Johnny B. Right grew up on Santa Gertrudes behind the old Lucky grocery store. He ate Kirkland mac & cheese five nights a week with a diet Mountain Dew and a can of creamed corn. I married him a week after I turned nineteen at the St. Paul of the Cross on Foster Road just off Valley View. He had a cute little scar on his upper lip, a surfer’s grace and ate pizza on the other two. OK, so it was Dominoes but back then I didn’t know about goat cheese, tapenade, Marguerite and Portobellos brown-butter stewed. Stuffed crust was enough until my dead sister turned up with talk of Mee Grob, Flautas, Justice, Revenge, carnitas tamales and pungent Lobster dew, which is how I was wooed. Well that and the fact that Johnny cheated and I didn’t care.
But now, as I sit here alone in a Hollywood studio with nicotine walls, banging out lousy fish taco reviews, I’m thinking… maybe I made it all up: the visions, the purpose, the belief that I would discover who was kidnapping little girls and maybe who killed my sister. Maybe I didn’t see them on that Baja Street, maybe I didn’t know of angels in the mist. Maybe my sister was still alive out there, somewhere that I had missed. Maybe the fried oysters at the Palm, Ana Maria burritos, the torta grease trucks and the bacon wrapped hot dogs at the carts on Maple downtown were crap and maybe I’d never get my soul kissed. Maybe my faith, alone, had determined these things and maybe my faith was flawed. But I’d lost fourteen years playing by the book and I’d slammed someone, left them slack-jawed. So here I sat, pen and doubt in hand.
I opened a San Miguel, put old “Better Days” on the player and drank as Muldaur wailed for someone to love. I snapped it off, opened the window for a breeze and peeked through the bougainvillea down to Mulholland, below… I saw a skinny coyote scurry down through some bush with something fleshy in its mouth and I saw a dull blue van, creep away, not too slow.
I could feel something bad in the warm night breeze. The spirits and nightmares were calling for a hack and man oh man, that was me.
Rhea.