Hailey's War Read Online Free PDF Page B

enough to find three part-time jobs—none of them particularly interesting or challenging, but the checks cashed fine. When I’d saved enough, I put down money on a tiny studio in town. CJ tried to talk me out of leaving, and I was reluctant, too, but I couldn’t have a life that was just an offshoot of his. And I wasn’t going far, just down into the city. So he yielded and helped me move.
    I wouldn’t realize until later—when I had to leave—how much Los Angeles had gotten under my skin. Mostly I’d sat out the longstanding Love L.A./Hate L.A. debate. When I’d chosen to go there after leaving West Point, my decision had been fairly arbitrary. I didn’t have roots in Lompoc anymore. Julianne had moved away during my plebe year at West Point, and even the Mooneys, CJ’s parents, had done something quintessentially Californian: They’d sold their real estate at a profit and bought a bigger, cheaper place out of state, in Nevada’s Washoe Valley. But L.A. was the nearest big city to where I’d grown up. My feeling had been,
I suppose if I’m from anywhere, I’m from here
.
    Later, if you’d asked me why I liked it there, I’d have given you everyone’s general paean to L.A.: the open streets and the palm trees and the laid-back vibe, et cetera cetera cetera. The truth was simpler: L.A. just felt like a place for people like me, young people raised on high-fructose corn syrup, long on energy and short on a sense of history.
    I doubt I would have approved if I’d moved straight there after high school. I’d gone to West Point to test myself against hardship and privation, to see how little comfort and pleasure I could get by on. But I came home in a very different frame of mind. Then, I wanted what I called
omnia gaudia vitae
, all the pleasures of life, and L.A. was the place for that. Vietnamese iced coffee, British Columbian marijuana, Colombian cocaine, French film noir, Israeli krav maga training—you could get it all here, and if it was all imported, like the water supply and the workforce and even the iconic palm trees, who cared?
    I told CJ when I moved into town that we’d still see each other all the time, and we did. He opened the doors to the West Hollywood clubs he was always waved into, and I spent many nights drinking and dancing, sometimes in his immediate company, other times only knowing that he was somewhere in the same vast and densely packed venue. I wasn’t ever lonely. CJ’s circle of friends, friendly acquaintances, and hangers-on was enormous, and they were always willing to share space at their tables, their drugs, even their bodies. I left footprints on the windows of a few Navigators and Escalades owned by guys I didn’t know very well.
    Some mornings I dreamed of the clean citadel of West Point and woke up first disoriented, then unhappy. I chased that feeling away with strong coffee or a joint, or sometimes a hard workout.
    I attained something of a reputation in CJ’s crowd as that mostly quiet girl with the birthmark and the occasional hair-trigger temper. From time to time CJ had to drag me away from a vending machine I was trying to bust up for taking my money or a bouncer twice my size I felt provoked by. Sometimes CJ had to wrap his arms around me from behind and negotiate over my shoulder, telling people that I was on mood-altering meds or just getting over a bad breakup.
    Later, when I apologized to him, he always said, pleasantly, not to worry about it. Some of that was CJ being CJ, so mellow that one friend of his joked that his adrenal glands secreted some kind of cannabinoid substance instead of adrenaline. But I think CJ chalkedmost of it up to my washing out of West Point. It’s amazing the shit people will let you get away with if they think it’s coming from a place of anger and low self-respect.
    Nonetheless, I always told him I was sorry—often too abjectly,