by James Frey
The day slides away, they take it in remember it, forget it. As the truck runs low on gas Dylan pulls into a motel. It doesn’t look good, doesn’t look bad, most people probably drive past it without noticing it. It’s brown and yellow, there are two floors, a railing along the second, a mostly empty parking lot. It has a neon sign that doesn’t glow it says Valley Motel and Motor Lodge, Weekly, Monthly. Maddie speaks.
Why are we stopping here?
I think this is the place.
What do you mean?
For us.
To live?
Yeah.
How are we going to live here?
I have a plan.
What?
Let me go inside and check a couple things out.
You’re going to leave me here?
It doesn’t look bad.
It doesn’t look good.
You’ll be fine. I’ll be right back.
He kisses her gets out of the truck walks into the lobby. He talks to a man behind the reception desk. The man is thin and his hair is thinning and he has a patchy mustache that his friends laugh about behind his back.
Maddie watches Dylan talk to the man, the man nods continuously he nods when he talks he nods when he doesn’t talk it’s like a nervous tic nodding, nodding. Dylan reaches out, shakes his hand, the man nods.
Dylan walks out of the lobby gets into the truck.
Our new home.
Maddie shakes her head, looks distraught.
No.
What’s wrong?
This is not what I thought we were coming here for.
What do you mean?
This is California. I thought we’d live in a beautiful place near the ocean and we’d be happy.
We’re nineteen. We don’t have any money and we don’t have jobs. This is the best we’re gonna get.
Where are we?
North Hollywood.
This is Hollywood?
North Hollywood. The guy said real Hollywood is worse.
I’m scared, Dylan. I want to go home.
This is our home.
No it’s not. This will never be my home.
We can’t go back. We can’t go back and live our parents’ lives. I’d rather die.
I’m scared.
We’re gonna be fine.
How are we gonna pay for this? How are we gonna get jobs?
He motions to a used car lot across the street, a sign says—we pay cash.
I’m gonna sell the truck. A room here is $425 a month. We’ll stay till we can afford something better. It can’t be any worse than it was back there.
Promise me this won’t be our life.
I promise.
Maddie smiles, nods. Dylan starts the truck, pulls out, drives across the street. He sells the truck for $1,300. It’s worth more, but he takes it because he knows he’s in no position to haggle. They walk back to the motel. He pays the man behind the counter two months rent. They go to their room it’s at the far end on the second floor. They go into the room the carpet is stained and worn, the bedspread is stained and worn, the television is old, there’s no clock. There are two threadbare chairs near the window and there is a sink and a microwave, there are orange and brown curtains hanging at the window they’re stained and frayed. Dylan sits on the bed. Maddie looks around, shakes her head, looks like she’s going to cry. Dylan stands and walks to her puts his arms around her.
I promise we’ll find something better.
I’m scared to touch anything.
This is just the beginning.
I know.
She looks at the bed, starts to cry.
Don’t cry. I don’t want you to cry.
I can’t help it.
Is there anything I can do?
I’m scared to touch anything.
In 1874, the Point Fermin Lighthouse is built in San Pedro, which is now the site of the Port of Los Angeles. In 1876, the Southern Pacific Railroad connects Los Angeles and San Francisco. In 1885 the Sante Fe Railway connects Los Angeles to the transcontinental railroad.
There are seventy-five residences in the Palisades Heights Trailer Park. They are spread across eight acres of land on the bluffs above the Pacific Coast Highway, and were originally built, if that is even the correct word, to be a form of affordable housing in an upper-class community. For years they were the butt of jokes, they were sneered at, mocked, demeaned, the people who lived in them ignored by the rest of the community. When the real-estate boom of the late ’90s and early ’00s hit, they boomed at a greater percentage than the rest of the country did, and more than the surrounding area, where mansions sell for as much as $50 million. At that point, some of them were sold, some upgraded, some expanded, some went unchanged. The largest is a triple-wide on a double lot, the smallest is a 170-square-foot Airstream Bambi.
Tammy and Carl moved into the park in 1963. They were from Oklahoma and both grew up, on opposite sides of Tulsa, dreaming of a life at the beach. They met in their freshman year at Tulsa State, they were both studying to be teachers. They married a year later, had their first child, Earl, a year after that, Tammy dropped out to stay home with him, Carl stayed in school and got his degree. Two days after graduation they got in their wood-paneled station wagon and drove west. When they got to LA, Carl started looking for a job and they started looking for a place to live with a view of the ocean. They looked up and down the coast, from Ojai to Huntington Beach. Carl applied for seventy-four jobs, they couldn’t afford anything that was habitable. They lived out of the wagon for a month, parking in the lots of public beaches, cooking hot dogs on a small hibachi.
The job came first. It was teaching science to eighth graders at a public junior high school in Pacific Palisades, an upscale ocean community that lies between Santa Monica and Malibu. It was a good school, and the pay was good for a teaching job, but it was not enough to live in the Palisades or in Santa Monica or in Malibu. They found the trailer park, which was on the edge of the Palisades. They bought a double-wide for $3,000. They had two more children, a boy named Wayne and a girl named Dawn, and they lived together as a family in the trailer. It was crowded, but the lack of space brought them closer, forced them to live in peace with each other, made the good times better and the bad times shorter.
They would walk down the hill to the beach every weekend, and every day during the summer, and they would play in the sand, in the waves, the boys both learned to surf, they continued cooking hot dogs on the hibachi. The kids went to the public schools, which are among the best in the state, all of them did well and went on to college. Carl continued to teach science, and became the football coach, at the junior high for thirty-five years. Once a year at Christmas they went back to Tulsa, where their relatives looked at them like they were aliens. Once a year, at spring break, they drove down to Baja and rented a bungalow on the beach and spent a week eating tacos, playing Frisbee and surfing. The years drifted by simply and easily and wonderfully. Aside from the fact that they lived in a trailer park, the family had a quintessential California beach life.
The kids are gone now, grown and on their own, Earl is an entertainment lawyer in Beverly Hills, Wayne is a college English professor in San Diego, Dawn is married with children in Redondo Beach. Carl is retired and he and Tammy spend their days walking along the beach, sitting on the patio in front of their trailer reading history and mystery books, playing cards with their neighbors. They see at least one of their kids every weekend, usually at the trailer, and their grandchildren, there are seven of them, love visiting them. Earl, who makes an absurd amount of money, has offered to buy them a house but they don’t want to move. They love the park, they love the trailer, they love the life they have led and continue to lead. They want to stay until they’re dead and gone, until they move on to what they believe will be their next life. Tammy and Earl, like hundreds of thousands of people a year, came to Los Angeles to make their dreams come true. Sometimes it happens.
Josh bought his trailer three yea
rs ago. It’s a small standard in the back of the park. It’s in good shape, is relatively new (ten years), and was sold with its furnishings, which are simple and tasteful.
Josh is a television producer. His specialty is dramatic one-hour police shows. He comes up with the ideas for the shows, finds writers to execute his vision, sells the shows to networks, supervises their production. He has had three make it on network prime time in the last five years. One of them was canceled, two are still on, and one was recently syndicated.
Josh is thirty-six years old. He is married and he has three children.
He lives with his family in a seven-bedroom Spanish mansion north of Sunset Blvd. in Beverly Hills (most of Beverly Hills is wealthy, the ridiculously wealthy live in the hills north of Sunset). His net worth is just past $75 million. Fifty million of it exists on paper in the United States, $25 million of it is in untraceable bank accounts in Monaco and the Caribbean. He hides the money because he believes it is his money, and his money alone. Should his marriage end in divorce, and he loves his wife and is not planning on it ending, though he would also not be surprised if it happened, he does not want her to be able to get at everything he’s earned. He doesn’t give a shit what the laws of the State of California say, it is his money, his alone.
Josh bought the trailer with overseas money. His wife does not know about it, none of his friends know about it. He uses it to sleep with actresses who want jobs on his shows. He meets them all over town, at casting sessions, in restaurants, in clothing stores, everywhere. Those he likes, and he likes them young, fresh and unspoiled, sixteen at the youngest and twenty at the oldest, he invites to the trailer. Nothing, except a private meeting, is ever explicitly offered. Once the girls are in the trailer he offers them liquor and drugs. Sometimes they take it, sometimes they don’t, and it doesn’t really matter either way. Usually the girls are impressed enough with his success, his money and his power to sleep with him willingly. When they aren’t, he tells them he’ll make sure they never work if they don’t change their minds and spread their legs.
Now and then, he has to force himself on them. When he’s done he orders them a cab. He tells them to call him, that he’ll take care of them. Unless they’re spectacular, and he plans on seeing them again, he gives them a fake number. Those that he sees again are used until he’s finished, and then they’re discarded.
Betty is three and three-quarters years old, which she takes great pride in telling everyone she meets. She is thirty-seven inches tall, weighs thirty-four pounds, has blue eyes and curly white hair. She moved into the park with her mom, who is a nurse at a hospital in Santa Monica, when she was two. She calls the park Trailer-Land, and she calls herself the Princess of Trailer-Land. Her favorite activities are riding her tricycle and playing with her doll, whose name is Dollie.
Betty’s mother, whose name is Jane, inherited the trailer when her aunt passed away. Although she loved her aunt, and was truly and sincerely saddened by her death, she believes the trailer was a gift from God. Jane’s husband was an alcoholic who beat her on an almost daily basis. At various points in their relationship he had broken her nose, eye socket, both of her arms and six of her fingers. He hadn’t seriously hurt Betty yet, but he had started abusing her as well, slapping her when she made too much noise, pinching her on the backs of her arms and legs when she did things he didn’t like, kicking her away if she came near him when he was in a bad mood. He told Jane if she went to the police he would kill her and kill their daughter, if she left he would find them and kill them.
She believed him. If she tried to do anything, she believed he would kill them.
Jane prayed to God for a solution. Every day, three times a day, she got down on her knees and prayed please God help us we need a way out please God help us please. She did not go to church, she did not claim some sort of false conversion, she did not scream hallelujah to the sky; three times a day she got on her knees and prayed, three times a day.
The abuse continued. He knocked out three of her teeth. She kept praying.
She was at work when she saw him. She worked as an ER nurse he came in on a gurney. He had been in a bar during lunch he was drunk he followed a woman into the bathroom and tried to force himself on her.
Her boyfriend came into the bar heard her yell opened the bathroom door saw him pulling her hair and trying to bend her over the sink. The boyfriend slammed his head into the mirror above the sink. The mirror shattered and shards of glass went into his eyes.
They operated, but they couldn’t save them. He would never see again.
Later the same day, the aunt died. When Jane got home from work, she kissed Betty, thanked God she got down on her knees and thanked God over and over again, and she cried herself to sleep. There were no tears for him.
Jane filed for divorce the next day. The day after, she and Betty left the house with a few bags of clothes and some toys and they drove for two days to the Palisades. He was in the hospital for a week and released.
He had a new white cane. He went to his mother’s house. He hated his mother but she was the only person who would take care of him.
When they arrived, the trailer was in perfect condition. There were two small bedrooms one for each of them, a small yard with a flower garden.
Jane switched jobs at the new hospital, went from the ER to pediatrics, she found a babysitter to watch Betty while she worked. They built a life, a new life, one that revolved around each other. They play at the beach on Jane’s off days, they watch the sunset when she gets home from her shift. They grow tomatoes in the garden and have barbecues in the yard, they’ve been to Disneyland six times. Betty becomes more adorable every day, more outgoing, she skips and smiles and laughs through her days, she plays with her toys and reads her books, she never asks about her daddy.
She has become friends with almost everyone in the park, young old rich or poor everyone loves her, loves her silly little giggle, her crazy hair, her best friend Dollie. She tells them all she’s the Princess of Trailer-Land.
None of them disagree with her.
Emerson hit his peak when he was nine years old. He was in three films, two of which were massive hits, he made two million dollars, and he was nominated for an Academy Award. He didn’t win the award, but he was the youngest nominee in history. He went to the ceremony with his mother and he got a blow job, his first, from a thirty-four-year-old blonde in the bathroom.
Emerson is now twenty-nine years old. The intervening twenty years have not been kind to him. His movie career was over by the time he was twelve, he dropped out of high school to pursue an ill-fated dream of rock superstardom, most of his hair had fallen out by the time he was twenty-two. At this point, the only area of his life which is not in a state of disrepair is his financial life. He invested well and spent frugally. He has four million bucks in the bank.
He moved into the trailer park when he was twenty-four, a year after giving up on his rock-star dreams and a year before he decided to rededicate himself to the craft of acting. He no longer has an agent or a manager, and he hasn’t had a paying job in fourteen years. He still, however, has the dream, and he believes that if he was nominated once, it will happen again. He spends his days taking acting classes and consulting with acting coaches. He spends his nights reading plays and doing theater at small playhouses around the city. He spends his weekends at the beach reading gossip magazines and dreaming of the day he’ll be on the cover with the words COMEBACK KID beneath his name.
He doesn’t date and he doesn’t socialize, unless he believes it will somehow help his career. He wants it again. His name in lights. That feeling when he walked down the street and people stared at him, pointed towards him, called out his name.
Leo and Christine moved out from Chicago twenty-two years ago. They had both worked forty long years at a car factory and had dreamed of the sun and the sand and lawn chairs and endless bridge games. They had been married for thirty-six years when they retired, had raised three childr
en, had scraped and saved and planned. They’re in their late eighties now. They’ve had all the sun and sand and bridge they wanted and needed to have and they’re ready.
They will miss their children, and their grandchildren, and their soon-to-be three great-grandchildren. They will miss their lawn chairs, where they sit every day and chat and have coffee and read the paper. They will miss staring into each other’s eyes, even after all these years they still love staring into each other’s eyes.
There is much they will not miss. They go to bed together every night knowing they’re ready. That it might be their last. They’re ready.
Twelve acres of land adjacent to the park is being developed into a high-end gated community. The houses will have between six and ten bedrooms and will range in price between four and nine million dollars.
The views from their living rooms will be the same as the views from the living rooms of the trailers.
By 1875, Los Angeles had separate and distinct communities of Africans, Spanish, Mexicans, Chinese, and white Americans, easily making it the most diverse city in the country west of the Mississippi. There was little intermingling between the communities, and the Los Angeles City Council passed a law allowing whites to discriminate against all nonwhites.
Amberton sits in his home office. He also has an office for the production company that he and Casey own together, but he rarely goes there. That office is for the employees and for his public persona.
This office is his and his alone. It is very safe, very secure, very private.
It is where he keeps his deepest secrets: his journals, pictures, videos, mementos he keeps from his favorite lovers his records of their time together.
He is naked in his chair his feet are on his desk he is wearing a headset.