American Outlaw (2 page)

“She went away,” I say finally, pulling out in traffic. Instinctively, the jackals fall into pursuit formation behind me. We set out down the street toward Cubberly Elementary.

“Is she ever coming back?”

“Are you wearing your seat belt? Put on your seat belt, sweetie.”

“It’s
on,
” says Sunny, impatiently.

“Just making sure.”

We weave our way through the narrow streets of Long Beach, down Fourth, across Broadway, down to East Livingston. Everywhere I go, the swarm mirrors my movements. Cars swerve next to me, in front of me, buzzing me from all sides as their shutters click and their lenses refocus, retracting and extending, struggling to get a clear picture through my tinted windshield. Shooting digital is the cheapest part of the whole operation, so they roll endlessly, with infinite patience, waiting for something interesting to happen. Together, we crawl forward as a mass.

For a strange moment, I almost feel empowered by these idiots and the devotion they show for me. They’re zealots. They would follow me to the ends of the earth. I could take us on the most boring of errands, and they would follow in rapture. Just as easily, I could lead them into the belly of the beast, South Central gang
territory or a cartel-run border town in northern Mexico. Tempting as that is, my daughter is with me, so I remain calm.

We make our way into the parking lot of Sunny’s school. I stop the truck and hop out of the cab, walking to the back door and opening it swiftly.

“Okay,” I say, unstrapping her from the backseat. “We’re here. Ready to be a good girl for Dad?”

“Yep. I’ll be good,” Sunny agrees.

“So what we’re gonna do,” I say, “we’re gonna walk real, real fast, and I’m gonna kind of be a
shield
to you, okay? I’m gonna be super big, and you’re going to be super small.”

Sunny kind of looks at me askew.

“Just walk real fast, Bub.”

We speed walk down the short patch of pavement that connects the parking lot to the kindergarten building. She takes small, bouncy steps, and I lumber after her, my coat stretched wide, trying to create a sort of no-camera zone around my small, towheaded daughter. We make it to the front doors in record time.

“Nice work,” I say, dropping to her level for a good-bye kiss on Sunny’s forehead. “Go on, get inside. I love you.”

“I love you, Dad,” Sunny says, as she glances over her shoulder and slips inside, giving me a quick wave.

I walk back to my car, furiously angry, my jaw clenching. My kids have become part of the hunt, and there’s no one to blame but myself. This realization fills me with an intense rage that I need to vent. Clearly, the best target for my fury, at this moment, are the pale, flimsy cuttlefish with cameras fluttering before me.

I nod to them, hatefully.

Now it’s on, motherfuckers
.

Hopping into the cab of my truck, I take a moment to focus myself and crack my knuckles before driving in a slow and controlled way out of the elementary school parking lot. I lure them away from the school zone, across the winding, flat, black pavement of the
industrial wasteland that is Long Beach, the proud biker armpit of Southern California. I have lived in Long Beach my whole life. It is my home, my haven. My den of pride. And they have followed me here, dead set on staking me out. They must pay somehow . . .

But no matter how much I’d like to, I can’t just drag one of the sleazebags from his car, clutching his oily neck with my bare hands, shaking him until his consciousness dims. No, that would look pretty terrible.

“Okay then,” I mutter, “let’s go for a ride.”

I know this city like the back of my hand. I know its ins and outs, its secret crannies—the pockets where the paved roads end and lead to stretches of dirty gravel and dust.

I drive just fast enough for them to think I’m trying to outrun them, but I’m not. I want them close. I dive under an overpass, finding an open spot where the pavement dips and then dies. I check the rearview: the shoal is going to follow.

We are off the map now, on the hardpack California dirt. I breathe in, relishing the small but undeniable freedom that washes over me. The large, thick wheels of my truck ramble over gravel and dry, broken road, onto the hard flatness of the Long Beach dust bowl. The flotilla of Kias, Sentras, and Subaru wagons gives chase.

Slowly, I begin to increase my speed. I watch as the speedometer climbs from forty to fifty. With barely a tremble, my heavy vehicle cruises to sixty, then seventy, then eighty miles per hour . . .

Behind me, the dust is rising in a plume of massive gray clouds. I know that visibility is gradually becoming more and more obscured for the photographers. A whiteout, a driver’s ultimate nightmare, will be their reality in less than a minute. And what will they do then? Will they change course, or attempt to follow still?

A jagged rock flies up from underneath my back wheel. Spinning, it flies directly into the front windshield of the paparazzo following closest behind me. The windshield of his car shatters. I watch as he brakes hard, pitching jaggedly.

Satisfaction washes over me, intense and immediate.
One gone,
I think, smiling,
twenty-nine to go.

I begin to drive more and more dangerously, careening from side to side without reason or warning, and more and more dust flies up in the air behind me, churned up by my massive wheels. A chorus of tinny horns heralds general panic and mayhem among the paparazzi. Their plaintive war cry doesn’t inspire any fear in me, though: I increase my speed to ninety, then a hundred miles an hour.

Behind me, I hear the dull smash of metal on metal, followed by a furious volley of frightened horn blasts. Some men have damaged their flimsy cars beyond repair. Perhaps they will leave them to bake in the pitiless desert. Or maybe the collision is only incidental, a mere fender bender that won’t shake even one of them off my tail, and instead will only inspire them to more relentless pursuit. I don’t know.

And suddenly, my satisfaction from winning a temporary, meaningless battle against a couple of bottom-feeding photographers turns sour in my throat.
What’s the point?
I think bitterly.
None of this will stop the real story: my front-page failure.

I crush the gas pedal to the floor, flying through the envelope of rising earth, as if maybe, if I go fast enough, drive recklessly enough, I can disappear through the cloud, into a place where my mistakes never existed, where I had never betrayed myself so infinitely in the first place.

Go.

1
 

I’ve had a violent life.

When I was six, my parents split up after a crazy screaming fight in their bedroom that ended with my dad punching something and breaking his hand. When I was seven, I took my first ride on a chopper, courtesy of my mom’s drunk boyfriend. I got trashed for the first time when I was ten, on California Coolers. Pretty standard blue-collar upbringing, I suppose.

By the time I was fourteen, I’d grown into a huge, strong, confused, zit-faced punk. My main purpose in life seemed to be stealing shit from the Riverside mall, alongside my best friend, Bobby, a beefy guy with long hair and a mess of scars on his forehead, just like a WWF wrestler.

Bobby was a fearless, relentless, and almost absurdly enthusiastic thief. Not a week went by without him honing his skills.

“Let’s take us a little walk, Jesse. What do you say?”

“Aw, man,” I groaned. “Really?”

I was tired, and I was hot. It was the summer of 1983, and Riverside, California, was in the midst of yet another sticky, smoggy heat wave.

“You heard me, man! You haven’t been stealing SHIT lately. You’re getting soft. Worse than that, you’re getting
lazy.
Come on. Get up off your ass. We’re going to the mall. Let’s steal shit.”

Bobby led the way, strutting through the heat of the Riverside afternoon, wearing a three-quarter-length-sleeve Ozzy Osbourne
Howl at the Moon
baseball shirt. I followed him dutifully, dragging my large feet, squinting in the bright sunlight as I eyed the industrial crap that dotted our landscape: the brake shops, the strip-mall vet clinics, a batting range. Finally we made it down to the Tyler Mall, where we headed toward our favorite target—the RadioShack.

“Watch the master work,” I announced, as we stepped through the doors.

“Sure, fucker,” Bobby said. “Go ahead.”

As I took a slow lap around the store to divert the salesman, I checked out the merch, casually.

“Poor bastard,” I whispered to Bobby when I reached him again. “Doesn’t suspect a thing.”

“Wow,” he said, totally unimpressed. “You’re a real operator, James. I’m just
so
proud to know you.”

“Quiet, buddy. Watch and learn. Watch and—” I cut myself off midsentence. The clerk had turned momentarily to assist a customer, leaving his back to us. I reached out and swiped a Sony Walkman, stuffed it under my shirt and under the waistband of my jeans. I hopped out of the store in a quick beat.

My heart was amped. I racewalked to the other end of the mall. Every so often, I glanced back over my shoulder: no one was following. I was safe.

Twenty minutes had elapsed before I dared to come back to the RadioShack side of the mall. As I approached, I saw Bobby’s
hulking figure appear on my horizon. In his thick arms, he appeared to be cradling an entire home stereo system.

“You still here, asshole?” He hefted a receiver, amp, and two speakers.

I stared at him, confused. “How did you . . . get that?”

“Nothing to it.” He stared right back at me. “Should we head home?”

“Bobby, man,” I said, laughing. “How’d you just walk out of RadioShack
with a full system
?”

He shook his head at me sadly, like I was slow. “You dumbass, I just stared the clerk dead in the eyes and walked out with it. I mad-dogged him.” Bobby grinned at me, proudly. “I got real big balls on me, James.”

Stereos were all fine and well, I guess, but I felt more badass when we were stealing cars. Second- and third-generation Camaros were ideal, because they were easy to chop up and sell. It wasn’t that big a deal to steal a new Camaro back then: the 1980s muscle cars still had 1950s technology inside the door.

There was a flat steel rod in the door, and you could take a screwdriver with a rubber mallet and bam, pound it right underneath the lock. You’d hit the rod and pry it open, and it would unlock the door. Then there’d be a cast-aluminum tilt column behind the steering; you could hit that with a hammer and it would crack open like a nut. Then you just put anything in the ignition, and
WHOOM!
Good to go. A real operator could pull it off, from start to finish, in thirty seconds.

We could only drive around in a stolen car for about a day. That’s all it was safe to do, and we weren’t quite stupid enough to go longer. Then our aim would be to rip out the motor and the wheels, and try to sell them. We’d cut the rest of the car up with an acetylene blowtorch and toss the wrecked parts into a Dumpster.

I split time between my parents’ houses growing up. My mom had stayed in Long Beach after the divorce, while my dad had
moved to neighboring Riverside, only a short drive away. Neither of them tried too hard to keep a close eye on their unruly, pissed-off son, though, and mostly, I was left to my own devices.

And that meant plenty of time with Bobby. Once, I remember going over to his house, and finding him up on the roof, shooting up his next-door neighbor’s yard.

“Hey, Bobby,” I said.

“What’s up, fuck face?” Bobby said politely. He didn’t look up at me: instead, he continued to stare through the range finder of his .22.

I watched him for a moment. “What’s all this?” I said.

“What’s it look like?” He pulled the trigger on the gun once:
whoop.
“I’m shooting shit.”

“You’re shooting dirt,” I observed.

“Yes,” Bobby agreed. He pulled the trigger again:
whoop.

“Did your neighbor’s yard do something to you?” I asked.

Bobby looked up at me curiously for a moment. “Nothing in particular. Why?” He turned back to his gun and squeezed off another few rounds.
Whoop, whoop, whoop.
Clods of dirt and grass flew up from the perfect green turf of his next-door neighbor’s lawn.

“Hey, you got a silencer on there, huh?”

“Mm-hmm,” Bobby said. “Made it myself out of a plastic two-liter.”

Just as Bobby took aim at the next clod of dirt, the neighbor’s dog bounded out to investigate the odd, silent disturbance that was causing his yard to erupt magically from within.

Whoop.

Bobby’s rifle jerked up as the Labrador fell to the ground, dead.

“Holy shit!” Bobby croaked.

“You fucking asshole!” I shouted. “Goddamn you! You sick fuck!”

“Geez, James, don’t get so excited,” Bobby said, shaking a little and laughing nervously.

“Man, I should kill
your
dog, and see how you feel about it!”

“Chrissakes,” Bobby said. He removed the silencer from his gun. “Calm down. You’re acting like it was your girlfriend.”