Southland (10 page)

Jackie took a gulp of her Coke. “What do you think’s going on with him?”

Lanier shrugged. “I don’t know. He probably
does
think I’m a reporter. And my guess is, he’s gonna retire in the next couple of years and he doesn’t want any kind of hassle. The last thing he’s going to want to do is dig up a scandal from thirty years ago.” Lanier paused, remembering the conversation. Thomas had been curt, self-protective, an old-school Negro. Lanier almost felt sorry for him—what twists, what back-flips he must have had to perform in order to succeed at his job. Thomas was his father’s age, and Lanier understood his suspicion, his fear. So many of the old folks had been crushed down and down.

“So what do we do now?” Jackie asked.

“I’ve got some ideas on that,” Lanier said, “but I’ll tell you about them later. Let’s get out of here before the traffic gets bad.”

They threw their trash away and waved goodbye to the Carters. They got into Lanier’s green Ford Taurus station wagon, strapped themselves in, and Lanier took a left onto Crenshaw.

“Where we going?” Jackie asked.

“We’re taking a drive.” They passed Crenshaw Motors, an old building with rounded corners that had clearly been there for decades. There was a string of small offices and stores on the right, and Jackie wondered how all these places remained in business—there didn’t seem to be enough foot traffic to support them. When she looked closely, she saw that many of the stores were empty. She thought of the ghost town she’d once seen, driving back from Arizona; she thought of the broken-windowed, barricaded buildings of Northridge, which she and Laura had toured the week after the earthquake. At the first big intersection, several blocks down, Lanier made a U-turn and they headed back north. Looking up, Jackie saw the Hollywood Hills in the distance, the tiny Hollywood sign, which was lovely, but incongruous, like someone had rolled in the wrong backdrop for a movie set.

“This area ain’t exactly hopping,” said Lanier. “But right up here, by Leimert Park, it’s nicer—this is what I wanted to show you. There’s a couple of art galleries, coffee shops, jazz clubs. And Magic’s new theaters are helping bring people to the mall. You should see this place on Sunday, when they shut Crenshaw down to traffic and the kids all come.”

He walked over sometimes, just to watch the show. The young brothers in their souped-up cars, shiny old Pontiacs and Buicks that rattled and groaned like prehistoric beasts. The drug dealers in their Nissans and heavy gold chains. Young men with arms slung out windows, lifting their chins and calling out to the girls, who’d pretend they weren’t trying to be noticed. Stereos blasting, music jumping from every open window. The bass lines so solid you could walk on them. You didn’t need a ride as long as that bass kept thumping, carried you down to where you wanted to go. Ride this line and it felt so good you knew you were gonna live forever, come back the next Sunday just to keep the thrill going. Young men and young women all looking fine, dressed, and ready. Eyes feasting on each other. Appraising and making offers, rebuffing or rebuffed. Affiliations made and broken. Sex or a hit or even the big prize, love, if the music and the weather were right. Crenshaw on Sunday. Like Mardi Gras. The candy store. Every carnival and holiday packed up into one tight bundle and rolled on down the wide boulevard. The young brothers and sisters cruising Crenshaw on Sunday. Nothing—at least that one perfect night of the week—could ever get in their way.

Jackie nodded as Lanier turned onto Degnan, noting that, indeed, this street was more lively. She saw the galleries and the stores that sold African goods. She saw several older men sitting in metal chairs, playing chess outside a coffee shop. Degnan was only a few blocks long, and soon they were right back on Crenshaw. “What did it look like around here thirty years ago?”

“More open,” said Lanier. “The houses didn’t look much different—they were nice, and a lot of blocks are still real nice, as you’ll see. Although just about everyone has bars on their windows now. There weren’t gangs, not the way we have them today. And a lot of these here businesses,” he waved his hand in front of Jackie’s face, “were open. This was just a nice, solid, middle-class area, pretty mixed-race even way back then, with a lot of black and Japanese folks. During the ’65 uprising, the looting didn’t start up here until the third or fourth day. It was a lot less widespread than the mess in ’92. But then, things were a whole lot worse in ’92.”

Jackie nodded, more in acknowledgment than agreement. She’d watched the ’92 riots unfold on TV. The rioters had made it to within a mile of her apartment, all the way up to Pico and Fairfax, extending into Hollywood just east of her, along La Brea and Western and Vermont. She’d been horrified and scared, though less certain than Lanier that this upheaval was somehow understandable. But now she remembered the TV newspeople talking about how “it” was coming closer to “us”; telling their viewers—as if they couldn’t see and smell for themselves—of the smoke that hovered over the city.

Lanier turned right onto a side street, and then turned left at the second corner. He’d been right—the houses were nicer here, and Jackie was surprised by how middle-class they all looked. The lots were big, the lawns neat, the eucalyptus trees large and looming, the houses well-kept and substantial. The trees that lined the sidewalk reached across the street and tangled their fingers together, so that when they drove down the block, Jackie felt like a child running through a gauntlet of older children in a game of London Bridge. At the next corner they took a left, and then another. Something was different about this block, but Jackie couldn’t put her finger on what it was. “Where are we going?” she asked.

Lanier slowed down and pulled over to the curb. He pointed out the window, saying, “Here.”

Jackie saw a tan stucco house with a black-tiled, sloping roof. There was nothing remarkable about it. “What’s this?”

“Your grandfather’s house.”

Jackie nodded. She thought, of course. But other than that, she felt nothing—no recognition, no connection. The only thing that struck her was that this house was bigger than the one the family moved to in Gardena. “It’s nice,” she finally said. She looked a minute longer. And as she looked, certain things became clear to her, the way a stranger’s features, once you learn she’s related to someone you know, suddenly appear more familiar. Jackie noticed the black tiles, the shuttered windows, the perfectly manicured bushes and bonsai-style trees. “That stuff—the trees, the tiles—that’s all Japanese.”

Lanier nodded. Jackie looked down the street and saw that all of the houses had the same bonsai-type bushes and trees. Many of the houses also had old Japanese-style doors, black strips of wood criss-crossing the white body of the door, like crust laid over a pie. A few places had window shutters modeled after screens in Japan, and stone lions placed on either side of the entrance. The roofs were black and tiled, some multi-layered and pagoda-style.

“This looks like Gardena,” Jackie said.

Lanier nodded. “There used to be a lot more houses like this, but most of them are gone now.”

After a few more minutes, he pulled away from the curb, and Jackie realized that she’d seen a picture of this house, of Lois and Rose as little girls, sitting on the lawn with a kitten between them. She stared out the window, feeling like a tourist in her grandfather’s life, and when they turned again, she felt a twinge of loss. She didn’t pay much attention to where the car was going until Lanier stopped in front of a boarded-up old building. He nodded toward it. “Your grandfather’s store.”

This time, Jackie reacted. She was afraid, she was curious, she wanted both to flee and to stop and look closer. She got out of the car and stood there for a moment. The store was free-standing— to the right was an alley and to the left, the back of the buildings on Crenshaw. It was bigger than she’d expected, not like one of the tiny bodegas she often passed on Washington or Pico. The building had obviously met with violence and fire—there were boards across the door and the plaster around each window was black and charred. The walls were covered with graffiti, black and indecipherable to Jackie. The faded black letters on the rusted white sign read, “Mesa Corner Market.” There were several crushed beer cans in the doorway, two or three broken bottles, and a scattering of glass vials with green plastic caps.

“Jesus,” she said. “How long’s it been like this?”

Lanier had gotten out of the car, and he came up and stood next to her, arms crossed. “Since the uprising.”

“That long?”

“The ’92 uprising. It was open a long time before then. Your grandfather shut it in ’65, but he sold it to someone else.”

“Has that owner had the place the whole time?”

Lanier shook his head. “No. He sold it again a few years ago to a Korean couple.” Lanier kicked at a can in front of him; it went skittering down the sidewalk. “I felt bad for them. The day after the store burned, the wife, Mrs. Choi, was standing out in front, looking at the mess and crying. A couple of the mothers brought back stuff their kids had taken from it—just little things, packages of cookies and cigarettes—and a few others helped sweep up the glass and the ashes. But they never reopened and I don’t know who owns it now. It’s been empty for the last two years.”

Jackie nodded, only half-listening. As she walked forward, getting close enough so that the front of the store blocked out the sky, she was thinking that this place, this shell of a building, was where her grandfather had spent twenty years of his life. She went right up to the door, raised her arm, placed her fingertips on the wood. It was cool and rough, a little frayed. Slowly, so as not to get a splinter, she flattened her hands against the board and closed her eyes. On the other side of that wood, her grandfather had struggled and sweated and laughed. She could almost see him as he’d been then, as she’d seen him in pictures—tan work pants, white shirt that was always slightly too large, crisp white apron, neatly tied and blindingly bright. Tan face, almost as brown as the skin of his field-laborer father, and shiny black hair, slicked back with Pomade. Her grandfather’s money had been made and lost here. Four teenage boys had died here. It seemed to Jackie that if she could just get inside, beyond the boards, the answers would all be available to her, scattered among the ashes. Or perhaps Frank himself would be there, sweeping, restocking the shelves, ringing up groceries for an afternoon customer.

Lanier watched her, glad that he’d taken this foolish girl by the head and forced her to look at her past. She seemed nice enough, concerned enough about Frank to be here today, but her parents, clearly, had sent her into the world without the nourishment of her own family history. Her past was like this neighborhood—still there, intact, but she had never bothered to visit. Never driven through its streets, taken in the beauty of its trees and houses. Let it sit there unexplored just down the road from her.

“Can we get in here?” she asked, not turning.

“No. It’s all closed up. And there’s really nothing to see in there anyway. It was all pretty much burned out.”

Jackie nodded. She took her hands off the wood and turned back toward Lanier, who was standing, a bit awkwardly, on the sidewalk. “Thanks,” she said. “I’m glad I saw this. It makes everything more real, somehow.”

Three young boys careened around the corner on bicycles, rode between them, then turned again and darted down the alley. Lanier watched them go. He and Cory always biked over around this time to see what Curtis was up to. “You know, a lot of times at this time of day your grandfather would be sitting outside with his friend Mr. Conway to greet the kids when they were coming home from school.”

“You think that’s how he met Curtis?”

Lanier shrugged. “Probably. Curtis and Cory lived a couple blocks from here and they would’ve walked by on their way back and forth from school.”

“What do you know about Curtis? Why did my grandfather like him so much?”

“I don’t know why your grandfather liked him, but I know why
I
did. He was always there, man.
Always
. He was solid.” And he kicked me in the ass when I needed it, Lanier thought. He paid attention to me, and wasn’t embarrassed to have me and his brother hanging around with him. With him I felt big, like I mattered. And so much of what I do now is still about him.

“What was his family like?”

Lanier sighed. “Complicated. I’m not sure their parents liked each other much. Bruce—my uncle—was from L.A., but he met Curtis’s mom when they were working in Oakland. Actually, Curtis was born up there, and his mother went back up there after he died. Anyway, Bruce and Curtis used to fight something awful. I don’t know what the problem was—Curtis was a pretty good student and didn’t get into any trouble. But he did whatever he wanted and hung out with whoever he wanted, and I don’t think that sat very well with his dad.” Nothing ever did sit well with Bruce, he remembered. Jimmy’s own mother didn’t, which meant that neither did Jimmy. Uncle Bruce was more frightening than any version of Jimmy’s father, drunk or sober. He had a way of making you feel like you were being beaten, even though he never raised a hand.

“Anyway,” Lanier continued, “Bruce and Alma, Curtis’s mom, used to fight a lot too. Usually about Curtis, I think.” But Alma, he remembered, could handle him. Fiercely loving but also aloof somehow, she was Jimmy’s first love. And Curtis’s. And everyone else’s.

“What’d they do for a living?”

“Bruce worked for Goodyear. When I was growing up, there were a bunch of factories and plants in the area. A lot of men walked to work—you could actually hear the five o’clock whistles. And Alma was a teacher. She ended up getting some important job with the Oakland School District after Cory graduated from high school, but back when I knew her, she was a teacher. Before that, she was a factory worker. And before
that
, she worked as a domestic.”

“My grandmother was a teacher, too. And my great-grandmother was a domestic.”

Lanier laughed. “My great-grandmother was a domestic, too. And my grandmother.
And
my mother. I guess that was the fate of most women of color back then.”