And Serena was careful. Her crew only knocked over a few pharmacies a year, at quiet suburban locations Serena carefully scouted, and while she and a trusted second raided the back for lucrative prescription drugs that Serena resold around her neighborhood, younger girls swept the shelves of Pampers, baby food, cough syrup, and OTC meds-all things desperately needed among the young mothers of the barrio.
It would be nice to imagine Serena as a kind of urban feminist Robin Hood, but I knew better than to indulge in that kind of fantasy. Violence was inextricable from gang life: grudges and retaliations, attacks and counterattacks, beatings and shootings. I heard the stories Serena’s girls told, thinking I didn’t know enough Spanish to understand. And they routinely went around strapped, meaning carrying a gun.
But this lifestyle of retaliation and revenge was the price of having familia. In its perverse way, it was a virtue, the dark side of loyalty. Serena encouraged the same kind of loyalty among them that the guys had for one another. Unlike male gang members, though, girls affiliated with the same clique often fought viciously with one another, sometimes over gossip, more often over a boy. Serena said she’d never let her clique be divided over a man: “The sucias are for the sucias,” she told them. “We represent like the guys.”
I didn’t learn all of this at once, of course. But after that first night, Serena was surprisingly open with me, given that we’d hardly known each other back in school, and that I’d once been the straightest of straight arrows, Cadet Hailey Cain.
I think that Serena had been waiting for someone she could talk to. She had to front around the guys, with whom sharing her feelings would have been a liability. And she cared for her sucias, but they were little more than children, with short attention spans and narrow worldviews. There wasn’t anyone else like Serena in Serena’s world. The person who came closest, skin color notwithstanding, was me.
Maybe she understood, too, that I’d honored her when, in time, I told her the full truth about why I had to leave West Point.
I’d like to say that I was wracked with guilt over telling her something I hadn’t even shared with CJ, but it wasn’t true. I didn’t tell CJ because I knew he’d lie awake at night thinking about it. Serena wouldn’t. She understood about bad luck.
The day after I told her, we went to the Beverly Center, L.A.’s cathedral of capitalism, and did something the rest of the world wouldn’t understand but that made sense to us.
Perhaps it was inevitable that Serena started to kid me about getting initiated into her clique. She said I could become her second. I took it as gentle condescension. But she kept on it, asking me when I was going to take my beating, get jumped in for real. Slowly I began to realize that she wasn’t entirely kidding, and I began to understand. The things that set me apart from her sucias were, in fact, assets-chief among them my white skin and blond hair. Those alone would make me the ideal driver on a pharmacy job. I was the anti-profile; any LAPD officer would think twice before pulling me over.
“Look at the way you live now,” she said one evening, watching me gingerly put makeup on a bruise I’d gotten in a bar fight. “Getting beat on, partying, sleeping until noon, no plans for the future-how is that any different from la vida?” She’d put an arm around me and looked at us in the mirror. “Come and be mi gladia.”
“Gladius meus,” I said. My sword. Serena had learned all the words that went with her warlike life-milites, hostes, bellum, mors-but she tended to hybridize them with Spanish. “And no thanks. I’ve seen the beatings that your girls give each other jumping them in, and those are bad enough. I don’t want to go through the beatdown they’d give a white girl to make her prove herself.”
“Scared?” she said.
“You know better. But what’s the point? I’d never be one of you. What would my street name be? Blondie?”
“The girls will accept you if they see I accept you. And they can learn from you. Nobody ever taught them anything about fighting, about protecting themselves.”
“Think about what you’re asking me. To teach young gangbangers to be better shots, better at beating someone up? I really need that on my conscience.”
“You can teach them honor. Teach them when not to throw down, when to walk away.”
“Honor?” I’d said. “Been there, done that, didn’t get the gold bars. Listen, Serena, I don’t make moral judgments about what you’re doing. I’m happy you’ve got something that means something to you. But it’s not for me.”
She’d shrugged. “You’ll come around,” she said. That was how we left things. The last time Serena came by my place, I was waiting for my ride up to San Francisco, my old Army duffel at my feet. Serena had pressed the five-shot Airweight into my hands, told me to watch out for myself, and then kissed me on both cheeks, like an old-style gangster.
We hadn’t kept in contact. Ours wasn’t the kind of friendship that would survive long-distance. Which is why it surprised me to learn that she was trying to get in touch with me.
four
My living situation in San Francisco was pretty simple: I rented a room over the base of Aries Courier, in Japantown.
To get to my room, as I did when I came back from what had become a day’s worth of pickups and drops, I had to walk through Aries’s ground-floor space, which resembled a garage more than an office: bike frames and parts, freestanding filing cabinets, posters advertising bike races and rallies, a big, circa-1950s refrigerator full of Red Bull and Tupperware containers it was best not to open. When I came in, Motobecane over my shoulder, the owner, Shay Clements, was on the phone with his back to me.
Shay was a hard guy to figure out. Rather, he was the sort of person whom people assumed they understood immediately upon meeting him: bike messenger turned slightly bohemian entrepreneur. He was about thirty-five, six-foot-four with a straight, ice-blond ponytail and blue eyes and good facial bones. He still had the build of a cyclist. He wasn’t married, and I didn’t think he ever had been, but he would never lack for dates as long as there were coffeehouses and the kind of women who frequented them, looking for guys who were sexy in a left-wing way. You just looked at Shay and thought, pesco-pollo-vegetarian, knows some yoga asanas, votes Democrat.
In truth, like all blue-state small-business owners, Shay was remarkably Republican when it came to his own bottom line, full of complaints about regulations and taxes, and nearly as resentful of his own employees. Aries was all-1099, as riders put it, meaning everyone was an independent contractor, without job security or health insurance. This didn’t do much to foster loyalty. Riders regularly quit Aries without notice. This led Shay to look on his riders as irresponsible flakes. It was a vicious circle.
My relationship with him was a little better than that, largely because I was reliable. I didn’t kiss his ass, but I didn’t have to. As I’d told Jack, I was usually his top-earning rider. I got hurt sometimes, true, but I also rode hurt, so it didn’t cost Shay any downtime. Beyond that, if Shay wasn’t the warmest guy in the world, well, he probably thought the same about me.
Seeing me out of the corner of his eye, Shay waved me over, not interrupting his conversation on the phone. I came over without speaking, and he handed off a pink slip of paper, a phone message. Please call Serena Delgadillo.
Only then did I remember the call I hadn’t answered on the bridge. I took out my cell and brought up the call log, and sure enough, there they were, Serena’s familiar digits. I raised my eyebrows, but Shay had already turned back to what he was doing and didn’t notice my surprise. I slipped the message into my bag, lifted my bike to my shoulders, and went up the stairs.