Chapter
One
Wednesday Night/Thursday
Morning
Last Wednesday was "hump day" so
I went out looking for some. Maybe it was the full moon or the recent
arrival of spring. Or, maybe it had been too long since I'd last gotten
any. I checked out a couple of places but it was still too early for any
action to speak of so I took a walk down by the water. Sometimes you can
find some pretty women trying to be mysterious, but usually they're drunk
and don't know what they're doing. It's easy to get them out of their
clothes; they're mostly hanging out of them anyway.
Instead of somebody living, I found the
body of a girl washed up on the beach. It was the first time I'd seen
anybody D.O.A. in the L.A. Basin. With the way gangs like to shoot each
other up, you'd expect streets lined with corpses. Don't believe that crap
about the dead looking like they're sleeping. They look dead, just like a
dog that's been run over and made into street pizza.
I had my little automatic camera so I took
pictures. That's my job, taking pictures of weird people and awful things
and then writing about them for the preeminent rag of Los Angeles, The
Daily Purge. When we finally published the photos, along with the
story I wrote about the dead girl, even in the black and white of
newsprint, the flash makes her look even paler. She has seaweed in her
hair and her eyes are open.
She still had her clothes on; the daily
newspapers would report that morning that she fell off a luxury yacht by
Catalina Island. I didn't believe it from the get-go. If that was true,
the current would have taken her north to Santa Barbara. It doesn't make
sense she would float due east.
This is how I found her. I was standing on
the Santa Monica Pier looking down on the beach at a gang of Crips kicking
the shit out of some old wino. They were having so much fun I had to
laugh. One of them looked up at me and called me loco en la
cabeza, "crazy in the head." It's just like a punk to
call you crazy when he's the one doing the weird stuff.
All those greaseballs killed a
"civilian," that is, a non-gang member, to be in that gang.
Brave stuff, killing someone. Sneak up behind a guy sitting on a park
bench. Put a gun to his head. Pull the trigger, and you're in. Easy as
pie. If they really wanted to show how tough they are, they would find
some other gang banger with a gun and shoot it out in the streets. The
rest of us would get some entertainment out of it, at least. Sort of like
the opening credits to Gunsmoke. Meanwhile, they continue to show
how tough they are by beating up winos.
I don't believe all that sociology bullshit
about disadvantaged minorities. They know white people are afraid of them
and all that keeps people of color in their place is knowing the cops will
come down on them like the end of the world if they step out of line. So,
when they need to whale on someone, they find a wino to destroy because
they know there isn't anyone who'll complain.
Remember the L.A. riots? Did you see any
cops risking their lives to protect the property of the Koreans? No, of
course not. The police beat feet out of Jungletown as quick as shit sucked
down a toilet. "Let the monkeys burn down their tree," was the
attitude.
I did a story on this. The next day every
white man flashed down to the local K-Mart to buy shotguns and membership
into the NRA. "Gotta protect my famb'ly from them fuckin'
coons," said one citizen exercising his second amendment
constitutional rights.
Did you see the scene on t.v. where the
Korean store owners in Spookville are shooting it out with the rioters
with AK-47s? That made a big impression on the people I interviewed. None
of them made the connection the police made. The "fuckin' coons"
had enough smarts to stay in their own neighborhoods. Had they ventured
into Beverly Hills, Pacific Palisades, or Santa Monica, there would have
been the biggest pig riot since the 1968 Chicago Convention. The only
people with a chance of being safe would have been blond.
Given half the chance, the people living in
my town, Santa Monica, would thank the Crips. The cops coddle the homeless
people too much, is the way they see it. The "People's Republic of
Santa Monica," is what everyone calls it. Somehow, the conservatives
in the town elected liberals for the city government. Now they have to
stew in their own juices. That's what comes from being a bleeding heart.
It's hard for outsiders to understand is
that "Los Angeles" is a generic term as well as a real place.
Within, without, surrounded by, and surrounding L.A., are dozens of little
cities like Santa Monica. The term, "Los Angeles," refers to an
area the size of Rhode Island; room enough for a small state or a large
city. I can hardly wait for the big earthquake to come and take out all
the freeways. Then, people down here can learn, first hand, how big the
place really is.
Anyway, when the wino stopped crying out
and begging them to leave him alone, I figured it was time to go. These
gangs are like sharks; give them a taste of blood and they go out of
control. They weren't old enough to tire out by hauling on a defenseless
old fart; they might think I was just frisky enough for them. I've had
people think that because I don't have any hair on my head I must be
lacking in testosterone. Thanks, Samson.
So I went to the south end of the pier and
walked down the steps to where the old guy and his buddies sleep at night.
During the day it's upscale restaurants, but the moment they close up and
the sun goes down, the fellows with the cheap bottles of wine come out of
the woodwork and take over. It beats me why someone would want to pay
fifty bucks for a dinner when they have to wade through last night's vomit
to get at it.
Further along you get to Venice and there
are a row of bars where the really rich yuppies like to go when they're
slumming. It'll cost you three bucks for a draft and the guy serving it
makes you feel like he's doing you a favor taking your money. Sometimes
the women get ditched by their boyfriends or lose their way to the toilet
and end up on the beach. Usually, they think it's funny and try to pretend
they're MM in some movie and you're Yves Lauren or some other french guy.
It doesn't bother me; they can call me anything as long as I get their
panties past their knees and their heels up in the air.
That's what I was looking for when I found
the girl. From where the light of the bars end I walked down to the beach.
She was just above the surf line. The tide must have planted her there and
then ran out.
In the moonlight you could see she had a
pretty face and the kind of body men would kill for to run their hands
over. Someone must have poured her into her clothes like jello into a
mold. Too bad she was dead was my first thought. She had on somebody's
idea of what you're supposed to wear on a boat; white duck pants, a blue
navy shirt with little stars on the piping, and sperry topsiders. No
socks.
I dragged her up the sand a bit just in
case I was wrong about the tide. I must have looked at her for an hour
trying to decide what to do. No need to hurry. Finally, I got the camera
out of my backpack. I like to take pictures at night. There's something
pure about night scenes in southern California. The smog is gone and there
aren't any crowds. The lights only illuminate what someone thinks is
important; their house number, the name of a business, street corners so
the drunks don't get lost, and the sidewalks in front of the banks so the
cops can spot the robbers.
The Purge lets me write about
anything I want as long as I give them a thousand words every week and a
sufficiently "arty" photograph to go along with it. In return,
they give me enough dollars to pay rent and eat dinner on alternate days
at Tom's #5 on Pico and Ocean Park. The fries are greasy and the chili
dogs remind me of what I hate to step in but it cleans out the gut and I
read someplace that's important.
I don't know why I did it but I told the
cops about the photo. Because of my journalistic credentials, they didn't
confiscate the film, but I could tell they wanted to. The Sergeant in
charge looked at me like I was some sort of pervert and said I shouldn't
have even moved her, much less taken her picture. Maybe they were angry
because I waited until 4 a.m. to call them. Maybe they thought because my
last name's Garcia, I'm a Crip. Maybe they just like to push people
around.
They didn't want to hear how I'd found her
or that I fell asleep waiting before I called them. They weren't
interested in knowing my family arrived in the Golden State in 1814 and
that I was more American than any of them with relatives who came across
the Atlantic in cattle boats after the war to end all wars. They were
interested in acting tough so I let them have that. If a man wants to feel
big and strong then there isn't anything I can do except stand out of the
way.
|