by James Frey
They come in the name of God. Silently and under assumed names fake papers with real visas students and teachers, researchers, religious men who hate. They despise America despise the decadence of Los Angeles they’re revolted by the excess, the narcissism, the waste. They want to destroy it. They want to kill its residents.
They learned their craft in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq. They saw their brothers die in the name and aspired to join them. They are trained in death and mayhem and how to deliver them they are trained in the words of a book they say justifies them but doesn’t.
They watch. They listen. They prepare. They only speak to their own. They have plans based on their observations and they have the materials to make their plans realities. Some of the plans are small a café a restaurant a store that sells goods that revolt them. Some are larger, schools, malls, government buildings, houses of God where infidels and Jews worship false idols. Some are massive city blocks to contaminate hospitals to burn a port to annihilate an airport to raze. A hundred thousand people at a football game. Three hundred thousand at a parade. They live on quiet streets in homes that look normal apartments like any other they drive cars that don’t draw any attention they avoid notice. They miss their beards but it is sanctioned. They miss their robes but it is sanctioned. They miss their brothers but believe they will see them again when it’s over. They live on quiet streets and they wait for a signal, a message, words strung together that mean more to them mean that it’s their time. They live on quiet streets and they wait to die and they pray to the East that they take you with them.
In 1950, Los Angeles resident Richard Nixon is elected to represent the State of California in the United States Senate.
They come to live. They come because the help they need is unavailable in whatever town, city, state or country where they reside. If they don’t get it, many of them, if not all, will die. At home they ask their doctors what they should do, where should they go the doctors say West, go West, it may be your only hope, go West.
It is the largest nonprofit medical facility on the West Coast. There are 2,000 doctors and 7,000 support staff. It is the most heavily funded medical facility on the West Coast the overwhelming majority of its funds come from private donations. It is considered the best medical facility in the western United States and one of the best in the world. Founded at the turn of the twentieth century by a wealthy family looking to provide medical care to Jews who were turned away at other hospitals. It did not discriminate so others began to come because of the quality of care. It grew expanded moved grew more expanded more moved again. In the ’70s it moved to twenty acres on the edge of Beverly Hills. It grew and it expanded and there are now eighteen buildings spread across the acreage and plans for more.
Walk through its halls it is one of the few places in the city where race is irrelevant, religion is irrelevant class is irrelevant. The child of Polish immigrants living in Iowa gets chemotherapy for lymphoma. An Arab prince has heart surgery. A gangster from Watts recovers from a gunshot wound. A movie star has a child. A Japanese businessman is treated for a brain tumor. A seventy-year-old Mexican gardener who does not speak English and has never voted or paid taxes gets a new hip. An Armenian has kidney stone surgery, a Russian has eye surgery, a Jew from Syria gets a new heart. The priority is not money or the enrichment of an endowment it is health and care and recovery it is providing services that make the world a better place. A 700-pound woman from Arizona who hasn’t walked in a decade has gastric bypass. A four-year-old burn victim from Oakland has a series of skin grafts. A teenage girl has reconstructive facial surgery after being hit by a drunk driver. Priority life.
They come to learn at the seventy-five colleges and universities in Los Angeles. Many of them are drawn by the idea of living under the sun. Many come because they think they’ll spend their free time amongst movie stars and recording artists and that the life they see on TV and in magazines can be theirs while they’re in school. Many come because some of the schools are the finest in the country, the finest in the world. Many come simply because they’re accepted.
There are approximately 1.2 million college students in Los Angeles County. Eight percent of them are black, 20 percent Latino, 13 percent are Asian, 12 percent are from outside the United States, and 45 percent of the students who start school finish with a degree of some kind. The largest schools are University of California Los Angeles, with 37,000 students, and California State University Long Beach, with 31,000 students. Hebrew Union College has 57 students, the Rand School of Policy has 60. One of them has an operating budget of $800,000 a year. Another has an operating budget of $1.7 billion. There are ten law schools in Los Angeles, two medical schools, two dentistry schools, and thirteen seminary schools. Fifty-six schools offer education degrees. Two offer degrees in advanced theoretical astrophysics. There are departments at the schools covering more than 600 other subjects, including the production of maple syrup, queer musicology, Hitler studies, Peloponnesian dance, the phallus, nonviolent terrorism studies, solar psychology, dream failure therapy and soap opera conception and production.
When they’re done, if they ever finish, some of the students return to the other 50 states and 190 countries from which they came. Sixty percent of them, however, stay in Los Angeles. They work in every type of job available, in every field, though less than 3 percent of all of the graduating students of all of the schools in Los Angeles work in their specific field of study. They join a workforce of 7 million other people with college degrees, the second-largest college-educated workforce in the world.
They come to fuck, suck, lick and moan. They come for single penetration, double penetration, triple penetration. They come for bondage, S&M, gangbangs. They come for interracial, anal, latex, poolside, snowballing, bodystocking, creampie and piledriving. Some of them actually enjoy it, and all of them expect to get paid for it. They go to the San Fernando Valley, also known as Porn Valley, or Silicone Valley, where 95 percent of all American pornography is produced. Though actual statistics are hard to find or verify, it is estimated that it is a business that generates between $10 and $14 billion a year in revenue. It is a business built on the backs of women, or rather, on women on their backs, or standing, sitting, bent over, legs up, legs curled, facedown, sometimes on swings, sometimes in cages. Though men are a required aspect of it, it is not the men who bring in the money. Pornographers need girls, young hot fresh girls, girls who are willing to do whatever they ask as many times as they ask with whomever they provide and do it on camera for people around the world to see, usually on video or the Internet. There is no shortage of girls in Los Angeles. There is no shortage of girls willing to have sex on camera for cash. Though there are scouts who patrol the streets of the city looking for talent, and often approach potential talent with the simple statement—how much would it cost me to fuck you on film—thousands of girls, and women, come to LA every year hoping to break into porn. They are women of every age (yes, there is a fetish that involves watching elderly women have sex), every size (yes, there’s another involving obese women), every race. They are willing to do almost anything in order to become a star. And yes, porn stars can be as famous as their less liberal counterparts in the traditional entertainment industry. A brand-name porn girl can make, via films, magazine shoots, a personal subscription-only Web site and endorsed products such as dildos vibrators and sex dolls, millions and millions of dollars a year. They have devoted fan bases, fan clubs that follow and revolve around their every move, franchise films that involve multiple sequels (and multiple orgasms!!!). Some have television shows on cable TV, a few have segued into careers in nonpornographic film and television.
For most, though, there is no fame, no fortune, no happily-ever-after. There is simply, day after day after day after day, mindless, meaningless, loveless sex. They take whatever jobs come their way, or whatever jobs their agents (yes, there are also talent agencies that only handle porn girls) can find for them. They have surgery to en
hance or alter their bodies (there are also plastic surgeons whose entire practices involve surgery for the porn industry). They make enough to pay their bills but barely, and those who don’t often work in that other money-for-sex industry. Alcoholism is common, drug addiction rampant. Though HIV is extremely rare, and most porn producers require HIV tests before proceeding with shoots, many of the women contract other sexually transmitted diseases such as herpes, chlamydia, hepatitis, human papillomavirus (genital warts), bacterial vaginosis. The window to become successful, with certain fetishistic exceptions, is very short, and most of those that come are no longer considered desirable after their twenty-fifth birthdays. Some go home, and hope that no one they knows sees them in anything, and try to start new, more conventional, lives. Some stay and work as strippers, escorts or try to get into the business end of porn. Some become wives and mothers and look back on their foray into filmed entertainment as a period of oats-sowing, a wild adventure that made them happy for a few years. Some are destroyed by it and die addicted, diseased and alone.
The psychological effects are more difficult to quantify, and vary from girl to girl, woman to woman. Some of the women, often the most successful of them, don’t suffer any outward or obvious psychological effects, and very frankly, absolutely love their jobs and couldn’t imagine doing anything else. They believe that what they do brings pleasure, literally and figuratively, to millions and millions of people around the world. It isn’t illegal and nobody forces them to do it, and it is their right, their absolute right, to chase their dream, and make it a reality. Others are damaged beyond repair, feel victimized, taken advantage of, suffer from low self-esteem, depression, anxiety disorder, cannot maintain healthy relationships.
Whatever the level of success, whether they are fluffers (women who, off camera, keep the male actors erect between shots), anal specialists, golden shower girls, toesuckers or world-famous brand-name porno superstars, they come ready willing and able, year after year after year, to a city that welcomes them, loves them, uses them, films them, sells them, year after year, they come.
They come to visit an endless stream of tourists 25 million a year they spend $13 billion and employ 400,000 people. Drawn by the allure of fame, fortune, glamour and sun they fill the 100,000 hotel rooms night after night the stream never ends. They come for Disneyland, Universal Studios, for the 2,500 stars embedded on the Walk of Fame on Hollywood Boulevard. They come for Venice Beach, the Santa Monica Pier. They come to shop Rodeo Drive, Robertson Boulevard, Melrose Avenue. They come for the Lakers and Clippers, the Angels and Dodgers, the Galaxy and the Kings. They come for Griffith Park the La Brea Tar Pits Huntington Gardens. They come for LegoLand, Wild Rivers Waterpark, Magic Mountain. They come to see the Queen Mary. They come to see the Sunset Strip. They come to the homes of movie stars, though mostly what they see are the driveways and security gates of stars. They come to sit in the seats of Mann’s Chinese Theater, the Pantages Theater, the Kodak Theater, the El Capitan, the Cinerama Dome. They come to walk the halls of LACMA, MOCA, the Getty Museum, the Museum of Tolerance, the Guinness Book of World Records Museum, the Petersen Auto Museum, the Norton Simon, the Hammer. They come to sit in the sun on the twenty-seven-mile stretch of sand that starts in Manhattan Beach and ends in Malibu. They come to laugh at the Comedy Store, the Laugh Factory, the Improv. They come for Spago, the Ivy, Morton’s. They come to stand outside of the Oscars, the Golden Globes, the Grammys. They come to see celebrities, though they almost never do. They come to watch the ponies at Hollywood Park Race Track. They come to wonder at the Magic Castle. They come to listen at the Hollywood Bowl and the Greek Theater and the Wiltern. They come to party at the Roxy, the Viper Room, Whisky A Go Go, at Area, Café des Artistes, Freddy’s. They come to stay at Chateau Marmont, the Peninsula, the Beverly Hills Hotel, the Hotel Bel-Air, the Mondrian, Shutters. They come to see what they see on television and in films, what they hear about in songs, what they dream about when they want to forget about their lives 25 million a year spending $13 billion.
They come for freedom. Thirty thousand Persians fleeing the rule of ayatollahs. One hundred and twenty-five thousand Armenians escaping Turkish genocide. Forty thousand Laotians avoiding minefields. Seventy-five thousand Thais none in Bangkok sex shows. Two million Mexicans living amongst their own. Twenty thousand Bulgarians who don’t want to be Russian. Fifty thousand Ethiopians who eat every night. One hundred thousand Filipinos with a stable government (sort of ). Two hundred thousand Koreans neither north nor south. Thirty-five hundred thousand Hungarians who don’t want to be Russian. Seventy thousand Guatemalans with a chance at real jobs. Eighty thousand Nicaraguans free from war. Ninety thousand Salvadorans with a chance at real jobs. Twenty thousand Vietnamese who came to America to avoid an American war. Fifteen thousand Samoans who crossed the ocean. Thirty thousand Cambodians living without the Khmer Rouge. All are the largest communities of people in the world outside of their native countries. Also seven hundred thousand Jews living in safety. Fifty thousand Japanese none interned. Five thousand Serbians and five thousand Croatians none at war. Eight thousand Lithuanians who don’t want to be Russian. Six thousand Ukrainians who don’t want to be Russian. Four hundred and fifty French who hate American coffee and hate American people. Four thousand Romanians who don’t want to be Russian. Two hundred Germans who drive nice cars. Thirty thousand Native Americans to whom it belongs. Seventy-five thousand Russians who don’t want to be Russian and eat McDonald’s and love capitalism.
In May of 1955, the Los Angeles Police and Fire Departments lift race-based hiring restrictions and commission their first black officers. Later that month there is an earthquake, a large fire and a mudslide. Local preachers claim the disasters were God’s punishment for the hirings.
Esperanza stays in her room. Her mother brings her food, her father comes in every night before he goes to bed and sits with her. She usually doesn’t want to talk, she just lies in bed, he sits next to her and holds her hand.
She does not go back to the Campbell home. She does not go anywhere near Pasadena. She makes no attempt to contact Doug or his mother. During the day she watches television, mostly Mexican soap operas. At night she stares at the wall. She tries not to think about Doug, though, as is often the case when one tries not to think about something, he is all she thinks about, hour after hour, night after night. She remembers the first time she saw him, chubby, jelly stain on his shirt (which she later got out using high-powered stain remover), something that looked like a small piece of an English muffin stuck in the corner of his mouth. She remembers the first time he made a face behind his mother’s back how hard it was to keep from laughing. She remembers the smell deep and pure of the first rose he gave her, the smell of his breath not bad sort of like orange juice the first time he kissed her, the way he felt dense heavy and warm the first time they lay together on her cot. She thinks about the moments before his mother came home the moments alone in his room his hands on her thighs staring at her smiling his words I love you she believed him still believes him. Alone in her room it hurts more because it should have worked, or would have worked under different circumstances, it hurts more when the reasons are no good. His mother. A week two three her parents understanding at first become increasingly concerned. Her mother tries talking to her when she brings in her meals many of the meals are left untouched Esperanza never responds. Her father tries talking to her as he sits beside her he tells her how much potential she has how smart and beautiful he believes she is she never responds. Her cousins knock at the door, nothing. Her aunts and uncles knock at the door, nothing. She loses weight everywhere but her thighs. She doesn’t shower she smells. She stops brushing her teeth terrible breath, her hair becomes tangled. Her mother brings her food untouched, her father sits by her side and talks to her she never responds. She remembers his hands, they were soft and smooth the hands of a man who had never done manual labor, slightly pudgy, sometimes with ink stains, sometimes food stains.
On the fourth Sunday of her isolation Esperanza wakes up reaches for the remote control turns on the television. One of the Spanish channels is showing a weekend marathon of a popular show about a family in Baja that owns a hotel. The members of the family fall in love and out of love with the staff and the guests, there are marriages and divorces, fights and affairs, there’s an occasional murder mystery. As she watches, a young woman threatens to commit suicide by jumping into the propeller of the family’s yacht, the young woman has been having an affair with the eighty-five-year-old patriarch of the family which he ended when his wife found out about it and stabbed him with a barbecue fork. The young woman screams, yells, calls the old man names, begs him to take her back, warns him that he will die with the image of her chopped up in the sea if he doesn’t take her back. Esperanza laughs at her, laughs at her situation, laughs at the idea that the old man would end up with her, that their love actually had a chance. The young woman keeps screaming and yelling and when the scene ends, with the young woman hanging by her fingertips from the back rail of the yacht and the old man heading into the cabin for a cocktail and a massage, Esperanza turns off the TV, gets out of bed, takes a shower and gets dressed. She brushes her teeth (the yellow disappears quickly and easily) and does her hair (like she’s going to prom) and puts on makeup and a dress and walks to the kitchen, where her parents are having coffee before they go to church. They’re surprised to see her. They both smile, stand and embrace her, her father picks her up and twirls her around and says Amo a mi hija, yo falté a mi hija and she laughs it’s the first time she’s laughed in almost a month and it hurts a little but mostly feels great, almost perfect like something she loved and lost and found again she laughs. When her father sets her down he kisses her cheeks and tells her she looks wonderful, she smiles and asks if it would be okay if she went to church with them. Her father claps his hands together and says sí, mi hija perfecta hermosa, and her mother bursts into tears, and five minutes later they walk out of the house together.