Orange County Noir (Akashic Noir) (2 page)
Read Orange County Noir (Akashic Noir) Online
Authors: Gary Phillips
164
LAWRENCE MADDOX City of Orange
266
MARTIN J. SMITH Balboa Island
281
PATRICIA McFALL Garden Grove
istory seems slow in the making until we stop for a
second and look back on things. Then the past hits
the present like a bullet and we all dive for cover.
I first set foot in Orange County half a century ago. Our
new Tustin tract home cost $21,000. The dads wore showingscalp flattops and skinny neckties. The moms sported hardened coifs and dorky glasses. There were orange groves falling
fast and Santa Ana winds blowing hard and station wagons
called the Country Squire and the Kingswood Estate rolling,
kid-filled, down the suburban streets.
Now look at it. How that Orange County became the one
we see today is a tale of migration and war and race and economics and even climate. In ways that are not difficult to see,
the changes of Orange County have been the changes of the
nation. We are all Orange County and it is us.
Like a beautiful woman, Orange County is easy to label
but hard to understand. Gone are the orange-packing houses
and the white Republican demographics and the four halfgallons of bottled milk left cold on your porch early in the
morning. Gone is the John Birch Society. Gone too are Leary
and the Brotherhood of Eternal Love.
But it is often easier to list what is gone than to truly see
what is now here. How do we define these 3.1 million souls?
Who gets to define them?
Sometimes it's good to let our artists and writers be our eyes and ears. That's part of their job. Sometimes they really
get it right. Sometimes they can see around the corners. You
can read Kem Nunn's Tapping the Source. You can watch Orange
County, or listen to Richard Stekol or No Doubt.
And you can read the book you are now holding in your
hands.
Here are fourteen stories about this intriguing and somehow ineffable locale. Orange County through noir eyes? Why
not? There's a dark side to most places and certainly the
names Ramirez and Kraft and Famalaro haven't slipped your
mind. Noir writers are bent toward the darkness, so don't expect the Orange County in these pages to be quite as sunny
as it thinks it is.
But noir writing has its own brand of humor too, and I can
foresee a grin or two as you read about a deranged security guard
at Disneyland (where else?), or a thirty-something woman who
trades in her penniless but hot boy-toy for a paunchy Orange
County Republican who can provide her with the good life in
east Costa Mesa.
You'll see some of Orange County's wonderful diversity on
display in these tales. You'll see an Orange County that looks
very little like it did a few short decades ago. You'll meet insiders and outsiders, power brokers and wannabes, rich and poor,
the sacred and the profane.
They're all out there, whatever there really is. That's up to
you to decide.
Enjoy the black orange.
BEHIND THE ORANGE CURTAIN
oincidence that I was born the same year Disneyland opened and Charlie "Bird" Parker died. A lot of
things begin and a lot of people die in any given year.
But those two events have stayed with me-given the accident of occurring in that particular year-and they provide a
hint as to how we arrive at this collection of all-new, tough,
unblinking stories in Orange County Noir.
As everybody probably knows, Disneyland is located in Orange County, the city of Anaheim specifically. When I was a kid
growing up in South Central Los Angeles, what I knew of life behind the Orange Curtain-beyond bugging my dad to take me to
the theme park-was nil. None of my relatives lived there, nor did
my folks have friends in the area. Except for going to Walt's Ad-
ventureland or Knott's Berry Farm in Buena Park, all I knew was
that getting to Orange County was too long a trip on the freeway
for a nine-year-old anticipating the thrill of riding the Matterhorn
roller coaster and realizing the birthright of Southern Californians
of driving a car-at least for a few minutes solo on the Autopia.
Now, I'd heard of the Beach Boys and associated their
songs of the endless summer with the surfers I'd seen on TV
piloting those majestic waves down in Orange County (even
though it turned out those guys grew up in the South Bay area
of Los Angeles). By the time I was a teen, I finally understood
the chuckles my dad and his friends had over beers when they
joked about not letting the sun go down on them in Orange County, "where all them Birchers are." Referring, I'd find out,
to the ultraconservative, anti-civil rights John Birch Society.
Time and the social evolution of the Southland have
brought change even to vast Orange County with its forty-some
miles of coastline. I was recently told by a resident of Newport
Beach, one of the tonier enclaves of the county, that her district, which launched ex-pro quarterback Jack Kemp to office,
went for Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential race.
Because and beyond being a GOP stronghold, Orange
County brings to mind McMansion housing tracts; massive
shopping centers with their own zip codes where Pilates classes
are run like boot camp and real-estate values are discussed at
your weekly colonic; and ice-cream parlors on Main Street,
U.S.A., side by side with pho shops and taquerias. Los Angeles has been and continues to be explored as the place where
noir, if it wasn't spawned there, sure as hell flowered. But what
about its neighbor to the south? What secrets do Orange
County's denizens have to tell ... or hide?
This volume, like coming in from a sudden storm and then
being gripped by a heavy riff from Bird's horn, takes you on a
hard-boiled tour behind the Orange Curtain. Among those
you'll meet are a reclusive rock star who has lived way too
long in his twisted head, a crooked judge who uses the court
for illicit means, a cab driver prowling the streets with more
than the ticking meter on his mind. In Orange County Noir,
cultures clash, housewives want more than the perfect grout
cleaner, and nobody is exactly who they seem to be.
Enjoy.
Gary Phillips
Los Angeles, CA
January 2010
