Los Angeles Noir - Denise Hamilton [109]
A kid beat him up at school. And Manny got beat up by the kid’s father when he confronted him.
She touched the wrinkled lapel on her robe as if she knew it needed to be smoothed, but she didn’t smooth it. Somebody hurt Emerson?
I nodded.
She looked at me for a long moment, and then stepped out of the doorway to let me pass.
I drove over to Veronica and Manny’s apartment. As I headed north, the dilapidating bungalows of my inland Mar Vista neighborhood gave way to better-kept houses and lusher streets. They lived in what used to be the crappy part of Santa Monica, along the southern border, in the same rentcontrolled apartment Manny’s mother raised him in, up on the once-seedy hillside roads near Rose Street, just inside the Santa Monica line. When I was smaller, gangs from nearby Venice and Mar Vista claimed the blocks as territory, and I’d notice their cars patrol it, though most of the white people living in the small houses had no idea. But the neighborhood was changing. Many of the bungalows and apartment complexes had been torn down and replaced by trendy condos.
Veronica was two years older than me. Like me, half Filipino—our moms are sisters—but she grew up in Santa Monica north of Montana and went to a private alternative school founded by hippies in the ’70s, full of rich white kids now, mostly affluent and movie industry. She tutored me in math—would come down south to wherever we lived at the time, in the triangle of south Santa Monica off Pico where all the Mexicans and blacks lived, the house Mom rented in Mar Vista, the apartment in Venice.
After we finished the schoolwork, Veronica would reward me with play. She took me and my brother Gabe everywhere—to the beach, the parks, movies, malls. She was a fun tomboy—wasn’t afraid to play basketball in the driveway or on the courts across the street from our church. We played rough volleyball on the sand. I did well in school mostly to please her.
After she left California for Reed College in Oregon, I got into trouble. I’m sure Veronica thought it was because she left, but I was enmeshed in adolescence, a new school, new neighborhood, and I probably would have ended up gangbanging even if she’d stuck around. People act surprised when they find out I got involved in Chicano gangs at St. Dominic’s—a white liberal Catholic parish. But it gave me the respect I needed after being dogged by both whites and Asians. I knew Manny at St. Dominic’s. He was a bookish guy, tall, thin, with a chip on his bony shoulder. A Jesuit’s pet. He disapproved of my dressing like my Mexican friends, even passing as one, thought I was ashamed of being half-Filipino. We were the only Filipinos at school.
The truth is, he may have been born in Quezon City, but he grew up in Fremont and Santa Monica and is as suburban as you get. He was as much a poseur as I was.
One day he gave an oral report on his native country. During the Q-and-A, I pointed out an inaccuracy in the way he pronounced a Tagalog word. People laughed. He reddened and glared at me. A month later he reported that I had turned in a paper written by another classmate, and I got an F.
When Veronica flew back for family visits, she seemed shocked to see me with my Spanish tattoos, the business I’d started training attack dogs, the shaved head. Once, at a restaurant with her mom and dad, I took her aside and showed her my pistol—as if that would impress her. But unlike the other relatives who gave up on me, she still came over to our neighborhood, picked me up, and we’d go surfing together. At Bay Street if we were lazy, or up the coast to Zeros or Topanga if she felt like the drive. An old bond. But she was different now, too. Something about the confidence with which she moved on her board, the swell of her breasts against her black tank top, the beads she let dangle around her wrists and neck even in water, an impervious indifference to the stares of local surfers. We’d come back, shower, and walk to the Rose Café for breakfast.