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“There’s a new Nissan coming out called The Cube,” Conan said. “You can only get it in Japan. But who wants a square car? The Cube. Now there’s an aerodynamic concept. Nissan makes these trucks you can hacksaw the catalytic converter off in three minutes. I can’t walk past one without stealing the muffler. I should sue the manufacturer for forcing criminal behavior on me.”
great character
Smokey could hot-wire any vehicle. “She would steal a car, we’d party in it, wipe off the prints, and dump it.” Once they were in a fight and Sammy was trying to buy heroin at the hamburger stand in Compton. Smokey came revving up in this horribly loud cement truck, the mixer on the back revolving full tilt. Sammy yelled over the grinding noise for Smokey to shut it off. “I could not score with a cement mixer next to me, so I start walking away, to lose her and that noisy thing, and Smokey’s driving it the speed of my walking. No dealer was going to sell to me, creating a scene like that. I’m yelling turn it off, the what’s it called, the spinning thing, and she’s going, ‘I don’t know how.’ All she could do was put it in gear and drive it. We were yelling at each other and finally I got in so we could fight in private. We go driving around in this cement mixer, and we’re starting to get along. I’m not mad anymore. The driver had left his lunch box on the seat. I opened it thinking I’d drink his juice and eat his sandwich, whatever he had in there, and inside the lunch box is the dude’s wallet. Smokey and I got in a fight all over again. She had this crack idea that because she hot-wired the cement mixer, the wallet was hers. Nuh uh. Sorry. I took the cash and got out. Our relationship had a lot of drama to it like that. Different ideas on things.”
i love this scene
They sewed sandbags on death row. Nothing else. They had six machines and they sewed sandbags for flood control. If you see a pile of sandbags along the side of a California road, they have been touched by the hands of our celebrities.
Payment is five cents an hour, minus fifty-five percent restitution, and the work is repetitive and lacks the satisfaction of making even a single finished thing. They are not completed. They still have to be filled.
Who completes the bag? My guess is men. Men fill it with sand, and close up the top.
The lawyer had given me the phone number of child welfare, which he said might tell me the name of Jackson’s case manager, but I could only contact people with a Global Tel Link account. I wrote letters and tried not to go insane. I sent one to Eva’s old address, and one to her at her father’s address, but I had little faith that either would reach her. I called Jimmy Darling, but the call did not go through, since he didn’t have Global Tel Link. I told myself if I ever got out, I’d blow up Global Tel Link.
a criminal racket
Gordon went over the bridge to San Francisco alone, ate at a Vietnamese restaurant downtown that his student Romy Hall had told him about. Not that she was recommending it to him. She listed it among places she missed. The cook, she’d said, has this funny habit. After he uses them, he bangs his cooking tongs twice, and tugs on his shirt. His smock has a big grease splotch where he does that. And his father sits chain-smoking and chopping meat, upstairs, where the bathrooms are. The cook was there, on Gordon’s visit. He banged the tongs twice and pulled on his shirt. The father was upstairs, chain-smoking and chopping a huge pile of meat.
kind of love this
Laura Lipp walked into the bathroom. We stopped talking and stared. She looked like the Exorcist. She’d snuck punch from us. She was loaded.
“I’m from Apple Valley,” she said.
“We know,” everyone shouted. Sammy stood to push Laura out of the bathroom.
“But I never knew. I didn’t listen. Didn’t hear. I never understood what that means. The valley of apples. It’s about temptation. Right? Sin. See? Poisoned fruit. Oh, it feels so good,” she said, “to have a place to put your anger, to punish someone like you’ve been hurt. That is the truth and every woman like me knows it. The one who hits her child with a hanger or a belt or who shook a baby, it’s all the same. You do it because it feels good. They won’t say. They won’t tell you how it is. They don’t have the courage. I’m telling you. The devil goes in us and we do it to feel good. I wish they had stopped me but no one did. God, He stopped the hand of Abraham. He intervened. But where was He when I needed him? He wasn’t there. No one helped me. No one.” She stumbled like a blind person, kneeled on the floor on her hands and knees, and sobbed.
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I dreamed I had just won on The Price Is Right. There was a crushing sound of applause, cheers, and whistles when my name was called. It was a deafening waterfall of clapping and screaming. I was trotting toward the stage in this pounding noise, the cheers of the studio audience, when I woke.
The first one he looked up was Sanchez, Flora Martina Sanchez, whom the others called Button. Her case was all over the internet. Sanchez and two other teenagers had assaulted a Chinese college student near the USC campus. He was premed, and the one allotted child his family was state-sanctioned to have. According to the confession Sanchez provided, the student had tried to “karate chop” her. All three kids mentioned in their confessions that the victim cried in a foreign language as they hit him with a baseball bat. The bat was green aluminum, Worth brand. It had on it fingerprints of the two boys and Sanchez. Sanchez had waved her Miranda rights. They all waved them, gave confessions, went to trial, got life without parole.
how is this not 'waived'?
The word violence was depleted and generic from overuse and yet it still had power, still meant something, but multiple things. There were stark acts of it: beating a person to death. And there were more abstract forms, depriving people of jobs, safe housing, adequate schools. There were large-scale acts of it, the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians in a single year, for a specious war of lies and bungling, a war that might have no end, but according to prosecutors, the real monsters were teenagers like Button Sanchez.
In the primitive part of the mind, violence was body-to-body, punching and clubbing and cutting. Those people went to prison. Were not offered any kind of mercy. Signed up for Gordon Hauser’s class. Did or did not do the reading.
After indulging in the difficult facts, he all at once grasped why these kids, Button and her friends, had killed the poor student and ruined their own lives.
The student was not a person to them. That was the reason. They would not have harmed someone they knew was a full person. He was alien to them, his fluency in Mandarin something the kids never considered.
“Did you ever see the green flash,” she asked him after class, “down at Ocean Beach?”
He had not, he told her. She explained that it was an optical effect at sunset, when rays from the top of the sinking sun turned green. She had never seen it either, she said.
“Are you sure it isn’t a story cooked up by the Irish drunks who live out there?”
She laughed. They were standing outside the school trailer. It was a June evening when the sun sets late. The light was gold from valley haze and low, slanting into her eyes, filling the irises.
Looking at someone who is looking at you was a drug as strong as any other.
“Move it, Hall!” an officer yelled. It was time for evening count. “Move your ass, now! I said go!”