by Peter Craig
“You pregnant?”
She started to laugh at this, a bead of milk clinging to her bottom lip. “No, I’m not pregnant. Why would I have to leave town because I was pregnant?”
“I don’t know.”
“The scorned woman! God. That’s so—medieval. No, I’m not pregnant. But I don’t want to say too much: it’s more like a legal issue. I shouldn’t tell you; it’ll put you in a bad position.”
Link gave the first puff of an aborted laugh, then said, “Thanks.”
“My boyfriend had this idea. We could get married so I’d never have to testify against him. You know, they can’t force a wife to rat out her husband. Shrinks, doctors—they all talk now. Blah, blah—whatever you want from them. But marriage is still sacred.”
“Pretty romantic.”
She shoveled in a few rapid bites, then said with her mouth full, “I swear I thought he was in love with me. There were times when I looked at him and just . . .” She pantomimed cringing, as if frostbitten, hugging her own shoulders, apparently indicating some kind of writhing pleasure or indecision. “You know? If I could just get there—get to a soft spot.” She rapped her knuckles on the table. “It was so close sometimes. I mean, he knew, he really, honestly knew that there was something different about me. He understood that. He was just really fucked up about it. He couldn’t express himself without, like . . . firearms.”
“And you’re supposed to testify in court?”
“Oh no, no, no. No. It’s all a disaster now. He’s dead.”
“Who?”
“My boyfriend. He got shot.”
“Uh-huh.”
“In the neck.”
“Too bad.”
“It’s like—it’s not even real to me yet. I just don’t think it’s hit me that all this is really happening.” She gestured to the dim trailer all around her.
“You know, Lydia, maybe you don’t have to jump town right away.”
She began tapping her finger against her head, and replied, “Mmmm—but I got lots of information. So I just got to get away from this whole situation.”
“Information?”
“He was well-connected.” She started rocking her head side to side as she spoke. “So there’s a lot of people looking for my white ass right now. That’s why I’m like—this is my last meal here. This bowl of fruity whatever, and then I’m out.”
She held up the bowl and slurped the remaining milk from it.
“Kid? Can I say something? All my life, it was always somebody else’s fault. Do you see what I’m trying to say? For thirty some years I was fighting and drinking and drugging, like everybody had it in for me. Then one day, I just sobered up and realized something: I was the asshole.”
“Yeah, your higher power isn’t going to do shit for me, Dad.”
Staring off at the screen door, Link said, “I can get you money, but I need time.”
“Don’t worry about it. I’m looking around, and I know you don’t have any money. You did what you could. Thank you for the cereal and the lecture—that’s actually all the fathering I need.”
“I got a lot of people who owe me. Let me help you. And you got to promise me something, too.”
“Promises are totally meaningless to a person like me.”
“Give me a week. Give me a week and you stay clean the whole time. If you got people looking for you, who’s going to find you out here? They don’t know anything about me.”
“Cops are probably listening to us right now.”
“No, Jesus—I’m nobody. I just piss in a cup once a month. My parole officer’s got a caseload like . . .” He spread his arms out wide. “A week. You dry out. Next Saturday, if you’re on your feet, kid, I’ll give you everything I got in this world. Whatever it amounts to. Six shirts and a jar of peanut butter. You need to stay put for a few days, kid. Take a break from all this drama.”
Lydia glanced at the fading light through the open front door, then back at her father, a queasy look on her face but no decision whatsoever in her eyes. She said, “I just ate all that shit way too fast.”
Lydia & Jonah
part three
From the Topanga Messenger, December 16, 2000:
Topanga Boys Play Key Role in Murder Investigation
BY THOMAS KITTERING, Staff Reporter
In another twist in the ongoing investigation of the incident on Old Topanga Road, police reports reveal that several local children assisted the escape of a woman who is now considered to be a material witness and possible suspect.
After days maintaining a pact of silence, ten-year-old Joey De Salvo confessed to his family after a nightmare. His mother promptly called LAPD homicide detectives, who have since interviewed each of the boys involved. Lead detective David Holcomb refused to give specifics, but stated that two children guided a teenage girl along hiking trails through the Santa Monica Mountains.
“The children have been extremely cooperative with police thus far,” states Detective Holcomb. “This has been a troubling event for the entire community, and we certainly appreciate the way that the families have rallied together and aided us throughout the week.”
One of the victims of the home invasion, Martin Reynard, was reportedly a local dealer of methamphetamines. Neighborhood activists have called meetings to discuss growing drug problems within the canyon, and ways to protect our children more effectively.
“I just can’t stand the idea that those kids were playing outside that house,” said one resident mother. “That could have been any of our children. And there might be hundreds of houses out there, just like that one.”
Printing from online archives 5/1/01.
seven
Lydia first met Jonah at a little past 3 A.M. on a warm and restless night when every kid in the city seemed to be out looking for a better party. It was the middle of July, and leftover fireworks still detonated on residential streets around kicked bottles and idling cars. In the air was a steady wash of sirens, crickets, and stereo bass, while every now and then a helicopter would circle overhead, its searchlights fragmenting through sycamore branches onto packs of loitering teens. Cops broke up a party in Mandeville Canyon before eleven, and word spread that the kegs on Kenter were a rumor. Lydia rode in the backseat of a Mustang convertible, jammed in tightly with her friends, all of them fielding cell phone calls, pledging their determination not to waste another night at the bluffs—dropping cigarettes and Hennessy bottles into the ravine.
Over the past years, these girls had been more than Lydia’s friends: They had fed and harbored her; they had circulated her among guest rooms, couches, pool houses, and the four-poster beds of out-of-town parents. Lydia woke nearly every morning among a new set of volleyball trophies or glass figurines, in the shrine to a daughter gone to college or rehab, on the liniment-smelling bed of a grandparent, beneath collages of family vacations, or amid a hundred pictures of grinning strangers, brandishing ski poles or fishing rods.
Chloe, Lydia’s best friend and the most righteous about protecting her, was a hardworking rich girl with the mentality of a social worker. The daughter of a movie agent and a child psychologist, she was a plump and freckled straight-A student, always blushing with excitement or outrage, who loved to sit up late, clutching her pillow and mulling over the injustices of the world. They had agreed to join the Peace Corps together, until Lydia found out that it required a college degree. But the rest of Lydia’s friendships were intense and fleeting, with girls like Danielle, now riding in the front seat, who had lent her a suede skirt for the evening and threatened to call DHS if Lydia hurt it.
Beyond Danielle and Chloe, there was a network of girls, kicked out of top-tier private academies or missing credits at public schools from Beverly to Sa-Mo. Lydia was never so much a runaway as an island-hopper along the archipelago of their houses. They were privileged screwups, and Lydia was different only in that she lacked the safety net that so many of them dove into without a thought. She still carried some of her
mother’s eagerness to please “a better class of people,” and always believed that she was an impostor, a ragged orphan swaddled in fancier clothes. She was a paradox to the other girls: She had been raised predominantly in wealthy households with rich stepfathers, but she also boasted of her white trash status. She even smiled when the other girls made fun of it. She talked about how her mother now wore a rock worth “ten or twenty g’s,” but still went ballistic if anyone left the lights on in a room.
House to house, Lydia paid her fare in stories. She could captivate her friends with sordid tales of stepfathers and boyfriends: a cokehead restaurant owner whom she and her mother fled one night near dawn; a drunken orthodontist stepfather who had groped Lydia regularly and had once dislocated her arm in a fight. One of her mother’s boyfriends had been a cross-dresser with a gun collection, and Lydia had caught him one night, drunk and in a garter belt, brandishing a flintlock pistol. “The antique part’s key,” said Lydia. “Older that shit is, the better. Imagine that freak with, like, a teddy and a musket. Too fucking classic!” But whenever she ran out of grim or colorful yarns, she would return to her dad’s saga, his criminal history and his life on the road, until she found that there was nothing better for her street credibility than a blood father in prison.
That night in mid-July, Lydia and her friends found themselves on an exhausting quest, party to party, house to house, in search of ecstasy. They lost two hours in a living room in Beverlywood, where everyone sat around in leather chairs watching two kids entranced at a PlayStation, sharing a beer bong, as a third boy made inquiring phone calls. They killed another hour at a diner on La Cienega, each girl launching into her own cell phone soliloquy, while Lydia sat quietly, listening to their overlapping voices. Danielle couldn’t reach her connection; Chloe offered to steal booze from her parents; two other girls might be able to score something from a hairdresser they knew in the Palisades. Back on the road, passing the looming towers of Century City, they now seemed doomed to a night back home by the bluffs. Instead, Danielle’s cell rang, and her connection referred her to someone else. She rose and faced them from the shotgun seat, blouse flapping in the wind, and announced—as the self-proclaimed savior of the night—that they could get crystal. All of the girls were holding their hair out of their faces. They voted, majority ruled, and they decided to turn around and head for Hollywood. After all, they needed to accomplish something.
In a parking lot just down from the Opium Den, they met Danielle’s friend, who ambled to the car like a gunslinger, leaned against the door, and invited them to a get-together in the hills. The girls disagreed over this; Chloe was skeptical about any party that hadn’t been mentioned in the original deal, especially because the “connection” was a sour-looking gangster wannabe sitting behind the wheel of a Chevy Impala, slapping on the door beneath him. He wanted Danielle to ride with him. She agreed, but only if one of her “niggas” came along. To silence another developing argument, Lydia volunteered with a groan.
Off again, two cars began wending northward, Lydia and Danielle in the backseat, while Chloe ran red lights trying to keep on their tail, repeatedly calling on the cell phone to scream, “This kid drives like an asshole!”
The connection’s name was Tito, and it seemed fitting that on a harried night, their quest for intoxication would lead to a poser: a hundred-and-twenty-pound pseudo-thug in a wife-beater T, using Chicano slang like “foquin car, mang,” bragging that he ruled the West Side, couldn’t keep the bitches off him—all because he could get his hands on an eightball of stepped-on crank. He had a patchy, adolescent mustache, and a few strands of his hair were bleached and combed back. He talked for a long time about how ecstasy was bullshit—strictly for rave faggots, that he could get them two or three times as high with crystal.
Lydia said that they had both done meth, so they didn’t need a lecture on pharmacology.
“Listen to her. Getting all SAT and shit.”
He angled down his rearview mirror to look at her body, and Lydia put her middle finger onto her lap. On the stereo, a deep, gravelly voice rapped a list of sexual conquests.
They drove past dark alleys and the silhouettes of palm trees. As they began ascending the hills, he called back to the girls: “Listen up, yo. Y’all need to be quiet about this. I got a lot of my boys up there tonight; but my brother, he’s a businessman. He don’t want no product in the house.”
Tito explained that both of his parents had “passed” and that his brother supported him: school, clothes, cars, bling, whatever shit he needed.
Danielle said, “So if he’s the big businessman, why we talking to your ass?”
“’Cause he ain’t going to waste his time with two hos from the 818.”
“We’re not from the Valley,” Danielle said.
“We’ll show the utmost discretion,” said Lydia, raising her chin.
“See. SAT knows what I’m talking ’bout.”
“More like GED,” said Danielle, bursting into laughter. Lydia pushed her down in the backseat, and they began a giggling squabble of palms and elbows.
“You are so sensitive,” said Danielle, laughing. “Take your fucking Paxil.”
Lydia tackled her and pinned her onto the seat, then she sat on top of her, bouncing up and down, as Danielle winced and said, “Stop, sto-ho-ho-ho-hop. Oh my God, your ass weighs a ton! Go on a diet!”
Lydia was becoming genuinely angry, and this sent Danielle into such hysterical laughter that she couldn’t get out the word “Atkins.” When her cell phone rang, she squirmed under Lydia to answer it, saying, “Ow, ow, wait, bitch. My leg just fell asleep.”
Twenty minutes later, the play-wrestling match now finished, Tito was pulling up to a cast-iron gate, with Chloe tailgating him in the convertible. They ascended a long, curling driveway, crunching over acorns and brushing through the hanging whiskers of a willow tree until they reached a stone house planted into the hillside.
Immediately the driveway filled with shadows, projected in crooked stripes across a garage door.
Lydia said, “Oh, shit, does Rick James live here?”
The headlights went off and the shades clarified into men in three-quarter-length pants and white T-shirts. Their movements around the car were slow and predatory, and, as Tito stepped out, they yelled at him that the house was already full of his clowns. They scolded him like a child, and, whispering, he pleaded with them not to embarrass him in front of the ladies he had just picked up. During the long, hissing conversation by the garage door, Lydia found Chloe in the darkness on the driveway. “This is creepy,” said Chloe. “I’m so out of here.”
But the girls voted to follow Tito around a stone wall, where they were stopped by a thin man with his shirt off, long shorts clinging to his hips below bunched-up underwear. He smelled saturated with weed, his eyes red, his head shaved, gang tattoos on his scalp, and, ranging across his chest, the word “El Salvador.” There was a languid, catlike quality about him, as if he had just awakened from a nap. He smiled and said, “Hold up. No weapons in here.” There was little banter remaining among the girls as he frisked them one by one. Danielle tried to make a joke by pointing to his chest and asking him where he was from, but her voice trembled. When he searched Lydia’s satchel, the others had already moved up the steps. He rifled through her phone book, condoms, cigarettes, makeup, notes and pictures, chuckling at the mess. Then he told her to put her arms out and spread her legs, and he ran his palms around her blouse and skirt.
“So which security company you work for?”
He gave a slight smile, which only affected one side of his face; and then, turning his head to the side, he pointed to the tattoo on his neck. “This one,” he said, flashing gang signs on his fingers.
The patio sat in a clearing of cypresses and eucalyptus, so high up that the wind sounded like a stream above the muted city. Acorns clattered like hail onto the roof and lawn chairs. Below the scrubby hills, the shimmering flats of the West Side stretched toward
the far-off darkness of the ocean, and the sky was a canopy of ambient pink. Farther down along this high perch carved into the mountainside there was a pool and a fountain in a grotto between swaying trees.
As they continued into the house, all five girls were now quiet and vaguely green, as if seasick at the first dips of open sea. The front room was completely barren—not a piece of furniture, not a picture on the wall, only a wide and glossy hardwood floor, a bay window, and a high ceiling that made their voices echo. They followed the noise and cigarette smoke down carpeted steps into a sunken game room, where a small crowd circled around a pool table. For a few wary moments, Lydia thought they might be entering a genuine gang party inside a plush safe house, but she was instead relieved to find a scene she recognized: boys in jerseys, with knit caps pulled low and whittled-down patches of chin hair; the girls clustered in tight packs, gesturing with their cigarettes. This group had little or nothing in common with the men outside. A man with a red goatee shouted, “Whoooo—Tito!” and Danielle knew a kid in a Rugby shirt from her stepbrother’s all-boys academy.
But once Lydia adjusted to the smoke and clamor, she noticed that the scene also had a confused undercurrent. Like at every other party, the guys yelled and swayed with hip-hop mannerisms, but they seemed painfully aware that there were real thugs outside. They checked the doors and windows. They performed like nervous actors, eyes shrunken with smoke and worry.
Tito began ferrying groups of four to the bathroom, and Lydia went first with Danielle and Rugby Shirt. Tito’s hands were all over Lydia, until she swatted his shoulder. Danielle didn’t seem to mind as Rugby kissed under her hair, holding her from behind as she did a line. Tito put his hands on Lydia’s hips and tried to kiss her while she massaged a burning nostril. His breath smelled like medicine. She laughed and said, “Let me breathe for a second.”
The first rush bloomed through her, tingling in her fingertips, that seductive feeling of unimagined possibilities. But she wanted to get away from Tito, who had cruel eyes and bad skin along the edges of his flossy mustache. He was now vigorously rubbing her ass, and Lydia said, “Damn, dog. What do you think—a genie’s going to come out?”