by James Frey
Regardless of how crowded the house became, Esperanza always had her own room. It was the only room in the house that had a real paint job (pink with yellow and blue flowers) and had furniture purchased new from a store (bed, dresser, bookshelf, desk, also all pink). The first thing Jorge told everyone who came into the house, whether they were there for a few minutes or were moving in, was that Esperanza’s room was off-limits unless Esperanza invited you in, and that when her door was closed, she should not be disturbed.
Behind the door, Esperanza read, listened to music, dreamed. She dreamed for hours, lying on her bed with her eyes closed, or staring out the window. She dreamed about boys, about her prom (someday?), about being one of the popular kids, about dating an actor on her favorite television show, about someday marrying the actor. Although she loved her family, she dreamed of escape, of living away from her sixteen roommates, of living alone in her own house, her own big house, a house where her parents could visit and have an entire wing of rooms just for themselves, the wing would have a phone that did not accept calls from Mexico. The dream she went to most often was about her thighs. The older she got the more she hated them, and the more she realized that they were truly odd, and the more she dreamed of life without them. Day after day after day she dreamed that she could make them shrink, disappear, deflate them, that she could wake up with normal-sized legs or have some kind of surgery to reduce them, that she could have her thunderous thighs cut off and replaced with some sort of small electronic thigh. Nothing ever came to be: she did not become popular, she did not go to prom or on any sort of date at all, she never got away from the house, her thighs remained as large and outsized as ever. She kept dreaming.
Esperanza did well in high school, she graduated with honors and received a scholarship to a local community college. It was the proudest moment of Jorge and Graciella’s life, and they decided to throw a huge party for Esperanza. For several days before the party, Jorge paraded around, and justifiably so considering his own background and educational résumé, like a proud peacock. Graciella sewed herself a new dress and had her hair and nails done at a salon in Montebello, a middle-class Latino neighborhood twenty minutes away. They spent three days cooking a feast, they cleaned and decorated the entire house, they planted flowers in the yard. Every member of the household chipped in, and because Esperanza hadn’t had a quinceañera, a traditional Latino party announcing a girl’s womanhood that usually occurs at age fifteen, they wanted to make her graduation day extraordinary.
The day arrived. Esperanza wore a specially tailored pink dress that hid her thighs as much as possible. Her aunts and female cousins doted on her and did her makeup and hair. When they were done, she looked in the mirror, and for the first time in her life, she thought she was beautiful. None of what she experienced over the past years, the teasing, the taunting, the loneliness, the insecurity, the pain, mattered to her.
She looked in the mirror and she thought she was beautiful. It erased everything.
The guests arrived, started eating and drinking, one of them brought a guitar and started singing traditional Mexican songs. The yard was packed when Esperanza made her entrance. There was clapping and cheering, hooting and hollering and whistling. Guests who had known Esperanza her entire life were shocked by her transformation, those who didn’t know her commented on how lucky Jorge and Graciella were to have such a lovely and intelligent daughter. As she worked her way through the crowd, saying hello to and thanking all of the guests, men flocked to her, crowded around her, vied for her attention, fawned over her. She was smiling, glowing, becoming more beautiful and confident with every passing moment, reveling in all of the attention. As the crowd around her grew, men began jostling for position and pushing each other, throwing subtle elbows and knees into each other’s sensitive areas. Within five minutes, a fight broke out.
The fight started between two men who had both, unsuccessfully, been searching for a wife. Both were in their early thirties and felt their time was running out, one was known all over East LA for his terrible breath, the other for his awful body odor. They had, over the years, pursued the same women, failed with the same women, and blamed each other, instead of the odors they carried around with them, for their failures. As they pushed their way towards Esperanza, they confronted each other.
When the man with the breath got in the face of the man with the body odor, a punch was thrown. It was returned in kind. Neither punch hit its mark, striking other men instead, who reacted by throwing more punches. The violence, as it always does, escalated very quickly, and within ten seconds, every one of the twenty men surrounding Esperanza was involved.
Esperanza tried to get away, but there were too many men, all of whom were now more concerned with their own safety than with hers. One of them stepped on the edge of her skirt. Another fell against her. She got knocked over, and as she went down, her skirt tore at the waist. There was almost immediate silence, immediate calm, an immediate end to the hostilities. Esperanza lay spread-eagled on the ground. Her thighs, which no one, aside from her parents, had ever seen unsheathed, were on open view. There was silence, dead heavy silence. And then it came: clapping and cheering, hooting and hollering and whistling, and above them all, laughter, laughter, laughter.
In 1871, the Farmers and Merchants Bank is founded by John G. Downey and Isaias Hellman. It is the first incorporated bank in Los Angeles County.
It takes Joe between five minutes and three hours to receive the donations necessary to purchase his daily dose of alcohol. If it’s summer, and the hordes of tourists are swarming, and there are sometimes as many as 250,000 per day on Venice Beach, the money comes quickly. In the winter, when the number dwindles to as few as 25,000 per day, it might take longer. There is also a fair amount of luck involved. Sometimes Joe will get a twenty-dollar bill right off the bat, sometimes it’s nickels and dimes for hours. Regardless, the goal is always the same: acquire the cash necessary to purchase two bottles of nice, cold Chablis.
Joe considers himself a connoisseur of Chablis. If the bottle costs less than $20, he’s tried it and has an opinion on it. If it costs less than $10, he can expound at length about it. If it costs less than $6, he can recite both the front and back labels verbatim, can opine on the wine’s strengths (at that price there are few) and weaknesses (many), and can most likely identify it by taste and smell. Joe likes to think that there isn’t a Chablis in America that he hasn’t tried at some point, and there isn’t one under $10 that hasn’t made him vomit on multiple occasions. Whenever he is asked about his drinking habits, he smiles and recites a verse of his own composition—Chablis is for me, from sea to shining sea, it sets me free, Chablis Chablis Chablis, Chablis is the drink for me. Poet he is not, connoisseur of mediocre wine, undoubtedly.
Joe first fell in love with Chablis when he was a child. He grew up in New Jersey with his mother, his father showed no interest in him beyond the moment he was conceived. One afternoon, as his mother was getting ready to receive guests, he heard her say the word, Chablis, and he loved the way it rolled off her tongue. He asked her to say it again, Chablis, Chablis, Chablis, and he knew, whatever Chablis was, and at that point he had no idea, he was in love with it. Even though he could barely read, and wasn’t out of the first grade, Joe started searching for mentions of Chablis in books, on television, as he listened to the radio. The first nonfamilial reference came from television, where he saw a washed-up, overweight film director, who was once the most heralded auteur in the world, expounding on the joys of a particularly wretched California Chablis during a television commercial. For days he walked around imitating the man’s voice, and saying—Chablis, for all your special moments! He said it over and over again, his mother finally had to threaten him with no dessert for a month if he wouldn’t stop.
His next encounter with Chablis came when he was eleven. A girl in his fourth grade class, a mean little girl who never came out of her biting, hitting, spitting and scratching phase, was named Chablis. Joe
became infatuated with her as soon as he heard the name. He followed her around, carried her books, gave her his lunch (she was also extremely overweight and capable of eating four or five lunches), wrote her love letters. She responded by biting him, hitting him, spitting on him and scratching him. Their love affair ended when she was sent to a school for children with special needs. Joe cried for a week.
At thirteen, Joe discovered the true meaning and power of Chablis. He was at a friend’s house and was helping his friend take out the garbage. There were several bottles in one of the bags, Joe slipped as he was carrying the bag, the bottles came tumbling out. Joe started picking them up, there were three 40-ounce bottles of malt liquor, six Pabst Blue Ribbons, two bottles of Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill, and a bottle of Chablis. There was a small amount of yellow liquid left in the bottle of Chablis, some of it undoubtedly wine, some of it most likely saliva. He picked up the bottle, smelled it, it didn’t smell very good, he didn’t care. He brought the bottle to his lips, drank the yellow liquid as fast as he could, it hit his stomach and started burning, it hit his head and started buzzing. Chablis, it was as if the Sirens were calling him to the rocks.
Chablis, like a runaway train heading straight into a brick wall.
Since that day, that fateful day, Joe has not gone more than eighteen hours without a taste of Chablis. As a kid he stole bottles from his friends’ parents and stockpiled them in his room, sneaking sips before he went to school, when he got home, when he went to sleep. When he was sixteen he got a fake ID and bought bottles at low-end liquor stores, he kept them hidden in his mother’s garage. When he was eighteen, and he was graduating from high school, in the space beneath his picture where he was supposed to list his life’s ambition, he wrote—Spend my life drunk on Chablis.
He left home two days after graduation. He had a backpack filled with six bottles of Chablis and a toothbrush, he had no money, no change of clothes, no idea where he was going. He started walking west. He went through Pennsylvania slept in the weeds on the side of the highway, begged for money at truck stops, took rides when he could get them.
He drifted into Cleveland and stayed for two months, sleeping outside of the old Municipal Stadium and feeding his Chablis habit by selling predictions on the games (they were always the same: the Cleveland teams are going to lose, lose, lose). He drifted south into Kentucky and Tennessee (fuck that Jack Daniel’s shit) and ended up in New Orleans, where he slept in the streets outside of the jazz clubs for three years. From there he wandered through Texas, where he got beat up and called names on a regular basis (men who love Chablis aren’t really welcome in Texas), he worked his way through New Mexico and into Nevada, where he lived on the Strip in Las Vegas for a year, eating gourmet buffet food out of casino dumpsters and playing the occasional slot or video poker game in low-end gaming houses. He left Las Vegas when he started hearing voices in his head. The voices said—walk west, Joe, walk west, walk west, walk west, Joe. Initially he thought somebody might have given him a quarter or a dime soaked in LSD, which he then absorbed through his fingers. The voices continued long after a dose would have worn off, so he thought maybe he knocked some of his brain wires loose when he fell down after consuming eleven bottles of discontinued wine he purchased at a wine close-out sale. He smacked himself a few times with his hand in the hope that he could get the wires properly realigned, but alas, the voices continued. He finally decided that he was insane, and that there was nothing to do but obey the voices. He started walking west. The voices stopped. He kept walking west. They did not return. He walked west until he reached the ocean, and walking any farther would have led to his death by drowning. As he stood on the sand staring across the ocean he heard one word—here here here. And so it was, here.
In December 1871, the Los Angeles Fire Department is created. It consists of three fire engine companies, two hook and ladder companies and three hose companies. Each company consists of no more than sixty-five men and no less than twenty-five men, all of whom are over the age of twenty-one. Membership in the fire department is on a volunteer basis.
They spend six days living on the beach. On the sixth day, their truck gets robbed. The driver’s-side window is broken, the radio is gone, their stash of money, $1,500, is gone. They have what is left in their wallets, about $150. The $1,500 had been hidden in a crevice beneath the steering wheel. He had hidden money there in the past, it had never been found.
They weren’t in Ohio anymore.
They wave down a policeman on a bicycle. There are policemen on bicycles all over Santa Monica. Because of the traffic and the crowds and the pedestrian walkways that line the beach and the overhanging bluffs, it is easier and faster for police to ride bikes than it is to drive. The truck is in a crowded parking lot. The policeman looks at it, looks at them. He speaks.
How long’s it been here?
Six days.
You move it at all?
No. I didn’t think I had to.
Thieves walk around this lot looking for cars that haven’t moved. They figure the cars are either deserted, or the owners are putting them in here because they don’t have room for ’em anywhere else. They’re easy targets.
I didn’t know that.
What’s your name?
Dylan.
What’s her name?
She speaks.
Maddie.
Like Madeline?
Yes.
You have ID?
They both say yes, hand the officer their driver’s licenses. He looks at them.
Long way from home.
Maddie is nervous, Dylan speaks.
Yup.
You on vacation?
We’re trying to get settled, find a place to live.
You come out here to get famous?
Nope.
The officer laughs.
Two kids from small-town Ohio move to LA and don’t think about becoming movie stars? Right. I believe that.
He hands them their IDs.
You can file a report if you want, but there is almost no chance of finding whoever did this, and your money’s gone. I’d recommend finding somewhere else to park.
There any cheap places to live around here?
The officer laughs again.
No, there aren’t.
Any idea where we might find one?
Go somewhere in the Valley. You’ll find something there. Where’s the Valley?
Buy yourself a map. You’ll find it.
The officer rides away. Dylan and Maddie get in the truck. Dylan cleans out the broken shards of glass before they sit down. They drive to a gas station, buy a map. They get on the 10 and drive to the 405, get on the 405 and head north. They are almost immediately stuck in a massive traffic jam. Dylan looks at Maddie, speaks.
Holy shit.
Indeed.
You ever seen anything like this?
Nope.
We get eight lanes on each side of the road. A sixteen-lane parking lot.
We’re moving a little.
He looks at the speedometer.
Three miles per hour.
How far away is the Valley?
Like ten or twelve miles.
She laughs.
Nice four-hour drive. Concrete and car horns and the smell of exhaust.
Welcome to California.
Traffic picks up as the 405 enters the canyon between Brentwood and Bel-Air. On the Bel-Air side there are mansions built into gray stone slopes, on the Brentwood side is the looming, white marble behemoth of the Getty Museum. It takes ninety minutes to get through the canyon and into the San Fernando Valley, which is 260 square miles of overdeveloped desert surrounded by mountains on four sides, home to 2 million people.
It’s primarily middle class, but there are sections of extraordinary wealth, and sections of extraordinary poverty. Dylan and Maddie pull off the exit for Ventura Boulevard, stop at a light. Dylan speaks.
Where do we go?
No idea.
Right
or left or straight?
If we go right we drive into a big rock hill.
He laughs.
Choose something else.
Straight.
He nods.
That’s how we’re gonna do it from now on. You tell me when to turn and where to turn and we’ll drive around till we find somewhere to stop.
We need money. We need to find some way to get money.
At some point today, I’m gonna stop and rob a bank.
Seriously?
No.
I’d help you if you were.
Seriously?
No.
Dylan smiles.
The light just turned green.
Maddie smiles.
Go straight.
He drives straight turns left, right, right, drives straight straight straight, turns right, straight. They drift, turn, get lost, roam. There’s no radio so Maddie sings softly, she has a light, clean voice, sometimes she hums. Neighborhoods have clean streets well-kept lawns children on sidewalks mothers with strollers. Others less clean, no grass, fewer children, no mothers. There are long desolate stretches lined with battered steel warehouses. There are golf courses and baseball diamonds they’re unnaturally, perfectly green. They see Warner Brothers, Disney, Universal, they’re behind thick walls, guarded gates. They drive for six miles without seeing a home only gas stations, mini-malls and fast-food restaurants. They find palm-lined avenues mansions on both sides, they find what appears to be a war zone. The hills along the southern rim are wild, and overgrown, houses are built on stilts, carved into the side of the rock. There are apartment complexes that hold more people than live in their old town, some are gorgeous, some decrepit, some look livable, some don’t. They stop in a grocery store. Everyone is beautiful. The people who appear unattractive would probably not be considered so in other parts of the country. Coffee shops are full, outdoor cafés are full, traffic is relentless, it seems like no one has a job. The sun is always up, shining, the heat ebbs and flows, the more with concrete, the less with green.