Nina Revoyr
Page 1
More Critical Praise for Nina Revoyr
for Southland
• A Los Angeles Times Best Seller
• Selected for the Los Angeles Times’ Best Books of 2003 list
• Winner: Lambda Literary Award
• Winner: Ferro-Grumley Literary Award
• Winner: American Library Association’s Stonewall Honor Award
• Finalist: Edgar Award
• A Book Sense 76 Pick
• Selected for the InsightOut Book Club
“The plot line of Southland is the stuff of a James Ellroy or a Walter Mosley novel … But the climax fairly glows with the good-heartedness that Revoyr displays from the very first page.”
—Los Angeles Times
“Compelling … never lacking in vivid detail and authentic atmosphere, the novel cements Revoyr’s reputation as one of the freshest young chroniclers of life in L.A.”
—Publishers Weekly
“If Oprah still had her book club, this novel likely would be at the top of her list … With prose that is beautiful, precise, but never pretentious …”
—Booklist (starred review)
“[A]n ambitious and absorbing book that works on many levels: as a social and political history of Los Angeles, as the story of a young woman discovering and coming to terms with her cultural heritage, as a multigenerational and multiracial family saga, and as a solid detective story.”
——Denver Post
“Nina Revoyr gives us her Los Angeles, a loved version of that often fabled landscape. Her people are as reticent and careful as any under siege, but she sifts their stories out of the dust of neighborhoods, police reports, and family legend. The stories—black, white, Asian, and multiracial—intertwine in unexpected and deeply satisfying ways. Read this book and tell me you don’t want to read more. I know I do.”
—Dorothy Allison, author of Bastard Out of Carolina
“Subtle, effective … [with] a satisfyingly unpredictable climax.”
—Washington Post
“Fascinating and heartbreaking … an essential part of L.A. history.”
—LA Weekly
“An engaging, thoughtful book that even East Coasters can enjoy.”
—New York Press
“A remarkable feat … Revoyr’s novel is honest in detailing Southern California’s brutal history, and honorable in showing how families survived with love and tenacity and dignity.”
—Susan Straight, author of A Million Nightingales
“Dead-on descriptions of California both gritty and golden.”
—East Bay Express
“Southland gripped my attention and would not let go until I turned the last page.”
—International Examiner
“Southland is a simmering stew of individual dreams, family struggles, cultural relations, social changes, and race relations. It is a compelling, challenging, and rewarding novel.”
—Chicago Free Press
for The Age of Dreaming
• Finalist: Los Angeles Times Book Prize
* Top Five Books of 2008: The Advocate
“Rare indeed is a novel this deeply pleasurable and significant.”
—Booklist (starred review)
“[Revoyr] is fast becoming one of the city’s finest chroniclers and mythmakers.”
—Los Angeles Magazine
“Reminiscent of Paul Auster’s The Book of Illusions in its concoction of spurious Hollywood history and its star’s filmography … Ingenious … hums with the excitement of Hollywood’s pioneer era.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“Fast-moving, riveting, unpredictable, and profound; highly recommended.”
—Library Journal
“Revoyr beautifully invokes Jun’s self-deceptions and his growing self-awareness. It’s an enormously satisfying novel.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Revoyr conveys in a lucid, precise and period appropriate prose … a pulse-quickening, deliciously ironic serving of Hollywood noir.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“[Nina Revoyr is] an empathetic chronicler of the dispossessed outsider in L.A.”
—Los Angeles Times
“Quietly powerful … settles to a close as deftly and beautifully as a crane landing on quiet water.”
—LA Weekly
“Revoyr resurrects the old old Hollywood, from the time before talkies, and dreams it into existence once again.”
—Bookforum
“Five stars.”
—Time Out Chicago
for The Necessary Hunger
“The Necessary Hunger is the kind of irresistible read you start on the subway at 6 p.m. on the way home from work and keep plowing through until you’ve turned the last page … It beats with the pulse of life …”
—Time
“Quietly intimate, vigorously honest, and uniquely American … Tough and tender without a single false note.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Revoyr triumphs in blending many complex issues, including urban poverty and violence, adolescent sexuality, and the vitality of basketball, without losing sight of her characters. She creates a family, in all senses of the word, of characters who are complex, admirable, and aggravating; readers will root for them on and off the court.”
—Detroit Free Press
“Revoyr focuses on a number of issues, including competition, interracial relationships, and same-sex relationships … A thoughtful work …”
—Library Journal
“A wholesome coming-of-age novel about two high school basketball stars, Revoyr’s debut is a meditation on consuming passion and a reflection on lost opportunities … The basketball action, which builds climactically, honors the split-second timing and excitement of the game. Revoyr also evokes the feel of contemporary L.A., capturing crack-heads, gang-bangers, and car-jackings in sharp, street-smart dialogue.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Revoyr has unerringly caught the angst of teenagers, as well as the rarified, self-involved world in which they live … A sympathetic, tender rendering of the frustration of unrequited love.”
—Cleveland Plain Dealer
“This book may in fact contain the most loving prose we’ll see on basketball until John Edgar Wideman writes about his daughter Jamila, the gifted point guard for Stanford.”
—Chicago Tribune
This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Published by Akashic Books
©2011 by Nina Revoyr
ePub ISBN-13: 978-1-617-75018-2
Hardcover ISBN-13: 978-1-936070-86-2
Hardcover Library of Congress Control Number: 2010928792
Paperback ISBN-13: 978-1-936070-71-8
Paperback Library of Congress Control Number: 2010922723
Akashic Books
PO Box 1456
New York, NY 10009
info@akashicbooks.com
www.akashicbooks.com
For Johnny Temple and Johanna Ingalls
TABLE OF CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT PAGE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
EPILOGUE
Acknowledgements
How we fall into grace. You can’t work or earn your way into it.
You just fall. It lies below, it lies beyond. It comes to you, unbidden.
—Rick Bass,
Colter
I would burn soles of my feet
Burn the palms of both my hands
If I could learn and be complete
If I could walk righteously again
—Lucinda Williams, “Get Right with God”
ONE
In my apartment in California there hangs a picture of my grandfather. He is one of twelve men dressed in off-white baseball uniforms and plain dark caps, all seated in front of a boy in a baggy black suit. The men sit cross-legged or rest on one knee; their bats lean together like logs on a camp fire, surrounded by their gloves. Behind them stand two large, boxy cars with a banner draped between them that reads, Buick Ball Club, Deerhorn Wisconsin. Although the picture is posed, there is something about the quality of the players’ postures and smiles that makes it seem like they just collapsed there, giddy and tired, and someone happened to capture the moment. The uniforms have a softer look than what ballplayers wear today—the caps are rounder and more pliable, the pants and jerseys looser, the gloves amorphous and lumpy—but the men look more like men. My grandfather, sitting in the lower right-hand corner, smiles at the camera from out of his open, handsome face as if he knows he’ll live forever. The license plate on one of the Buicks has tags from 1925, and if the date is accurate, then my grandfather, Charlie LeBeau, is nineteen. Because of the cap, the usual shock of slicked-back hair that falls over his eyes, making him look playful and roguish, is held still. But even so, he is beautiful, and knows it. Farther back in the picture, a young woman leans out the window of another car, resting her chin in her hand, and I imagine she is staring at Charlie. Everyone, for all of his life, always stared at Charlie.
My grandfather grew up in the country five miles outside of Deerhorn, and played ball in the evenings after long days out in the fields. His family grew corn and potatoes and barley, and raised cattle and pigs, until the Depression made it impossible to keep the farm running and they sold it and made the move into town. By that time, he was married to my grandmother, Helen Wilkes, whom he’d met at the one-room school just east of town. Charlie was never a student—he was two years behind his class when Helen sat down in front of him, and Helen a year ahead of hers, their respective talents and deficiencies erasing the gap of three years that divided them. He kept pulling on her pigtails as she tried to listen to the teacher, and she finally married him, she said, to make him stop. They married—eloped—when Charlie was twenty and Helen seventeen, so he already knew her when the picture of the baseball team was taken. It could be that the relaxed, self-satisfied grin on his face has something to do with her. It could also be that the girl in the car—whoever she is—knows this, and that’s why she looks so sad.
My grandfather never fought in a war. He was too young for the first great conflict in Europe, which took his father’s brother, and too old for World War II. And he never held a position—say, sheriff or lawyer—that placed him above other men. No, Charlie LeBeau worked the same unforgiving, muscular jobs—at the meat processing plant, the car parts shop, the Stevenson shoe factory—that the other men did, but he always seemed larger than them, heroic. He was the best ballplayer in the region, a third baseman pursued by the White Sox, as his father had been twenty years before. But also like his father, he turned down the chance to enter the White Sox’s minor league system because he wouldn’t leave Central Wisconsin—and because he refused to play for the team that had recently thrown the World Series. He won the state skeet-shooting championship a half dozen times; I still have a letter, dated 1935, from the Thomason Gunworks Company, congratulating him on his perfect score in that year’s contest and offering him a lifetime supply of free ammunition. He was simply, consistently the best shot in the state of Wisconsin, as he proved every fall by bagging more ducks, grouse, pheasants, and deer than his family could ever possibly eat. The gun case in my grandparents’ dining room was his centerpiece, his shrine, filled with weapons of every size and capacity—some functional, some collectors’ pieces purely for display, like the Springfield Rifle his uncle had used in the Great War. He also had three bows, regal, primal-looking things, and another case for his collection of fishing rods. Sometimes I would take out one of these rifles or bows just to hold it and feel the power it contained.
But it wasn’t his skill with weapons that set Charlie apart. It was the way that other people related to him. Men gathered around him at Jimmy’s Coffee Shop or Earl’s Gun Store or in his own house to hear him expound on everything from the proper training of hunting dogs to the town’s new traffic light; women lowered their eyes and blushed when he was near. And he paid back and increased this devotion in a thousand small ways—by changing tires or plowing sidewalks for the widows in town; by welcoming unattached men into his house for Friday suppers; by taking young boys to the baseball fields to work on their games, or out into the deepest woods, to hunt.
My grandfather was a man, in a vital, fundamental way that grown men simply aren’t today, at least not in the city. And maybe that was why he was so disappointed in my father. Stewart LeBeau was as different from Charlie as a boy could possibly be—studious, dreamy, and unathletic. He hated hunting, and didn’t care much for fishing or dogs, and while it wouldn’t be exactly true to say he disliked sports, playing catch did not enliven him as it did the other boys in town. Stewart read, and spent his time with a few other serious, awkward boys, and behaved well enough in school to generally avoid having his knuckles rapped by the nuns with their ever-ready rulers. He was closer to his mother, my grandmother, who was glad to have produced a child she could relate to (they talked of books together, and he helped her with shopping and chores). Stewart, like his father, was born between wars—he was too young for World War II and Korea, and past the age for Vietnam—yet, unlike his father, he had no desire or ability to make up for what Charlie considered unfortunate timing, striking the second generation in a row. But while he was never of the town—not in the blood-deep way my grandparents were—he never did anything to openly defy it until his final, huge act of rebellion, which was leaving. He had applied to the University of Wisconsin without telling anyone (the nuns, who believed that the world outside of Deerhorn was sinful and corrupting, would not have approved), and he was the only boy in town who went to college. In Madison—much to his parents’ distress—he acquired new clothes, new concerns, and a strange new set of friends. My grandparents’ dismay must have multiplied by a thousand when he decided to marry my mother.
If leaving Deerhorn was so distasteful that both my grandfather and great-grandfather passed up a chance to play in the majors; if the town was so insular that my father’s departure was seen as defection; if it had never, in all the years of its existence, been home to a soul who wasn’t German, Polish, Norwegian, or French Canadian, imagine the shock of having to contemplate a daughter-in-law from Japan. And my mother, Reiko Tanizaki, was not Japanese-American—she didn’t eat hamburgers or say the Pledge of Allegiance or speak English much at all—but real, born-and-raised-there Japanese. My father had met her in Madison, where she was an exchange student at the university. Maybe despite their language and cultural differences, they had something in common because they’d both made their way out of small country towns to try their luck in the larger world. But more likely, her sheer difference from everything Stewart had known was exactly what drew him to her. For their enclosed and turbulent marriage became the central drama of my father’s life. It was the one realm where he could be extreme and heroic and foolish, just like his father always wanted him to be.
Although my grandmother cried and pleaded with him, my father was set on marrying Reiko, so Helen, tight-lipped, took a Greyhound bus down to Madison for the wedding. My grandfather did not attend, and you could say—as my grandmother often did—that the trip itself, not the color of Stewart’s bride, kept Charlie at home, but my father rightly took his absence as disapproval. There was no way Charlie LeBeau would ever accept a foreigner into his family, and although he did finally meet my mother when my
parents visited Deerhorn, he didn’t smile for her or turn on his charm; she never saw who he was. My parents never stayed in one place long enough to get comfortable, anyway. Theirs was a traveling road show of a marriage, starting out in Madison, and making stops over the next ten years in Milwaukee, St. Paul, Fresno, Sacramento, Seattle, and finally Japan. I was only present for the last part of this journey—I was born in Tokyo in ’65—and something about my appearance must have tipped their already precarious union completely over the edge, because by the time I was two, my mother started leaving us for days and even weeks at a time. I remember her absence more clearly than what it was like to have her with us, and I remember my father spilling whiskey and holding his head in his hands, pleading with her parents in his broken Japanese to please tell him where their daughter had gone.
I lived in Japan until I was eight. And when I think back to that time, I always see myself—although of course it isn’t true—as having lived alone. My parents were always busy—my father worked for an English-language radio station (I was conceived, he once told me, while he was doing broadcasts at the ’64 Olympics), and then for an English-language newspaper, which was staffed by hard-drinking expatriate Americans who behaved as if it were still the Occupation. My mother worked too, as a translator for a tourist agency, and occasionally teaching Japanese to American businessmen, both jobs that she considered beneath her. And when my parents weren’t working or going to parties, they were wholly engaged in each other. In some of my earliest memories I am lying in bed, listening to my parents argue—my father’s voice low and guttural, my mother’s high, cobbling together short fragments of English into an angry, disjointed string of accusations. They always fought in his language. I could see their shadows move across my ceiling when she stormed out of their room, his shadow grabbing hers by the arm, hers turning and striking closed-fisted against his chest and shoulders. When my mother finally left for good just after my sixth birthday, I almost missed their fights, which had been the only sounds of life in that rented house. I didn’t miss my mother, or at least it seems that way now; I suppose my mind has closed up whatever wound her departure may have caused. It was her parents I missed, my grandparents in Osaka, my gruff grandfather whose eyes softened when he read me a story, my laughing grandmother who spoiled me with red bean ice cream and laid soft, caring hands on my shoulder. But my father felt as uneasy with them as my mother must have felt with his parents. The circle of language and food and laughter that enclosed my grandparents, my mother, and me could never really include him. Even as a child, I understood that they embraced me in a way they couldn’t embrace my father. But once my mother left and they wouldn’t tell him where she had gone, he refused to let them visit or talk to me. I understand now this must have broken their hearts, for after my mother left I never saw them again.