White Trash Stole My Wheel
Los Angeles, 1986
Jesssie woke to a tinny radio alarm screaming the morning news. He rose from the folding futon he had spread the night before, this in his one-room, ground-floor barrio apartment that despite extraordinary efforts still smelled of previous tenants’ cigarettes, feet, and beer. Paint peeled off the walls—walls behind which innumerable generations of roaches had made their homes. On closer inspection, (and he inspected closely once he had sprayed with poisons to the point of his own asphyxiation), they had appendages no insect should. Mutants, probably. With his luck, probably a plague-carrying strain.
The next moment, mariachi music blasted through the window. The whole building shook to the beat of the oom-pah bass. A maudlin voice through accordion chords wailed about his corazón. He could have ripped the corazón from whoever was blaring that car radio at 7:30 am. He flashed on an image of himself striding outside in his shorts, thrusting his hand through the open car window, deep into that chest, and wrenching forth the heart—the shocked, bewildered faces of the neighbors wailing wildly in abject horror, blabbering madly in Spanish, crossing themselves furiously and convinced they had glimpsed the devil itself.
He steamed impotently until the car drove off, the thunderous bass trailing after it. In the sudden silence, he opened the window to let some air in.
“Puta!” WHAP! Through window he heard the palm smack her face and the wounded woman’s cry. Looking out, Jessie saw the man turn and walk away, as she followed, her eyes red and tearing, both hands to the burning cheek.
He closed the window.
In the tiny hallway between the bathroom and the front door, he opened his small closet for the artful task of dressing. He chose the underpants with the fewest holes; ditto the socks. On the ground sat three old, well-worn pairs of shoes. Today, he chose the black topsiders, the soles of which were split, but such that no one could tell unless he crossed his legs in the masculine fashion—not likely. The clothes were mildly tattered but clean, well-matched, and tasteful. Since they hailed from his better days, their wornness could pass for chic dishevelment.
Once dressed, he loaded his slim wallet in his back pocket, took enough change to board the bus, with transfer, and headed for work.
Such were the depths to which Jessie Vincent Grandier III had sunk.
He had not been a fall down, gutter drunk, or one that wept on barstools at the mention of “mother” or “friendship.” In public, he drank moderately and behaved well. It was in private, behind locked doors, that he punished himself like a vicious child who had trapped some writhing creature. He had never foreseen such a fall, had not been raised to think events so chipped-flint sharp could cut him, so bright and loud could blind and deafen him. His senses had been tuned to the American lie of ease and subtler things. Dulcet tones. Muted hues.
After graduating from Harvard, he had barely set foot in his father’s house in the DC suburbs before he fled to Los Angeles where he soon took his first TV job—in the mailroom. He had never been west of the Mississippi and rarely far from the academic underbellies of New York and Boston. He had come to make his mark in film, to wring through great art a deliverance from the strange, vaudevillian, death-besotted saga of his life. He had studied film under pot-bellied semioticians and weasly philosophy PhD’s, men who spoke of films in terms of sacred texts—a language in which Jessie had grown proudly fluent and knew—just knew—to be the standard lexicon of all film folk.
As with so much in his young life, the joke would be on him.
*****
On hearing of his plans to move to Los Angeles, Jessie’s father suggested he live with one of his two LA relations, Cousins Alma or Fred, but preferred he live with Alma, for she, as he put it, lived “right in the middle of everything” while Fred lived, “way the hell out there” in Beverly Hills.
Alma lived in the ghetto.
Jessie’s plane hit LA at night. He sat in Alma’s car on the ride from the airport leering out the windows at the moonlit noir-ness, the palm trees, the stucco, the gaudy, freeway-ribboned, incandescent sprawl. It was so much like he had pictured it. Gazing out those windows, Jessie imagined himself cinematically larger than life: on the lam, running, perhaps scared, definitely lethal.
The next day, he faced with shock the sun-blanched reality of the world beyond the Ivy—league, that is.
Jessie was not accustomed to poor people, nor black folks who did not conform to the New Orleans/Creole college-educated striver mold. As an Army child, he had lived many places, at home and abroad, in most of them surrounded by white people. His mother avoided his father’s family like the plague, and her people, among whom the children sometimes lived, came from Africans who, generations ago, interbred with the visiting Spanish and French such that skin honeyed, hair loosened, features remolded. Although black, individually and culturally they crowned themselves unique. Often monied, the cream of New Orleans’ black coffee, the most outrageous of them, the ones from whom Jessie had sprung, bore themselves with a mixture of semi-courtly majesty and gutbucket sass that Jessie had come to think of as the universal black folk norm (just as he thought Hollywood filled to spillage with semioticians).
To open the door that morning, walk outside, hit main drag Crenshaw Boulevard, and hear consonant clusters drop like pennies and the non-ironic use of “ain’t” . . . to be welcomed to the neighborhood by a young woman sporting a nametag reading, “Aquanetta,” her striped uniform dotted with orange game birds identifying her as off-to-work preparing greasy chicken dishes . . . this shocked him. It would have been one thing if he could have dismissed them, like he would have hillbillies. But with them he shared a common ancestry. How, oh how, could similar cultural underpinnings have produced someone called “Aquanetta” and himself?
Jessie’s cousin Fred, Alma’s brother (and arch enemy because he was rich and lived in Beverly Hills and she wasn’t and didn’t) still worked the original fount of his current wealth, a veterinary office on the corner of a once middle-class black neighborhood, now gone to seed. His naugahyde lobby, unchanged since the ‘60s, smelled faintly of dog and if you traveled through the double doors, the smell overwhelmed you as you reached the tiny back apartment in which Jessie’s Uncle Bernard lived. He was about seventy, and one of those old men who seemed outrageously fat, though he was not huge. The fat had just invaded every crack and crevice in him. His fingertips, his ankles, his knees. Some was swelling. Bernard drank, too.
Bernard drank like a blaring object lesson. He gave the impression he had really worked and yearned for something years ago, but you couldn’t figure what. You couldn’t separate the bluster, the bravado and lies, from the truth, but occasionally, something set him alight, and the heightened lucidity bespoke honesty. During Jessie’s slow, relentless fall, the January 1943 Carnegie Hall Concert recording of the historic performance of Duke Ellington’s uncut “Black Brown and Beige” was released on vinyl. Jessie couldn’t afford it, but he bought it anyway. Now, guilty, he visited Bernard to borrow money. Sixty dollars. Not much. He wanted and needed more but wouldn’t get it since poor Bernard was the only one from whom he wasn’t too embarrassed to borrow. At the veterinary office, they sent him to a bar down the street called the Ten Spot.
Fifties style red-shaded lamps hung down above the tables—cool lighting, dim but not sleazy, reeking of jukebox Dinah Washington and troubles you tell no one. Semi-circular booths, the kind in which, drink in hand, you forge friendships through raucous laughter, the point of which you may forget, but the memory of which you keep forever. The faces leaned over the bar, full of lines and forgetting, and all of this looked like it might have looked years and years ago. Jessie had dreamt places like this. He dreamt himself in them, full of his own imaginary black people, the ones he loved, who, unlike the white ones, accepted their dying, sometimes piss poorly but they accepted it, who ate bitterness and want, who digested it and made it part of themselves, knew rage, against white men and God, and could still wake each day and do what they had to, who didn’t confuse themselves with God, and, sick with power, make everything in heaven and earth smaller than they were, and then, contemptuous, kill or demean it.
Bernard sat there, alone at a booth. The afternoon sun streamed in through the stained glass windows, shifting the deep reds of the place to burnished orange, and his face merged with the sun and woods and red-globed lanterns, with the emptiness and the slow song, the voice tired, resigned, and almost amused, that played on the box. His eyes were too large, bloodshot, and his hair speckled with a dirtying gray. His brown skin was still smooth, though, the damage he inflicted showing mainly in airs, and girth, and in the worn, tired eyes.
“Wish I could do moh fo’ ya’,” he said in a voice weak from liquor and cigarettes, not even gravelly, or raspy or any of those things that might have lent it distinction. “But I’m not one o’ the money folks. I’m poh folk.” He laughed, tongue inching through the lips, a tortured sound like an asthmatic urgently blowing a balloon. They talked of the music for a while, Jessie mentioning the Ellington album. He couldn’t confess to buying it, not while he sat here bumming sixty bucks for food to eat.
“I knew her back in the ole days,” Bernard said when Jessie mentioned the girl singer, Betty Roche. “Back in Nyarlens.” He said he jammed with her and other famous names, way back when. He talked of others he knew, musicians, most of them dead now, a few familiar names, but most players no one remembered except others like himself who heard them and knew their worth firsthand.
Jessie tried to imagine this old man young. Staring at that face he tried to whittle away the years from the eyes, whittle away the fat and the wear and tear to find a seed that could stand for the younger man. Since he could not, he rested on cliché: dark places like this one full of smart mouthed women in butt-tight cocktail dresses, the smell of hair tonic about them, tottering on heels after a few too many, their conked escorts full of swagger and bullshit. Colored folks, all of whom knew what a saxophone meant, and what Mahalia Jackson sounded like. His head said there was nothing to envy. Each generation, armed with the ray guns of romance, envies its predecessors. There was nothing in it. No truth to the rumor that black folks had lived on the other sides of mountains.
*
Having dressed in his worn best, Jessie crept from his barrio apartment, the socialist snoring mightily behind the bedroom door. He paced contentedly to the busstop that morning. It was lovely out, yesterday’s rain having cleared the smog away. Even this dirty neighborhood looked welcoming. Across the street, tenement dwellers loaded their piecework from their sewing machine-filled apartments into a van. Mildly to severely overweight women dragged children to schools and busstops, little child voices like razors. Yuppies in Volvos and near-yuppies in Jeeps swept down this two-lane street, shortcutting to their jobs downtown, the towers of which were visible between the ramshackle apartment buildings. As he stood at the crosswalk, a streetsweeper roared past outpacing many a passenger car, occasionally swiping the piles of fast food wrappers, beer cans and Old Night Train bottles amassed in the gutters. The driver actually blared his horn at the slower cars in his path.
Jessie wondered if that dead thing was still there, the decomposition of which now fascinated him. It had shocked him at first. He’d assumed it was a cat. Then on closer inspection, he realized it was some wild thing, a possum maybe. That first day, he passed it with a subdued “eeuugghhh” and walked on. He assumed that some government bureau in charge of dead things would discard the corpse. He had forgotten where he was, a denizen of just where he had become. For the next two weeks that same rotting possum lay festering, a feast for ants and roaches, probably local cats and dogs accustomed to meals of rotting flesh. As the days passed, it began to look as if it had deflated. As if the life, along with the flesh, had just been . . . let out. There was something wrong when his world and that of wild, rotting creatures were not distinct. Some breaking point had been reached. Accommodation would have to be made.
On arriving at the bus stop, he stood with his nose pressed against the nearest wall, as if suddenly overwhelmed with grief or examining it for structural faults. This prevented positive identification by passing motorists. How humiliating to take the bus in LA. It meant carlessness, and in a town where fry cooks with shoes still damp from crossing the Rio Grande drove, carlessness bespoke a demeaning sort of poverty, the kind where you couldn’t even scare up a few hundred for a passable wreck, and hadn’t the resources, connections, or cool to turn over some quick drugs for the money.
The downslide, the slow, inexorable decline of Jessie Grandier had begun with the car, as so much does in LA. A few months out of St. Mary’s Drug Rehabilitation Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, he still lived in fashionable Beverly Hills Adjacent although he had been laid off from the low-level network TV executive job to which he had quickly climbed. Jessie owed two months’ rent.
That building sat just off the Sunset Strip, an historic main drag dotted with rock ‘n’ roll clubs. The clubs sat nearly dark through the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, but now experiencing a renaissance through Heavy Metal. Skinny boys in skin-tight leather pants, long blond hair layered and dyed, studded bracelets about the wrists, and their girls in hooker/whore drag, tight mini-skirts and fishnets, tits bouncing (if they had them yet), and tripping in spike heels over any wound in the pavement. At closing time they spewed from the clubs, drunk and stumbling, yelling, fighting, fucking.
One presentimental night, Jessie came home to find a strange car jacked-up near his parking space. A gaunt, scruffy looking man, and a fat, dyed-blonde woman in skin-tight clothes and too much makeup hung out of the open doors of their tattered VW. Cigarettes dangled from their lips. He eyed them suspiciously. He went straight to his balcony to spy on them, but from that angle, he couldn’t see anything. He should have confronted them, threatened them, called the police, done something. But he didn’t. Cops unnerved him. He had a kitchen drawer full of unpaid bills. He had mistakenly opened it the previous week and immediately slammed it shut with a shudder. The registration had expired and the car was not insured. He waited. Eventually he fell asleep.
Next morning he found his little dented orange Datsun listing badly to one side. A wheel was gone. Not just flat, but gone. He could have screamed. In fact he did. A loud, low growl of woeful insult, for he knew this was the beginning of the end, the first stomach churning lurch on a long, steep, downhill plunge the end of which was nowhere near and the depths of which he couldn’t imagine.
“White trash!” he spat, the outrage and portentousness palpable . . . “White trash stole my wheel!”
DATELINE LOS ANGELES—1988
An unquestionably ignorant, possibly senile ex-actor, having assumed the Presidency of the United States through ingeniously manipulating romantic iconography, outdated yet still potent, of great frontier boom lands begging settlement by lean and hearty white folks, in fact served as shield for corporate interests and wealthy individuals, reducing or eliminating restrictions on their financial behavior.
The country embarked on an unprecedented peacetime military buildup, with a reciprocal dwindling of non-military resources. Thus, many fell homeless, funds for safety-net programs for mental health and public housing slashed, they begged coins, dirty, sometimes dangerous, sleeping in paper on doorsteps, squatting in abandoned buildings, defecating on sidewalks, standing near freeways holding signs saying “will work for food.” The number of Americans without health insurance rose dramatically, as did the cost of medical care. Hospitals turned away those without coverage. The infant mortality rate rose to the highest in the industrialized world. Funds for education dwindled across the fifty states. Inner cities, populated by blacks, Latinos, and other minorities were the hardest hit, commerce having abandoned their neighborhoods. The manufacturing base of the U.S. disappeared through government policies aligned with corporate greed to drive manufacturing to cheap third world labor sources to which U.S. corporations flocked. The inner city high school dropout rates shot to near fifty percent. Youth gang violence exploded and random drive-by shootings became a way of life.
It was America. You got by, that’s all. You did what you had to, prayed for a windfall, bought that lottery ticket, hoped and prayed another chance might find you.
You got by.
