The Necessary Hunger Read online

  Table of Contents

  ___________________

  Introduction by Lynell George

  The Necessary Hunger

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Afterword

  Acknowledgments

  About Nina Revoyr

  Copyright & Credits

  About Akashic Books

  Introduction:

  Live the Way You Play

  by Lynell George

  I imagine most cities play host to nesting shadow cities—essential terra incognita known only to those who reside within those specific mapped quadrants. Los Angeles has the double-edged snare of being "known"—a region so frequently photographed, in stills and in motion, that many think they "get it," and can untangle it—even from afar.

  I grew up in Los Angeles an avid reader, looking for the sort of stories that existed along the edges of the narrative the outside world knew as "Los Angeles"—expansive beaches, conspicuous wealth, the high gloss of the good life, the fertile land of second chances. I knew different: along the edges, really, was the heart. These were the neighborhoods that tended to be brown, older, striving, and scuffling. These were neighborhoods that were not just misunderstood, they were invisible to the outside world, unless you knew where to look.

  Nina Revoyr's body of work travels deep into these spaces, these blink-and-you'll-miss-them enclaves spreading below freeway overpasses. These neighborhoods, and the people who live in them, keep the city pulsing—the school teachers, the coaches, the nine-to-five business park denizens, the bus and truck drivers, the convenience store owners, the students praying for college scholarships to lift them out of the cycle of bad luck or poverty so they can catch that LA dream that has lured so many outsiders.

  The Necessary Hunger, Revoyr's first novel, is set in the late 1980s, the time leading up to Los Angeles's 1992 urban unrest. This rebellion, as it is often termed, was a pushback, a revolt that sent an urgent message out to the world about the long-term effects of government neglect and socioeconomic inequity. It underscored, once again, just how many Los Angeleses existed in the region. For those far outside the boundary lines of the heat of flashpoint—communities evoked within Revoyr's landscape—the kindling was "mysterious." Some residents in far-flung neighborhoods—Santa Monica, Tujunga, the West Valley—were confused about the rage that lit up the sky in fires or that filled the TV screen. Revoyr's novel is a lesson in both topography and psychogeography; it schools those on the outside about minefields of class and race.

  Place is people and Revoyr vividly weaves together her characters' personal histories, their struggles in formulating a sense of who they are and who they hope to be in the world. Identity, at this stage of their lives in these spaces, is less about fitting in, but rather about being in search of an "authentic self." Her protagonist Nancy Takahiro, a Japanese-American teenager and high school basketball star, is captivated by Raina Webber, an African American star player in her orbit. But Nancy's crush—a whirling, almost debilitating obsession—keeps her questioning herself and renders her unable to make any definitive move.

  In Revoyr's careful hands race is not a billboard, yet neither is it incidental. The same is true about sexuality and the language (and interplay) around it. Interactions or flare-ups may not always be casual, but they are conversational, sewn into the fiber of life. Revoyr's gift here is in the nuances and subtleties. The ritual of basketball and the rules of neighborhood bind the characters together, make them intimates unified by their yearning, their gains and losses. In an ethnically mixed environment, proximity shapes the interactions, sense of self, and worldview—but it's not always smooth nor without drama. Nancy is on the cusp of adulthood and has a clear understanding of race and class and how it organizes and divides her neighborhood. Her divorced father, Wendell, has moved them from a tony, mostly white community in Redondo Beach to working-class Inglewood. The characters must navigate a landscape that is fraught with inter- and intraracial tensions, whispers of homophobia, and class hierarchies.

  In these spaces, workarounds are memorized, as best as one can. With practice, risk might be conquered by grit. But for all the planning, eluding drama or disaster isn't guaranteed.

  There were so many mistakes we could make, Nancy reflects, so many ways to abort our futures—crime, pregnancy, gangs, drugs, or simply leaving school and giving up. Adolescence in LA was like Russian roulette, and the game would not be over until we were gone.

  That kindling for 1992? It's here too. In the meandering neighborhood walks Nancy takes with Raina, Revoyr tours readers through the effects of white flight and government neglect—graffiti, gangs, the street-worn "crack lady," and the ever-in-the-wind threat of drive-bys, carjackings. From this vantage—more than twenty-five years gone—we see glimpses of what the neighborhood used to be and what has yet to befall it.

  All of the buildings were stuccoed in deceptively cheerful colors, but if you looked closely, you could see spots where the paint was flaking off like dead skin . . . Many of the houses sat behind short chain-link fences, and a few of them had red Spanish-style roofs. Their doors and windows were covered with bars, most of which were black, but some of which were white and decorated with metal flowers, as if design could disguise their function. Several of the properties had For Sale signs on their lawns; the signs usually stayed there for a year or two before the landlord or the family who lived there gave up and finally took them down. A generation earlier, those properties would have sold in a matter of weeks, and there were still suggestions of what the neighborhoods had once been . . .

  In these hardscrabble neighborhoods, Nancy and her crew are more than stars. They are hope. They balance the weight of the community's pride and expectations on their shoulders. But even that leg up offers limited reward.

  The opportunities were narrow for women. These were the years before the WNBA, and the end of high school ball may be the end of not just a slot as a star athlete, but a chance at something larger—college, a dream that might put you in play, raise your odds for a better future. But they all saw how tenuous that was; they'd seen careers and all manner of other future-dreaming crashed at the side of the road. Injury, pregnancy, jail time weren't just short detours, they required a life's full reimagining.

  The game-day high fives and "stay toughs" weren't just expressions of school spirit. People didn't just root from the stands or in the hallways. The entire neighborhood was invested. A little bit of hubris and hope could go a long way. Nancy and her winning team represented strength and pride of place, of territory. In the fragmentation of the community, so much of that had been worn away.

  Revoyr understands that some of this diminished pride can be recaptured by knowing the past—the struggles and gains and the strength of forebears. In a key scene, Nancy drifts into a local convenience store to get her pregame good luck Twix bar. Even more, however, she is pulled by the stories its proprietor, Mr. Wilson, dispenses, the stories that others no longer reference or have forgotten. Mr. Wilson, a neighborhood griot of sorts, holds them, doles them out if asked: [H]e was like a walking history book that nobody wanted to read.

  Nancy wants to know the past, senses its import, but she represents the future. "You'll all leave Inglewood, sooner or later—you and
your friends . . ." Mr. Wilson assures her, acknowledging the inevitable cycle. She'll launch herself away from this place, he predicts. It's an expectation, not a resentment. And to her protests, her oath of loyalty, he volleys back: ". . . don't forget where you come from, or the people you leavin behind."

  This moment has remained with me since my first read, more than twenty years ago. It's just as powerful now, as stories and histories are stripped away, new buildings rise, and neighborhoods are renamed. This voice in your ear—imploring you to hold on to those stories, "Don't forget where you come from," or, as was often recited in my old neighborhood, "Lift as you climb."

  I stumbled on Revoyr's book serendipitously when I was a staff writer at the Los Angeles Times covering these same "at-risk" communities, keeping a close ear to those voices that tended to be muted or forgotten. The novel was among a stack of soon-to-be-released titles cluttering my editor's desk. I think the title caught my eye. I flipped it open and found familiar signposts: streets and schools and language that intersected with my own. I took it back to my desk and started reading. Immediately, I saw my Los Angeles—finally—slide into view. When I interviewed Revoyr via phone (she was living in Ithaca, New York, at the time), I asked her about a coach in one of the basketball sequences. I'd played high school basketball briefly, oh so many years ago, I told her, and I recognized something familiar in the coach's voice and his interplay. She asked me where and when. There was a pause between my answer and her reply. "You should recognize him," she said, launching into a sunny laugh over the wire. "It's him! We had the same coach!"

  For life along the edges, rarely, if ever, does this happen: a fulfillment of a desire to see your shadow world, your experience float into view, sharpen in focus—not just the plot points but the very atmosphere, the streets, the intersections, the music, the slang, the side roads that all add up to who we come to be.

  The Necessary Hunger lingers over that brief threshold of time between wishing and being, the bubble we inhabit where so much in the world still feels fully open and possible. Revoyr writes vividly about striving and hope and the will it takes to dream larger than the expectations the world has for you. But perhaps even more important, it is about that hunger to carve out new worlds, eschew labels, and lead with not just desire but an absolute need to conquer—to push past one's own lowered expectations, and to best them—again and again and again.

  Lynell George is an award-winning Los Angeles–based journalist and essayist. She has been a staff writer for both the LA Weekly and the Los Angeles Times. She is also the author of No Crystal Stair: African-Americans in the City of Angels and After/Image: Los Angeles Outside the Frame, a collection of her essays and photographs.

  For my father

  and

  for Andrea

  If you

  train your ears

  for what’s

  unstated

  Beneath the congratulations(!)

  That silence

  is my story.

  —Cornelius Eady,

  “Gratitude”

  from The Gathering of My Name

  CHAPTER 1

  In December of 1984, when Raina and I were sophomores, my high school held its first and last annual girls' winter basketball tournament, the Inglewood Christmas Classic. The next year, an hour before the first-round games were set to start, a light fixture fell from the ceiling and left a six-foot hole in the floor, and the indignity of having to cancel the tournament once convinced my coach we shouldn't host it anymore. This was a shame, because the first Classic was the only tournament we ever actually won. It was also the place I met Raina. I was running the clock on the first day when my coach came over and told me that Raina Webber had just walked in, and that I should pay attention to her. He didn't add—he couldn't have known—that a few months later, our parents would meet and fall in love, and that eventually the four of us would live together. All he knew then was that Raina and I were two of the top sophomores in Los Angeles County. That day, when her game began, I sat and watched her in awe, so dazzled by the way she slashed through the other team's defense that I kept forgetting to add points to the scoreboard. Midway through the second quarter, Raina dove for a loose ball and landed smack on the scorers' table. She'd knocked the scoreboard control box into my lap, and she lay facedown, her head between my hands where the box had just been and her legs trailing onto the floor. Dazed, she looked up into my face for a moment. Then her eyes began to focus.

  "Hey," she said, smiling. "You're Nancy, right? I'm Raina. That was a hella sweet pass you threw against Crenshaw yesterday, and I know their coach called you a hot dog 'cos you passed behind your back, but shit, there was a defender kinda standin in your way, and besides, if you got it, you should use it, don't you think?"

  She stood up, pulled the box off my lap and placed it on the table, and then ran back onto the court before I had time to answer. To me, that first encounter would repeat itself in various forms through all the years I knew her—Raina would land in front of me, and I would flounder.

  Basketball, for Raina and me, was more a calling than a sport; it was our sustenance; it underpinned our lives. Every Sunday morning, as I drove the twenty-eight miles from our house in Inglewood to a gym in Cerritos, I saw well-dressed people on their way to the churches, mosques, and synagogues that were scattered throughout Southern California. I was en route to my Junior Olympic team's weekend practice, but my intention wasn't really so different. That drive to Cerritos was my weekend ritual, but it made up just a fraction of the time I gave to my sport. I was reverent and devout. The only differences between my faith and theirs were that I wore workout clothes instead of my Sunday best and that I worshipped every day.

  Los Angeles was a great place to live if you were a basketball fanatic, because the sport was all around you. Besides being the only city that had two NBA teams—the Lakers and the Clippers—it was the home of half a dozen major colleges. Better yet, the players were part of the scenery. In the mideighties, when I was in high school there, it wasn't unusual to run into Magic Johnson at the mall; see Byron Scott drive through the neighborhood on his way to visit his mother; or spot Cheryl Miller, the great USC star, dancing up a storm at a local nightclub. Each August, Magic, Isiah Thomas, and other NBA stars would play pickup games at UCLA, and I'd go watch them as often as I could. The world was perfect on those summer afternoons. If Jesus himself had finally shown up, I wouldn't have noticed unless he'd worn sneakers and had a dangerous jump shot.

  In our own small way, we high school players were celebrities too. For one thing, we weren't subject to the same rules as other students. When my teammate Telisa got sent to the principal's office our junior year for calling her physics teacher an asshole (well, he was an asshole—he called Telisa a wench, because he referred to all women as wenches, and she finally got sick of it and told him off. All the girls in the class applauded when she did it too), the principal just laughed and let her off without even listening to her side of the story. We were picked to win our league that year, and he refused to punish one of the people responsible for wresting glory away from the schools around us.

  For another, we were always being recognized. This was especially true once our pictures started appearing regularly in the papers, and, in my case and in Raina's, after we'd been named third-team All-State our sophomore year and had begun to attract the attention of college scouts. I'd be shopping, or getting gas, or hanging out at the beach, and someone would come up and tell me that they'd seen me at such and such a place playing against this or that team, and that I'd scored however many points that day. Once, when I was with Raina at the movies our senior year, some little freshman who'd seen her play in a tournament somewhere started screaming and asked for her autograph like she was a rock star.

  The admiration was occasionally more ardent. I received a couple of suggestive fan letters, some players were given flowers or candy, and sometimes I even got phone calls from people who seemed impressed by thi
ngs other than my skills on the court. After Raina moved in we got twice as many calls. She dealt with this better than I did. She talked to all her callers politely and said that she was sorry, but she already had someone and so it was impossible for her to meet them for a date. I, on the other hand, was not as composed—I always just got nervous and hung up.

  If my teammates had ever heard me say I wasn't comfortable with being a big-time college recruit, they would have laughed long and hard, but it was true. As an only child, I lacked the social skills to shift easily into the role of semipublic figure, and I wasn't even gifted physically, except with height. Once, after a summer league game, I found a scouting report that a college coach had left in the bleachers, and so I discovered that the official word on me was this:

  Nancy Takahiro, Senior Forward—6' 0", 155 lbs. Doesn't have the best athletic ability, but a great scorer and effective rebounder. Smart, consistent, tremendously hardworking, and can be counted on to get the little things done.

  I always wondered what my father would have thought about the "getting little things done" part, since his refrain throughout those years was that I never cleaned my room. Still, it was the textbook portrait of a type-A only child. Takahiro means "tall and wide."

  It wasn't easy being big. It seemed to me that the world had a grudge against big people, especially Asian ones, like me, who were supposed to be small. A few houses down from us there lived an old widow named Mrs. Cooper, a lady whose skin was both the color and the texture of a walnut shell, and every time I passed her on the street she clutched her purse a little tighter, although we'd lived on the same block together for the past eleven years. Short adults glanced up at my face suspiciously, even when I was being polite. Babies looked at me and burst out crying.

  Maybe that's why I was drawn to Raina, because she was compact, her body well-proportioned and economical. At 5'7" she wasn't tiny, but she was still five inches shorter than me. Tougher too, or so I believed—and I felt qualified to say that because I watched her more closely than anyone else, with the possible exception of the scouts. The day she landed on the table and introduced herself, her team, which was seeded eighth, was going up against the number one seed. Raina was the shooting guard on that underdog team, and she was making all the other players look like they were standing still. She moved around the gym as if it had been built for her—not arrogantly, but with the casual assumption that everyone knew it was hers and wouldn't mind that she'd come there to claim it. She was always the first person up the court, always weaving through people like they were rooted to the floor, not because she was so much quicker than everyone else, but because it didn't seem to occur to her that she could fail. When she stood at the free throw line, she stared at the basket and held the ball at her waist as if she'd forgotten she had to shoot it, as if she could score the point just by concentrating hard enough. This attitude, I learned later, was typical Raina—she approached every aspect of the game as if it were a matter of will.