Los Angeles Noir - Denise Hamilton [66]
He spun around and looked at Glorette’s house, across the dirt street from mine, and said, “She think that fool gonna take her to L.A.? She keep sayin she want to go to L.A. I got this ride, and I’m goin. You know what, Fantine? Tell her I come by here and I went to L.A. without her. Shit.”
Then Lafayette said to him, “Grady, man, come in the barn and get a taste.”
My brothers had hidden a few beers in the barn. When Grady went with them, I didn’t even hesitate. I’d wanted to go to Los Angeles my whole life. I got into the Dart and lay down in the backseat.
When Grady started the car, he turned the radio up real loud, so Glorette could hear it, I figured, and then he spun the wheels and called out to my brothers, “Man, I’ma check out some foxy ladies in L.A.!” I could smell the pale beer when his breath drifted into the back. He played KDAY, some old Commodores, and then he talked to himself for a long time. I knew the car must be on the freeway, by the steady uninterrupted humming. I had never been on a freeway.
“She always talkin bout L.A. Broadway. Detroit don’t hear nothin. He don’t know how to get to L.A. He know Detroit. She coulda been checkin out a club. Checkin L.A.”
I fell asleep on the warm seat, and when the car jerked to a stop, I woke up. Grady was crying. His breath was ragged in his throat, I could smell the salt on his face, and his fists pounded the steering wheel. “There. I seen it, okay? And you didn’t. You didn’t see shit cause you waitin on some fool-ass brotha who just want to play you.”
I sat up and saw Los Angeles. The city of angels. But it was just a freeway exit and some narrow streets with hulking black buildings. I remembered one said Hotel Granada, windows with smoke stains like black scarves flying from the empty sills.
Grady looked back and said, “Fantine? What the hell you doin in here?”
I walked down Broadway, where the butt models showed off curvier jeans than you’d see on Melrose or Rodeo. No mannequins in the doorways of some stores—just the bottom half, turned cheeks to shoppers. All the stereos blasting ranchero and cumbia and salesmen calling out and jewelry flashing fake gold.
L.A. I had come here for college, and that was it. I wanted to live in an apartment with a fire escape so that I could see it all. See more than orange groves and my father’s truck and the ten grove houses set along our street. I wanted to live above a restaurant, to watch people all day long, people who weren’t related to me. I knew everyone’s story at home, or I thought I did.
Now I lived in a lovely Mediterranean castle building, and I had a lunch meeting, and I wanted shoes. I wasn’t going to think about Grady and Glorette. I walked along Broadway, turned on 8th, and then headed down Los Angeles toward the Garment District.
“No one shops downtown,” people always said to me at receptions or parties in Hollywood or Westwood. When I was at a tapas party in Brentwood the week before, someone said, “Oh my God, I had to go downtown with my mother-in-law because her Israeli cousin works in the Jewelry District. I thought I would die. Then she wanted to see another cousin who sells jeans wholesale in some alley. Nobody speaks English, people can’t drive, and we took a wrong turn and ended up in Nairobi. I swear. It was like Africa. All these homeless people on the street and they were all black.”
“African American,” someone else said smugly, holding up his martini glass.
“They were tribal. Living in cardboard boxes.”
“But is that better than dung huts in Africa?” the same guy said. “Did you know that people are so resourceful they make houses out of crap?”
I drank my apple martini. The color of caterpillar blood. Had they ever cut a caterpillar in half after they pulled it off a