Random Thoughts from LA


I arrived in Los Angeles July 5th by way of Orange County, where I'd chilled the previous late afternoon and evening with my parents in Orange County. Life behind the Orange Curtain is much like life in my present digs, sans the population and the multitude of strip malls and housing developments everywhere: it's a Republican stronghold, and pretty solidly Caucasion, but that's changing rapidly. Lots more Hispanic and Black people now, intermingling with the ever present Asian population. Caucasions are going to be the new minority there very soon, but those of you in fly-over country won't know that from watching the latest episode of The O.C.

We chilled in our old hood in Pasadena; saw friends in Burbank (Del and Sue of Dark Delicacies fame, and Mike McCarty, FX wizard of KNB). Mike took us on a tour of the KNB facilities, primarily to show my wife and daughter. The girl-child dug the Narnia stuff; the Wife dug the assortment of corpses lining the warehouse shelves, which are labeled appropriately (burned corpses, dessicated corpses, etc).

The girl-child had been bugging me to see Hollywood for months, so I obliged. It wasn't enough that we spent most of our time in the Valley, which is where 'Hollywood' conducts much of its business anyway. No, she had to see the real Hollywood. As in, Hollywood Boulevard and the Hollywood Sign. Not having ventured into Hollywood proper since I left Los Angeles (with the exception of a brief stay with Dave Schow in '06), I was unprepared for the glitzy schlock Hollywood Boulevard had become. It was like walking in Disneyland. Where were the bag ladies pushing their shopping carts of junk up the Walk of Fame? Where were the mohawked punks hanging out at storefronts begging for spare change? The skinny dudes strolling down the street carrying giant boom-boxes on their shoulder? They were nowhere to be found; instead, it was wall-to-wall tourists, gawking at Britney Spears's star on Hollywood Boulevard.

Grauman's Chinese was still cool (I refuse to call it Mann's), but the Kodak Theater, which sits next to it, was the worst of the abomination that has become Hollywood. I don't think I even saw the theater; what I saw resembled a suburban multi-level shopping mall, complete with chain boutiques and fast food outlets.

I suppose the responsible parent would rejoice at this, not wanting to expose their offspring to the dregs of society that used to permeate the Boulevard. My kid wouldn't have noticed the bag ladies and the punks if we'd landed in the Hollywood I knew, circa 1979-1997, which were the years I spent a goodly portion of my time either walking the streets, slumming in bars to see various bands, or watching movies in various theaters that once lined Hollywood Boulevard. I even used to buy my clothes in Hollywood. No, she still would've thought the various stars embedded in the sidewalk on Hollywood Boulevard, and the foot/handprints of various actors encased on cement in front of Grauman's were cool.

Hey, what can I say? She's my kid.

So while the girl-child enjoyed her "Hollywood" experience, I was a little let down. The Ripley's Museum, which I'd never been to and the girl-child wanted to see, was cool. You couldn't see the Hollywood sign from Hollywood and Vine street (too smoggy), and by the end of the day the wife and girl-child were too tired to venture into the hills to get a glimpse of the goddamn thing. So we high-tailed it for Pasadena.

Monday saw us back behind the Orange Curtain again. Had dinner one night with Jamie LaChance. Saw my sister and her kids, and generally hung out and relaxed for a change.

Thursday I drove us to the old neighborhood to show the girl-child my really old stomping grounds. My elementary school. My middle school, and high school. Where I hung out as a kid. The fence that surrounded my high school had been replaced by this huge monstrocity that makes it impossible for scaling should today's youth need to ditch school for the day. I was horrified at this.

The house I grew up in had been retrofitted and refurbished to the point where I didn't recognize it. Much of the houses and surrounding businesses had seen similar changes. What I remembered of my old neighborhood existed in my memories, with a few familiar landmarks sprinkled every other building.

Other landmarks I saw on that trip were those I utilized in some past works of fiction.

In 2006 I published a novel called Bully. Much of the novel takes place in the old neighborhood of Gardena, California. The home of Raul Valesquez was based on two houses, one belonging to an auto mechanic who lived with his blended family of wife and four kids, and a second house four blocks north of me which was occupied by a family of alcoholics. The character of Raul is loosely based on the youngest son of this latter family. While the real-life Raul was not a serial killer, he was a terrifying figure to legions of kids in the early eighties and his home life, as described in Bully, was pretty accurate, with the exception of the prostitution/drug ring and the police protection that is depicted in the story.

When I wrote the novel I drew on elements of both families and my vast knowledge of true crime to create a scenario that proved to be a mixture of danger and dispair, but ultimately I was asking myself a simple question: whatever happened to the real people behind the inspiration of Bully?

We drove by the first house. It appeared unchanged. The people that lived there in my youth had been drug dealers and I'd known the youngest son, who I will call Larry. Larry was a good kid, but I knew his home life was troubled. He was a foster kid, and it was rumored his foster parents beat him. Larry hung out with two other kids who I will call Danny and Richard, the three of them being pretty inseperable. They'd get high, mostly at Richard's house.

Richard was the youngest of four boys who lived in the second house I've just described with the family of alcoholics, and it was Richard who I based Raul Valesquez's character on. Richard was three years younger than me, and I went to school with his brother, Ralph, who dropped out in the tenth grade. Unlike Richard, Ralph was a nice guy when I knew him (back in the fifth grade he gave me the nickname 'Batman', due to my penchant for Batman comic books). He never let on to the trouble at his house, but of course we all heard the rumors of the heavy drinking and neglect, of the physical and verbal abuse, of the dysfunction. The family had been living there for years, since the late 1960's by my estimation. Their house was the only blight on what was (then) a typical cozy, working class neighborhood.

I moved away from that neighborhood but had friends who lived down the street, and over the years I'd hear anecdotes. The mother eventually died, of what, I'm not certain. Ralph later succumbed to alcoholism and drug addiction, and I'd see him on my occasional ventures to the neighborhood to visit friends--he became a total waste-case. Richard spent most of the late 1980's into the middle 1990's in Chino Prison on attempted murder. And then ten years ago at my friend Stephen's wedding I heard what I'd been expecting to hear for a long time: having been released from prison, Richard finally met his maker courtesy of a single shot from a homeowner's handgun during a break-in. As for the rest of the family, I had no idea what ever became of them.

I found out that Thursday when we drove by.

Curiosity made me glance in the direction of the house as we drove by and my first thought on seeing its dilapidated frame was I can't believe they still live there. Then, as we crossed the intersection I saw two homeless guys on the corner. A dark-skinned man with unruly bushy black hair in a white t-shirt was standing over a rail-thin white guy who was lying on his back, blood covering his face, while a bicycle lay near the curb. My first impression was the man had fallen off his bicycle and hit his head on the pavement.

The wife noticed this too and we pulled a U turn and drove back. As we pulled to the curb we saw that the guy on the ground was unconscious, his face covered in blood. Both men were dirty and had no teeth. The wife asked white t-shirt if they need help. "Call 911," he said. "He fell off his bike."

On first glance that's what it looked like. Lying on the ground near the handlebars of the bike were grocery bags filled with empty plastic bottles; it looked like the unconscious guy had been scouring the area for empty bottles to recycle. While I called 911, the wife got out of the car to see if immediate medical attention was necessary (it wasn't; the guy was unconscious, but breathing, and the bleeding had already stopped). The first cop was on the scene within a minute, followed less than five minutes later by the EMTS. And the neighbors. Around this time a black guy came by walking a bicycle. Strung up on the handlebars of his bike were two bags filled with more empty plastic bottles. Like the guy lying on the sidewalk, and the guy in the white t-shirt, the black guy was dirty and had no teeth and appeared homeless. He parked himself by his comrade in mange and at one point tried to take the fallen man's bike back to the house where Ralph used to live. I had a sinking feeling that white t-shirt was related to my old childhood classmate Ralph.

The more I was looking at the scene, the more white t-shirt's story wasn't adding up. I got a better look at the unconscious guy now. He had longish graying hair that was dirty, as was his beard, and he was bleeding from the nose and the mouth. He had been bleeding pretty badly from the back of the head where he'd hit, judging by the amount of blood. He was lying on his back when we came across him, and the bike was lying a good five feet away near the curb. No way he fell off it and sustained those injuries. The wife later told me both of them were in the bag and it just didn't make sense that a drunk on a bike would tumble off it and cause that much damage to himself. It looked more to me that they'd gotten into some kind of argument and white t-shirt had popped the other guy in the face, causing him to fall back and strike his head.

White t-shirt had seemed familiar to me, and this was verified by one of the neighbors I was talking to, who identified him as Randy, an older brother of Ralph. "So they still live there?" I asked.

"Yeah, the house was passed on to them after their father died," the neighbor said. "House is paid for, and an older brother pays the taxes on it and Randy, Ralph, and their friends live in it. All they do is drink. They don't eat, and they have no running water or electricity. They pretty much collect stuff to recycle so they can buy more booze. Sometimes they get desperate and drink rubbing alcohol. This kind of stuff," He waved a hand towards the battalion of EMTs, Ambulances and police cars that had gathered at the scene. "It happens here all the time." He brought up another character, a guy who I loosely based the character of David Bartell on in Bully. Only difference was the real-life Bartell had not become a cross-dressing tranny. The only thing that shocked me was that he was still alive.

As the neighbor filled us in on what had been a familiar story to me even when I lived there, a car pulled up. "That's Ralph," the neighbor said. By then the fire truck, EMT, and ambulance had carted the skinny homeless guy to the hospital, and only one police car remained on the scene. White t-shirt and his friends had retreated back to their cave. Ralph came out to take a look at the spot the skinny guy had fallen, then retreated back inside. I barely recognized him. He didn't look as decrepit as his brother, or the other two homeless guys. He never glanced my way, and I'm sure if he did he wouldn't have recognized me, either. And I had no intention of crossing the street to ask him if he remembered me. Thirty years of drugs and booze had probably obliterated his childhood memories.

In the days that have passed I've wondered what scenario could be worse? My fictional take on the characters I created in Bully, or the real-life people they were inspired from?

The seeds of Bully came from a simple idea: what if the murder of a kid who was the neighborhood bully wasn't as open and shut as the police made it out to be? In my novel, a suspect was quickly arrested and convicted. I won't spoil the rest of the novel for those of you who haven't read it, but that was the basic idea. When it came, I ran with it. I set the flashback scenes in the late seventies, and because it was easy to draw on that time period (having lived through it), I felt it would lend more verisimilitude to draw certain elements from my life and memories of that time period to the narrative. I did not come from a broke home but I had friends who did, so it was easy to draw on that. I was also an avid skateboarder back then (I was pretty good at it, too). Therefore, the characters of Danny Hernandez, Bobby Whitsett, and Jerry Valdez were easy to write about. There's elements of me sprinkled in all three characters. While the characters of Raul, David, and Raul's home-life are fictitious, their backgrounds were partially inspired by the people I've just described.

When I finished writing Bully I thought nothing could be worse in real life than what I put my characters through.

And I suppose, in a way, what I put Raul and his brothers through was much worse.

I had no idea the guys I drew on for inspiration were still alive. Not to mention in worse shape than they'd been when I knew them.

If you ask me, they're dying a slow death.

Who knows what kind of real-life horrors they might be experiencing? Or even worse, what they might be putting others through?


JFG