PROLOGUE
FIRST, A MEMORY: The hillside set ablaze, the fire playing a game of hopscotch across the canyon. The air smelled like a campfire, and the sky was a palette of smudged eye shadow. A fireman, lethargic and ruddy, walked from door to door with a practiced calm, warning people there was a chance they’d have to evacuate.
“You live here?” I heard him say to my father when he opened the door.
“Yes,” my father said.
“You’re the owner?” he said.
“I do believe that’s what my deed says,” my father said.
The mailman had said the same thing when we first moved in, and my father had responded in the exact same way, but the mailman’s response was much more ebullient.
“Yes! Brotherman! Moving on up!”
“Make sure you have a bag ready to go,” the fireman said. “Just in case.”
He scratched his bulbous nose and peered into our house. Then, having satisfied whatever curiosity he had, he turned and made his way down the tile steps.
My father followed after him. He walked to the side of the house where the hose was coiled snakelike, picked it up, and, with it in tow, headed toward the front of the house. There, he pressed the metal trigger. The force of the water startled him, but only a little. He hosed down our roof, spraying the shingles over and over again, so that the water dripped down like rain. My mother and I stood beside him, waiting. The neighborhood dogs barked in a chorus.
The Parker family was the first to leave the canyon, several hours after the fires began. Tim and Todd Parker, then fourteen and sixteen and already dead behind the eyes, had blown up our mailbox that first week after we moved in. Though my parents couldn’t prove it, we knew. Tim and Todd followed their parents out of the house, wearing backpacks and holding a photo album and a trophy each. Their mother held what I’m pretty certain was an urn, which seemed silly to me back then, because if whoever was in there was already ash, what more could happen to them, really? This was before my grandma Opal died, before I realized the last pieces you carried of a person, no matter how small, could feel so big. Tim and Todd’s father carried several paintings under his arm. Reproductions or originals, it was difficult to tell. Their black dog, Rocky, ran through Tim and Todd’s legs. Mr. Parker looked over at my father and waved. I guess the possibility of losing everything had him feeling friendlier than usual.
One by one, over the course of the next two days, the rest of our neighbors packed up their suitcases and piled into their station wagons.
As the fires burned, a menagerie of animals began to trickle down the hillside. First the rabbits and squirrels, and then the coyotes began to wander down the streets, wide-eyed and emaciated. I even saw a deer.
At five years old, I found wonder in the burning, all the animals, the ash and the exodus. Two days after the fireman came by, with the air growing ever more apocalyptic, I stood next to my father, looked up, and placed my hands on my hips, surveying our prospects for survival.
“Maybe we should leave now, Daddy,” I said.
“Go back inside; everything’s going to be fine.”
He kept muttering it to himself, as though he could save our pretty wooden house through the sheer force of repetition.
The joke goes that in Los Angeles we have four seasons—fire, flood, earthquake, and drought.
Fire season. It’s part of the very nature of Los Angeles itself.
CHAPTER 1
ON THE NEWS, they keep playing the video. The cops are striking the black man with their boots and batons across the soft of his body and the hard of his skull, until I guess they felt like they’d truly broken him, and, sure enough, they had. Four of the cops who beat him are on trial right now, a trial that some say is a battle for the very soul of the city, or even the country itself. It’s something I should give a shit about, but I don’t—not now.
Right now, birds chirp, palm trees sway, and it’s the kinda Friday where the city seems intent on being a postcard of itself. Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch are on the radio singing “Good Vibrations,” and it’s no Beach Boys, but it’ll do. Heather and I do the running man and hump the air to the beat; this even though she’s told us, in no uncertain terms, that this song is lame, and the rest of us have terrible taste in music. We’re several weeks away from being done with high school, and when I think about it too hard, it terrifies me. So right now I’m trying really hard not to care about anything at all.
After we exhaust ourselves, Heather and I collapse on the old pool chairs with their broken slats. The plastic creates geometry on my skin. Heather is pudgy and sometimes doesn’t shave her pits. I can see the dark of her hair in patches in the center of her pasty outstretched arms. How she manages to stay that pale given how long and how often we bake ourselves, I don’t know. It’s a spectacular feat of whiteness. Her lime-green toenail polish is chipped so that each nail vaguely resembles a state in the Midwest. Courtney’s pool vaguely resembles a kidney.
Across from us, Kimberly and Courtney stretch their bodies out across two fat plastic donuts that are pink and tacky and rainbow sprinkled. They float into each other’s orbits and back out again. Every so often they splash water at each other and shriek, “Omigod, stop it!”
Heather yells, “Jesus, get a room already.”
Courtney laughs and squeezes Kimberly’s boob like it’s a horn.
They’ve ditched class two times a week for the last month. I don’t ditch nearly as often as my friends do. But my parents and I are supposed to meet my crazy sister’s new husband tonight, and it’s gonna be a doozy of an evening, so it kinda felt like I owed it to my sanity to not be at school today.
These are the places we go—the mall, somebody’s pool, or our favorite, the beach. Our parents hate Venice because it’s dirty and there are too many homeless people, tourists, and boom boxes blasting, which means we love it. We flop across our boogie boards and stare into the horizon. Occasionally, a wave comes and we’ll half-heartedly ride it into the sand, our knees scraping against the grain. Then we stand, recover our bikinis from our butt cheeks, and charge back into the water like Valkyries. Afterward, we eat at this place the size of my closet, where even the walls are greasy. The interior is bloodred and peeling, and a fat Italian caricature in neon announces, “PIZZA!” Just in case you couldn’t tell. The previous owner, Georgi, was a skinny Italian with a villainous mustache who gave us free cookies; now the owner is a skinny Korean named Kim who does not.
After we eat, we watch the men with muscles like boulders under their skin, all of them so glazed and brown that the black men don’t look so different from the white men and everything in between. Most of them lift barbells, but some of them lift and balance on top of each other, a grunting tangle of bodies in short shorts and muscle tees. Last weekend, one of the men grabbed Kimberly and lifted her up to the sky like an offering.
Afterward he tried to convince us to come back to his place, like we would be dumb enough to go just because he was blond and tan and could balance like a circus elephant.
“I’ve got alcohol,” he said.
“Tempting, but no,” Heather said.
“I wasn’t talking to you anyway,” he said.