Christopher Sorrentino - Trance

“You think you could find us a cheap van or station wagon? Just buy it from whoever?”

“Well, I could look around.”

“Just need to run, that’s all.” Cinque reached into his pocket and pulled out a wad of cash. He counted out ten twenties, two fifties, and two hundreds.

Charles Gates suddenly had this great entrepreneurial idea: He’d call around to friends on behalf of the SLA, offering fifty dollars for the afternoon’s use of their car, and then offer copious apologies when the SLA disappeared with it. It was such a sweet idea he started right away, walking to the pay phone down at Sam’s. Hey, man, I said it’s for the SLA! No takers, though, and they all gave him shit about it. Think I’m lying? He walked back to the house, fingering the cash in his pocket, to tell Cinque he’d try again later. He’d hold on to the money, right, just in case he had to make a deal quick.

MABE’S, NORMANDIE AVENUE

Mmmmm-hmm. So I say, I’m a tell you what you need to do, girl. You better watch your mouth. Mmmmm-hmm. ’Cause I don’t want to hear that. ‘Cause that’s some feeb excuses. ’Cause that’s bull . I never had no problems getting in the movies. I hand them they money and they say, Come on in , Sharifa, same as everbody else. And she say, she say, Why you don’t believe me? See my ticket? Show me some raggedy-ass stub she be picking up off the ground somewheres. This here girl a genius of deception, I tell you. Mmmmm-hmm. And she goes, they say I dressed in-appropriate. And I say of course you are dressed in-appropriate ly . You dressed inappropriate ly in here. You dressed in-appropriately when you be going down to the church. You dressed in-appropriately when you lying on your sofa at your house. You are a in-appropriate person by in large, you knowm saying? That’s why my momma tell me not to book around with you when we kids. That’s why you pregnant when you eighteen, fool. Mmmmm-hmm. That’s why you gots four kids and no money. Mmmmm-hmm. But they let anybody in the movies. They let Woolsy in and he a screamer. They let gang kids in and they be ripping on the seats with they knives. And I give you five dollars to be taking my kids to the matinee, and I want to know where it’s at and what you did with them when they wasn’t at the movies like I said. I’m sorry, I just saying the truth ’cause God don’t like a liar and God don’t like ugly. That’s what I tell her.

Honey, what can I get you?

Just coffee? Honey, you look hungry!

All right, all right, just axing ’cause you look like you need a real meal.

In there. Uh-huh.

Damn, they got a what you call, Hamburger Hamlet, right up near the Forum if she only want to eat where the white people at.

Well, if she just need to take a pee, I let her. Not like some cheap white restaurant lady.

In the ladies’ room Yolanda raises her shirt and untapes the note from her abdomen. Stiffly, she lowers herself to her knees to peer under the sink and, feeling satisfied that conditions are OK under there (on the basis of criteria she invents on the spot), she tapes the message to the underside of the basin. She rises and dusts off her knees and then leaves the room. She places a quarter next to the steaming cup of coffee and is about to walk out, but then she stops, fixing the coffee with sugar and plenty of milk to cool it. She drinks it down quickly, feeling upon her the eyes of the counter woman and her single customer. She tells herself that she feels closer to these people every day. She is trying hard to love them.

Meanwhile …

It is 8:55 and a police sergeant lifts a bullhorn to his lips.

“To those inside the house at Eight thirty-three West Eighty-fourth Street, this is the Los Angeles Police Department. We want you to come out of the front door with your hands up. We want you to come out immediately. You will not be harmed.” He lowers the bullhorn and looks at the device while he awaits a response, as if he expected to see smoke curling from it. One hundred twenty-five cops and federal agents are here, ready for a siege, ready to see blood rain from the poor shack they surround and fix their attention on, 125 law officers wearing jumpsuits and flak jackets, laid across rooftops with powerful scoped rifles trained on Prophet Jones’s hovel, concealed in the shrubbery with M -16s and tear gas canisters, crouched behind unmarked cars, all squired by dozens of members of the press, who stand back across the street with notepads and doughnuts and cardboard cups of tepid coffee. Their attention is beginning to wander. The LAPD commander on the scene notes this and imposes himself on the FBI supervisor, calling for immediate action. The agent agrees.

There is a ritual uneventfulness to what follows, the way that brutal and violent games intersperse bursts of outraged fury with prolonged and decorous procedural maneuvers. Four FBI men break from cover to dash toward the house, two covering with M-16s as the others fire Flite-Rite rockets bearing CS tear gas through the front windows of the building. Then all four men disappear again, to rejoin the waiting.

Five minutes later another team of four agents storms the house, breaking down the door and rushing in with rifles. The remaining lawmen and the press wait.

Then one of the agents emerges from the house, his gun put up, and removes his gas mask. He is supposed to be indignant — he says, “Shit!”—but he’s actually relieved to live another day.

CRENSHAW ACRES SHOPPING CENTRE, INGLEWOOD

So I’m out here with my staple gun and my flyers, going around and hoping for the best. They do run away sometimes and you just have to face that and I said to Ralph last night just before bed when I’d gone outside and called for her for a little while with no luck that you just have to face it. Cats aren’t the most domesticated of creatures, you know? It is the essence of their appeal if you ask me. They were in the wilds aeons after dogs had already made themselves right at home among man, because I suppose dogs had more of a function in a hunter-gathery kind of culture like they liked back then. Then of course people started growing things and storing grain and before you know it you have mice and rats getting into the grain and that’s just not good at all for the good people of the Fertile Crescent or wherever it was and so cats sort of insinuated themselves and the people looked the other way and then the next thing you know they’re carving these big statues of them and praying to them! And from there you get the common house cat that we all know. But common as they are, you become oh so attached to them. The last one I had, it was all over at seven, kidney problems, that’s how the males go. I’ll never have another male again; it breaks your heart. But we moved recently, not too very far from where we were, I suppose she may have gotten confused. Somebody over there is probably feeding her, and I’ll be heading over there with my flyers and my staple gun, and then I’ll be off to the Humane Society to check the binders and see if anyone’s reported finding her. There’s always a little hope.

Young man, do you need to get in here? I don’t mean to be blocking your path but as I’m telling this young lady here I want to cover this bulletin board nicely because — oh, excuse me!

Some people just aren’t very nice these days. Well, I don’t let it bother me, though I do hope that it’s a nice sort of person who spots her. I’ve heard terrible stories about vivisectionists, do you know, who slice open living animals for science — science they call it! — they roam around looking for lost pets to take to USC for secret experiments. It’s too horrible to even think about! So I won’t.