Jodi Compton: Hailey's War

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 not 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.”