South Central Noir

She pulled the door closed and stomped to her bed. No kneeling to make her prayers. I watched her douse the light and lie in her bed, her blanket clasped to her chest, her hands like claws. She was fuming. I didn’t remember what anger was like. So I watched her to see if I could remember. Steps in the corridor. Lots of them. She hadn’t bothered to lock her door. She was too angry. The steps got closer. What was she going to do?

16

The newspapers covered Sister Conception’s trial. The Sentinel, the colored paper, wondered why Mr. Washington was still in jail. I didn’t return to the courthouse to see Sister Conception. She couldn’t hear me whisper about Hell anyway.

17

It’s quiet in the academy now. Too many families took their children out. Sister Conception was going to get her wish. They were going to tear down the school. Cut down the big magnolia trees along the sidewalk out front. It was all going to go. Build something else in its place. Los Angeles was like that. Get rid of the old. Cover it up. Build something on top of it. Until that was old...

As the years tolled on, I lost more and more of my memory, and never remembered why I was there... or even who I was. Or... if I was anyone at all...

All That Glitters by Gar Anthony Haywood

Watts Towers

It was a strange place to work as a security guard. The fabled Watts Towers in Los Angeles. What the hell was somebody going to steal at the Watts Towers?

Before he got the job, all Eric knew about the Towers was what he’d learned in elementary school. Way back in 1921, some crazy Italian immigrant named Simon Rodia had started constructing what would eventually become, when he was done thirty-three years later, seventeen giant spires and interconnected structures on the site of his 107th Street home. He combined steel rebar, concrete, and anything else he could get his hands on — scraps of porcelain, tile, glass — to create what was now either the biggest eyesore or the greatest piece of man-made art the city of Los Angeles would ever see, depending on your taste for the bizarre.

Today, looming almost a hundred feet off the ground at their highest point, the Towers were a California State Historic Park, one that saw forty thousand visitors annually. Eric Pound was one of six people on the security staff charged with keeping the Towers safe and unmolested. Which, to Eric’s mind, was like being tasked to make sure nobody made off with the doorknobs at a Motel 6.

Not that Eric didn’t see his share of undesirables at the Towers. Like at any public space, the people who came here covered all kinds of emotional, psychological, and socioeconomic ground. Some were stone criminals and others were simple drunks. Words got exchanged, fights broke out, and sometimes blood was spilled. The Towers were situated in a patch of South Central turf the Bloods and Crips had been fighting over since before Eric was born, so it was only natural that violence would break out on the grounds from time to time.

But it wasn’t visitors intent on harming each other that Eric saw most often during his daily rounds at the Towers. It was certifiable crazies. Drug addicts, alcoholics, or clinically disturbed individuals on or off their meds, who showed up hallucinating, walking the lines to get into the park on unsteady feet as they held two-way conversations with themselves. They rarely bothered anybody but some were a nuisance requiring intervention.

The guy in the green jacket was one of those.

Today made the third time Eric had seen him at the Towers in the six months since being hired. As before, the guy had come in wearing a tired, oversized green overcoat he didn’t need for the current weather. He was a Black man with small teeth and a head spotted with bald patches whom Eric had initially thought was homeless, because he had that sad, hunched-over set to his frame and his clothes and shoes matched the green overcoat’s thrift store aesthetic. But he always had money for the park’s entry fee and when he spoke — which he did only sparingly — it was with a clarity that life on the street usually denied people over time.

Still, whomever or whatever he was, today was the third time someone on the security staff had been forced to remove him from the park for attempted vandalism. Eric caught him using a common spoon he’d somehow managed to slip through the gate to try to pluck a piece of yellow glass from its concrete setting in one of the tower walls.

“That’s her,” the guy in the jacket said with some excitement, as Eric and his supervisor, Melvin Barnes, escorted him out to the sidewalk. It was the same thing Eric had heard him say the last two times.

“You need to let it go, Pops,” Melvin said when they got the guy outside. “Next time we call the cops. Understand?”

The man in the green jacket didn’t seem to understand at all, but he walked away without an argument.