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The Rent Collectors: Exploitation, Murder, and Redemption in Immigrant LA - Hardcover

Katz, Jesse

 
9781662601736: The Rent Collectors: Exploitation, Murder, and Redemption in Immigrant LA
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1662601735 ISBN 13: 9781662601736
Verlag: Astra House, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

WINNER of the 2024 Los Angeles Times Book Prize

"For a tough-guy book about tough guys, this is a work of almost unerring tenderness. If its subtitle promises “redemption,” the book itself delivers something more honest: stories about people broken by powers larger than they are and who nonetheless find the will to fight on." — Ben Ehrenreich, The New York Times Book Review

"Katz has constructed a riveting and masterful urban narrative."
—Lorraine Berry, Los Angeles Times

Baby-faced teen Giovanni Macedo is desperate to find belonging in one of LA’s most predatory gangs, the Columbia Lil Cycos—so desperate that he agrees to kill an undocumented Mexican street vendor. The vendor, Francisco Clemente, had been refusing to give in to the gang’s shakedown demands. But Giovanni botches the hit, accidentally killing a newborn instead. The overlords who rule the Lil Cycos from a Supermax prison 1,000 miles away must be placated and Giovanni is lured across the border where, in turn, the gang botches his killing. And so, incredibly, Giovanni rises from the dead, determined to both seek redemption for his unforgivable crime and take down the gang who drove him to do it.

With The Rent Collectors, Jesse Katz has built a teeth clenching and breathless narrative that explicates the difficult and proud lives of undocumented black market workers who are being extorted by the gangs and fined by the city of LA—in other words, exploited by two sets of rent collectors.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jesse Katz is a former Los Angeles Times and Los Angeles magazine writer whose honors include the James Beard Foundation’s M. F. K. Fisher Distinguished Writing Award, PEN Center USA’s Literary Journalism Award, a National Magazine Award nomination, and two shared Pulitzer Prizes. His writing has appeared in the anthologies Best American Magazine Writing, Best American Crime Writing, and Best American Sports Writing. As a volunteer with InsideOUT Writers, he has mentored incarcerated teenagers at Central Juvenile Hall and the former California Youth Authority. His first book, The Opposite Field, was set in LA’s immigrant suburbs.

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1

A Forgotten Planet

When at last he opened his eyes, it was because he was falling. That meant he wasn’t dead, not yet. The earth below Giovanni was like cinder, slick from an overnight mist and steep as a windswept dune. With each "inch of his body the slope loosed beneath him— a hiss of shale, a rush of gravel— propelling him downward.

A ribbon of lavender broke the darkness, revealing the day’s first glimpse of La Rumorosa, the coil of borderland highway that writhes around the Sierra de Juárez, halfway between Tijuana and Mexicali. The gusts that moan through the rusted canyons and granite crags have given La Rumorosa its name: the Whispering Woman. In the span of fourteen miles, Carretera 2D
twists more than seventy times, corkscrewing as it plunges four thousand feet from shrouded mountaintop to swirling sands. La Rumorosa is a gash in the Baja desert, a white-knuckle trek and a dumping ground. Mythologized in ghost stories and second-guessed by safety engineers, the passage stirs primordial awe—a “forgotten planet,” the Mexican poet Adolfo Sagastume calls
La Rumorosa, a “silent uterus.” A city boy, Los Angeles born, Giovanni had never heard of the place. Now it was swallowing him.

Flailing his arms, pawing at dust, Giovanni felt the scrape of chaparral. He wrapped a hand around a gnarled root. It broke his slide. For a moment he was suspended, the cliff still once more. Blinking away the fog, Giovanni tried to make out the road above him; too high to see. Below, the gorge looked bottomless. He realized then that his shoes were gone, the black-suede Jor-
dans he’d bought with the check from his first honest job. Only socks covered his feet. He stared at his shirt, a white tee with the curly Sean John logo, now stained with vomit. Blood, too, had soiled the cotton. His neck throbbed, so much he could barely turn his head. The skin burned. He thought maybe he’d been shot, until he touched a finger to his throat. A collar of torn "esh, pulpy and raw, branded his windpipe. That was where the rope had seared him, where his killers, before tossing him over the edge, had cinched it tight, yanking like some soul-snatching repo men.

Now he remembered.

Giovanni rolled onto his elbows. His chest heaved. Tears stung his eyes. He tried to replay the previous night, to piece together the whole disastrous week. He was barely eighteen, but in just a few days of 2007, he’d lived a lifetime, from duress to euphoria to revulsion to catharsis, and finally betrayal. He’d been given a jale, a real heavy job. A test of his callousness and credulity. If he had the stomach for it—for dirtying himself in the name of an enterprise that "outed all checks on its power—he might at last earn the one thing he craved: respect. It was an easier word to say than love. If he backed out, he’d confirm every doubt and suspicion. Giovanni didn’t stop to question why he’d been selected, what made him the right candidate for such a foul mission. The
minute they’d put the .22 in his hand on a crowded LA sidewalk, he had no choice but to step up—to prove himself worthy. And then he’d gone and botched it.

News crews were now doing live shots from that same stretch of blood-splattered pavement. Pastors were leading vigils. The Los Angeles Police Department’s elite Robbery-Homicide Division was combing the neighborhood. The most nefarious prison mafia in America was demanding a scapegoat. The city was dangling a $75,000 reward for information leading to the capture
of the suspect—“a threat to everyone,” the mayor declared, “everywhere.”

Hiding out in Mexico hadn’t been Giovanni’s idea, but he’d embraced the melodrama of a run for the border. He was a desperado blending into the jangle of Avenida Revolución, losing himself in a TJ blur of clubs, strippers, booze. In a few months, the heat off him, his penance complete, Giovanni expected to make his return: back to the girl from Subway with the irresistible dimples, whose name he’d inked that summer across his right hand; back to his mom, a janitor at the mall, whose despondence he’d both fueled and fled; and back, if all went well, to his tribe of bald-headed soldiers and slangers, the outlaw capitalists of MacArthur Park, who offered an identity more conse- quential, more urgent, than the routines of a neighborhood whose sweat kept the city scrubbed and fed and prosperous.

Don’t die, he told himself. Don’t die like this.

Giovanni had a baby face, even with a pencil’s width of fuzz clinging to his upper lip. His grin began sly but soon grew plentiful, and his eyebrows formed twin arches that seemed to scout for approval. Built like a flyweight, all clavicles and ribs, he’d been fidgety for as long as anyone could remember, a rat-a-tat of bouncing knees and rubbing hands. His first-grade teacher noted that Giovanni “needs to learn to stay on task and work cooperatively.” His third-grade teacher predicted that Giovanni “could be outstanding if he were more serious and less distractable.” His fifth-grade teacher found Giovanni “so restless he seldom #nishes an assignment.”

Giovanni’s first great passion was Street Fighter, the arcade game, which he played at a mini-mall donut shop with quarters filched from his mom’s change jar. He favored the role of Akuma—orange hair tied in a topknot, sculpted arms bursting from shredded sleeves—whose signature move
resembles an act of frustration. Rearing back, the fighter slams his fist down to the earth, a godlike blow that unleashes a lethal shock wave.

In middle school, Giovanni signed up for a different kind of martial experience, a National Guard youth contingent called the California Cadet Corps. He’d started seventh grade the week before 9/11, and with Americans rushing to enlist, he sensed a shared purpose in the program’s starch and creases, a narrative that offered strength and stability. He learned to polish his shoes and center his garrison cap. He marched, heel-first, in formation, pivoting to the column and flank commands, and saluted his major with sharp karate chops to the brow. He wished he’d volunteered for the riffe drills, to learn to port and present arms with one of those triggerless wooden parade models, but he’d been too nervous—afraid of an embarrassing bobble or a breach of some protocol he’d failed to consider. If he’d been asked then what he planned to do with his life, Giovanni wouldn’t have hesitated: join the army. He wanted to belong to something that mattered.

Giovanni’s dad, a sad-faced man from Guatemala, seesawed between sentimentality and affliction. Juan washed dishes and buffed floors and knocked down walls for a demolition crew. Despite five DUIs, he also valeted cars at a Hollywood club; he carried a picture of himself with Jean-Claude
Van Damme from the time the action hero handed him the keys. Before his borracheras blew up the family, before Giovanni’s mom reached for a kitchen knife to silence his rants, Juan had done what he could to guide Giovanni and channel his excitability. He gave his son a pit bull they called Rocky, and together they built a doghouse in their backyard. He strung a sand-filled punching bag from a tree out there too, encouraging Giovanni to pummel it until his arms grew limp. To bulk him up on the cheap, Juan fed Giovanni 99-cent Whoppers, MacGyvering the burgers by slipping a fried egg between the buns.

As the eldest of three kids—he had a brother a year younger and a sister born six years after that—Giovanni took the brunt of...

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Verlag
Astra House
Erscheinungsdatum
2024
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1662601735
ISBN 13 
9781662601736
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
320
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
gpsr@libri.de
gpsr@libri.de

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