American Outlaw (12 page)

I pushed the floor polisher for two hours every day, watching the bristles speeding in a ring-shaped orbit, until they blurred with their own purposeful velocity. Patiently, I worked every inch of grime off the cafeteria floor. I worked the machine for six weeks, every day, twice a day, until it felt like it was mine.

5
 

When I finally got out of the California Youth Authority, I’d missed eighty-three days of class.

“Would you like to graduate, Mr. James?” my guidance counselor asked me wearily.

“You know what?” I said. “I would.”

So it was off to summer school for me. They had some pretty cool classes in summer school in those days, gotta say. My favorite was High School Cafeteria. They tossed me an apron, jammed a white paper cap on my head, and taught me how to be a short-order cook. Not bad, not bad at all. A couple weeks in, I could flip a mean hamburger. Just add ketchup.

At nights, I was back at Golden Apple, either leafing through comics or working an event. One evening my boss motioned me to his side.

“You interested in more work, kid?”

“Always.”

“A buddy of mine needs a security guy to work a volleyball tournament. He needs someone to supervise setup and breakdown—is it okay if I give him your number?”

“Absolutely,” I answered.

“Lucky kid,” he said, shaking his head. “Chicks on the beach. Man, I wish I was you!”

The tournament was put on by the AVP, the Association of Volleyball Professionals, but they were sponsored by Miller Lite, so there were all kinds of bikini girls there. One young woman in particular caught my eye. Her dark, bobbed hair and tight little body stood out against her red swimsuit.

“Need help with anything?” I asked her, hoping for a crumb of affection.

She just sort of looked me up and down.

“No,” she said kindly, after a moment. “Thank you.”

I shrugged, moved on. I don’t know, maybe she smelled teenaged convict on me. Little did I suspect that
adding
to my bad-boy image would catch her eye later. Midway through the summer, I amassed enough cash to get myself a used motorcycle, a broken-down, turquoise 1976 Harley-Davidson. I know, turquoise Harley: sounds pretty wretched. But this was the eighties. It was my Duran Duran bike.

I loved that cycle dearly. It seemed so incredibly fast to me. And the sound! When I started her up, the straight pipes were like two cannons going off.
BAHPAHBAPABAH!!
I felt like I was going to bust windshields. It was pure bliss.

The following weekend, I had another volleyball tournament, and of course I rode my cycle all the way to Manhattan Beach. As it happened, the bikini model I had a crush on saw me getting off it.

“What’s
this
?” she said, smiling.

“Just my Harley,” I said casually. “It needs some work.”

“Oh, wow, I love bikes!” she exclaimed, caressing the handlebars. “Do you think you might take me for a ride sometime?”

“Yeah, of course,” I said, grinning, unable to believe my luck. “Anytime you want.”

“Well, how about . . . tonight?” she said coyly. Her hand drifted from the bike to my forearm, as if it were an extension of the machine.

Nothing much ever came of us; I think she figured out pretty soon that I was fresh out of high school, and that kind of killed it. But damn, the motorcycle had sure opened the door for me. Of that, I took careful notice.

At the end of the summer, I received a battered cardboard package in the mail. I sat down on my front steps and ripped it open with my hands. It was my diploma.
Well, how about that?
I thought, laughing. They’d pushed me down, but they hadn’t beaten me yet. Life could have been a lot worse.

After all, I could have been Bobby. He called me one night, out of his mind with worry.

“What should I do, man?” he asked, tense. “My girl . . . she’s pregnant.”

I shrugged. Bobby and I had never really been the same after the CYA. He’d apologized, of course, and I’d accepted it, but I was still pretty touchy about serving his sentence for him.

“That’s up to you,” I said finally. “I can’t help you make that decision.”

He sighed. “I have the strangest feeling that I’m about to do the honorable thing.”

He did. At the age of eighteen, Bobby married his girlfriend. They found a place to live and set out to raise their child together. You had to respect him. He’d stepped up.

And me? Well, I was headed to community college. The Division One schools might have withdrawn their scholarship offers, but that sure as hell didn’t mean I was never getting on a football field again.

“Jesse,” Coach Pfieffer said, “you do a strong couple of seasons
on one of these teams, and we’ll have Kansas banging on the door again, I promise. And this time when they come, you’ll be ready.”

I nodded, not fully convinced. “I’ll do my best.”

Luckily for me, a strong junior college was right around the corner: Riverside Community College. Like all junior colleges, they were a bit more forgiving when it came to tolerating players’ various idiosyncrasies, like having committed multiple burglaries. They needed a linebacker, and with Coach Pfieffer’s help, a scholarship had been set aside with my name on it.

“I made my decision,” I told my dad one afternoon, as he was restoring an oak dining set for the coming weekend’s swap meet. “I’m heading to RCC.”

My dad didn’t look up from his lacquering. His small brush moved steadily and with confidence. “That’s good.”

I watched him work for a while, my hands stuffed into my pants pockets.

“So, I guess I won’t be seeing you for a while.”

Patiently, my father continued to apply lacquer to the chair’s thin, ornate spindles.

“Any thoughts?” I asked impatiently.

“You got a place to live?” he said, finally.

“I’ll be in the dorms.”

“We can’t afford that.”

“You don’t have to pay a dime,” I said. “I’m on scholarship.”

“Oh. Okay.” My dad glanced up at me briefly, his paintbrush held between his index finger and thumb. He appeared lost in thought. “Well, stop by when you can.”

“Right,” I said. After a long silence, I added, “Thanks.”

——

On our first day of football practice, our new team assembled in a small locker room, unconsciously segregating ourselves according to ethnicity. The black kids, most of whom came from Compton
High and South Central L.A., sat sullenly on one side of the room, staring down the beefy, working-class white knuckleheads who’d gathered together on the other side. In between us sat the Mexicans, the Samoans, and the Tongans in one big group. Instead of a football team, we looked like three gangs getting ready to rumble.

The assistant coach squinted at his clipboard, his chewed-up yellow pencil poised over the roster.

“Jackson, Anton?”

A thin, muscular black kid raised his hand. He wore cornrows and baggy jeans. His eyes emanated a quiet hate. I recognized him immediately from the California Youth Authority. He hadn’t been a friend, exactly.

“James, Jesse?”

I raised my hand. “Right here.”

Anton Jackson sneered. “I know you, motherfucker,” he said softly, looking right at me.

I didn’t smile.

Our team could not have differed more strikingly from my high school squad. Riverside Community College specialized in tough kids from rough neighborhoods, standout athletes with messed-up families and severe attitude problems whose extensive juvenile criminal records and inability to function inside a classroom had conspired to keep us out of real colleges and universities. We were hoods, every one of us. And we were none too happy to join forces.

“You thought you were the
baddest
dude at the Youth Authority, huh?” Jackson said, his voice low and soft.

“Was I wrong?” I said, disliking him more every second.

He nodded. “Real wrong.”

A sick feeling filled my stomach as I studied my teammates. But my mood darkened further that evening, when I discovered that I had been assigned to live in the “football dorm.”

“BREWWWWW!”
Peter Ososoppo bellowed. The curly-haired,
three-hundred-pound Samoan was the cornerstone of our offensive line. “BREWWWW!”

“Line up, bitches,” cried Kevin Ososoppo, Peter’s fraternal twin. “Get your mouth open, it’s chuggin’ time!”

“Yo, Jesse, what the fuck!” Peter yelled happily. “Get
in
here, man. It’s Miller time!”

“Hi,” I said politely. “Look, I think I might try to get some sleep. Up early, you know?”

“Sleep? In
this
place?” Kevin shouted. “Good LUCK!”

As if to further convince me of the futility of ever closing my eyes again, Kevin wrenched the volume knob of his stereo violently forward. Def Leppard’s
Hysteria
exploded forth at top decibel.

“Pour . . . some . . . sugar
on meeeee
!” the giant lineman sang.

“In the name of
love
!” added Peter. The twins shared a long, silent moment of fraternity, followed by a sweaty embrace.

“Love you, big dog,” Kevin sniffed.

“Love you, too, baby bro.”

I winced.
Fuck. This.

I hefted my book bag over my shoulder and scuttled down the hallway, toward any kinder fate. For example, swallowing a box of razor blades.

Outside, away from the chaos, I felt more sane. I tried to assess the situation with some calm: this was college, or close enough, so the library might be a relatively okay place to be. There would be books there, and comfortable chairs to lounge in. I hadn’t started my classes yet, but being in an environment where the smart kids hung out might make me feel like I hadn’t deliberately stationed myself in a sea of degenerates for the remainder of my education.

I hoofed it to the library and made my way to the bottom floor, where I collapsed in an uninhabited corner. Feeling the strong need to rinse the last vestiges of Def Leppard from my eardrums, I pulled my Walkman out of my backpack and popped in one of my favorite albums, Slayer’s
Hell Awaits.
Pulling the plastic headphones over
my ears, I settled back happily in my chair, where I closed my eyes and let the music flow over me.

My peace was short-lived.

“Motherfucker,
hey
!” A brisk knocking on my desk interrupted the music. A huge black dude with a shaved head and a gold front tooth swayed over me. “Turn off that shit.”

I slipped the headphones off my head, angrily. “Why should I?”

“Because this is a
library,
” he said. “You have the volume up so high, I can hear every last goddamn drum solo.”

“Oh,” I said. “I didn’t realize you could hear it.”

“You should have, with those cheap-ass headphones,” the giant said, laughing. I realized this guy was a football player, too—I’d seen him at the meeting, but we’d never talked. “You got those for free, huh? Found ’em in the trash?”

“I bought them.” I scowled.

“Well, you overpaid, tell you that much,” he said and laughed cheerfully. “Man, that’s not even Slayer’s best album. All that Satan shit? Corny as a
motherfucker
!”

I inspected him more closely. “What do you know about Slayer?”

“Oh, because I’m
black,
I can’t know metal?” His thick eyebrows knitted together, and suddenly, he looked annoyed. “Are you for real, man? Are you actually
saying
this shit to me?”

“Calm down,” I told him. “I just didn’t expect it. That’s all.”

“I guess we’re all just some Run D.M.C. fans to you, huh?” His gargantuan head bobbed in front of my face, eliminating all other fields of vision. “Man, I
know
Tom Araya. I
feel
his pain.”

“Shut up already,” I said. “You just caught me by surprise.” I looked him over. “You play football, right?”

“Yes. And so do you, I believe.” He grinned and extended his hand for me to shake. “My name’s Josh Paxton.”

“I’m Jesse James,” I said, taking his massive paw in my hand.

“Like the outlaw?”

“Just like,” I said.

Josh made a finger gun and shot me with it. “Well, it’s a pleasure to meet you, you weakass-headphone-wearing punk.”