was also in those bad days that, underneath his parents’ willow tree, we’d learned French kissing from each other, because we’d had no one else to practice with. Then we’d kept doing it long after we could no longer justify it as a learning process. We had to love each other, because we were unlovely to everyone else.
All this is a long way of explaining the resentment I felt when I saw his picture in entertainment magazines, CJ in a nightclub banquette with glittery club girls or carrying his girlfriend-of-the-month on his back on Leo Carrillo Beach. I understood what they saw in him, but dammit, I’d seen it first. I hadn’t needed the big career or the eight-figure bank balance or the A-list friends to love Cletus Mooney. I just had, and now I was the only one who wasn’t allowed.
Serena’s voice floated out from the bedroom. “So I was thinking—Jesus, do you have to sit like that?” she said sharply, looking up at the no-hands way I was sitting on the railing, leaning forward with my elbows resting on my thighs, like someone following a ball game on TV. “If you fall from up there, you’ll break your neck.”
“Why would I fall?” I said, not turning around. “If I was sitting on the kitchen counter like this, you wouldn’t say that.”
“If you fell off the counter, you’d get up again. Can you please come in, so I don’t have a heart attack?”
I shifted my weight and swung a leg over, then backed up until I could rest my spine against the concrete wall, sitting sideways. “Is this better? Because this is about all the concession to safety I’m willing to make.”
She leaned against the slider’s framework. “Sometimes I really wish I knew how it felt to be you.”
“Blond?”
“Fearless.”
“I didn’t say I’m never afraid,” I told her. “I’m just … blunted. Haven’t you ever been drunk and you did something you’d never do sober? Your feeling was just, ‘What the hell, I’ll do it’?”
“That’s not the same thing,” she said.
“Isn’t it? Why do you think they call alcohol ‘liquid courage’?” I said. “It’s an extreme example, but think of people on PCP. They’ll do anything. Nothing scares them.”
“That’s different,” Serena said. “Those people are out of their minds. Nobody jumps off a roof just because it’s not scary to them.”
“Exactly,” I said. “I wouldn’t, either. I’m rational. But when things happen where I should feel afraid, there’s just an absence.”
“So it’s better,” she said. “Because you’re not uncoordinated, like a drunk person would be, or half asleep, like someone in a hospital on downers would be. That’s all it is, like a drug with no side effects?”
Other than eventual death from brain cancer?
“I guess,” I said. “There aren’t that many things you can compare to my situation. There are kids that seem to be born with a really high fear threshold, maybe from brain damage sustained during difficult births. They do a lot of heart-stopping things on their bicycles or jump off rooftops. Afterward they don’t understand why people are yelling at them. When people say, ‘You could have broken your neck,’ they say, ‘But I didn’t. What’s the big deal?’ ”
“And you feel the same way,” Serena said.
“Not exactly,” I said. “I haven’t had this problem all my life. I remember what used to frighten me, and I know what scares other people. That guides me.”
“Hmm,” she said, inspecting one of her thumbnails. “I guess it’s good you say that.”
“Why?”
“There’s something we gotta talk about. It’s Trippy.” Her face was serious in the ambient city light.
“She hates us, yeah. This is not news.”
“She hates you,” Serena corrected quietly. “I hear things, Insula. She’s been telling anyone who’ll listen that she’s going to kill you. She’s saying this is still her neighborhood and she’s not afraid to come onto my territory to put a bullet in you.”
“Let her try,” I said, shrugging. “She loves to wave a gun around, but she’s a lousy shot.”
“You’re so full of shit,” Serena said. “You just said that what scares other people guides you, but I’m telling you this is something to be scared of, and you’re, what, blowing me off?”
“I’m not blowing you off. It’s just, I’ve had more dangerous enemies than Trippy Ramos, and I’m still standing. Grudges like Trippy’s, it’s kid shit. She’s just blowing off steam.”
“Whatever. I had something to say to you—now I’ve said it. I’m going to bed.” She turned and left.
The truth was, she probably had a point about Trippy. Grudges could be deadly in the ghetto and the barrio. This wasn’t “kid shit” to Luisa Ramos. I’d taken her place and dealt a terrible blow to her ego. In antiquity, in the present, in organized crime, in corporate boardrooms, these kinds of clashes played out everywhere. Loss of position, loss of face: one of humanity’s most primal wounds. Why was I still here, making myself a party to it? Because of Serena. My loaded gun.
I looked inside to see her standing in front of the dresser where she’d stashed her money. Now she pulled from the top drawer a bottle of pills, not one of the little orange ones that patients get but a larger wholesale one that she’d kept after a pharmacy heist. I didn’t have to watch her spill the little white oval pill into her palm to know what it would be: Ambien.
She washed it down with Corona and, still standing in front of the open drawer, crossed her arms and pulled her T-shirt over her head. The dog tags she wore as a necklace caught briefly in the collar, then fell back to bounce against her hard breastbone. Usually the tags were out of sight under her clothes, but Serena never took them off, in honor of the past life she believed she’d lost in Vietnam. I’d once encouraged her to travel over there, to see the country that occupied her dreams, but it didn’t seem that she ever would.
In the dim electric light of the bedroom, she was thin enough to count ribs. Weight loss, stomach pains, Ambien sleep—the glamorous gangster life.
The bottle of Corona I held was still half full, but I didn’t want any more. Briefly I considered letting it drop from my hand, three stories down to the sidewalk, just for the nihilistic pleasure of seeing shards of glass and white foam explode against the pavement. No. Reckless was one thing, but pointlessly antisocial was another.
I got off the railing and went inside. Stripped down to her panties, Serena had climbed onto the bed, wrapping the spread, but not the sheets underneath, around her; it’d been ninety-nine degrees at midday and would likely stay warm all night.
“You want me to look for a movie or something?” I asked, but then saw that Serena’s eyes were already closed. Ambien is quick.
I began getting undressed as well.
Home, right now, was an apartment in the Crenshaw district. Like Serena, I understood the virtues of being NKA; the apartment was my compromise. My name wasn’t on the rental contract nor any of the utilities. Instead I paid cash to a young woman as white as me, who was a schoolteacher with the Los Angeles Unified School District. She was gaming a federal program that gave teachers in “underserved communities” a sizable tax break to live where they worked. So she’d taken the modest second-story apartment, then immediately rented it off the books to me and moved to Hollywood.
It took me a little while to get used to living in the land of ay yo instead of órale, but I was accustomed to outsider-hood. And Crenshaw was the last place that Serena’s enemies—by extension my enemies, the ones who spray-painted SUCIA KILLER on walls—would look for me.
It wasn’t home, but I hadn’t had a real home for some time now.
4
The next day dawned bright, promising to be as hot as yesterday, and I was out of the apartment at ten, before Serena or Diana had risen. I was thinking of two things: one, that maybe the Blind Guy was at his bench in the park, and two, how good a chocolate-filled roll from a favorite panadería would taste.
I’d first seen the Blind Guy several weeks ago and st
ill thought of him that way, even after learning his name, Joe Keller. He’d drawn my attention the first day I’d seen him, for two reasons. First, he’d looked enough like CJ—young and tall and loose-limbed, with curling red hair—that my heart had briefly skipped, until I’d realized it was highly unlikely that CJ would be sitting around an East L.A. park by himself. Second, I’d seen the white cane that immediately marked him as blind.
The cane was the reason I went over to talk to him that first afternoon.
“Hi,” I’d said. “My name’s Hailey.”
“Joe,” he’d said.
“Look, I could lead up to this by making small talk first, but I won’t. The thing is, this neighborhood is one where maybe you want to bring a friend if you’re going to hang out. I know it probably seems like a lot of nice people, kids and mamis with strollers, but there’s a lot of gang activity here, too. In fact, the bench you’re sitting on is pretty marked up with gang graffiti.”
I’d gone on, “And while I’d like to say that gangbangers have scruples about jacking the elderly or the disabled, mostly they don’t. They see someone like that, by themselves, and it’s like the rest of us feel when seeing something we need in a store marked half off. It’s like, ‘Hey, I can’t pass that up.’ ”
His face had been inscrutable, with the dark glasses adding to that impression. When he didn’t respond right away, I’d said, “I’ve offended you, right?”
“No,” he’d said. “You might have, but then the analogy, the half-off discount, really redeemed it.” A small, sardonic smile had lightened his expression, and then he’d said, “What about you?”
“What about me?”
“You’re young, female, apparently alone, and, from the sound of your voice, white. How much are you discounted for those guys?”