Los Angeles Noir - Denise Hamilton [63]
Grady Jackson and his sister were the only other people I knew from Rio Seco who lived in L.A. now, and I always heard he was homeless and she worked in some bar. I had never seen them here. Never tried to. That night years ago, when he stole a car, I’d wanted to come to L.A., where I thought my life would begin.
But I had thought of Grady Jackson every single day of my life, sometimes for a minute and sometimes for much of the evening, since that night when I realized that we were both walkin fools, and that no one would ever love me like he loved Glorette.
I came out my front door and stepped onto Delta, then turned onto Echo Park Avenue. My lunch meeting with the editor of the new travel magazine Immerse was at 1:00. I had drunk one cup of coffee made from my mother’s beans, roasted darker than the black in her cast-iron pan. When I went home to Rio Seco, she always gave me a bag. And I had eaten a bowl of cush-cush like she made me when I was small—boiled cornmeal with milk and sugar.
All the things I’d hated when I was young I wanted now. I could smell the still-thin exhaust along the street. It smelled silver and sharp this early. Like wire in the morning, when my father and brothers unrolled it along the fenceline of our orange groves.
All day I would be someone else, and so I’d eaten my childhood.
When I got close to Sunset, I saw the homeless woman who always wore a purple coat. Her shopping cart was full with her belongings, and her small dog, a rat terrier, rode where a purse would have been. She pushed past me with her head down. Her scalp was pink as tinted pearls.
At Sunset, I headed toward Downtown.
Downtown, receptionists and editors always said, “Parking is a bitch, huh?” I always nodded in agreement—I bet it was a bitch for them. If someone said, “Oh my God, did you get caught up in that accident on the 10?” I’d shake my head no. I hadn’t.
And I never took the bus. Never. Walking meant you were eccentric or pious or a loser—riding the bus meant you were insane or masochistic and worse than a loser.
I had a car. Make no mistake—I had the car my father and brothers had bought me when I was twenty-two and graduating from USC. They wanted to make sure I came home to Rio Seco, which was fifty-five miles away. My father was an orange grove farmer and my brothers were plasterers. They drove trucks. They bought me a Chevy Corsica, and I always smiled to think of myself as a pirate.
I was like a shark too—or like the homeless people. I needed to walk every day, wherever I was, traveling for a piece or just home. I needed constant movement. And every time I walked somewhere, I thought of Grady Jackson. Now that I was thirty-five, it seemed like my mind placed those rememories, as my mother called them, into the days just to assure me of my own existence.
I’d have time in the Garment District before lunch. One thing about walkin fools—they had to have shoes.
I had on black low-heeled half-boots today, and flared jeans, and a pure white cotton shirt with pleats that I’d gotten in Oaxaca. It was my uniform, for when I had to move a long way through a city. Boots, jeans, and plain shirt, and my hair slicked back and held in a bun. Nothing flashy, nothing too money or too poor. A woman walking—you wanted to look like you had somewhere to go, not like you were rich and ready to be robbed, and not like a manless searching female with too much jewelry and cleavage.
Down Sunset, the movement in my feet and hips and the way my arms swung gently and my little leather bag bumped my side calmed me. My brain wasn’t thinking about bills or my brother Lafayette, who’d just left his wife and boys, or that Al Green song I’d heard last night that made me cry because no one would ever sing that to me now and slide