by Jodi Compton
“Look at the way you live now,” she said one evening, watching me gingerly put makeup on a bruise I’d gotten in a bar fight. “Getting beat on, partying, sleeping until noon, no plans for the future-how is that any different from la vida?” She’d put an arm around me and looked at us in the mirror. “Come and be mi gladia.”
“Gladius meus,” I said. My sword. Serena had learned all the words that went with her warlike life-milites, hostes, bellum, mors-but she tended to hybridize them with Spanish. “And no thanks. I’ve seen the beatings that your girls give each other jumping them in, and those are bad enough. I don’t want to go through the beatdown they’d give a white girl to make her prove herself.”
“Scared?” she said.
“You know better. But what’s the point? I’d never be one of you. What would my street name be? Blondie?”
“The girls will accept you if they see I accept you. And they can learn from you. Nobody ever taught them anything about fighting, about protecting themselves.”
“Think about what you’re asking me. To teach young gangbangers to be better shots, better at beating someone up? I really need that on my conscience.”
“You can teach them honor. Teach them when not to throw down, when to walk away.”
“Honor?” I’d said. “Been there, done that, didn’t get the gold bars. Listen, Serena, I don’t make moral judgments about what you’re doing. I’m happy you’ve got something that means something to you. But it’s not for me.”
She’d shrugged. “You’ll come around,” she said. That was how we left things. The last time Serena came by my place, I was waiting for my ride up to San Francisco, my old Army duffel at my feet. Serena had pressed the five-shot Airweight into my hands, told me to watch out for myself, and then kissed me on both cheeks, like an old-style gangster.
We hadn’t kept in contact. Ours wasn’t the kind of friendship that would survive long-distance. Which is why it surprised me to learn that she was trying to get in touch with me.
four
My living situation in San Francisco was pretty simple: I rented a room over the base of Aries Courier, in Japantown.
To get to my room, as I did when I came back from what had become a day’s worth of pickups and drops, I had to walk through Aries’s ground-floor space, which resembled a garage more than an office: bike frames and parts, freestanding filing cabinets, posters advertising bike races and rallies, a big, circa-1950s refrigerator full of Red Bull and Tupperware containers it was best not to open. When I came in, Motobecane over my shoulder, the owner, Shay Clements, was on the phone with his back to me.
Shay was a hard guy to figure out. Rather, he was the sort of person whom people assumed they understood immediately upon meeting him: bike messenger turned slightly bohemian entrepreneur. He was about thirty-five, six-foot-four with a straight, ice-blond ponytail and blue eyes and good facial bones. He still had the build of a cyclist. He wasn’t married, and I didn’t think he ever had been, but he would never lack for dates as long as there were coffeehouses and the kind of women who frequented them, looking for guys who were sexy in a left-wing way. You just looked at Shay and thought, pesco-pollo-vegetarian, knows some yoga asanas, votes Democrat.
In truth, like all blue-state small-business owners, Shay was remarkably Republican when it came to his own bottom line, full of complaints about regulations and taxes, and nearly as resentful of his own employees. Aries was all-1099, as riders put it, meaning everyone was an independent contractor, without job security or health insurance. This didn’t do much to foster loyalty. Riders regularly quit Aries without notice. This led Shay to look on his riders as irresponsible flakes. It was a vicious circle.
My relationship with him was a little better than that, largely because I was reliable. I didn’t kiss his ass, but I didn’t have to. As I’d told Jack, I was usually his top-earning rider. I got hurt sometimes, true, but I also rode hurt, so it didn’t cost Shay any downtime. Beyond that, if Shay wasn’t the warmest guy in the world, well, he probably thought the same about me.
Seeing me out of the corner of his eye, Shay waved me over, not interrupting his conversation on the phone. I came over without speaking, and he handed off a pink slip of paper, a phone message. Please call Serena Delgadillo.
Only then did I remember the call I hadn’t answered on the bridge. I took out my cell and brought up the call log, and sure enough, there they were, Serena’s familiar digits. I raised my eyebrows, but Shay had already turned back to what he was doing and didn’t notice my surprise. I slipped the message into my bag, lifted my bike to my shoulders, and went up the stairs.
Once in my room, I hung the Motobecane on its hooks on the wall, then went over to my little half-height refrigerator. I took out a pint bottle of vodka, drank, then kicked off my shoes and lay down with my bare feet up on the wall.
I’d lived over Aries for nearly as long as I’d been in San Francisco-not quite a year-and I still didn’t have enough possessions even to make this small room look lived in. There was the bed and a dresser and a mirror. The bathroom was down the hall, and the kitchen was the little refrigerator and a single-coil burner, with my few cooking supplies on a pair of high, plain shelves.
Had I been religious, a cross on the wall or a Buddhist altar would have given the room’s bareness a kind of monastic sense. But I wasn’t. Nor could I bring myself to care about personalizing the place. The things that made me who I was weren’t on display, but under the bed, out of sight: My Wheelock’s Latin, with my birth certificate and my only photo of my father tucked inside. A scarlet dress, never worn and still in the box. My class ring, set with real West Point granite, and my cadet sword.
Feeling the vodka filtering into my bloodstream, feeling relaxed, I dialed Serena’s number.
“Hailecita,” she said. “It’s been a while, eh?”
“Yeah.”
“How’s life up there?”
“It’s all right,” I said. “Kind of dull.”
“I figured,” she said, and the conversation lagged.
I tipped the bottle again, drinking. “This isn’t just a call to catch up, is it?” I said. “You want something.”
“Yeah,” she said. “It’s not a big thing, honest.”
“What?”
“There’s a girl up in your part of California who needs to go back to Mexico, to the village where her mother grew up and her grandmother still lives. The abuela’s sick, and this girl, Nidia, is going to take care of her.”
“Okay,” I said, meaning, Go on.
“This girl needs a, what do you call it, an escort. There’s no one who can take her, and I thought of you.”
“Me?” I said, surprised. “What, on my bicycle? I don’t even have a car. And what do you mean, there’s no one who can take her? I don’t want to be racial here, but don’t Mexicans do everything together? Go places eight to a car, sleep four to a bed?”
Serena laughed, unoffended. “Her family is undocumented, and so are a lot of the people they know. They’re scared to cross the border and try to come back.”
“They can’t put her on a bus?”
“She’s not just crossing the border into Tijuana,” Serena said. “Abuelita lives up in the mountains of Chihuahua state, the northern end of the Sierra Madre. It’s a long way, and off the main roads. And the family doesn’t want this girl to have to travel alone. She’s not a tough Americanized girl who knows what time it is. She’s different.”
“Oh, yeah? How’d that happen?”
“She’s really religious,” Serena said. “She used to want to be a nun, until she was thirteen years old.”
“Let me guess,” I said. “Then she discovered boys.”
“She discovered a boy,” Serena said. “Johnny Cedillo, his name was. He was Dominican and part black, and her parents were kinda worked up about that until they saw how serious he was about her. He was talking about marrying her from high school on, gave her a ring, like, what do they call it? Not a re
al engagement ring, but-”
“A promise ring.” Some of the more sincere kids in my high-school class had done that.
“Yeah, a promise ring. They were real serious about each other. Nobody doubted they were really gonna get married and have beautiful little kids.”
“So what went wrong?” I said. “Where’s Johnny now? Did he go to Vegas, get a little on the side, and Nidia found out about it?”
“No,” she said. “He was totally into her, and since she was making him wait for their wedding night, as far as anyone knows, Johnny Cedillo died a virgin.”
“He’s dead?”
“Johnny didn’t go to Vegas. He went to Iraq.”
“Ah, shit.”
We were quiet a second, then Serena said, “The other problem with her traveling alone is that apparently this girl’s beautiful, a real knockout. In her neighborhood, even after Johnny went away to war, no one bothered her. It got around that she was saving herself for her wedding night with him, and even the vatos respected that. But strange men, on a cross-country trip? They’d hassle this girl no end.”
“Wait, back up,” I interrupted. “You’re talking about this girl like you know her, but you said ‘apparently’ she’s beautiful. What’s up?”
“I don’t know her personally,” she said. “But you remember Teaser?”
“Sure.” Teaser was Serena’s lieutenant, her most trusted among the sucias.
“She’s dead,” Serena said.
“Sorry,” I said. I didn’t have to ask how. Another name for Serena’s roll call in tattoo ink.
She went on: “Teaser was her cousin. They didn’t live in my neighborhood, Nidia and Johnny, so I never met either of them,” Serena explained. “But I guess they were pretty well known around their neighborhood. People looked up to Johnny; he was an athlete in high school and never got ganged-up, but he was a stand-up guy with his friends, not a squeaky-clean teacher’s pet type. That whole trip. Teaser would ask me why guys like that don’t go for girls like us, and I’d tell her, Because we’re girls like us, that’s why. She also said that people liked Nidia a little more because of him.”
“Liked her more than what?”
“Well, she’s pretty religious, didn’t go out or party. Not the sort of girl you’d expect people like us to like,” Serena said.
Then she realized she was getting off point. “Anyway, I got a phone call from Teaser’s sister, Lara Cortez, about Nidia needing to get to Mexico and asked if I could help. So I called Nidia’s family to talk about it, and I mentioned you. I told them that you could handle yourself and look out for Nidia.”
“You can handle yourself, too,” I pointed out, “and you’re someone they’d trust, a Mexican. Why not you?”
“I don’t have a passport,” Serena said. “They changed the rules about the border, remember? It takes weeks to get one, and the family doesn’t want to wait that long.” Then, in a lighter tone, she said, “Besides, you know what la vida is like. I gotta TCB”-take care of business, she meant-“here, in my neighborhood.”
“Yeah,” I agreed, “those cars won’t steal themselves.”
“I don’t do that small-time shit anymore, you know that,” she said.
“Yeah, I know,” I said.
“And, I should’ve said right up front, you’d get paid. Her family’s sending some money to cover the expenses, but if it’s not enough, I’ll make up the rest. And I’ll match whatever you’d make per day up there.”
“You don’t know what you’re offering,” I said. “A good bike messenger pulls down a lot of money.”
It was a little-known truth about the job: If you were committed to it-steady and reliable in reporting for work but fast and heedless on the street-you could outearn some of the young suits you sped past on the street.
I stood up and walked over to the window, looking down at the traffic. “You’re doing all this for Teaser’s memory?”
“Yeah,” she said. “I know it may not seem like there’s much of a connection to you, but la raza can be a small community. And Teaser was one of mine. The sucias are for the sucias. You know how it works.”
“I know,” I said.
“No you don’t, not really,” Serena said. “You ought to get you some familia, someone who’ll never not back you up.”
I’d never told her about CJ. The two of them had been the bright and dark of my old life. They didn’t mix.
“But don’t worry about the money,” she said. “Times are good right now.”
I didn’t believe her. I’d seen the truth of Serena’s glamorous gangster life in the faded brown shag rug of her rented house and the twenty-year-old sedan under her carport.
But then she added, “You know, your pay wouldn’t have to be all in cash. I could open up the drugstore for you.”
Her gang brothers in Trece dealt coke; Serena had her pharmacy heists. Cocaine meant speed for the street, and Xanax and Ambien were peace for the evenings, when memories of West Point and Wilshire Boulevard troubled me most. Serena was smart. She once told me that drugs were money in places money couldn’t go. Clearly she hadn’t forgotten that. I hadn’t used since I’d left L.A., but now the prospect was tempting to me where mere cash wouldn’t have been.
I ran my hand through my hair. “I’m not saying yes right away, but let me think about it,” I said. “I’ll have to look at a map and figure out how many days this’ll take, then I’ll give you an estimate on what it’ll cost. I’d want to be sure the expenses were really covered.”
“They will be,” she said. “Whatever you need.”
“I just mean this trip is going to take the time it takes,” I said. “I’m not going to drive way over the speed limit, or push myself until I could get tired and make an error in judgment. I can’t be reckless on the road. You know why.”
“Yeah,” Serena said. “I know.”
What we were both remembering was the reason I left L.A.
five
If you keep up with the entertainment news at all, you’ve probably heard of a man named Lucius “Luke” Marsellus. He ran maybe the second-biggest gangsta rap label in America. Or, if you were an LAPD cop doing gang suppression in South Central about fifteen years ago, you knew him for different reasons. I could say that people who knew Marsellus when he was a teenager knew him “before he was famous,” but that wasn’t quite accurate. He just had a different kind of notoriety back then. There are different words for it-made guy, OG, veterano-but most gang members reach that status young. When you’re liable to be dead by twenty-one, you have to. Luke Marsellus was ganged-up by the time he was ten and a hood celebrity by fifteen.
At that age, Marsellus had become the right-hand man to a dealer named J. G. Deauville, a man who’d climbed the distribution chain from street-corner dealer to having two dozen guys working for him. And Marsellus was constantly by his side, his protection and enforcer. His shadow: tall, silent, feared. The extent of his crimes in Deauville’s service still isn’t known: The gang unit never made anything stick to him.
His boss wasn’t so fortunate. Deauville taught Marsellus a lot, but perhaps the most important lesson was this: Luck always runs out. He taught his lieutenant that the hard way: After years of luck, in which the DEA and the LAPD failed to touch him, the IRS nailed Deauville, like Al Capone before him, on tax evasion, and he went to prison.
Marsellus was the obvious heir to Deauville’s enterprise, but he didn’t do the expected thing. To the eyes of those who’d long been watching him-the police, the feds, gang rivals-he seemed to drop off the radar. Several smaller, warring gang sets carved up Deauville’s territory, and life went on.
Maybe a year after Deauville’s arrest, Marsellus resurfaced in an entirely new role. Using money he’d apparently saved from his gangland years, and completely unknown talent from the streets, Marsellus founded a rap label. He was twenty-two years old.
But he quickly proved to have a natural business acumen rivaling that of his old boss. Marsellus
signed the coldest and angriest of the gangsta rappers; their live-fast-die-young words were echoed by white kids in the leafiest of suburbs. The usual suspects boycotted his music-parents’ groups, law enforcement-but that only sold more CDs.
So Marsellus became a legit businessman, but it’d be going too far to say that he’d entirely left his old ways of doing things behind. He made no apologies for the fact that his private security men were all ganged-up. And while nothing stuck to him, disturbing incidents followed the Marsellus name. A troublesome ex-girlfriend, reportedly about to sign a contract for a tell-all book, was beaten so severely she lost the hearing in one ear. A young white talent agent who’d lured several artists away from the Marsellus fold found a new line of work after a gunman put two rounds through the window of his house. Federal agents subpoenaed boxes and boxes of documents from Marsellus’s downtown L.A. offices, but no charges ever followed. The local cops hadn’t been able to nail Marsellus on anything in his dealing days, and in his newer, bigger life, the feds couldn’t, either.
This was how Marsellus ultimately defied them: He became respectable. When a South Central African Baptist church was burned down in what was assumed to be a hate crime, Marsellus paid to have it rebuilt from the ground up, not as the humble shag-carpeted refuge it had been before, but as a graceful edifice with high clerestory windows and slate floors. He bought a home in Beverly Hills. He was generous with his siblings, and threw storied birthday parties for his nieces and nephews. And when he married, the ceremony was attended by not only his large extended family and his music-industry peers but by a former congressman, and several well-known actors and pro athletes.