So the two of us got on our skateboards and headed to the big Nike store in Santa Monica.
I’d never actually been in that store. It was super slick, with huge video screens and music playing and different artificial surfaces to test your shoes on. We found a salesman and I told him about Jojo, his height, his weight, his explosiveness, how he could dunk on dudes a foot taller than him.
The salesman just stared at us.
Then we noticed two security guards behind us, one of them talking into a walkie-talkie. We were like, “What did we do?”
They thought we were shoplifters. Or street people. Or something bad. I guess we looked a little rough around the edges. Not like the other shoppers who were all super neat and clean and wore brand-new Nike stuff, head to foot.
“Never mind them,” said Diego. We went into the basketball section and figured it out for ourselves. We got the brand-new Air Jordans, with reinforced arch support, soft leather interior, and shiny red outer shell. I paid for them on the spot: $239 cash. The sales guy didn’t mind us so much then.
We were psyched! When we got back to Venice, we told everyone to come to the basketball courts the next day, at noon, for the presenting of the Air Jordans to Jojo. It would be a big event, a big surprise.
The next day, everyone was there, gathered around the main court. Jojo’s team had just won their third game in a row. That was when I stepped down out of the bleachers and announced in my loudest voice, “Jojo, today you’re gonna get something for your efforts!” Everyone started gathering around and clapping in rhythm. Jojo didn’t understand at first. Then Diego walked out with the Nike bag and lifted it up high so everyone could see. People went nuts, yelling and clapping and cheering for our man! Naturally, Jojo teared up. He always cries whenever anyone acknowledges him, or claps for him, or shows him love in any way.
But he still didn’t understand what was happening. Finally, he got it: The Nike bag was for him. Diego handed it over. Jojo opened it, looked inside, pulled out the shoe box. He laid it on the ground and about a hundred people bent down to watch. “Open it, Jojo!” people said.
He did. He opened the box and there they were. The amazing shoes!
At first, he didn’t understand. He seemed happy to see them, but he didn’t know what they were for. Finally someone shouted, “They’re for you, Jojo!”
“They’re a present!” Diego said.
Slowly, he began to understand.
“They’re from all of us!” I said, gesturing to everyone.
“We love you, Jojo!” someone yelled out.
“We love playin’ ball with you, brother!” said someone else.
“You’re the best in the world!” yelled a third person.
When he realized what was happening, he put them on, with no socks, of course, since he didn’t have any. Everyone cheered and clapped and whistled some more. Then everyone backed away and he did a couple spectacular dunks so everyone could see the bright red shoes in action. It was like a big party, everyone laughing and joking and admiring Jojo’s new shoes, which looked amazing.
I thought it went great. I was so happy. Diego and I high-fived. Just like Hope and other people had helped me out, now I’d done the same for Jojo.
Later that afternoon, Diego and I were down at the chess tables, drinking Mountain Dew with Tommy Shirts and a bunch of other guys. We were laughing and talking and telling people about our present. Tommy Shirts was deeply impressed with our generosity and thought maybe he should get a present too. In fact, whatever direction the conversation went, he steered it right back to things he needed, and what would be a good present for him. In case anyone wanted to give him one.
Then a guy rode by on a skateboard. He had the same Air Jordans we gave to Jojo. Diego pointed them out to the other guys. “See those?” he said. “Those are just like the shoes we gave Jojo. Just like that.”
Everyone admired the shoes. Everyone said we had good taste. There was some more high-fiving. But then the guy wearing the shoes glanced back at us. He had an odd, slightly guilty expression on his face.
He sped up.
“What the…?” I said out loud.
“Oh no…” said Diego.
We both jumped to our feet and took off running after the guy. But he saw us coming and sped up even more. We had no chance.
We gave up and then hurried down the boardwalk in the other direction. We found Jojo, who was taking a nap in his little cardboard shack behind the tattoo parlor. We yanked back the old blanket and found him asleep on his dirty yoga mats. On his feet was a pair of horrible Kmart sneakers. They had a picture of SpongeBob on the sides of them. We shook him awake and we were like, “Jojo! Some skater dude stole your shoes!”
He was like, “No, no, no…”
We were like, “Yes! We just saw him!”
But Jojo was like, “No, no. He didn’t steal them. I gave them to him. He needed them. So we traded.”
Diego and I looked at the SpongeBob shoes. We looked at Jojo. We looked at each other. Of course Jojo gave them away. He gave everything away.
Poor Jojo started to apologize, but we were like, it’s all right, it’s not your fault, we understand. And then Diego felt bad because it was his idea to get them in the first place. But I told him it was okay, it was nobody’s fault. We tried. That was all that mattered.
I did one other stupid thing with my money. I got talked into paying for a little birthday party Tommy Shirts and some of the guys were throwing for Grumpy George, an older local guy who had no teeth. This meant—at first—paying for a case of beer and some chips, which turned into several cases of beer and some chips and some wine, which turned into all those things plus four large bottles of vodka and a huge order from a local Mexican restaurant since Mexican food was all Grumpy George could eat. Pretty soon I’d given Tommy and the guys about four hundred dollars. Then, before the party even started, Tommy and his buddies decided to stash some of the vodka for later. That started an argument. Which then turned into an actual fight. Which traveled from the chess tables to the alley to the Sidewalk Cafe, like a fight will do. Several tourists ended up covered in black-bean soup. So then the cops came and arrested everyone and took all the alcohol. In the end, Diego and I had to hide in the storm drain and we didn’t even do anything.
As soon as I got back in my tree house that night, I resolved to keep my money and my private-investigator business to myself. Which was a good idea anyway. Asking questions about people, digging into their lives—that wasn’t cool with certain people around the boardwalk, even if it was for a good cause, even if you were helping Mugs get reunited with his family or whatever.
If that’s even what happened.
So that’s what I did. I hung out, I played basketball, I surfed. I listened to Mötley Crüe. I checked out a book called The Big Sleep, which the guy at the library said I should read since it was about a private detective.
And then Ailis showed up again. She came out to the tree house one night, after eating dinner with Hope and some of her woman friends. This was a couple of weeks after our disastrous sushi/movie night. Things had gone back to normal between us. An awkward acquaintanceship. We hadn’t gone to any other movies. We hadn’t really spoken.
“Cali?” she said.
“Hi, Ailis,” I said, pushing open my little door and looking down. She stood barefoot in the yard. Hope was making everyone take off their shoes lately, because that’s what people did in Japan.
“I saw a brochure at the community college and I thought you might be interested in it.” She held it up in the air, as if I could read it from there.
“What’s it for?”
“It’s about getting your GED.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s a test you take. And if you pass, you get a high school diploma.”
I had vaguely heard of this.
“There’s a whole program for it,” she said. “You take some classes and then you take the test. It’s pretty easy.
Maybe you should do it.”
This was the hard part about Ailis. It was easy to think of her as an annoying person. But then she would do these little things for you. Like making the classical-music CD. Or now this. She was, in her robotic way, looking out for me.
“Okay,” I said, staring down at her. “I’ll take a look.”
“Do you want it now?” she said.
“Yeah, sure.”
“Do you want me to leave it inside?”
“Okay,” I said. I watched her standing in the grass in her bare feet. It was a nice night. The outside lights were on, so the whole backyard looked like a movie set.
“Or do you want me to come up?” she said.
Oh great, I thought. Ailis wanted to see inside the tree house. I knew that would happen. No matter if you’re seven or seventeen, if you have a fort, a girl wants to come in it.
“You want to come up here?” I asked.
“I mean, it would be better than leaving it in the house, don’t you think?”
I didn’t, but whatever.
“Well, I don’t mind if you come up. But you gotta climb the ladder. It isn’t easy.”
“I know how to climb a ladder,” she said.
She went to the wooden ladder, gripped it, tried the first step with her bare foot. It wasn’t super graceful, but she did it. She climbed up.
I had to move away from the door to let her in. It wasn’t a big tree house. Maybe ten feet by eight feet. I had the light on and the radio was playing softly. There were some notebooks scattered around and The Big Sleep and the front half of War and Peace.
Ailis crawled in on all fours. I had backed up and was sitting against the wall.
Ailis looked around. “Wow,” she said.
I have to say, not to brag or anything, but the inside of my tree house is pretty sweet. The outside, I’d left looking half-assed and randomly nailed together, so people wouldn’t break in. But the inside had carpet and a lightbulb and two little shelves for my clothes and stuff. It was all waterproofed and there was a little hatch in the ceiling you could open if you wanted to look at the sky before you fell asleep. The only bad thing was the low ceiling. You couldn’t stand all the way up. You did most of your moving around on your hands and knees.
Still, Ailis was impressed. “What’s that?” she asked, pointing to the hatch.
“That’s the roof,” I said.
“What’s up there?”
“The rest of the tree,” I said.
Ailis saw the little hot plate I’d brought up recently. I’d intended to make hot chocolate at night, but it was too much trouble to bring water up and mix it and clean your cup and all that. So I just did it inside.
“Can we go up there?” said Ailis, pointing back to the hatch.
“Sure.”
We crawled onto the roof. Now I was actually worried for Ailis because you could fall off the roof. There were no walls, no railings. And it was high up. So I made her sit in the middle.
“I’m not gonna fall,” she said.
“I know. But the view’s better in the middle.”
So then we both lay on our backs on the roof and stared into the sky. The tree swayed slightly and the moon was out and you could smell the ocean and hear the waves in the distance. It was pretty fun, having another person there. Even if it was just Ailis.
NINE
There’s one thing about living in a tree: You notice the weather.
I woke up early the next morning and I knew instantly something was up. I could smell it in the air. I could feel it in the motion of the tree.
A big storm was rolling in off the Pacific. I got dressed and climbed down into the grass. I cruised on my skateboard to the boardwalk. Huge dark clouds were moving in off the ocean like monstrous alien ships. The wind blew. The ocean was wound up and crashing around. Not big clean waves, like you might surf on, but lots of little ones, all jittery and churning and bouncing into each other.. The seagulls hunkered down in the wind and crows leaped around on the boardwalk, squawking and fighting over pizza scraps and french fries and being pretty bold about it, since the humans had cleared out.
I went over to the Pizza Slice and got a slice and ended up talking to a girl sitting on the curb outside. Her name was Strawberry and she had run away from somewhere back east. She didn’t look so good. She’d slept in the alley the night before, like right on the ground.
I found myself advising her. I don’t usually tell people what to do, but for some reason I couldn’t help myself. I told her she needed to get a deal like I got. Find someone to take you in. Live in someone’s garage or something. Pay a little rent if you had to, just don’t sleep outside. Things can get rough on the boardwalk at night. You need to be somewhere with a roof over your head. Not sleeping on the ground in the alley.
She didn’t really listen, though. She said she liked sleeping outside. She’d done it in Maryland, New Orleans, Tucson. Why couldn’t she do it here? The Pizza Slice guy had offered her free pizza to stand on the boardwalk with the PIZZA SLICE $1.99 sign, which she seemed to think was a good deal. She was a little slow, I noticed. I wondered if she was on drugs. I hoped she would be okay. I didn’t know that she would.
So then I cruised on my skateboard toward the Milk Bar Cafe on Washington Boulevard. The boardwalk was almost deserted now. Some fat drops of rain had begun to fall. Most of the vendor stalls were closed or closing.
I coasted passed a guy leaning on his car. He’d driven right up onto the walkway, where you weren’t normally allowed to drive. He watched me pass. He studied my face, my board.
“Hey!” he yelled after me. “You know a guy named Cali?”
I swung my board around and stopped.
“I might,” I said.
He came right over to me. “You’re him, right?”
I nodded that I was.
“You got a minute?” he said. “I’d like to talk to you. It’s important.”
We went to Café Italia on Pacific Avenue. He bought me a chai latte and a bagel and we settled at a table by the window. It was nice to be inside a real café with the storm outside. It was cozy.
The guy’s name was Grisham. He was a private investigator. He showed me his ID. It was in a leather holder, that you could flip open, like on TV.
Unlike the other guys, he didn’t tell me what he wanted right off. He seemed not in a hurry. He took care of the little things first. Like putting sugar in his coffee. And stirring it. He had a wide face and a short, military-style haircut. There was a big ring on one of his fingers. It looked like a class ring, or maybe it was something about sports. He looked like he could have played football.
“I was told you know this area,” he said to me.
“I hang out a lot,” I said.
He smiled. “That’s a good strategy. Learn a place. Make it your own. Make it so that if anyone wants to know what’s going on, they gotta come to you.”
I smiled at the compliment. I drank my chai. I felt comfortable with Grisham. I felt pretty confident in general. I’d found Chad Mitchell and Mugs and the bike stealer. I was three for three.
“Can I ask you something?” I said.
“Of course.”
“How’d you get started in the investigator business?”
“Good question,” he said, looking out the window. “I started off working with an older guy, an ex-cop. I worked in his office, did the grunt work. Eventually, he let me do some real stuff. When he retired, I took over his clients. And built it up from there.”
I nodded.
“I’d offer you a job, but I’m a little far from home on this one. I work out of San Francisco.”
I nodded more.
“Anyway,” he said. He took a folder out of his briefcase. “I’m looking for a girl. Maybe you can help.”
He opened the folder and pulled out a picture of a pretty girl, about sixteen. The photo was of her and a friend standing on a soccer field. They wore soccer shirts, their hair was braided in an athletic st
yle.
He passed it to me.
“Her name is Reese Abernathy. She’s from Palo Alto, California. She ran away from home. We think she’s down here somewhere. LA, possibly San Diego.”
He handed me some cell-phone records.
“Why’d she run away?” I asked.
“Family issues.”
He handed me a credit-card statement, a police report, a missing-person file. There was also a seven-page statement from her father, detailing the family history, the present situation, how Reese had changed after her mother’s death. I skimmed the first couple pages as best as I could.
“How did her mother die?” I asked.
“Suicide,” said Grisham.
I flipped through more pages of the statement. “And this happened in San Francisco?”
“Palo Alto. Otherwise known as Silicon Valley. The dad’s a big finance guy. Apple, Google, Facebook, he kinda works behind the scenes. Very wealthy. A major player.”
He handed me another picture. “Here’s a more recent photo.”
In this picture Reese looked totally different. No braids, no smiling jock face. She had shoulder-length black hair, dyed. She wore dark lipstick and black mascara. She looked like she’d walked out of a Goth club.
“And here’s another,” he said. “This one might be the best to see what she actually looks like.”
He slid across the table a mug shot. Underneath the plain, pale, and possibly intoxicated face of Reese Abernathy, it said: SAN FRANCISCO POLICE DEPT. #8726354.
“What’s this for?” I asked.
“Shoplifting. Possession of fake ID.”
I nodded. I went back to “Jock Reese,” and looked at her. I went to “Goth Reese,” looked at her. I picked up “Fake ID Reese,” and looked at her.
“She likes to change her style,” I said.
“I guess so,” said Grisham.
“What does it mean when people change their appearance a lot?” I asked.
“That, I wouldn’t know,” said Grisham. “Why do people dress up like vampires and put rings in their noses?” he said, grunting with disgust. “I don’t know that, either.”
The Prince of Venice Beach Page 5