Christopher Sorrentino - Trance

Yes, young man, I can, and I would. I’m just not so spry as a strong young fellow like you … oh, you look perfectly healthy to me, young man, your knee may have been injured once upon a time but I’m sure it’s healed completely, the young are lucky that way, but please do not push past me, I told you that I will move out of your way just as I did before, you have only to ask.

It gets worse and worse. It really does.

This is General Teko’s most daring move yet. The drop is on the community bulletin board of the Crenshaw Acres Shopping Centre-directly across from Mel’s Sporting Goods! It was while scouting out this drop, during their first day in L.A., that Teko had spotted Mel’s and made a mental note to return for supplies. There is some bright yellow police tape demarcating the crime scene in front of the store and plywood covering the plate glass panes that Tania’s bullets shattered. Otherwise things look pretty peaceful. The old biddy is staring daggers at him but looks away when he meets her eyes. He wonders whether she noted the relative incongruity of the LETTER TO THE PEOPLE amid the ads for dance lessons and used cars or if his photograph has been broadcast locally. The radio has already aired news reports that the police have surrounded a “bungalow in the ghetto area of Compton.” And here he is back at the scene of the skirmish. He looks at his watch. About five to nine.

1466 East Fifty-fourth Street

Some girls came to see Crystal. They wanted to know if she wanted her hair cornrowed. She was wearing it in a sort of sloppy natural and she and her two friends went in the bathroom and studied their hair in the mirror. One thing they knew was that it was one hot-ass day. They wanted their hair out of the way if this was how summer was going to be. Casually, one of the girls asked Crystal who were all the white people in the house.

“They the SLA,” said Crystal authoritatively. She poked out her lips and opened her eyes big. It was her mirror face.

“The who?” said one friend.

Cinque stopped in the hall and poked his head in the bathroom door.

“How you sisters doing?”

One girl, Cathy, rolled her eyes. The other, Rondella, asked him: “Who’s the SLA?”

They were going to start a revolution and get the police. Not necessarily in that order. They were recruiting too. Interested? The girls shook their heads.

Crystal decided not to get cornrows because Rondella, who was good at it, wanted three dollars. She walked out with the two girls when they left the house. While they stood on the shaded porch, two of the white girls came out. One carried a rifle, and the other had her pistol out and was cleaning it. Cathy and Rondella were bugging out. They went off to tell people what they’d seen at Sheila Mears’s house.

THE VOICE SAYS, “THERE’S a real scientific reason for this. The reason that you so often see dogs in older photographs with pipes and cigars and cigarettes in their mouth is because photographers found that they were extremely sensitive to nicotine, the dogs were.”

The radio host says, “Sensitive? As in, they responded to it as they might have to a drug?”

“What a load of crap,” criticizes Teko.

The Lincoln pulls up beside a newspaper vending machine, and Yolanda, who has been sprawled across the seat to avoid stepping on Ray Fraley, emerges to buy a copy of the Los Angeles Times. The fugitives are looking to buy a car.

“Yes. Exactly. Photographers found that it was extremely helpful in terms of getting the dog to stand still and in place during the somewhat lengthy process of exposing the plate. So it became a common thing.”

“And there was no comic intent? No sense of here, just for laughs let’s dress this dog in a top hat with a cigar?”

“So why,” says Teko, “didn’t they just mix some tobacco in with their food?”

Yolanda runs her finger down the column. BUICK ’69 EL’TRA; CHRYSLER, ’68—NEWPORT; FORD GALAXIE 500 ’69; PONTIAC CATALINA ’62.

“Too big,” says Teko. “Too much money. Check the foreign cars.”

“And yet frequently,” says the interviewer, “you do see these animals wearing human clothes in photographs of the time.”

“Yes, but there was no true scientific reason behind it, as with the tobacco items.”

DATSUN ’72; TOYOTA, ’71, CORONA; VOLKSWAGEN ’68 BUG.

Teko: “Anyways, how would they get enough nicotine to actually be, like, drugged , just from having an unlit cigar in their mouth?” No one answers him. “What a load of crap,” he concludes.

“Now we’ll be accepting some questions from our listeners at home.”

Teko stops again. Yolanda takes a handful of dimes and goes to make some calls from a pay phone. The three occupants of the car sit without speaking.

“Hello? My young cat is very active and seems to want to be played with, but the thing is whenever I try to invent a game for her, she just stalks away. What’s wrong?”

Yolanda makes a thumbs-up as she walks back from the pay phone. Leaning in the driver’s side window, she points to a circled ad for a ’63 Corvair offered for three hundred dollars. She then points to an address written in the upper margin of the page. All this silent business is so that Ray Fraley has no way of identifying the make and model car they buy. Teko nods.

“Am I on?” asks a man. “What I wanted to say is it seems to me that everyone knows about dogs, but nobody knows about horses. What I mean is that practically everybody can tell the difference between a poodle and a bulldog, but nobody knows the difference between, say, a quarter horse and an Arabian. Why?”

“I honestly don’t know, but I certainly agree with you. And the strange thing is that horses are such a big thing, quote unquote, today.”

1466 East Fifty-fourth Street

Jimmy Reddy knew Lillian Maybry liked her greens, so he picked some fresh that morning before the sun got too hot to be standing around like a old fool and made up a brown paper bag for her. He carried it over. Hot already, with one of them warm winds that put a angry in you.

Lillian was a nice girl and easy to look at. Something funny, though. The house seemed to be full of guns and white folks.

“Where’s Lillian at?” he asked a young white man who sat in the front room. The white man shrugged, so he carried his bag into the kitchen and set it down. A fat white girl came up and upped herself on tiptoe to peep in the bag, nice as you please.

“Hi,” she said. “Did you just pick those? They look fantastic.”

“Got ’em out my garden,” he said.

“How do you make them?” she asked.

“You just, you boil ‘em, or you can fry ’em up in a little oil, you know, till they get wilty.” He sort of backed out of the kitchen. That girl was wearing a gun.

The old man found Lillian in her bedroom, fully dressed but looking kind of groggy on the edge of the bed.

“Brought you some collard greens,” he said.

“That’s nice,” said Lillian. “Thank you.”

“What’s going on around here?” he asked. “Sort of funny-looking.”

“Oh, hi.”

Jimmy looked toward the open door and saw the fat girl again with a hard-looking white girl, hard-looking. She had a gun too.

“Is Lillian feeling OK?” asked the fat girl.

“Ask her yourself,” said Jimmy. “I got to go.”

YOLANDA CLEARS HER THROAT.

“Yo deseo la compra el azul coche que usted coloca el anuncio en el Tiempo de Los Angeles.”

“No entiendo.” The small woman stands on her doorsill, arms folded.

“¿El coche usted desea venta?” Yolanda tries again.

“¿Mi car? ¿Usted quiere intentarlo? You drive it?”