Chapter 19
Laine
Tom could take ten minutes or ten hours to get me a twenty on some action. I had to get out. I had to move. At the same time, I knew moving would get me into more trouble than pacing the loft with the TV on. I wasn’t looking for problems, but I was looking for something, and that was always trouble.
I got in the car and headed south.
I’d denied Michael Greydon had an effect on me when I was fifteen. He’d held my hand. We hadn’t even kissed. What should he mean to me? He’d come up to the bleachers at four thirty every day, bouncing his ball with his racquet on each step, forearms taut and tanned. He was wealthy, secure, an example of the clean life I thought was closed to me.
He’d sat next to me, same as always, his presence sending shivers over my skin. The twenty-five-year-old me laid my hand on the arm rest of my Audi, remembering the position of my hand and the way his fingers trailed down my hand and grabbed mine. Thank God I was sitting, because my breath stopped. My heart didn’t do much better.
I’d known he liked me when he took my hand in those bleachers, and I swore that I would be such a good girl for him. I would be nice and sweet, and from that moment on, I swore my life would change. I’d gotten out. I wasn’t a throwaway anymore.
“I won’t be here tomorrow,” he’d said. “I got that part I was telling you about. That movie. It’s shooting in Maine.”
I don’t know what happened after that. He said something about the logistics of finishing his senior year, but I didn’t care about that because he was squeezing my hand. All I heard was that he wasn’t coming back. I don’t know how I replied, except that I was happy for him and I thought he’d be very successful. I remember being pleased that I’d kept it together, because we were just secret friends. He didn’t owe me anything.
He let me go, kissing me on the cheek. “Thank you. I really enjoyed hanging out with you.”
“Me too” was all I could choke out. “Good luck with everything. And don’t forget to take a break once in a while.”
He kissed my cheek again. Not a quick peck but a sweet, tender brush of his lips, long enough to let me feel his breath and take a quick gasp of his cinnamon scent. I didn’t believe he was really leaving until he turned a corner into the locker room and waved before disappearing.
I waited, but he didn’t come back.
A driver took me home at five every day. His name was Jamal, and he always brought me sweet rolls. That day, I didn’t get into Jamal’s Bentley. I skirted around it and got on the bus. I went to my last foster home in East Hollywood.
Jake had been my last foster family’s biological son. He was four years older and sold little packets of brown sticky paste and salt-white powder. His friends called him Jake the Pillow Snake, after the Dr. Seuss character. He was home when I arrived. His room above the garage stank of pot, burning chemicals, and dirty sheets.
That smell… I knew of nothing like it, and as I remembered it, driving across town on the 10, my eyes filled up.
Jake was skinny and hairy. When I lived there, he’d tried to stick his hand up my shirt, and he laughed when I screamed and pushed him away. When I got there the day Michael told me he was leaving, he’d acted as if he didn’t want me. I felt so low, so unwelcome that I took my shirt off and put his hand where I’d refused him last time.
“You lose your virginity to some rich guy?” he said, grabbing my other nipple and pulling it long.
“No. Ow.”
“Such a pretty girl. Always were. Why you here?”
Maybe I had a doubt at that point about what I was doing there, and maybe I could have left. But to go where? Backward? Or was this backward? Inside my fears about Jake, a little bit of me wanted to just be wanted by someone, and that part of me wore down the bravado. Finally, after years of denying I cared if anyone gave a shit about me, I surrendered to that little kernel of need I’d ignored for so long.
“You want me or not?” I’d said.
“You sure you never been with a man before, sweet angel?” he said, letting my nipple go.
“No.”
He unbuckled his jeans. He didn’t have any underwear on. He took out his dick, and it was hard. I was pleased I’d done that. It was mine, that arousal. I’d had no idea how easy it was.
“You ever suck a cock?”
Words like that were what I was asking for, weren’t they? “No.”
He laughed. “Shit, I don’t know what to do first.” He swung his finger lazily at me. “Get the pants off. I got work to do.”
He watched me, and I stood there, naked and looking at the holes in the carpet, while he stroked his dick and thought about what to do with me. I’d hoped, in those moments, that he’d give me some sort of reprieve, as if it was no longer my choice to just put my clothes back on and go home. But that didn’t happen. Not at all. Because I had no home to go to, as far as I was concerned.
He gently and sweetly asked me to kneel, then he put his dick in my mouth. I didn’t know what to do. I gagged and choked. I felt incompetent and worthless. Then he put me on my back, pulled my knees way up, and took my virginity like a shoplifter. At least I felt as if I’d somehow gotten that right.
He’d hurt me that day, and he didn’t care. Neither did I. He said I could stay as long as I gave him my body whenever he wanted. Fewer hours than a real job for a roof over my head. Because he liked me. That’s what he said. He liked me. I told myself that at least I was wanted for something. I had a place, for what it was worth. I had a place, and it was my choice.
I’d shown up at the Hatches’ three days later, haughty, proud, and screwed to the gills by my former foster brother and a few of his friends. I didn’t know what I wanted out of the rich couple, but I was an outsider. It didn’t matter. After that, I left for days, showed up for school when I felt like it. They fought about me. Maybe a stronger marriage would have withstood the battles, but they were already shaky.
I ended up in another home soon after. I had no recollection of it, because I was hanging out with Jake, riding motorcycles, drinking, and thinking the fact that he wouldn’t give me drugs meant he loved me.
And it had all started with Michael Greydon’s fingers in mine. He did have an effect on me. That son of a bitch. He let me hope. He let me think I’d be something I wasn’t. It took me years to get away from Jake the Pillow Snake and Foo Foo the Snoo, with their constant needs and rough hands. It took Tom shoving in my face a stack of pictures that Jake and company had taken with Tom’s camera to wake me up. The camera didn’t lie. You could retouch a picture and Photoshop it to death, but a piece of trash was a piece of trash.
I knew I could get out. I was just afraid that I had nothing to get out for. I wasn’t afraid that I’d be slapped back but that I would still be an outsider.
But I had to try. I had to commit to being better. I ran away to Westlake with Tom, Irving found me, and I finally took his guidance about more than exposure and focal length. I needed to make money, and to make money, I needed to stop playing at being a photographer. I needed to make it a career. I needed to stop screwing around, because screwing around meant I wasn’t chasing the picture. I needed to invest money in relationships, which meant going to clubs and being nice to the wait staff. I needed to let my bitten nails grow out and dress like an adult. I needed to make the city my only lover.
I closed my legs and got on my feet. It was the hardest thing I’d ever done.
And now Michael Greydon was having an effect on me again. A different one. I wasn’t about to get on my back for all comers. I wouldn’t be used by strange men as a repository in the hopes that one of them would love me. But I felt that same need to crawl back into the arms of someone who would accept any part of me.
That was bullshit.
Unacceptable.
I had no time for it.
I almost missed my turn, and I yanked my car across two lanes of traffic to get onto 4th Street.
That was when I noticed the blue Corolla behind me. It cut across three lanes of traffic to get off on Central with me then changed lanes again when I did. Two guys, from what I could see. I stopped my car on Sixth Street and got out, and they blew by me. The guy in the passenger seat photographed me standing outside my car as they passed. They whipped around the corner, into the parking lot, and came around again.
I knew those guys.
They didn’t know who they were dealing with. Downtown LA? Those bitches were in my crib.
You know who cares about me? You know where I belong?
I belong in motion on the streets of Los Angeles.
I got back in the car.
If you go north on Central and make a right on Palmetto then another right into a certain nondescript industrial parking lot, you can cross to Factory Place, so named because someone had no imagination and named it after what surrounded it. Once you were in Factory Place, you could approach the Los Angeles Gun Club and use the yearly membership you got specifically for access to the underground parking lot. If you knew a damn thing at all, you knew that the underground lot had a service egress in the back, onto East Sixth.
And if you were cruel, you let the guys following you catch up to you. You pulled into a spot and let them think you were parking outside. You let them stop and get out, then you drove down the ramp and you watched them stare at your car as it disappeared underground.
“Bye-bye, assholes,” I said as I turned into the sunlight on East Sixth and headed south. I felt better.
Six minutes later, I pulled up to Irving’s place.
Irv lived downtown in a two-story craftsman with chipping lead paint and an overgrown front yard. Even when he taught at Breakfront, his house had looked like an abandoned building. It sat on the corner of a street that had been repaved repeatedly to no avail, because of the eighteen-wheelers rolling by daily. Next door, on the east side, sat a Mexican food warehouse, and across the street was a huge parking lot for the offices of a fashion empire that took up the entire block. Behind him was a small light industrial shop where four sculptors worked in granite and metal. He was the only actual resident in a four-block radius.
You’d think he was some lone holdout who wouldn’t sell to developers and thus ended up living in a swirl of light industrial noise, rotting food smells, and toxic dust, but he rented. The developers just hadn’t been interested in the property in the eighties, and they left it there. The rent never went up because Irv’s landlord knew no one else would want to live there.
“That was some kiss,” he said as he opened the door.
“The camera doesn’t lie. It was a once-in-a-lifetime.”
He snorted and got out of the doorway, letting me into his dark living room. “What’s in the bag?”
“I have a broken hinge on my mirror. I thought it was the shutter, but I’m rusty. I think I need help.”
“You know how to fix that.”
I shrugged. “Maybe I needed company.”
He took the paper bag from my hands and peered in. “Let’s take a look.”
The house was steeped in his presence, a complete pigsty with an organizational system based in fractal geometry. You could only see it when you stepped back. Boxes of old negatives were stacked on top of files of the same. Every corner, cabinet, and drawer held a piece of dead photo equipment, a file, a folder, or film. Tom and I knew his system from years of interning and working for him, but no one else would.
Irving had set up the second bedroom as a darkroom, boarding up the windows and sealing them with tinfoil. It was painted matte black, and the door had been replaced with a roundabout that kept out light. He’d jury-rigged the plumbing to put in a sink, and the leakage from the pipes, along with chemical spillage, had destroyed the floor to such a degree that some of the boards had rotted right through to the crawlspace.
He led me to the studio next to his darkroom. He laid my spare rig on his table and picked up a screwdriver with such a tiny head that it looked like an awl. “I remember this camera. You’re going back to manual?”
I pulled up a stool. “Auto focus is for amateurs.”
“That’s the spirit.” He shook out his hand, cringing.
“Is it the arthritis?” I took the screwdriver and camera from him.
“Hang on.” He limped to the bathroom, calling out from the rectangle of light down the hall. “Damn meds wear off all at once. It’s like these little men in my joints wait to ambush me.”
I worked out the screws. “I think I’m going to go old school and see how I like it.”
“You can’t do what you do without the auto. You’d have one guy in the pack with something to use and a bunch of part-time editors going through seven submissions a day if it wasn’t for autofocus. The technology created the business.”
I heard the click of him shaking out pills and the slap of the medicine cabinet closing.
“So, this guy?” he called from the bathroom.
“Michael? He’s not a guy. He’s a star,” I said.
“Is this a relationship?”
“We have a relationship. He runs away, and I chase him.” I had the camera open, its guts spread across the table like a heart patient’s.
Irving stood in the doorway. I was thankful I’d never told him about the bleachers, or the young varsity tennis player, or anything.
“Are you going to press charges?” he asked from the doorway.
“For breaking my camera? I should sue Tom.”
“I think he’s serious about that quiet girl.”
“You know what she does onstage? Screams like a banshee and pees into a plastic cup,” I said.
“No.”
“Yep.”
“And Tom likes this girl? Our Tom?” He moved a pile of old negatives from a chair and sat down, cringing as he bent and relaxed.
“Irv, can we talk about you?”
“Hell, no.”
“Can I be honest?” I said.
“No.”
“I’m worried about you.”
“Oh, shit—”
“No, listen—”
“Laine—”
“Stop it, okay? You need help,” I said. “And before you start, I’m not talking about cleaning this place up. Forget that. It’s a hopeless case. You need someone to assist you.”
He waved his lame hand at me.
“What?” I said.
“What, nothing. Assistants are for people who have work.”
“You could get someone in to go through this shit. You have pictures of celebrities going back thirty years. I can’t even imagine what the crap in this house would be worth if everything in it was filed right and sold.”
“No one cares about old shit, Laine. People want new stuff. I haven’t taken a worthwhile picture in… I don’t know how long.” He looked out the window, or more accurately, he looked toward the window. He was depressed.
I knew his deal. He had plenty of contacts he was afraid to call, because he felt they’d left him behind. He had students surpassing him in every aspect of their careers. He was breaking down physically, and his methods were so dated they were near obsolete. I could count on my fingers the number of my colleagues who knew that stop bath came before fixer.
“How about I make you dinner?” I said.
“I thought you cared about me?” he joked.
But I could cook. Maybe not gourmet meals, but I could put something edible on the table every night, because Jake had added that to my list of responsibilities after a month. So after I fixed my camera, I made him enough food for the week and wrapped it up while he told me about the old days of Hollywood.
The sun went down, and my phone didn’t ring. Not Tom with a twenty on Fiona. Not a single tip. And not Michael.
“I have to get out tonight,” I said, packing Irv’s freezer with meals. “Nothing’s come in, and I’m not sitting around. I won’t be ignored.”
“Maybe you could go to bed,” Irv suggested. “You know, take a night off since one’s being handed to you?”
“Never.”
But once I got in the car, I was bone tired. I went home, showered, paced, and told myself it would all be okay. I went to bed not believing it.
I didn’t know what to do with myself. Go out. Watch TV. Pace the loft. I had a feeling, like a vibrating thread through every thought, that something was going to change. With change came hope and hurt.
Every new foster family had that thread. Every time I was let go because another kid was coming on or because I kept going off in the middle of the night, I felt it.
The hippie couple in Malibu, Sunshine and Rover, had been more than a thread. They’d been a thick rope of optimism. At five, I still had the bad habit of hoping for the best. They read me stories with pretty pictures, and when Sunshine pulled me to her I smelled patchouli and sandalwood. Everything they owned was made of beautiful colors. They laughed together and took me walking on the beach in the early morning in winter.
I didn’t care when they lost the apartment. I didn’t mind the van. It was big enough for us. I would have lived anywhere with them. But the caseworker came and ended it. Rover said they’d come for me when they got a place. He promised.
I’d grabbed his beard and said, “Okay, Daddy. I’ll wait.”
I’d kept that hope alive through three more homes, avoiding connection with any family because Sunshine and Rover were coming back. I couldn’t let myself love another Mommy and Daddy, and most of them didn’t want to be loved. They wanted me to do stuff, or go away, or replace a dead thing in themselves.
I crawled under the covers and tried to talk away that thread of hope. I didn’t need it. I shot it down, shooed it out the door, burned it away with laser-beam intensity. By the time I fell asleep, it was a thin line of black ash.