L.A. Blues Page 8

  “Look, Haviland, your mother’s not here to defend herself. Stop all this mommy bashing, and I’ll sit in for you—if it’s okay?”

  Haviland looked sheepish, but I recognized the look in her eye. A look I remembered having when Shirley would show up for parent-teacher conferences while I was growing up. It was one of relief. I guess we all just wanted our mothers—or a “Big Mama” or a foster mother or someone to fill that void.

  It turned out that Shirley and Haviland’s adoptive mother, Ilene Rosenthal, had been friends of sort, as much as blacks and whites would befriend each other in the 70s and 80s. I never met Haviland before because Shirley only attended Foster Care Association meetings or parties alone or with Chill. She didn’t want us to feel like foster children with a brand on us so she never even took us to foster care Christmas parties. She bought our Christmas and birthday gifts out of her own pocket. The rest of the county money was spent on our extracurricular activities and travel.

  Apparently, Shirley had met Haviland’s adoptive mother through the foster care and adoption association. I learned they both volunteered at McLaren Hall, and although Shirley had been to a function or two at Haviland’s home in Beverly Hills, she’d never invited Mrs. Rosenthal to our home.

  9

  Shirley attended the weekly family sessions with me, and she also visited me every weekend for the first three weeks.

  Although Venita said to me, “We get no do-overs,” in the AA program, we’re supposed to try to make amends with the people we have harmed while we were in our addiction. I didn’t even know where to begin.

  As part of making amends and also to get uplifted, I went to visit Shirley before I graduated from my program when I got my first and last weekend pass on my fourth week in the program.

  “Shirley, I’m sorry for all the lies I told you when I was in the twelfth grade and was skipping school with Chica.”

  Shirley laughed. “I knew about it. I remember both of your report cards saying you’d missed seventeen days of school in your senior year. I knew I sent both of you out to school every day.”

  “Moochie, believe it or not, we weren’t having sex. We were just hanging out, going to ditch parties.”

  “Well, it’s a good thing y’all were even able to graduate.”

  We both laughed. Shirley had always said we had to finish high school, so she did get to see us cross the stage and get our high school diploma.

  We wound up having a comfortable talk, our first woman-to-woman chat together. Afterwards, Shirley surprised me when she offered me the rental of her garage, which she had renovated and which was supposed to be her little art studio.

  “The rent is free until you find work,” Shirley said.

  “For real? Thanks, but I think I’ve got a way to make money that will be something I’d like to do.”

  “What is it?”

  “I’d like to become a private investigator. I have a case already—if I decide to take it.”

  After I told her about my plan to get my certification as a private investigator, I could tell she was pleased.

  “You know, that seems to be right up your alley. You can take all your police experience and use it that way. You’re my girl. I knew you’d land on your feet.”

  Her words of encouragement brought tears to my eyes and it built a new resolve within me. I became more determined to stay sober. Besides, I knew it would be easier to stay sober, living under Shirley’s watchful eye.

  I moved back in with my foster mother, and once again I was glad I had her there for me. I guess I was a part of the boomerang generation at thirty-four, and, although I didn’t like it, I really didn’t have another choice. I had little or no money at this point. I drank up all my pension while I was on my nine month binge. So what else could I do?

  I read that here on earth, we make our own heaven and hell. I’ll let you decide. Maybe I made my own hell when I was drinking. I was clean since I went into rehab, but it sure wasn’t heaven. I felt uncomfortable all the time. It wasn’t that I wanted another drink, it was just that I could see clearly now all the damage I did while drinking and it hurt like hell to look at it.

  I started my new life, living in a garage apartment that was only about a tenth as big as my condo in Venice, yet, for the first time in a long time, I had peace of mind. My living space included a living area, a let out bed, which doubled as a futon, a small kitchen area and a half-a-bath with a shower stall. I brought my new Bible, and AA’s Big Book. I decided not to buy a TV. Besides, I had my laptop, which I could download movies on if need be.

  I used to love to read, but I lost my books when I was evicted. I found a used copy of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, one of my favorites, at a garage sale to begin my new library. I also started back building my Urban Books library. I started with Carl Weber’s Big Girl series, and Ashley & JaQuavis’ Cartel series, Michelle McGriff’s Obsession 101 series, and Shelia Goss’s Hollywood series.

  I was stripped down to my bare essentials, yet I was swaddled in contentment—something I hadn’t had since I first became an officer.

  For a couple of months, I didn’t have a car. During that time I learned a lot since I would catch the bus or hoof it. L.A.’s homeless had increased not only in number, but also in the types of faces you saw. Many of them looked like they had been good workers until the economy started going bad. I never noticed this demographic as much when I was driving. Now I even saw how people had made makeshift homes in the city bus stops at each curb. I couldn’t sit on the bench and wait for the city bus because people had made their pallets and set up their grocery carts inside the shed.

  During treatment, we were told not to embark on a serious relationship because of our own issues. Our counselors said we should get a plant or a pet to take care of and see if we could keep it alive for two years or so.

  Well, after I graduated from the program and moved back in Shirley’s garage, we were coming from Vegas with Shirley, I stumbled on to this abandoned, injured ferret. We’d taken the kids to Circus Circus during the last week of the Christmas holiday and my first week home. I didn’t even play the slot machines since that’s not my vice—only drinking. I let out a little prayer afterwards. I passed my first hurtle. I managed to do Vegas without drinking. Instead, I took in a few movies since I used to be a movie buff before drinking had become my primary source of entertainment.

  Anyhow, this ferret was a mousey gray brown, looked part cat, part rat, part dog, and he reminded me of myself—a mongrel. I called him Ben, since he reminded me of the movie with the rat by the same name.

  After I took him to the vet, got his wounds patched up, along with shots and instructions, I was on my own. Each day Ben survived with my haphazard care, I felt like I was getting healed. Ben liked to climb into the cabinets. He had already been trained to the litter box. At night, I put him in a cage, or else I had a hard time finding him because he could squeeze into the smallest cracks. In a crazy way, I kind of bonded to this ferret, too. I swear he began to look at me with a light of recognition in his little beady eyes.

  Meantime, I was staying sober, as the old cliché says, one day at a time. I made my meetings every day, sometimes in different areas of L.A. A few days after I left the program, I received a call from Haviland on my fortieth day of sobriety. “I still want you to take my case.”

  10

  “Are you sure you want to do this?” I asked Haviland when we pulled up in front of Westside Nursing Home in Torrance.

  “Yes, it’s now or never.” Haviland pushed her shades on top of her head.

  “Okay. I’ll wait outside,” I said.

  Haviland was driving her Bentley. She had picked me up at a McDonald’s near Shirley’s house. I didn’t want her to know where I lived because I still didn’t trust her. Something about her was a little too unstable and sheisty for me.

  Haviland nodded and climbed out the car. I sat there, reflecting over the past few weeks.

  I shook my head at this serendip
itous turn of events. Who would’ve ever thought the upshot of meeting Haviland would be that she’d become my first case? Haviland stayed on my back so much that I went on and started a search for her birth mother. Within a couple of weeks, I found her birth mother, Jill McIntire, through her social security records, which I got through Alice Thomas, an old friend from the crime lab, who also had access to the records at the police department. It really wasn’t that difficult because Haviland went through an open adoption. Alice gave me Haviland’s original birth certificate, not the amended one for her adoption. It turned out her mother had never married so she was easy to find with her original surname.

  Personally, I thought Haviland was just too afraid to do the search herself because she was afraid of what she might find. She was afraid her mother would reject her. And although her birth mother didn’t reject her, sadly, Haviland did find bad news.

  We’d just left Haviland’s elderly great-aunt Matilda, who had raised her mother, Jill. She lived in a small bungalow in Cerritos. Although she looked surprised to see that Haviland was black, she appeared genuinely happy to meet her.

  “I always wondered what happened to the baby, but she would never talk about it, and she refused to let us talk about it.”

  When Haviland asked her great-aunt Matilda if she knew who her biological father was, the woman replied, “No. Jill never told us who the father was. We all knew, though, when you came out colored, that it had to be a Negro boy.”

  Over the course of our two hour visit, Matilda gave Haviland a list of her mother’s siblings and their phone numbers. She also gave her a lot of pictures of Jill when she was a child and a teenager. Jill, who resembled Angelina Jolie, had been a busty brunette with full lips. As we were leaving, her great-aunt Matilda even gave Haviland a big hug.

  So there we were, an hour later, at a nursing home, visiting her mother. Although her aunt didn’t tell her, Haviland found out the bad news on her own at the nursing home, which turned out to be a hospice center. At fifty-two, her mother Jill was dying from AIDS. From her police record, I surmised Jill contracted the virus through intravenous drug use and unprotected sex. She’d had a number of drug arrests for heroin possession and accosting and soliciting.

  When Haviland came out of the nursing home, her eyes looked like a rabbit’s they were so rimmed in pink, and wet. She was too overcome to talk. I let her weep quietly for a few minutes before I spoke.

  “Well?” I lifted my eyebrow.

  Haviland wiped her eyes. “I’m so excited and happy that I’ve found her. These are happy tears. My mom explained everything. Why she couldn’t keep me. She was only sixteen, and my father was black. Back then that was really taboo.”

  “Did she give you your father’s name?”

  “No. She said she didn’t want to share that with me.”

  Unfortunately, Jill was in the last stages of AIDS, when they reunited. However, she had purchased an insurance policy years earlier when she was healthy and had named Haviland as the beneficiary, because the adoption had been open and Jill knew Haviland’s given adoptive name.

  Within a few weeks of Haviland meeting her mother, Jill passed away.

  “Haviland, are you going to be all right?” I asked, really concerned about her losing her mother after such a short time of reunion.

  “Yes, I’m fine. I’m just glad to have looked into the face of the woman who birthed me. That has helped. She’s also put me in touch with her sisters and brothers so I do have aunts and uncles now that I didn’t have before. My other mom has poisoned my adoptive relatives against me.”

  Haviland paid me five thousand dollars from the money she got from her mother’s insurance, all of which I banked. Somehow, Haviland and I became quasi-friends.

  At her request, I helped Haviland file a petition to revoke her adoptive father’s will. I still wasn’t able to get the will revoked, but it wound up tied up in probate court, since Haviland was contesting the will. Through word-of mouth from Haviland, I began to get a steady stream of customers. Haviland knew a lot of people in Hollywood and in the industry. Also I advertised on Craig’s list.

  Bit by bit, people started coming to me who wanted other people found, cheating husbands or wives followed—things they couldn’t go to the police with, for one reason or another.

  11

  At the age of nine, when I first moved to Baldwin Hills, after a thirty-day stay in the horrible, now defunct child detention asylum, McLaren Hall, I felt like I’d landed on a different planet. Baldwin Hills has been called the Beverly Hills enclave for blacks. Although this community was less than twenty miles from where I had been raised in Jordan Downs, it was a whole new world. School on a regular basis. “Three hots and a cot,” as they say in prison. But it was more than that. Shirley offered us kids love.

  As a child, Shirley’s home reminded me of what I’d seen of Hollywood on TV. From Shirley’s back ceiling-to-floor picture windows, you could see the Hollywood sign and the ridge of the Santa Monica Mountains. On a clear day, when the smog was low, you could see panoramic views of the entire city and the L.A. basin. The area was characterized by hillside homes and streets with names such as “Don Luis”, “Don Felipe” which graced the winding hills.

  Although most of the neighbors were black, they were homeowners. Where I came from, most of the people were renters. Many of the Baldwin Hills homes boasted amenities such as in-ground outdoor swimming pools and Jacuzzis. Where I came from, the community center was the only place that had a swimming pool, and often it was shut down due to shootings.

  Anyhow, Shirley’s tri-level house was nestled on a hill and boasted five bedrooms. I always loved how my feet slid across her mahogany hardwood floors and marble kitchen floors. I had never had a room to myself until I moved to Shirley’s. About a year later, Chica was placed in our home, and I had to share the room with her, but Chica and I clicked right away. We both had parents in prison and on drugs. I guess that’s how we became best friends.

  Unfortunately, over the years, things were so different for the teenagers coming up in L.A. than when I was coming up. Since we lived on the better side of town in Baldwin Hills, Chica and I always felt safe. Right at the foot of the hill, the Baldwin Village a.k.a. the Jungle had its own set of problems. It was home to the Baldwin Village Bloods and Black P. Stone Bloods.

  Shortly after I moved into the garage, Trayvon came to me, looking sheepish.

  “What’s the matter, Tray?”

  He hemmed and hawed. Finally, looking down at his gym shoe, he said, “I’m afraid to go to school, Auntie Z.”

  “Why?”

  “They say that some Mexican gang is going to put a hit out on any black person. They don’t care if it’s a child. They say they’re gonna shoot anyone wearing a white T-shirt.”

  “What?” I couldn’t believe it.

  “Yep. They say some Crips stole their drugs, and they are going to retaliate on anybody black. They don’t care if it’s a kid.”

  I was concerned about his safety so I gave him the usual black boy growing up in L.A. speech. “Always watch your surroundings. Don’t wear red or blue. Don’t claim any gangs. If someone comes up to you asking, ‘What set you from?’ just say, ‘I don’t bang.’”

  I wound up borrowing Shirley’s car and giving him a ride to school. As we drove to school, Trayvon told me some of the happenings. Last May, the traditional, Cinco de Mayo celebration was marked by disturbances at several local high schools. According to Trayvon, the Latino and the black high school students were fighting right there on the school grounds. The black students said that the Hispanic students walked out on Black History month so they boycotted the Cinco de Mayo celebration and the fight was on. I knew from the news that more and more, there had been riots between the Black and Latino gangs, either on the streets or in the prison system. A lot of it was drug-related, and beefing over territory to deal.

  Anyhow, after a few weeks, things seemed to settle back down and I began to breathe easy
for Trayvon.

  My world was finally getting a sense of order, that is, until one March afternoon when I went to the ‘big’ house, from my apartment and saw the ‘for sale’ sign sitting in the front yard. I had just starting paying rent in the past couple of months. To say I was a little perturbed was an understatement. I didn’t want to move any time soon. I was just getting used to being sober, and any type of life changes could start me back to drinking. Unfortunately, Shirley had done this before when she was upset with Chill. I decided I was going to just sit down and find out what was up.

  When I moseyed inside through the country kitchen door, the smell of garlic and tomatoes comforted my nostrils and brought up memories of growing up in these walls. I smelled my favorite meal—Shirley’s famous spaghetti, and I decided to invite myself to dinner.

  I too had a vested interest in what went on around here.

  “Moochie, what is that ‘for sale’ sign doing up in the lawn—again?” I’d been through this several times in the past ten years—all these mid-life-crisis-type threatened divorces which somehow were called off just before the divorce went to court. I stood at the L-shaped kitchen island and pulled up a stool.

  Shirley continued stirring her pot of spaghetti sauce. She sprinkled in handfuls of basil. This was accompanied by stir fried garlic, onion and red bell pepper. “I swear to God if California wasn’t community property, I would have divorced this man a long time ago.” She stopped, smacked her lips, and shook her head as if her forty-year marriage had been a waste of time.

  “You don’t mean that. Not all you two have gone through together.”

  Shirley let out a sigh. “Yes, I do. I don’t care.”

  I thought about how I could get Shirley in a better mood. Perhaps if she thought about Chica’s wedding, she’d put off the divorce and plans to sell the house. California was a community property state, and divorce could be costly. “Well, you know Chica’s wedding is just a few months away.” I appealed to her strong sense of family. “Com’on now, Moochie. You know she’s counting on you and Daddy Chill giving her away.”