Hailey's War Read Online Free PDF Page A

working?” they’d ask. And I’d say he was getting by, because I didn’t want them to know the truth: Unable to get even the lowest-level job in the music business, CJ was supporting himself by dealing pot.
    On the night before I left for West Point, I slept on the floor of his flophouse room, just like he’d done in my bedroom so many times before. He tried strenuously to give me the bed, but I said no, tomorrow I was going to be in Beast Barracks, and if I couldn’t tolerate sleeping on the floor, then the outlook was pretty bleak. CJ gave up, but joined me about halfway through the night, dragging a blanket down with him to nestle companionably behind me. I shouldn’t have let him, but I was secretly glad for his nearness, because it was the only thing that kept me from spending the night wondering what the hell made me think I could cut it at the United States Military Academy and deciding that it wasn’t too late for me to stay in California and go to community college.
    The next morning, CJ drove me to LAX. Standing in the departures drop-off zone, he’d joked, “Look at you, baby, you’re the pride of the Mooneys, and you’re a Cain. That hardly seems fair.” Then he’d turned serious, pulled me close, and said, “I am so very proud of you, baby.”
    I wanted to tell him that I was proud of him, too, the way he livedlife on his own terms. But I couldn’t, because it would have sounded condescending. He was right: I was the standard-bearer of our family, making my place in the world, and he was the black-sheep under-achiever, going nowhere. In that moment, our paths in life seemed set in stone.
    Funny how four years can change everything.
    Four years later, I was getting off a Greyhound at the downtown L.A. depot , with no commission in the Army, no college degree, less than two hundred dollars to my name, and no place to live. It took the last of my pride to do it, but I called CJ at his office. By which I mean I tried to. I left several messages with a cool-voiced receptionist (“Yeah … his cousin Hailey … he’ll know who you mean”) and stood for two hours in the Southern California sun by a pay phone, tired and out of sorts, itching with impatience when passersby stopped to use the phone and tied it up. The next day I’d have a pretty bad sunburn.
    Finally the phone rang. I only had to say, “Hello?” and, to my vast relief, I heard that familiar half-Appalachian, half-Californian drawl: “Where are you? I’ll come get you.”
    His first words to me in person, as he was jumping out of the same old silver BMW, were, “Shoot, I am so sorry, baby. My people didn’t know who you were.”
    â€œI know,” I said against his cheek, already enfolded in his long arms.
    That was the month that CJ was in
Vanity Fair’s
music issue. In the photo essay of that year’s most influential figures, he was labeled “The Prodigy” and was photographed standing on a gritty hotel rooftop, the sun behind him sinking into layers of L.A. atmosphere, the camera angle low enough to make him look seven feet tall. He’s turned away from the camera, an abstracted visionary.
    At just twenty-two, he had become one of L.A.’s most sought-after producers. No one doubted the depth of his understanding of hip-hop or his respect for it. Some people who saw him in deep concentration,listening to something only he could hear over headphones, said they’d looked at his eyes and thought at first that he was blind.
    He had also taken back his name, in the liner notes of the two CDs he’d produced and on the Grammy he’d won. The name Cletus Mooney now commanded respect throughout the music industry.
    Practically the first thing I asked him, that day in L.A., was which name he wanted me to use.
    He said, “Whatever you want to call me is fine.” He checked the traffic before pulling out