2. Just Think How Sane We’d Be if it Weren’t for the Heat
JUST THINK HOW SANE WE’D BE IF IT WEREN’T FOR THE HEAT
IT WAS SEPTEMBER AND the Santa Anas were at it again, or maybe it was climate change.
Without history for a benchmark, it was impossible to tell where the desert ended and global warming began.
The days simply yawned into each other, pulled like taffy across the horizon, never not tourist season.
Summers were scorching and smelled like smoke, daylight shrinking indistinguishably into fall.
Surely it would cool down soon, we all thought, but our memories were faulty, stuck in a time loop of nostalgia where September meant gently drifting leaves, bucolic pleasantries.
The myth of autumn fed to us by Hollywood, our darling and our demon.
The very monster for which we sacrificed ourselves.
With the heat came the aforementioned crime spree, a series of salacious murders, and worse, there was talk of strike in the air again.
Unease spread beyond the film industry like wildfire, so many of us dependent on the Hollywood machine remaining in working order.
Not just the actors and writers and casting directors.
Cinematographers, editors, designers, production crews, camera assistants.
Nannies for producer-children. My cousin Roro (a visual artist or a hairstylist, depending on whether you believed a job was something that paid you money) was, as I mentioned, dating a man she’d met on a sugar baby app, just in case she lost clients at the salon, and half the rent on the apartment we were supposed to have shared now came from some guy with a start-up.
This, Roro reminded me, was part of the grind.
In her free time, she was creating an installation fed by her true crime fetish: depictions of mutilated bodies in a stained glass, medieval style, like an elegy of saints.
Meanwhile, my other cousin, JR, Roro’s twin, had recently purchased a pigeon. The Santa Anas were blowing, my boobs were sweating. Everything was uncanny, unsettled, uncool.
The pigeon. First I’d have to explain the apartment complex where I was once again living, having lost the TV role I still cannot physically name (reason: despondency).
It was one of those courtyard buildings, colorless stucco with low brick siding, the central gated entry festooned with sprawling vines.
The sign bearing the name of the building, The Riviera, was high on my mother’s to-do list, being comically in decline.
Iron bars lined the windows around the bottom floor for good reason.
There were terraces, sort of. Parts of the building looked nice, having been outfitted with terracotta planters, but the older units were occupied by a variety of tables that were spiritually altars: clay pots with overgrown contents, odd porcelain-style busts, decorative rocks inside empty terrariums, painted stone fruits, rotting organic materials (maybe cardboard, maybe upholstery).
Along the driveway, there was a distinct earthy smell.
Weeds burst from every orifice of the sidewalk, which was itself raised up jaggedly by a sprawl of massive tree roots, like a shrine to an elder god.
It was, ask the city—or the developments multiplying virally along the undulating hills of Whitley Heights—an eyesore.
Again, my mother was trying her best. Even when Grandma was alive, any livability the building happened to boast had always been thanks to my mom.
Rent was collected on time except for sometimes, and everything about the complex that was within my mother’s reign of terror was orderly and beautiful, the carefully preserved Old Hollywood vibes accented by the sound of gently trickling water from the courtyard fountain that was my mother’s pride and joy.
The difficulty was that Tita Linda still lived in one of the units that faced the street, and she had been a blister to my mother for decades.
She was Grandma’s oldest friend, and utterly unevictable.
Mom didn’t want Tita Linda to die, per se.
She just wanted to go over everything with a good scrub, preferably without Tita Linda in the way.
Everyone we knew lived there. “Multigenerational living,” in sociological terms, or how we do things in the third world, as I liked to joke.
Mom didn’t care for that. I never fully grasped when it was okay to commit to the bit—to mock the occult shop catering to white people who didn’t understand that none of this was “authentic” in the slightest—and when it was irreverent, unacceptable, proof of my apparent failures and deeper betrayals, too.
Nothing was ever more confusing to me than whether I should be proud or ashamed of my heritage.
I looked mostly white, certainly whiter than anyone else in the family, with dingy chestnut hair I highlighted until it gleamed with blond and hazel eyes that looked greener when I wore dark colors.
Roro’s exhausting friend Nessa called me “Weda,” meaning white girl.
This, I was told, was a compliment. I was not allowed to be offended.
But if I asked my mom for lasagna instead of pancit, it was tantamount to a slap.
So yes, I never understood when I was allowed to make fun of my culture, unless it wasn’t really my culture and that’s why it was never appropriate for me to joke. Tacitly we all knew that was the darker, secret truth. Teasing was only acceptable if you belonged, which I didn’t and never would.
Mom and I originally had a courtyard-facing apartment on the upper floor—a gift from my grandmother after my mom left the house she’d once shared with my father.
It was a charity Mom never stopped trying to repay, and at that point in my life, having moved back in with my own mother, I could relate.
But why was it so shameful, accepting favors?
Accepting help? I wondered this often. Grandma wouldn’t have survived in this country if not for the charity of Tita Linda, who introduced her to the man I called Grandpa until his death.
He was already an American citizen, having served in the military, and his marriage to my grandma (his first, her third) allowed her to cobble together the collection of businesses one might call an empire if one considered a coin laundry, a dry goods shop, and a courtyard apartment building where only half the units had air conditioning to be imperial in any way.
By immigrant terms, it was. The point being: By the time three of my grandma’s six children joined her in the States (Tita Perla, Tito Joss, and my mom), she was able to give them a place to live, however imperfect, and steady work, however odd.
My mom was grateful, but she was also a hustler.
Maybe if she’d been born a Jen or a Liz or better yet a John and been acknowledged for the shark she really was, she might have gotten the respect she deserved, and then we all might have loved each other better.
But after Grandma got sick, when only my mom had the stamina to take the helm and carry on, that dynamic shifted abruptly and without much regard for anything that wasn’t forward motion.
Mom immediately fixed up our apartment and rented it out for triple the price of the other units, moving us into Grandma’s ramshackle one on the less-coveted ground floor.
She repeated the same pattern with other tenants, so that under my mother’s management, the building reached a tenuous forty-sixty split—a revolving door of upwardly mobile young people and the Filipino immigrants that Mom couldn’t legally evict.
And me, who was technically both.
As I said, on the night this all began I’d slipped my mother’s leash and gone out with Roro to a club.
I was wearing a hot pink tube top, Daisy Dukes, and cowboy boots, a ridiculous thing to be wearing to watch a man step in front of a bus.
I couldn’t have felt more idiotic, or more helpless, or more naked.
Which are not the things you want to feel when you watch another person’s life blink out.
The impact struck like a flash of lightning, a thing I couldn’t quite believe had happened even though I’d watched it with my own eyes.
If you’ve ever been in a car accident, you know the sound—that singular, sickening crunch, audible then over the sound of horrified, half-drunken screams. The bus, having tried to veer away, lurched to the left, into traffic, the only direction it could go without littering the sidewalk with bodies, ultimately smashing the passenger-side taillight of a car whose driver sat distracted and unmoving at the light.
The driver stumbled out unharmed, his phone in his hand, obviously filming not what had happened, but whatever would happen next.
I’ll admit, it did seem like something that would worsen, as if the real content was yet to come.
I’d never seen someone die violently before.
The realization hit me with a chill, some innate understanding that a person couldn’t live through that much impact, that the human body was fragile and insubstantial in the face of a moving cage of steel.
As it usually did, my mind churned with familiar rhythms of logic and sequence, soothing itself from a place of survival, generating its own internalized calm.
What now? I didn’t know what my responsibilities were, if I’d now have to talk to the police.
I couldn’t see much of the body in the street but I could tell it wasn’t moving, and of course it wasn’t.
It lay below the belly of a Metro Local bus.
Roro, who was carrying the cash that man had given her at the bar—inadvisably, in my view; what would she now do with cash? At least her boyfriend sent her money via Venmo, like a gentleman—had turned her head and thrown up on the sidewalk.