by Jodi Compton
In our second year of high school, CJ got his driver’s license, and not long after he bought a twenty-year-old silver BMW that he’d seen advertised “for parts” and rebuilt it from the ground up. He also won a starting spot on the baseball team, where he vexed opposing batters with the deep sinker and nasty screwball that Porter had taught him.
I don’t know if my cousin ever had the kind of life-changing moment that I did in the bookstore, but he told me a story about the time when, as far as he could tell, school turned around for him. It was in the middle of that sophomore year. CJ was getting books from his locker when a pretty black girl, a new transfer from Oxnard, took in his height-he was six-three then, on his way to six-five-and said teasingly, “Do you hang off the end of your bed?”
CJ had winked at her and said, “Only recreationally,” and not only had she laughed, the kids around her had, too.
By the end of that week, CJ and the girl from Oxnard were going out, and suddenly the entire female population of our school discovered, seemingly all at once, the aphrodisiac qualities of a Southern accent. CJ, of course, was happy to help them enjoy that discovery.
By our junior year I saw very little of him on weekends, not just because he was out with girlfriends-though he often was-but because once he got his car running, he could go to Los Angeles without waiting to ride along with friends. CJ wasn’t antisocial, but his interest in L.A. wasn’t the same as that of his friends. They went to surf and drink around campfires on the beach. CJ went to sweet-talk his way into L.A.’s music venues, the eighteen-and-over or twenty-one-only clubs where the new hip-hop acts debuted. All the money he earned repairing cars for his father went either to gas money or to two-drink minimums. He kept his grades up just high enough to stay on the baseball team, but that was all.
Teachers sighed and shook their heads about CJ Mooney, but there was no animus in it. The guidance counselor, she of the mobile eyebrows, saw that he’d inherited the Mooney gift with cars, put him on the graduation track, and loaded his schedule with shop classes.
They didn’t see what he was. Back then, none of us did.
Sure, it was obvious that he loved music. But in high school, what kid doesn’t? Even the fact that he was a white boy in love with black music didn’t raise any eyebrows; that was a story older than Elvis Presley.
Then, after our junior year, he dropped out of high school and moved to Los Angeles to try to find work in the music business.
Even in poor and rural areas, that doesn’t happen so much anymore. It caused a stir. At school, the teachers were shocked, the baseball coach cursed the loss of his best pitching arm, and the girls went into mourning. But his parents took it hardest. Several Mooneys of their generation had dropped out, but they’d made damn sure none of CJ’s had. They were convinced he was on the road to ruin: just seventeen, talented but with no marketable skills, in a town that ate gifted youth for breakfast and sent them home broke and failed. Both Porter and Angeline called me, asking me to talk to him. I said I couldn’t; it was his life. Secretly I believed what everyone else did-that in a year or two CJ would get disillusioned and come home-but I couldn’t be disloyal enough to say it aloud.
After that, CJ’s parents regularly asked me for news about their son. It wasn’t that he didn’t call them, but they thought I was getting the true, uncensored news of his life in L.A. “Really, how’s he doing down there? Is he working?” they’d ask. And I’d say he was getting by, because I didn’t want them to know the truth: Unable to get even the lowest-level job in the music business, CJ was supporting himself by dealing pot.
On the night before I left for West Point, I slept on the floor of his flophouse room, just like he’d done in my bedroom so many times before. He tried strenuously to give me the bed, but I said no, tomorrow I was going to be in Beast Barracks, and if I couldn’t tolerate sleeping on the floor, then the outlook was pretty bleak. CJ gave up, but joined me about halfway through the night, dragging a blanket down with him to nestle companionably behind me. I shouldn’t have let him, but I was secretly glad for his nearness, because it was the only thing that kept me from spending the night wondering what the hell made me think I could cut it at the United States Military Academy and deciding that it wasn’t too late for me to stay in California and go to community college.
The next morning, CJ drove me to LAX. Standing in the departures drop-off zone, he’d joked, “Look at you, baby, you’re the pride of the Mooneys, and you’re a Cain. That hardly seems fair.” Then he’d turned serious, pulled me close, and said, “I am so very proud of you, baby.”
I wanted to tell him that I was proud of him, too, the way he lived life on his own terms. But I couldn’t, because it would have sounded condescending. He was right: I was the standard-bearer of our family, making my place in the world, and he was the black-sheep under-achiever, going nowhere. In that moment, our paths in life seemed set in stone.
Funny how four years can change everything.
Four years later, I was getting off a Greyhound at the downtown L.A. depot, with no commission in the Army, no college degree, less than two hundred dollars to my name, and no place to live. It took the last of my pride to do it, but I called CJ at his office. By which I mean I tried to. I left several messages with a cool-voiced receptionist (“Yeah… his cousin Hailey… he’ll know who you mean”) and stood for two hours in the Southern California sun by a pay phone, tired and out of sorts, itching with impatience when passersby stopped to use the phone and tied it up. The next day I’d have a pretty bad sunburn.
Finally the phone rang. I only had to say, “Hello?” and, to my vast relief, I heard that familiar half-Appalachian, half-Californian drawl: “Where are you? I’ll come get you.”
His first words to me in person, as he was jumping out of the same old silver BMW, were, “Shoot, I am so sorry, baby. My people didn’t know who you were.”
“I know,” I said against his cheek, already enfolded in his long arms.
That was the month that CJ was in Vanity Fair’s music issue. In the photo essay of that year’s most influential figures, he was labeled “The Prodigy” and was photographed standing on a gritty hotel rooftop, the sun behind him sinking into layers of L.A. atmosphere, the camera angle low enough to make him look seven feet tall. He’s turned away from the camera, an abstracted visionary.
At just twenty-two, he had become one of L.A.’s most sought-after producers. No one doubted the depth of his understanding of hip-hop or his respect for it. Some people who saw him in deep concentration, listening to something only he could hear over headphones, said they’d looked at his eyes and thought at first that he was blind.
He had also taken back his name, in the liner notes of the two CDs he’d produced and on the Grammy he’d won. The name Cletus Mooney now commanded respect throughout the music industry.
Practically the first thing I asked him, that day in L.A., was which name he wanted me to use.
He said, “Whatever you want to call me is fine.” He checked the traffic before pulling out onto the street. As he did so, he said, “What’s wrong with your arm?” He’d noticed the cast on my wrist.
“Broken bone,” I said. “I fell. It’s no big deal.”
“You’re not out here on some kind of medical leave, are you?”
“No,” I said. “I… CJ, I’m not going back.”
I could see his confusion, and in a moment he articulated it. “You mean, you graduated early?”
He knew that wasn’t it, but denial is like that. Often there’s a short detour on the way to the unhappy truth.
“No,” I said. “I’m not going to finish.”
“Are you serious? Baby, what happened?”
“A lot of people wash out,” I said tiredly. “I warned you about that before I went. Do we have to talk about it?”
“No.”
“I’m okay. I’ll be okay.”
“I know you will,” he said finally. “Sure you will.”
I’m n
ot sure what I was expecting from the place that CJ, with his newfound wealth, would call home. Maybe a retro-Rat-Pack condo with a wet bar, or a beach house in Malibu.
Instead, he drove us up into the hills outside the city, an ascent so steep and fast it reminded me of taking off in a plane, to an area of no particular repute, where acres of land separated the houses and amateur spray paint on the road warned: SLOW! CHILDREN AND ANIMALS. On the way, his cell phone rang so incessantly that he finally shut it off.
His driveway wasn’t even paved, and as we pulled up in a cloud of dust, I looked curiously at the home he’d chosen. It wasn’t big, but somehow rambling, built of weathered wood, with old sash windows with little scrapes on them from many cleanings. A live oak tree bent toward the roof as though it wanted to enfold the whole house. There was a deck with a hot tub in it, but no landscaping. The grass that surrounded the house was natural. A Volkswagen Corrado, clearly in mid-repair, stood at a small distance. I observed all this with a growing sense of familiarity.
For as shy as he’d been about bringing people to the Mooney home of his adolescence, CJ had chosen to re-create it here. It wasn’t until I’d known the adult CJ awhile that I understood. He had to live a certain kind of life down in the city: the velvet-rope-and-VIP-room life, riding in Navigators with the talent and their entourages, getting drive-thru from In-N-Out Burger after midnight and washing it down with Cristal. But when he was ready to buy a home, CJ chose a place where he could be who he really was: someone who listened to baseball games on the radio while working on cars with his hands.
“Nice,” I said. It was inadequate.
“I took just about the first thing the agent showed me,” he said. “I just wanted someplace quiet.” He watched a red-tailed hawk wheel overhead a moment, then went on. “Look, I’d like to stay here tonight while you get settled in, but I have dinner plans, and actresses can be touchy about things like broken dates.”
“My, an actress. Aren’t you something?”
“Hey,” he said, “I’m gonna ask you to think twice about how you talk to someone who walked away from a meeting with two very big record label executives to drive across town to the Greyhound station to collect your stranded ass.”
“I know,” I said, chastened.
He smiled at me in the old way I remembered, eyes crinkling. “I’m glad you’re here,” he said. “It’s going to be good, having you around.”
“Thanks,” I said, “but it’s only for a while, until I get on my feet.”
“No hurry,” CJ said.
“No, I understand that you bought this place so you could have some privacy,” I said.
He looked at me as if I’d said something incomprehensible, and said, “Not from you.”
I lived with CJ a month, long enough to find three part-time jobs-none of them particularly interesting or challenging, but the checks cashed fine. When I’d saved enough, I put down money on a tiny studio in town. CJ tried to talk me out of leaving, and I was reluctant, too, but I couldn’t have a life that was just an offshoot of his. And I wasn’t going far, just down into the city. So he yielded and helped me move.
I wouldn’t realize until later-when I had to leave-how much Los Angeles had gotten under my skin. Mostly I’d sat out the longstanding Love L.A./Hate L.A. debate. When I’d chosen to go there after leaving West Point, my decision had been fairly arbitrary. I didn’t have roots in Lompoc anymore. Julianne had moved away during my plebe year at West Point, and even the Mooneys, CJ’s parents, had done something quintessentially Californian: They’d sold their real estate at a profit and bought a bigger, cheaper place out of state, in Nevada’s Washoe Valley. But L.A. was the nearest big city to where I’d grown up. My feeling had been, I suppose if I’m from anywhere, I’m from here.
Later, if you’d asked me why I liked it there, I’d have given you everyone’s general paean to L.A.: the open streets and the palm trees and the laid-back vibe, et cetera cetera cetera. The truth was simpler: L.A. just felt like a place for people like me, young people raised on high-fructose corn syrup, long on energy and short on a sense of history.
I doubt I would have approved if I’d moved straight there after high school. I’d gone to West Point to test myself against hardship and privation, to see how little comfort and pleasure I could get by on. But I came home in a very different frame of mind. Then, I wanted what I called omnia gaudia vitae, all the pleasures of life, and L.A. was the place for that. Vietnamese iced coffee, British Columbian marijuana, Colombian cocaine, French film noir, Israeli krav maga training-you could get it all here, and if it was all imported, like the water supply and the workforce and even the iconic palm trees, who cared?
I told CJ when I moved into town that we’d still see each other all the time, and we did. He opened the doors to the West Hollywood clubs he was always waved into, and I spent many nights drinking and dancing, sometimes in his immediate company, other times only knowing that he was somewhere in the same vast and densely packed venue. I wasn’t ever lonely. CJ’s circle of friends, friendly acquaintances, and hangers-on was enormous, and they were always willing to share space at their tables, their drugs, even their bodies. I left footprints on the windows of a few Navigators and Escalades owned by guys I didn’t know very well.
Some mornings I dreamed of the clean citadel of West Point and woke up first disoriented, then unhappy. I chased that feeling away with strong coffee or a joint, or sometimes a hard workout.
I attained something of a reputation in CJ’s crowd as that mostly quiet girl with the birthmark and the occasional hair-trigger temper. From time to time CJ had to drag me away from a vending machine I was trying to bust up for taking my money or a bouncer twice my size I felt provoked by. Sometimes CJ had to wrap his arms around me from behind and negotiate over my shoulder, telling people that I was on mood-altering meds or just getting over a bad breakup.
Later, when I apologized to him, he always said, pleasantly, not to worry about it. Some of that was CJ being CJ, so mellow that one friend of his joked that his adrenal glands secreted some kind of cannabinoid substance instead of adrenaline. But I think CJ chalked most of it up to my washing out of West Point. It’s amazing the shit people will let you get away with if they think it’s coming from a place of anger and low self-respect.
Nonetheless, I always told him I was sorry-often too abjectly, because I was usually still drunk or high or stoned and therefore able to access my feelings in a way I couldn’t when sober. “I love you,” I’d tell him. “I’d kill anyone who’d try to hurt you.”
“Those are lovely sentiments; go sleep them off,” he’d say.
But underneath the fevered language, I meant it. The way I thought of it was, I had been born an only child, but in time, the gods took pity and gave me a brother and a sister.
three
The sister was Serena Delgadillo.
Technically, Serena and I went back to the seventh grade together. We’d both been chosen for an academic-achievement program called ReachUP, which singled out promising students in rural or disadvantaged schools in hopes of helping them compete with middle-class students at college admissions time. We’d also both played on the girls’ soccer team that year, alongside each other as forwards. No question, she was better than me. The daughter of migrant workers, she had learned soccer on the hard brown fields of California’s inland valleys from her four older brothers and other immigrant kids, all futbol fanatics.
We weren’t friends, but we were friendly. That had been a big step for both of us at the time. Like me, Serena was skinny then, with Kmart clothes and hair her mother cut in harsh black bangs directly across Serena’s forehead. It made her self-conscious except on the soccer field, where she lost her inhibitions, becoming speedy and fluid and exuberant.
Then, in eighth grade, something changed. Serena dropped out of ReachUP and grew distant. She began styling her hair in the high, lofty wall of bangs that hadn’t quite gone out of style among Latina girls back then, an
d I only saw her with other Mexicans in the hallways. We sat next to each other in study hall, but she only spoke to me once, to poke me in the shoulder and say, “What’s that?” She’d been looking at the Latin flashcards I was reviewing instead of doing my schoolwork.
“It’s Latin,” I’d said.
She’d flipped through a few cards. “Weird,” she’d said, shrugging, and had gone back to her homework.
The next year, Serena was gone. That was a common thing. Farmworker families are nomadic; the population of our school was always in flux.
I forgot her pretty quickly.
In my early days in L.A., after moving down from CJ’s place, I was broke. The one luxury I allowed myself was food from cheap ethnic places. That month, I’d discovered pho, the Vietnamese noodle soup made with oxtail and rare beef. Late one Saturday afternoon, I was waiting in line to get my fix, when I saw that I was being watched by a tall young Latina.
She was good-looking and slender, her cargo pants hanging off sharp hip bones, braless under a strappy tank shirt, her hoop earrings so large you could have worn them as bracelets. She had straight hair, not quite black, pulled back off her face, and almond-shaped eyes. When I caught her looking at me, she didn’t smile or say “Sorry” like a lot of people would have.
“I think I know you,” she said thoughtfully.
“Okay,” I said. She wasn’t familiar to me, but I’ve learned not to argue with people about that. When you’ve got a birthmark on your face, people can recognize you long after they’ve changed beyond identifiability for you.
