Сьюзен Стрейт: Orange County Noir

History seems slow in the making until we stop for a second and look back on things. Then the past hits the present like a bullet and we all dive for cover.

I first set foot in Orange County half a century ago. Our new Tustin tract home cost $21,000. The dads wore showing-scalp flattops and skinny neckties. The moms sported hardened coifs and dorky glasses. There were orange groves falling fast and Santa Ana winds blowing hard and station wagons called the Country Squire and the Kingswood Estate rolling, kid-filled, down the suburban streets.

Now look at it. How that Orange County became the one we see today is a tale of migration and war and race and economics and even climate. In ways that are not difficult to see, the changes of Orange County have been the changes of the nation. We are all Orange County and it is us.

Like a beautiful woman, Orange County is easy to label but hard to understand. Gone are the orange-packing houses and the white Republican demographics and the four half-gallons of bottled milk left cold on your porch early in the morning. Gone is the John Birch Society. Gone too are Leary and the Brotherhood of Eternal Love.

But it is often easier to list what is gone than to truly see what is now here. How do we define these 3.1 million souls? Who gets to define them?

Sometimes it’s good to let our artists and writers be our eyes and ears. That’s part of their job. Sometimes they really get it right. Sometimes they can see around the corners. You can read Kem Nunn’s Tapping the Source. You can watch Orange County , or listen to Richard Stekol or No Doubt.

And you can read the book you are now holding in your hands.

Here are fourteen stories about this intriguing and somehow ineffable locale. Orange County through noir eyes? Why not? There’s a dark side to most places and certainly the names Ramirez and Kraft and Famalaro haven’t slipped your mind. Noir writers are bent toward the darkness, so don’t expect the Orange County in these pages to be quite as sunny as it thinks it is.

But noir writing has its own brand of humor too, and I can foresee a grin or two as you read about a deranged security guard at Disneyland (where else?), or a thirty-something woman who trades in her penniless but hot boy-toy for a paunchy Orange County Republican who can provide her with the good life in east Costa Mesa.

You’ll see some of Orange County’s wonderful diversity on display in these tales. You’ll see an Orange County that looks very little like it did a few short decades ago. You’ll meet insiders and outsiders, power brokers and wannabes, rich and poor, the sacred and the profane.

They’re all out there, whatever there really is. That’s up to you to decide.

Enjoy the black orange.

Coincidence that I was born the same year Disneyland opened and Charlie “Bird” Parker died. A lot of things begin and a lot of people die in any given year. But those two events have stayed with me — given the accident of occurring in that particular year — and they provide a hint as to how we arrive at this collection of all-new, tough, unblinking stories in Orange County Noir .

As everybody probably knows, Disneyland is located in Orange County, the city of Anaheim specifically. When I was a kid growing up in South Central Los Angeles, what I knew of life behind the Orange Curtain — beyond bugging my dad to take me to the theme park — was nil. None of my relatives lived there, nor did my folks have friends in the area. Except for going to Walt’s Adventureland or Knott’s Berry Farm in Buena Park, all I knew was that getting to Orange County was too long a trip on the freeway for a nine-year-old anticipating the thrill of riding the Matterhorn roller coaster and realizing the birthright of Southern Californians of driving a car — at least for a few minutes solo on the Autopia.

Now, I’d heard of the Beach Boys and associated their songs of the endless summer with the surfers I’d seen on TV piloting those majestic waves down in Orange County (even though it turned out those guys grew up in the South Bay area of Los Angeles). By the time I was a teen, I finally understood the chuckles my dad and his friends had over beers when they joked about not letting the sun go down on them in Orange County, “where all them Birchers are.” Referring, I’d find out, to the ultraconservative, anti — civil rights John Birch Society.

Time and the social evolution of the Southland have brought change even to vast Orange County with its forty-some miles of coastline. I was recently told by a resident of Newport Beach, one of the tonier enclaves of the county, that her district, which launched ex — pro quarterback Jack Kemp to office, went for Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential race.

Because and beyond being a GOP stronghold, Orange County brings to mind McMansion housing tracts; massive shopping centers with their own zip codes where Pilates classes are run like boot camp and real-estate values are discussed at your weekly colonic; and ice-cream parlors on Main Street, U.S.A., side by side with pho shops and taquerías. Los Angeles has been and continues to be explored as the place where noir, if it wasn’t spawned there, sure as hell flowered. But what about its neighbor to the south? What secrets do Orange County’s denizens have to tell... or hide?

This volume, like coming in from a sudden storm and then being gripped by a heavy riff from Bird’s horn, takes you on a hard-boiled tour behind the Orange Curtain. Among those you’ll meet are a reclusive rock star who has lived way too long in his twisted head, a crooked judge who uses the court for illicit means, a cab driver prowling the streets with more than the ticking meter on his mind. In Orange County Noir , cultures clash, housewives want more than the perfect grout cleaner, and nobody is exactly who they seem to be.

Enjoy.

Gary Phillips

Los Angeles, CA

January 2010

Santa Ana Narrows

See, right now, if the phantom was roaming around like he did back in 1977, haunting the freeway and busting up people’s cars, stealing food — damn, he even stabbed a deputy in the neck! — somebody would shoot him. No hesitation. Blow him away. A cop. Hell, a driver. Everybody’s got guns in their cars. The freeway’s a battlezone. People follow each other off the ramps and pull out automatic weapons. People lean out the window and shoot a nine like Grand Theft Auto . People die every day just for cutting each other off or throwing up a finger.

I almost shot the phantom thirty years ago, when he came out of that hole. His hair all dusty and his shirt in rags. I had my gun out. I thought I would have to kill him, but I waited to see if he remembered. If he’d look at my face and shout it out, what he’d seen me do. If he said it out loud, my life was over.

I saw him just before the rock hit my windshield. It was twilight. Strange word. My father always called it ocaso . In school they told us twilight, dusk, evening. Before night.

That’s the only time the phantom ever appeared. A shadow lifted up and twisted for a second, in the center divider of the freeway. I was heading west, toward Santa Ana, and on my left this movement — like when you have a nightmare as a kid and you can’t see the guy’s face, the guy chasing you.