The night I rode the bus home from the Woodland Hills mall, eating stale buttered popcorn, saving the twenty-dollar bill Arash had given me for a taxi, while Arash and his friends screamed in Farsi and threw candy at each other, in another part of the city, not far away, three bored private-school Valley girls with no criminal records were figuring out what to do with their weekend.
I read their descriptions. They could have been any number of girls from our school. Natalie was blond and had perfect bangs. She had a job at the Sherman Oaks Galleria Gap. Audrey was identical to her, but with longer eyelashes and greener eyes. They looked like sisters, everybody said, except one had bangs and the other didn’t. Erica, the third, was overweight and nobody bothered to describe her beyond that. The girls were hanging out in a hot tub in the backyard of Erica’s luxury home in Encino. As I read, I could feel the Santa Ana wind blowing on their skin, the temperature of the lukewarm water—how it made everybody look and feel the same. I imagined Erica floating with her big arms spread open, a wet T-shirt over her bathing suit to cover her rolls, staring at the sky. She knew she’d spend her Saturday night watching a movie. It was probably what she did every Saturday night while her prettier friends called boys and snuck out of her bedroom window. I imagined the giddy girls murmuring about parties into Erica’s pink phone. All rich Valley girls had private lines. Erica never went with them. She stayed behind because boys called her “Big Bertha” and said she took up too much space. I thought she probably didn’t mind, though. Maybe it was enough to see her friends getting ready—living the excitement and anticipation of a night out without running any of the risks.
The night of the shooting Natalie, the girl with the perfect bangs, called two guys she’d met at the DMV. They were older and belonged to a San Fernando Valley gang. I read their gang names and thought they were out of a movie: No Good Capone and Baby Huey. Natalie had picked them because they were “different.” They knew Ice Cube and Eazy-E from when they went to school in the Valley. They’d lured the girls with fun nights at Dr. Dre’s mansion in Woodland Hills. They had guns, which was hot. Their gang was called Every Woman’s Fantasy. It was a promising name. They had the best parties in the Valley and both Natalie and Audrey were fed up with Saturday nights doing drugs in McDonald’s parking lots.
It made sense.
I imagined Natalie and Audrey climbing out of the window, leaving Erica behind, warning her not to pick up the phone in case their parents called. I pictured Erica, disappointed, pushing The Bodyguard tape into the VCR deck, telling herself to pretend she was Whitney Houston, lighting a candle, closing her eyes. Kevin Costner would lift her up. He didn’t think she was too fat.
—
Audrey and Natalie cruised the Valley with the boys. No Good Capone knew someone who knew someone who hung out at Suge Knight’s Death Row recording studio in Tarzana, but that night he was nowhere to be found. The four of them kept driving, waiting for a plan to come up. Every Woman’s Fantasy members were famous for their wild parties, but where was the party now? Where were Dr. Dre and Suge Knight? Where was Ice Cube’s mansion? The girls became restless. Suburban somnolence, more warm wind, a succession of strip malls. No guns, no fun, no music, no party. Just a crack pipe in a Carl’s Jr. parking lot. Another Saturday night taking drugs in a fast-food parking lot after all.
“What are we going to do?” “What is there to do?” “Where should we go?” The girls asked the same questions over and over. They were high. They forgot what they just said. They said it again. The articles made it clear that there was some kind of role-playing. Everyone had a part. Natalie and Audrey did what was expected of them: raspberry body spray, apple shampoo, Victoria’s Secret lingerie stolen from the Sherman Oaks Galleria. But No Good Capone and Baby Huey weren’t living up to their end of the deal. The boys kept their eyes on their pagers. Why weren’t they blowing up like they said they would?
In an interview Audrey said she became a little bit worried when one of the guys decided to call a friend from West Adams. He boasted about how the guy had done drive-by shootings, kidnapped babies, and killed people. That was the moment when she realized maybe things could have taken a wrong turn. But her friend Natalie, she said, wasn’t afraid. She thought it was a game and going to West Adams was perfect because it was a chance to get out of the Valley.
Once they decided to go over the hill, they stopped by a pay phone in the parking lot of the Woodland Hills Mall so No Good Capone could page his friend and tell him they were on their way. The pay phone was crowded with a rowdy squadron of Persian kids. After getting kicked out of the theater Arash and his friends were making calls, looking for something to do—same as No Good Capone and Baby Huey. They wore baggy khakis, gold, buttoned-up flannel shirts. Baby Huey and No Good Capone wore the same clothes but were part of a different kind of squadron.
Arash’s friends who spoke to the journalists explained that No Good Capone didn’t want to wait his turn to use the phone. He did not want it to seem like he was the type of man who waited in silence for other men to do things.
No Good went up to Arash with a confident stride, the same one Arash always had, but less undulant, less bouncy, more like warfare.
“Where are you from?” he asked him.
Arash turned from the receiver and rolled his eyes at him without answering. From the car the girls were now paying attention.
“Where are you from?” he repeated.
Arash told him to back off. He was trying to talk on the phone and was annoyed, his friends told the reporters. He didn’t think the guy was for real. He looked like a kid, a little older than them, but still just a kid.
No Good insisted.
“Do you gangbang?” He asked the question forcefully. But Arash wasn’t intimidated. He lifted his face from the receiver, annoyed.
“Do we fucking look like gangbangers?” he replied, then turned his back to No Good.
Too mercurial. I could just see him. And then that question hovered. Arash’s simple reply had left No Good Capone speechless and he didn’t like being speechless. He did not want to use the phone after that.
He returned to the parked car. Natalie laughed. “I know that fool. I thought you were badass. I thought you’re Every Woman’s Fantasy. You gonna let him get away with that?”
Natalie said she recognized Arash from summer camp a few years back. He’d peed his bed. The papers said she tried to speak with a gangster inflection, but I was sure she still sounded like a rich, white Valley girl.