by James Frey
You sure you want to get out here?
The protesters surround the car, scream against the glass, hold their signs in front of Maddie’s eyes. Dylan speaks.
Yes.
The protesters scream.
The fare is twelve-fifty.
Maddie takes Dylan’s hand. He finds his cash with the other hands it to the cabbie, speaks.
Can you wait for us?
The signs dead babies targets Christ.
No.
A nondescript two-story stucco building Maddie speaks.
I don’t want to go, Dylan.
He reaches for the door.
We have to.
Opens it. The screams are magnified, the yelling shockingly loud, he steps out of the car holding Maddie’s hand she closes her eyes holds her other arm around her head like a shield the protesters step away from them, but scream, yell, wave their signs. Dylan rushes towards the door which is opened by a young woman he’s holding Maddie’s hand pulling her along with him rushes towards the door screams. They walk through the door, it closes behind them the screaming and yelling is muted. Maddie holds her arm above her head like a shield. Her eyes are still closed. Young woman speaks.
How can I help you?
Dylan speaks.
We have an appointment with a counselor.
What time?
Ten.
The waiting room is down the hall.
She walks down the hall, Dylan starts to follow to pull Maddie along with him. She resists, lowers her arm, speaks.
I don’t want to do it.
We’re not doing anything today.
I’m scared.
We’re just going to talk to someone.
I want to go home.
We agreed we’d talk to someone. Then we’ll go home and make the decision.
Don’t make me do this.
We’re just talking.
The young woman has stopped she’s waiting for them. The protesters are screaming murder, killer, death, God, punishment. Maddie is shaking. Dylan puts his arms around her, speaks.
I love you.
Then don’t make me.
We’re going to be okay.
Please.
We’re just going to talk.
He looks at the young woman and nods and starts guiding Maddie down the hall. After a few steps he pulls away but keeps her hand the young woman seats them in a small room with chairs along the walls, tables in the corners, magazines on the tables and in racks above the tables. Maddie moves her chair over so that it’s touching Dylan’s leans against him clutches his arm if she could sit in his lap she would. There are posters on the walls advocating safe sex, responsible contraception, adoption, in them happy couples smile, laugh, hold each other’s hands. None of them look like they’ve been called killers, murderers or sinners, none of them look like they’re shaking with fear. Maddie stares at the floor, Dylan alternates between looking at her and looking at the posters. He tries to reassure her. Two minutes last fifteen hours.
Their name is called they stand walk to a door they are greeted by a woman in her forties dressed simply and cleanly in a white shirt and beige skirt. They follow her through a door down a short hall into a small clean office more posters on the walls. She sits behind a clean desk they sit in chairs opposite. She speaks.
My name is Joan.
Dylan says hello Maddie tries to smile Joan speaks.
How can I help you?
Dylan tells her that Maddie is pregnant. Joan asks if they are sure she is pregnant Dylan tells her they’ve taken three tests all positive. Joan asks if they know what they want to do with the pregnancy, Dylan says no, that’s why we’re here, Maddie starts crying. The woman asks Maddie why she’s crying she shakes her head she can’t speak, Dylan tells the woman that Maddie doesn’t want to be here, doesn’t want to contemplate anything other than keeping the baby. The woman says she understands, that the decision is an incredibly difficult one, that they should consider all of their options, seriously seriously consider them, before they choose one way over another. Dylan nods. Maddie cries. The woman gives them some pamphlets. The pamphlets have information on medical procedures how they work and why they’re safe, on adoption and how to give a child to someone else, on keeping the child, the financial realities, the realities of having children at a very young age, religious implications. The woman goes over the pamphlets with Dylan and Maddie Dylan reads along with her Maddie clutches at his arm and stares at the floor. When they’re done the woman calls them a cab and walks them out the back door to a parking lot where the cab waits there are protesters at the edge of the lot fewer than there are in the front but enough to be heard, they yell, scream, wave their signs. As the cab moves slowly past the protesters Maddie ducks puts her head in Dylan’s lap she cries for the entire ride home. Dylan tries to talk to her she can’t talk just shakes her head. When they get back to their apartment she goes to their bedroom shuts the door he tries to go in and talk to her, comfort her, she asks him to leave her alone he says let me help she says leave me alone. He leaves the apartment buys her favorite dinner nachos and tacos from a Mexican fast-food restaurant he goes to a grocery store buys her favorite soda grape and new copies of six gossip magazines he goes home she’s still in their room he tries to open the door it’s locked. He knocks she says what he tells her about dinner and the soda and the magazines. She does not respond. He eats alone and sleeps on the couch.
The Los Angeles Air Pollution Control Board is established in 1946 in an effort to discover the cause of the brown cloud hanging over the city and decide how to combat and disperse it. In 1949, after intense lobbying from both the automobile and oil industries, and against the recommendations and position of the Los Angeles Air Pollution Control Board, the public rail system, which at one time was the largest in the world, and still serves a majority of the city’s population, is decommissioned and torn out. It is replaced by a small fleet of buses.
They come to rock. They want to rock long and they want to rock hard, they want to rock all day and rock all motherfucking night. They come with long stringy hair, with Mohawks, bald, they come with clean arms, tattoos, track marks, they come in jeans, skate shorts, leather. They come because rock is in their blood and rock is in their bones, they come because they eat rock, sleep rock, shit rock, and most important, they dream of rock.
They call it Rock School, though its official name is the Academy of Popular Contemporary Music. It started in the back of a guitar store when a salesman, who also happened to rock fairly hard in a local metal band, offered to teach an accountant, who came in looking for a flying-V electric, how to play. The accountant told his friends and some of them wanted to learn the mystery of rock, they told their friends who also happened to be interested in learning how to rock so hard in the proper way. Though the salesman initially felt somewhat uncomfortable teaching nonrock citizens how to live and rock his lifestyle, or at least pretend to live it and rock it, his band wasn’t doing very well and he needed the money, so he did.
A year later, seeing the business his salesman was bringing due to his teachings, and seeing the opportunity to make more money by having more students to whom he could sell guitars, the owner of the shop made an offer to the salesman, and they opened, across the street from the shop, an official, or as official as something can be in the world of rock, school. It was an immediate success, and surprisingly, to both of its owners, many of the students were young, knew their rock, and just wanted to learn to play their instruments. They opened a lead guitar department, rhythm guitar department, a bass department, a drum department, and a keyboard department (sometimes keyboards rock, but usually not, so they kept it small). A band that got together at the school made a hit record, and talked about the school’s influence, more students came. A second band hit, more students. They bought a building, a third band, more students, bought another, a fourth, more students. Over the next five years they bought two more buildings added academic classes, such as
history of rock, theory of rock, songwriting, lyricism, the cultural impact of rock, and started different subspecialty departments such as pop-metal, classic metal, death metal, classic rock, the blues, R&B, and punk (though no self-respecting punk can actually play his instrument and all of them fucking hate school). Students started coming, and still come from all over the country, all over the world. All they want to do is rock, all day and all night, in the classroom, in practice studios, in hallways and courtyards, in school recitals, at some point in local bars and clubs, and if they’re lucky and good, on the radio, TV, and in arenas and stadiums all over the world. Rock. Long live it. All day and all night, like a motherfucking hurricane. Rock.
They come for their families, who usually live in rural farming areas of Korea, China, Cambodia, Thailand. They are recruited by men who roam the areas looking for talent, the prettier the better, the younger the better. They are told they will have jobs, a place to live, that they’ll make money for their families, that they will have better lives, that they will have a future.
They come over in groups of fifteen or twenty, in the rear sections of cargo containers with little or no light, no running water, and no electricity, that get moved through the Port of Los Angeles. One or two die on every trip, the others have to live with their bodies. Once the containers are opened, they’re hustled into windowless vans taken to a windowless warehouse given showers and food and clothes, usually lingerie. They do their hair and they put on makeup. They are put on display.
Buyers arrive middle-aged Asian men and women. The buyers inspect them, poke at them, prod at them, sometimes they take them into small rooms with mattresses and test them. They negotiate prices for them, anywhere from five thousand to twenty-five thousand dollars. They put them in windowless vans. They take them to their new homes. They take them to what was supposed to be their American Dream.
They live together in a single room in nondescript buildings spread throughout the city and the county. Four five six sometimes ten young women in a single room its floor covered with old mattresses. They share a bathroom. They cook noodles on hot plates. They watch TV though they don’t understand most of what is being said. They share clothes and they share makeup and they share basic necessities like soap, shampoo, toothpaste. They never leave.
Men come, drawn by the sign that says Massage or the ads in the adult-classified sections of independent newspapers and magazines. They start coming at 8:00 AM and they keep coming until midnight. None of them actually expect a massage, or if they do, it is a small part of what they seek. They want young Asian women who will do what their wives won’t, their girlfriends won’t, what they can’t get elsewhere. They pay fifty dollars for half an hour, one hundred for an hour. They pay a man, usually a large, armed man, and they go to a small dark room with a massage table. The girls go to the room one by one until the man chooses one of them. Once the choice is made, the girl goes to a bathroom and gets a towel, some lotion, condoms, and comes back to the man’s room and closes the door.
When they’re done, if the girl has performed well, she is given a tip. She is allowed to keep half of the tip for herself, and has to pay the other half to the house. What goes to the house is placed against the initial cost to acquire her, plus 50 percent weekly interest. Her portion of her earnings is usually sent back to her family. On a good day a girl can see fifteen or twenty men, on a bad day none. If the girl works hard she can eventually pay herself off. If she can’t, she is used until she is no longer wanted. She is then either thrown out of the house or she is dropped on a street corner.
They come to work. They come across on foot, in freight trucks, on trains, in tunnels. They have little or no education. They have no money. Many of them have family in the area, but their family members are in the same situation. No papers. No chance of legal work. No way to take advantage of many of the opportunities that exist in a country, and a city, of dreams.
They stand on the street. They arrive at dawn. The sun is always out in the winter it’s 75 degrees, in the summer it’s 105. The street is lined with battered trucks, many of which they own. Some of them are in crews attached to the trucks they sit in them, on them, hang from them. A hundred yards away there is a home-improvement superstore, 100,000 square feet of plans, tools and materials. Legal citizens, many of whom own homes, and whose own families immigrated to this country at some point in the near or distant past, go into the store and purchase whatever they need for their projects. A few of them do the projects themselves. Most of them don’t. They load the supplies into their cars and pull out to the street and move towards the curb.
The men crowd around the cars. Most of them don’t speak English, but know a few choice words to make it seem as if they do. Regardless of whether they do or don’t, whatever the driver of the car needs, carpentry, painting, plumbing, gardening they know how to do it. As the window comes down they yell I work hard, I do job right, I work all day cheap, they push each other, knee each other, kick each other, get in fights over the position closest to the window, all they want is to work, and they will work long and hard, all they want is a day’s wages. They try to get the driver’s attention and if they get it, try to negotiate a good situation for themselves the longer the job the better, the higher the hourly the better. If they’re chosen they try to get their brothers, fathers, cousins, uncles and friends chosen. They get in the car quickly or motion to the driver of whatever truck they are attached to if a truck is needed. A good wage is ten an hour a great wage fifteen. Any wage is better than nothing.
If they are not chosen they wait. They sit and they wait they will wait all day with the hope that they might get an hour of work. When the sun drops they go home. Some have families some don’t some of them sleep in their trucks or cars some of them sleep on the street. The next day, they will arrive at dawn.
They come to escape. Most are from small towns in the Midwest, the South, the Southwest. Though many are still children, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, they are escaping their childhoods, escaping physical abuse, mental abuse, sexual abuse when they couldn’t take it anymore they ran, ran west, ran to California, towards the lights of Hollywood Boulevard.
There are several hundred of them. They live in packs beneath bridges and overpasses. They sleep together, eat together, take care of each other, love each other, hurt each other. The packs always have a leader usually a teenage male usually someone who has lived on the streets for an extended period of time. During the day they go down to Hollywood Boulevard, sit along the stars embedded in the concrete, panhandle, beg, occasionally, if they are desperate, rob the tourists. They forage for food in dumpsters. They get their clothing at shelters. They buy and sell drugs. They buy and sell themselves. They buy and sell each other.
Most people, tourists employees at local shops and restaurants and theaters, the police, ignore them. They can be difficult to look at kids in ragged clothes usually black clothes faces dirty hair tangled fingers caked with grime. Many are skeletal from the lack of food and the abuse of drugs. When one of them dies they try to identify them and contact their families they’re usually buried in paupers’ graves.
They stay for as long as they can a day week month some stay for years. Some go home. Many die. A few go to shelters or treatment centers. The unlucky, though some say the opposite, just disappear. When they enter adulthood they leave it’s harder to beg harder to garner sympathy harder to live amongst children. They run somewhere. Though by now they know there is no escape, no escape.
They come looking for waves. On bikes with saddlebags and on foot wearing backpacks in old pickup trucks with sleeping bags in camper vans bought from hippies. Many grew up in landlocked states without salt water they saw surfing on TV or in videos they read magazines filled with pictures of long-haired men in shorts dripping wet surrounded by beautiful girls. Some tried it on family vacations and found themselves others have known it throughout the entirety of their lives. All of them find peace and joy alone on th
e water a serenity contentment to which they devote their lives.
They live crowded together in cheap apartments in El Segundo, Playa del Rey, in the Marina and Venice. Some park in lots along the ocean they move every few days some live in Malibu campgrounds some sleep on the sand. They take jobs in restaurants, bars, at surf shops, as cabdrivers, anything that leaves their mornings free when the tides are high and the beaches empty and they walk with their boards and paddle out to where breaks start to curl. Some don’t have jobs don’t want jobs would rather starve than devote time they could spend on water doing something they despise. A few can make a living at it they travel the world to compete in tournaments come home when they’re free. To all of them jobs are just a means nothing more, nothing more.
How many are there two or three hundred maybe five, maybe six hundred men and a few women. Many know each other and are friendly some are not and avoid each other’s beaches avoid each other’s waves. If someone isn’t welcome they’ll break their board ride over them in the water cut them with their fins. Out of the water they might be friends smoke weed together drink beer on the water what is theirs is theirs and they will fight to protect it. It’s a dream their life no stress no expectations no ambition just love something they truly and dearly love that will never leave them, never forsake them. It’s sand and salt, water and waves, love.