The Black Kids: Prologue–Chapter 5

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.

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.

He scratched his bulbous nose and peered into our house.

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.

At five years old, I found wonder in the burning, all the animals, the ash and the exodus.

The interior is bloodred and peeling, and a fat Italian caricature in neon announces, “PIZZA!”

“Both. At the same time,” Heather deadpans.

Steve Ruggles is built like a Twinkie, round and a little jaundiced.

And then when we were in junior high, she got big into lepidopterology, which is all about butterflies and moths and stuff. It’s a bit morbid, if you ask me, taking beautiful things and pinning them down to be admired.

Like I said, Michael grew up partially in New York, so he likes to pretend he’s more street savvy than the rest of us, even though he grew up in Midtown and lives in Brentwood.

“I mean, maybe if you actually ventured out of the Westside...”

Several ruddy -faced tourists stick their cameras out the windows.

I swim under the water to the grotto.

Obscured from view, everything in the grotto feels like a secret.

“When you go out there in the world, you’re not just you, Ashley,” my grandma Opal said one summer while she braided my hair into four long strands that she embellished with yellow ribbons, “you’re all of us, your family, black folks. You have to be better than those white kids around you. It’s not fair, but that’s the way it is.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be in school?” he says.
“We’re seniors.”
“Truancy is against the law,” he says.

These are the ads they play on Spanish and Black people stations—bail bonds, cheap auto insurance, ads in which grown men berate your very existence.

Anyway, I’m pretty sure that nowadays my parents are far too concerned with work and analyzing what went wrong with their wayward daughter, Jo, to care about what I’m up to.

When she was in high school, she got suspended for a month because she handcuffed herself to the flagpole up front to fight apartheid.

I was terrified of driving both of us off a cliff, of careening out of control, but Jo just said, “Steady. Steady.”

We have heart-shaped faces and mouths and almond eyes and unassuming ancestral curves.

Outside, I flagellate myself with the towel to wipe the dust off.

Lucia has been privy to all our history, good and bad, for years.

She’s haughty and very tall, but also always wears exquisite sky-high heels so that, according to Grandma Opal, “Don’t nobody look down on her, not ever.”

She growls and purrs all over funk that sounds like the past and the future all at once.

Harrison looks at me intently.

“What do you like? Who do you want to be?”
His probing seems earnest, but I don’t have answers for any of it.

You can’t disenfranchise a huge portion of the population...

Maybe that’s why Jo can be indignant with him, why they can be indignant together, without all the business of being too grateful getting in the way.

Did they sign petitions or hold up signs and fight alongside us, or did they stand idly by?

“Girl, is you crazy?” my father said, which is how we knew he was dead serious, ’cause he very rarely uses the vernacular.

The self-inflicted hickeys on Steve’s arms run the gamut from deep red to practically purple.

Allen Greenberg’s dad cast him in a drug PSA, and after it aired, all anybody could talk about was how sultry LaShawn looked when he said no to crack.

Jamie and I were both near the top of the class, and so everything we did was in competition with each other, like we were vying for the title of Best Black Kid.

Kimberly, Courtney, and Heather dig through Kimberly’s makeup bag to primp.

The hotel ballroom was full of girls of all ages in various degrees of frippery.

As if in celebration for LaShawn Johnson himself, with a great flourish, Mrs. Lesdoux raises her wrists to the theater kids.

The arcade is full of painted wood in primary colors and the beeps and boops of mirth.

She taught me when I was younger, and then as soon as we got the chance to study languages in school, I chose Spanish. And anyway, it’s LA; if you even half pay attention to the city around you, you’ll learn it by osmosis.