My house is quiet when I enter. Dark, even though sundown is an hour away. I keep the shades drawn to keep it cool, and to keep it private. I have no pets. The street is small, and it isn’t a through street, so there isn’t much traffic, or noise. The house is a compact structure, one of the old clapboard Cape Cod-style bungalows that were built in the thirties and forties, when Santa Monica was still a small town. This block and a few others between Pico Boulevard and Rose Avenue have managed to withstand the upscale development that has transformed this community during the past twenty-five years, and especially the last decade, into one of the most expensive places to buy a house in the country.
If I ever sell, I’ll be set for life. But I’m not ready to do that yet. This house has too many of my old memories absorbed in its walls, its floors, its ceilings, like tobacco smoke and mildew stains. Some of those memories are bad, horrifying. But they are an essential part of me. I’m not ready to let go yet. If I get married and have a family, I’ll move, because I won’t allow my children to grow up exposed to my old ghosts. But until then, I’ll stay here. I’ve earned my claim, a hundred times over.
I
N 1987, WHEN I
was fourteen, my mother almost killed me. It was my own dumb fault. I should have known better than to try to sneak back into the house at three in the morning, given that my mother, Claire Thompson, was a paranoid lush who kept a loaded gun within close reach. It was just a peashooter .22 Ruger, a target pistol, not a gun with much stopping power, but she didn’t know that. All she knew was that it was a gun, it fired bullets, and it didn’t cost much. She had bought it at a swap meet under the table, no registration, no background check. The asshole who sold it to her out of the trunk of his car threw in a box of bullets and loaded it for her, on the spot.
We lived alone, she and I, in a perpetual state of undeclared warfare. My father had left us when I was barely out of my diapers, and I was an only child. I couldn’t blame my old man for bailing out—you can only live with a crazy person for so long, or you’ll go nuts yourself. My only regret was that he didn’t take me with him.
My mother had decided she needed a gun out of an irrational fear that we were going to be assaulted by some nameless, faceless crazo roaming the mean streets of Santa Monica. The reality was that the possibility of our house being broken into was slim to none; where we lived was statistically one of the safest neighborhoods in Los Angeles, but my nutty mother was convinced danger was lurking everywhere. Watching the local news channels night after night—all those lurid freeway chases shot from helicopters—can really mess with your head. She had never fired the gun, nor had she ever taken a lesson in how to properly shoot it. It was available, close by, a security blanket.
So there the gun was, in the top drawer of my mother’s bedside table, half hidden under a pile of worthless Lotto tickets—unfired, untested, mostly forgotten. She had shown it to me when she brought it home, and I had hefted it in my hand out of morbid curiosity. We had a gun in the house! Cool! I wanted to take it to a deserted stretch of the L.A. River and shoot off a few rounds, but she nixed that—guns weren’t toys; you don’t fire them for fun. They are serious business, to be used only for life and death emergencies, she recited solemnly.
Even back then, at my relatively tender age, I was more practical than she was, so I pointed out that if we had the damn thing we ought to test it out, to make sure it worked right. And also to feel what firing it felt like. But she didn’t buy that sensible argument. I was to keep my hands off the goddamned gun, she warned me sternly, unless I was alone in the house and a doped-up sicko had burst in and was going to kill me. After he committed unspeakable crimes against my person, such as rape and other horrendous tortures. I don’t know where she came up with that bullshit spiel; she’d probably heard it on television.
Anyway, I never got to fire the gun.
So now it was three in the morning and I was sneaking back into my house through the kitchen window, the same window I had snuck out of earlier, after she had gone to sleep. At that specific moment in time my mind wasn’t working right, because a few hours earlier I had lost my virginity to James Cleveland, on the foldout sofa bed in the basement of his parents’ house. James was seventeen, a junior in our high school, two grades above me. He wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer, but he was sexy, played halfback on the football team, and all my friends were hot for him, so I was confident I had picked a winner.
All the lights in my house were out. I wriggled through the kitchen window, trying to keep as quiet as an Indian scout. James and I had celebrated my deflowering (there really was blood, which freaked out both of us a little) by drinking a couple shots from his father’s stash of designer bourbon, so I had a bit of a buzz. I could walk a straight line and talk without slurring, but my senses were a tad off, just enough so that as I was maneuvering my way through the dining room on my way to the stairs leading up to the second floor, I bumped into one of the dining-table chairs and knocked it over. Fortunately, the floor was carpeted, but the impact still made a dull sound, like a phone book dropping onto a counter.
I froze in my tracks. Had my mother heard the crash? Usually, by the time she called it a night, she was pickled enough that she would sleep through a thunderstorm. But I was scared shitless that this time would be the exception—that she would wake up, discover my deceit, and rag on me for being out at three in the morning in my street clothes, with whiskey on my breath, when earlier that night I’d concocted this big song and dance about how I was
exhausted,
and was going to bed
immediately.
The sounds of the nighttime house—the hum of the refrigerator, the deep throbbing of our old gas heater, the slight creaks of the windows as the wind rattled the cracks—were humdrum in their normality. I carefully picked the chair up, set it back in place, and stood there, rigid, listening for my mother’s clomping footsteps; when she was in her cups, she had the finesse of a Clydesdale.
But nothing happened; she hadn’t awakened. I was free to sneak up to the safety of my bedroom. I knew how to avoid all the squeaks in the stairs, so I figured, smug little wiseass that I was, that I had pulled it off.
Halfway through my tiptoe journey up the staircase there was a sudden flash of light, like the flare of a match being struck, and at the same time I heard a
pop.
It wasn’t the eardrum-bursting explosion you hear in the movies when a gun goes off. It was more of a snapping sound, about as loud as when you step on a dry seaweed pod at the beach. And for an instant, the sting from the bullet was not awful. It felt like someone had punched me in the stomach.
But then the pain slammed through me, searing my gut like it was on fire.
I screamed. My knees buckled; my legs turned to water. I lost my balance and fell backward down the stairs, all the way to the bottom, where I lay in a writhing heap.
The hall light popped on. My mother appeared on the landing above me. Her face was Kabuki white with bedtime facial cream. She was wearing a short nightgown; in the shadowy light, her mottled legs looked like cottage cheese. The gun was in her hand. I was losing consciousness, but I thought I saw smoke drifting out of the barrel, like in an old cowboy movie. Or maybe I was already hallucinating.
My mother was staring down at me. “Jessica?” she whispered. Then she screamed my name:
“Jessica!”
“Mom,” I croaked. “Mother …”
She stood in place, as if her toes had grown roots into the floor. Her mouth was moving, but for a moment, no sound came out. Then she gasped, “I thought you were an intruder, I swear it!” She started crying, big globs of tears running down her cheeks. Her smudged makeup against the marble whiteness on her face made her look like Gene Simmons. “I thought …”
Suddenly, the crying stopped as abruptly as if she had turned off a faucet. She bared her teeth at me, like a wolf closing in on a wounded deer.
“What are you doing up at this time of night?”
she shrieked.
“Did you sneak out again, goddamn you!”
The pain in my stomach was excruciating. I was sure I was dying, and all she could do was scream at me like a harpy.
My voice in my ears sounded as if it was coming from a ghost. With all the strength I could muster, I yelled back at her.
“Call nine-one-one, you crazy fucking bitch!”
After I got out of the hospital I moved in with my aunt Jill, who lived in Bronson Canyon, an old section of Hollywood up in the hills below and slightly east of the hollywood sign. Jill wasn’t really my aunt; she was a friend of my mother’s, from when they were girls growing up in the Valley after World War II, at a time when there were still more orange groves along Victory Boulevard than houses. Like my mother, she was divorced, but she had her act together. She was a dental technician, made good money, paid her mortgage down monthly, and was a member of a travel group of single women who took two trips a year. Her house was full of knickknacks from her journeys. She loved my mother, but she understood that her childhood friend Claire was unstable and that I couldn’t live with her anymore. So she made room in her life for a sullen and withdrawn teenage girl, an act of kindness and generosity for which I will always be grateful.
For the remainder of my high school years, I went into a shell. I was enrolled in a new school in the middle of the year. I didn’t know anyone. All the cliques had been formed, all the clubs had their memberships, all the cool guys were taken. My old school had been a United Nations of races and ethnicities, but here, being white put me in a very small minority. The school population was mostly Latino, and there were a lot of blacks and Asians of dozens of stripes as well, but only a handful of Anglos. The races didn’t mix much, which was further isolating. Because I’m tall, the basketball and volleyball coaches tried to recruit me, but I shined them on. I had played sports at my old school—volleyball and track—but I didn’t want to join any of the teams at this new place. I kept my head down, did my work, and tried to be as invisible as possible.
Jill was a sweet woman, and she tried her best to provide me with a semblance of regular life, but my time living with her was strained. A week after I graduated, I moved out. I got a job waitressing at Ben Frank’s on the Strip, and found a room in the heart of Hollywood, near Fountain and Orange. The other tenants were kids, dropouts and discards like me. Except for me, they were all stoners. Most of them lived on handouts from their parents and by panhandling on Hollywood Boulevard. They supplemented their incomes with menial jobs, small-time drug dealing, occasionally selling their bodies. I stayed away from that stuff, but we got along all right. I did smoke their weed and drink their alcohol.
Even though I didn’t know where I was going, or if I was going anywhere at all, for the first time in my life I was free. Sometimes I was lonely—I wasn’t as nihilistic as the people I lived with—but I got by, and slowly, little by little, I found a sense of confidence I hadn’t had since the night I felt my life bleeding out of me. I was still basically a kid who didn’t have a vision of the future beyond her next paycheck.
I had become friendly with another waitress named Maude, an actress wannabe from Arkansas with a Southern accent so thick you could pour it on pancakes. She was in her mid-twenties, sweet and cheery, and she didn’t take life too seriously. We would go out together occasionally, to a movie or a club (she was the one who scored me my phony ID card). Two single girls having fun and looking for adventure.
One day, as we were leaving work, she asked me, “Ever done any modeling, Jessica?”
That threw me. “Modeling?” I’d seen the models in the Victoria’s Secret catalog and
Vogue.
I was pretty enough, but I didn’t look like them, not remotely. “No.”
“Want to make some extra money?” Maude asked. “Nothing illegal or sexual,” she added, to reassure me.
“I guess.” I was getting by, but barely. Any added income would really help.
“Are you free now?”
I was going to catch the bus back to my place and do some laundry, but that wasn’t urgent. “I guess.”
“Come with me.”
Maude’s Volvo, so ancient it had the old black-and-yellow California license plates, was festooned with dozens of bumper stickers dating back to the anti-Vietnam War period. It was parked illegally on Kings Road. Maude plucked the ticket from under the windshield wiper and tossed it onto a batch of other unpaid tickets in the glove box. The old sedan fired up with a belch of exhaust and we headed east, down Sunset Boulevard.
It was a prime L.A. day, warm, only a whisper of smog. We cruised along with the windows rolled down, the radio tuned to K-EARTH 101, an oldies station. The Supremes were singing “Baby Love.” I sang along with them.
We took Sunset all the way to downtown. Back then, the downtown arts scene was just starting to happen. A few abandoned factories had recently (mostly illegally) been converted into lofts. Real lofts, with exposed plumbing and brick walls, radiators that sputtered and clanged, and grimy industrial windows covered with decades of soot—not the new apartment-style lofts full of amenities that exist now, like my boyfriend’s. The rent was cheap and the spaces were huge, which was perfect for artists.
I had never been down there. Looking out my window, I could see the train yard, filled with freight cars. When Maude parked behind one of the old buildings, near the L.A. River off First Street, I didn’t know what to expect, but I was nervous.
“This is the easiest money you’ll ever make,” she promised me, giving me a reassuring wink. “And you don’t have to lift a finger. Come on.”
She locked the car and walked across the cracked asphalt and gravel parking lot to the building’s entrance. I followed, close on her heels. A large sign over the entrance to the building read
DOWNTOWN COLLEGE OF THE ARTS
.
“Art school?” I said, reading the sign. “You’re an artist?” I asked Maude, without thinking I might be slighting her.