Wendy Hornsby: Midnight Baby

The second book in the Maggie MacGowen series, 1993

Under a full moon and sodium-vapor streetlights, the girl was all silver: her pale cropped hair, her face with its heavy trowelling of matte makeup. The parts below her face, small, pushed-up bosom, narrow hips, muscled, serviceable legs, were banded in stretch jersey and black mesh and could have belonged to any undernourished, overused hooker between puberty and menopause.

At first, I had no attitude about her. Through the viewfinder of my video camera, she was no more than a photogenic image, good filmic contrast to the fat toddlers I had spent the day recording in Encino.

Guilt, or maybe the impulse of universal motherhood, I don’t know what, took over when I learned the girl was only six months older than my own daughter, Casey. That made her fourteen and a half.

My documentary project was nearly in the can, until I met her. Over-budget and overdue as always, but under control. Until I met her.

“I’ll do women,” she said, trying to keep her face away from my camera. “There’s no extra charge.”

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“You can call me Pisces.”

“Where do you live, Pisces?”

“Here,” she said, vaguely indicating MacArthur Park with her cigarette as a pointer. “I don’t like having my picture taken. Not for free.”

“How long have you been on the streets?”

She shrugged, glanced back at the red Corvette that had been following us along the curb as we walked. I couldn’t see the driver; he could have been a potential date, her pimp, or her dealer. Or an undercover cop doing his job. Whatever he was, when I turned the camera on him, he sped off.

I knew better than to get involved with the girl, just as I had known better than to finish off the bottle of wine the previous night before driving home, or to put myself into debt well into the next millennium to buy a house directly atop the San Andreas Fault. Wisdom and action don’t necessarily intersect on the same plane.

The street around us was a midnight carnival. Derelicts, hypes, a broad assortment of the ambulatory insane, spilled out of MacArthur Park like leakage from Pandora’s box, to panhandle or rage against internal demons, to look for another fix. Among them, skittery but tolerant, were little family groups of refugees to El Norte, whose lighted food wagons sold the same spicy meat pies I had bought once in San Salvador, Coca-Cola bottled in Mexico, and dysentery on a stick – crushed fresh fruit frozen in someone’s home kitchen.

It was April in L.A. The day had been warm, the usual monotonous seventy-six degrees, but the night had turned cold. My partner, Guido Patrini, had walked down to the corner to buy hot coffee from a torta vendor. I could see him leaning against the cart, practicing his Spanish while the coffee cooled. I felt impatient, not because I wanted the coffee, but because the neighborhood scared me shitless.

The girl, Pisces, wanted my attention again. Dramatically, she pulled out a dark lipstick and redid her full lips. “We can go in an alley, or there’s a motel on the corner if you want to get a room.”

“All I want is your face in my film,” I said, dropping the camera from my shoulder. “Pisces, are you okay out here?”

“You mean, do I have a man?”

“I mean, are you okay? Does your family know where you are?”

The way she shrugged reminded me of my daughter, Casey, who, if things were going according to plan, was at home tucked in her bed under the watchful care of our housemate, Lyle. In our house that lies over the San Andreas Fault.

The same red Corvette passed us again, tight by the curb and moving slowly. Pisces moved to put me between her and the street.

“I know a shelter just off Hollywood Boulevard,” I said to her. “It doesn’t cost anything to stay there and they won’t ask questions. If you want to get off the street tonight, I’ll drive you over.”

“And what do you get?” she smirked. “A free piece on the way?”

“All I get is peace of mind. I have a daughter your age. I wouldn’t want her to be out here unprotected, either.”

“Oh, a mother,” she taunted, but she didn’t walk away. “I remember mothers. They want you to wash behind your ears and eat your peas and carrots before they fuck you over.”

I hefted the camera back to my shoulder. “Tell me about home, Pisces.”

“I get paid by the half hour,” she said. “Even if all you want is talk.”

Four gunshots exploded into the night nearby – bam-bam, bam-bam, two pairs. I ducked. Everyone on the street ducked. And Pisces slipped into my arms.

Three punks in gang-banger uniform – black jeans and Raiders T-shirts – crashed through the shrubs around the park and scattered out toward the street, two of them dodging cars while the third lagged to fumble with something caught in his jacket. The police were right behind them, two sleek officers in pressed uniforms. They caught the laggard with a flying tackle and slammed his face to the sidewalk at the feet of a drunk, who didn’t even notice when the batons came out to beat the kid to quiescence.

The entire show took less than two minutes. When it was over, the police raised their handcuffed quarry by the elbows and quickstepped him down the block to the police substation in the park. One of the officers held a semiautomatic pistol he hadn’t had when he breached the shrubbery.

I have seen, through the lens of my camera, the conditions at home the Salvadorans fled from: chaos, hunger, war. As I looked around this carnival, I couldn’t see the improvement.

Guido walked up just then with two plastic cups of coffee. I traded him the camera for one of the cups.

“Took you long enough,” I said sharply, relieved to see him intact. “Did you have to harvest the coffee beans on the way?”

“I was trying to explain to this guy why he should start using paper cups.” He didn’t mention the shooting. “Shit, Maggie, don’t they know that plastic is killing us?”

“Maybe you should start bringing your own cup, Guido,” I said, blowing on my coffee, blowing off steam. “I’ll get you one you can hook to your belt loops. Better yet, I’ll get you a little solar-powered coffee maker you can carry around with you. You know, make your own, drink it right out of the pot. No, forget that. Just carry a bottle of water with you and some No Doz. Your body won’t know the difference. I read in Geographic how they’re burning the rain forests to plant coffee.”

“Always the smart-ass, Maggie,” Guido said.

“And you love it.”

He raised his cup to cover his grin.

Guido isn’t a very big man, about my height, five-seven or five-eight. He weighs maybe 130 pounds after a big lunch. He has that tight-wired intensity that little men often have; borderline hyper. I love having him work on film projects with me because of the energy he injects. Guido’s biggest professional problem is that while he’s a gifted filmmaker, he isn’t much of a salesman. You have to be both if you want to get funding to do independent investigative film projects. And that is my livelihood.

So Guido found himself a decent alternative: he teaches at the UCLA film school. It’s a good job, and he has made a name for himself. But he misses being out in the trenches so much that I have found him to be a bit of a slut – he never turns down my invitations to work.