Los Angeles Noir (17 page)

No, they didn’t, I thought. I looked at the haze in the window. They wanted to read about me walking down an alley in Belize, me going to the Tuba City swap meet and eating frybread tacos and meeting an old woman who made turquoise jewelry. But they really just wanted a week-long cruise to Mazatlán where they never even got off the boat but once to buy souvenirs. A week in Maui where they swam on a black sand beach and then went to Chili’s for dinner at the mall near the condo complex.

A woman paused to adjust her shopping bags, and she looked straight at me in the window and smiled.

I looked like anyone. A sista, a homegirl, a
payasa
. Belizean. Honduran. Creole.

“How about Brazil?” Rick said. “You look like you could be Brazilian. FX.”

“Where in Brazil?”

“Not the usual. Find somewhere different.”

He was challenging me. “Have you ever been in love?” I asked him, partly just to see what his face would do, but partly because editors realized I never mentioned any Handsome Gentleman or Nameless Boyfriend who accompanied me. I was clearly alone, and because of my adventurousness and initials, mysterious.

“Twice,” Rick said, looking right at me. “In high school, and she dumped me for a football player. In college, and she dumped me for a professor. Now I’m in love with my apartment and my job.”

None of us, at the parties or lunches, were ever in love. That was why we made good money and ate good food and lived where we wanted to. And yet Grady, and Glorette, had always been in love, and they’d never had anything but that love.

“My name is Fantine Xavierine,” I said. I looked into his eyes—brown as coffee. Mine were lemon-gold. “I was named for a slave woman who helped my great-great-grandmother survive in Louisiana.”

“Okay,” he said. He glanced down, at his fork. “I like that. So you’ll be fine in Brazil.”

I walked with him for a block toward Spring Street. It was after 2:00. I could head home now. Rick said, “You know, this place was worse than a ghost town a few years back, because the ghosts were real. But now all these hip places have shown up. There’s a bar people in the office are going to lately—the Golden Gopher. I guess it was a dive before.”

Rat. Gopher.

“Thanks, Rick,” I said, and I touched his arm. Gym strong. He was shoulder to shoulder with me. “I’ll call you.”

I remembered it now. 8th and Olive. Grady had driven down dark streets for a long time, looking for it, and from the backseat, I was dizzy seeing the flashes of neon and stoplights. Then I saw through the back window a neon stack of letters.
Golden Gopher
.

I walked toward 8th. Grady had parked and then he’d seen me. He’d said, “I can’t leave you here. Somebody get you, and your brothers kill me. Come on.”

At Olive, I rounded the corner, and a film crew with three huge trucks and a parade of black-shirted young guys with goatees was swarming 8th Street. They didn’t notice me. They were filming the tops of apartment buildings, where a young man was looking out the window of a place he would probably never live. A place probably meant to be New York or Chicago or Detroit.

There was no neon in this light. There was only a façade of black tile, and a door, and a sign that read,
Golden Gopher
. It didn’t open until 5 p.m.

The security guy noticed me now. A brother with cheeks pitted as a cast-iron pot. His badge glinted in the light from a camera. “Excuse me,” he said.

“You’re in the movies,” I said, and I moved away.

Even I couldn’t walk for another two hours. I looked for a Dunkin’ Donuts or somewhere I could sit, and suddenly realized how much my feet hurt, how much my head hurt. I never felt like this in Belize or Oaxaca, because I’d be back in my hotel or in the bar, listening and watching. Now I was like a homeless person, just waiting, wanting to rest for a couple of hours.

I sat at a plastic-topped table and closed my eyes.

Hattie was twenty-two then, and Grady was eighteen, and I was only a freshman. He’d pulled me by the arm into the doorway of the club, past a knot of drunken men. One of them put his palm on my ass, fit his fingers around my jeans pocket as if testing bread, and said, “How much?”

Grady jerked me away and up to the bar, and a man said, “You can’t bring that in here. Underage shit.”

A line of men sat at the bar, and someone knocked over a beer when he stood up. Then his sister spoke from behind the counter. She said, “Grady. What the hell.”

Hattie was beautiful. Not like Glorette. Hattie’s face was round and brown-gold and her hair straightened into a shining curve that touched her cheeks. Her lips were full and red. Chinese, I thought back then. Black Chinese. Her dress with the Mandarin collar.

She pushed three glasses of beer across the counter and someone reached past my neck and took them. Smoke and hair touched my cheek. I remembered. The bar was dark and smelled of spilled beer and a man was shouting in the doorway, “I’ll fire you up!” and through an open back door I could hear someone vomiting in the alley.

“I wanted to come see you,” Grady said. Sweat like burned biscuits at his armpits, staining his T-shirt. “See L.A. The big city.”

“Go home,” Hattie said. “Right now, before somebody kicks your country ass. Take that Louisiana girl wit you.”

I looked at Hattie, her contempt. She thought I was Glorette. I said, “I was born in California. I’m gonna live in L.A. myself. But I’m not gonna work in a bar.”

I thought she’d be mad, but she said, “You probably not gonna work at all, babyface.”

Grady pulled me back out the door, and this time the hand fit itself around my breast, just for a moment, and someone said, “Why buy the cow?”

Then we were driving again in the Dart, and Grady was murmuring to himself, “They got a bridge. She said.”

He drove up and down the streets, and I said, “The full moon rises in the east. Papa said. Look.”

He drove east, and the moon was like a dirty dime in front of us, and we took a beautiful bridge over the Los Angeles River, which raced along the concrete, not like our river. Grady said, “We can’t get on the freeway again.”

“Why not?”

“Shit, Fantine, cause I stole this car, and you ain’t but fourteen. John Law see me, I’m goin to jail.”

He drove down side roads along the freeway, past factories and small houses and winding around hills. The Dart ran out of gas in Pomona.

We were on Mission Boulevard, and Grady said, “You wanted to come. Now walk.”

I walked slowly back toward 8th. It was nearly 5:00 and the sun was behind the buildings, but the sidewalks were still warm. I was carried along in a wave of people leaving work. Homeless men were already staking out sidewalk beds in alleys. Back at the bar, the blackness was like a cave, tile and door so dark it was as if someone had carved out the heart of the building. The film crew was gone. A pink curtain waved in an open window where they’d trained the camera.

A bucket slammed down on the sidewalk, and someone began to wash off the tile. A homeless guy. Green army coat, black sneakers glistening with fallen foam from his brush and rag, and black jeans shiny with wear and dirt. His hair was thin and nappy, and a brown spot showed on the side of his head, like the entrance to an anthill.

Grady. No. Uh-uh. Grady?

He’d had ringworm in Mississippi, when he was a kid, and he’d always combed his natural over that place. Grady. His hand moved back and forth over the tile, washing off fingerprints and smudges. He was missing the end of his right ring finger.

I couldn’t do it. I pressed myself against the building across the street.
Hey, Grady, remember me? I wish I could get to know you again, have lunch, tapas or sushi, and then take a couple weeks before I tell you Glorette got killed by somebody in an alley, and she still only loved a guy who left her.

I watched him for ten minutes. He washed the tile, wiped down the door, and polished the gold handle with a different rag. Then he stepped back and turned to look at something above my head.

I didn’t move. His eyes crossed over me but didn’t pause. He went inside, and he never came back out.

Other people stepped in now that the door was open. Two actors from
The OC
. Three young women wearing heels and carrying briefcases. A guy in a suit.

I crossed the street and went inside. This was not a dive. It looked like Liberace had decorated, with chandeliers and black pillars and even little lamps with gopher shades in gold. I squinted. The jukebox played Al Green. My eyes hurt from saltwater and darkness, and I didn’t see Grady Jackson.

The bartender leaned forward and said, “You okay?” He had a two-tone bowling shirt on, and a porkpie and side-burns.

“Does Hattie Jackson work here?” I said. The bar was cool under my fingers.

“Who?”

“She’s about forty. She was a bartender here.”

A young woman—Paris Hilton—blond but with cool black roots, and a satin camisole—came up behind the bar and squinted. “She means Gloria, I’ll bet.”

Gloria was in an alcove to the side. It was like a little liquor store, and she was arranging bottles of Grey Goose and Ketel One. Her nails were red. But her lips were thin and brown. She looked old.

“Hattie?”

“Gloria Jones,” she said to me. I leaned against the wall. My hips hurt, somehow. She knew me. She said, “When I came here, you had Pam Grier and Coffy and all them. My mama named me Hattie after the one in
Gone with the Wind.
Who the hell want to be a maid? I changed my name long time ago. After you was here with my fool-ass brother.”

“Was that him? Outside?”

She nodded. “Comes to clean, and then he walks again. He got five, six routes a day. You know. He goes all the way along the river till Frogtown. Comes back later.” She pushed the bottles around. “I don’t get much tips over here. People don’t buy this shit till they ready to go to a private party.”

“You’ve been here all this time.”

She shrugged. “Seem like not much longer.” She wore a wig. The hairs were perfect. “After my senior year. I was fine as wine, but even the hookers in L.A. was something else. Hollywood was crazy. I came downtown to get me an apartment and wait for the right movie. Did the dancing place for a month.”

“The dancing place?”

“Over on Olympic. The men dance with you for ten dollars and they gotta buy you them expensive drinks. But they smelled. Lord, they all smelled different, and some of them, the heat comin off their underarms and neck and you could smell it comin up from their pants. Even if they had cologne, just made it worse. I couldn’t do it. I came here, and I was behind the counter forever serving drinks. The guys would tip me good, all the old drunks, and I went to the movies every night after work. Now the theaters are all Spanish. I just get me a video after work. And I sleep till I come in. I live next door.”

I didn’t know what to say. Her eyes were brown and muddy, as if washed in tea. “They were filming your building today.”

She shrugged. “Always doin somethin. Now that Downtown is cool again. Grady can’t even get his food in the alley now. Miss Thang at the bar like a hawk.”

“He comes back for dinner?”

Gloria looked around and nodded. “I used to take my plate out there early, before we got started. Take me two enchiladas and rice. Hold a extra plate under there and gave him half. Used to have Mexican food in here. Not now.” She glanced out over her counter. “Now the little old actors be out in the alley. Think they big time.”

I walked away from her alcove, past the bar, the bowling-shirt watching me with a puzzled look—
What is she? Brazilian?
—and out to the alley. It must have been just a place to dump trash before—but now huge couches covered with velvet and pillows lay at each end, and the
OC
boys were already collapsed on one, with two girls. It was cool to be in a dive, in an alley, drinking Grey Goose martinis.

“Where does he eat now?” I whispered to Hattie, to Gloria, as she marked off bottles on a list.

“In the other alley. Next door,” she said softly. “At 6:00. Every night, I take me a smoke break out there. And I take my purse.”

I waited for Grady there. I ignored the other homeless men, the drunks from down the street who stumbled past the Golden Gopher, the snide comments of one girl wearing a slinky dress who said, “Uh, the library is on 5th, okay?”

I saw him turn the corner and lope slowly toward me, steady, knees bending, arms moving easily at his sides. He stopped about ten feet from me and said, “Fantine?”

I nodded.

He said, “I been waiting for you. All this time.”

His hands were rimmed with black, like my father’s when he’d been picking oranges all night. His eyes were tiny, somehow, like sunflower seeds in the deep wrinkles around them. All that sun. All those miles.

“You told me you was gon come to L.A. And you left for college. I married Glorette. I married her.” His four top teeth were gone, like an open gate to his mouth. “Didn’t nobody know. We went to the courthouse. Me and her.”

I said, “Grady, I came to tell you—”

“I knew you was somewhere in L.A. Me and Glorette went to the courthouse after Sere Dakar was gone. He played the flute. But he wasn’t African. I seen his driver license one time. Name Marquis Parker. He was from Chicago. Call his-self
Chi-town
sometimes. Told me he was goin to L.A. and play in a band. Glorette was havin a baby.”

“He’d be seventeen now,” I said. “Her son.”

But Grady stepped closer, the ripe sweet smell of urine and liquor and onions rising from his coat. “No. My son. I was gon raise him. Dakar was gon leave every time. So I got him in my truck.”

I tried to remember. Grady had an old Pinto back then. “You didn’t have a truck.”

He trembled, and breathed hard through his mouth. “Fantine. All this time I waited to tell you. Cause I know you won’t tell nobody. You never told nobody about the car. About Pomona.”

I shook my head. My brothers would have beat his ass.

“I waited till Dakar came out that one bar where he played. I told him I had some clothes to sell. Then I busted him in the head and put him in the trash truck. It was almost morning. I took the truck up the hill. To the dump.”