Under the Bridge (3 page)

M
ANY PEOPLE
on the paradise-like island of Victoria refer to View Royal as “the place near the hospital” or “the wrong side of the tracks,” but to Warren, View Royal was “heaven.” For as long as he could remember, he'd moved around, and the list of places would take up the length of his left arm: Medicine Hat, Regina, Nanaimo, South Wellington, Castlegar, Trail, Estevan, and back to Nanaimo. He thought the constant moves were the reason his father wanted to live in a trailer, for as far as he could tell, his dad made a lot of money and Warren would later say, “I didn't want for anything.” After a life of moving, Warren grew used to packing up all his possessions in a duffel bag and not holding on to anything. Luckily, he made friends easily and could let go of them just as easily as his last address. Well, actually, letting go was harder. Letting go, starting again. Warren was getting pretty sick of it in the year of the murder, the year he would turn sixteen. In the fall of this year, around the same time neighborhood girls were pestering Colin Jones, Warren's dad announced he was moving once more, this time to California.

Warren's father was moving to live with a rich widow he'd met in a Vegas casino called Circus-Circus. He wasn't taking the trailer this time. He was moving into the widow's home, where there was a collection of art and a view of palm trees. Though he'd never traveled outside Canada, Warren knew a few things about California. He knew his namesake, Warren G., as well as Dr. Dre and Ice Cube, lived in the cities of Long Beach and Compton. He knew those Mexican gangsters,
cholos,
roamed the streets, and he thought
cholos
were pretty cool ever since he saw them in the movie
Once Upon a Time in America.
(“I liked the way they wore Virgin Mary's around their neck.”) Yet View Royal had this and mainly and truly this: Syreeta.

For six months, he'd spent every day with her, or as he put it, “Me and Syreeta, we were together 24/7.”
First love, true love.
He believed these were the words to capture the experience of always, always, forever wanting to be by her side. First love. True love. So when his dad offered the information about the move to California (which was perhaps more information than invitation), Warren said, “I think I'll stay here.”

Him and his dad, they didn't have much of a relationship anyway. His dad was the strong, silent type. He looked the part, kind of like Clint Eastwood. You wouldn't want to mess with him. He wore tight jeans and cowboy boots and tinted shades, and his hair slicked up just slightly on his forehead in the shape of a treble clef. Warren's mom, she liked those kinds of guys—she liked men like Charles Bronson and Clint Eastwood. (“She had a huge crush on Dwight Yoakam.”)

Warren knew this: he wasn't supposed to be born. Not that he wasn't wanted, but his parents weren't married and they both already had a couple of kids and bad marriages in their history. Warren's mom, she'd had it with motherhood, gone so far as to get her tubes tied, and still, somehow, he was born. How could that be? “You must have been one strong kid,” his mother told him.

The surprising birth of Warren occurred on April 26, 1981, in a town called Medicine Hat. His parents tried to stay together, for him, though they didn't get married and didn't really like each other at all. It was a disaster right from the start. Maybe they'd been in love once. Yet he couldn't imagine they loved each other, and he knew in his heart he was the son who caused all their fights.

•   •   •

In 1996, Warren's father moved his family to Nanaimo, to the last place the three would reside before their familial demise. Nanaimo, on the far end of Vancouver Island, was a town of strip malls and the Harmac Mill, where Warren's father worked as a welder from 7:30
A.M.
to 6:00 or 8:00 or 10:00
P.M.
Some Sundays, he'd take Warren to the swap meet, and he'd look for welding equipment while Warren wandered around looking at the chipped dishes and toasters, and once his father bought him a hockey net.

In Nanaimo, at the age of fourteen, Warren discovered on his own: acid, how to drive, the collected works of Too Short. Clara, an older neighborhood girl, taken, as the girls often were and might always be, by the sight of Warren's large eyes and hopeful smile, introduced him to gangster rap, while Laura gave him his first tab of acid one night when they sat on the steps of the Silver City Theater. Clara would pinch his cheeks and tell him how cute he was, and he'd blush but enjoy the affection because he knew it so rarely.

He learned to drive because his mom was always begging him to get her cigarettes. His mom wore tasseled moccasins and spandex pants, and because of her predilection for almost ceaseless inebriation, Warren never invited Clara or Laura into his home. He'd dress his mother in the morning, when she was dizzy from drink. He'd get her some food, drive off to get her cigarettes, and then return to the trailer, make her some coffee, and tell her to take it easy with the booze. Nights, he'd sleep on the couch knowing he shouldn't have to and didn't want to hear the fighting from the bed behind the thin wall. When school was over for the summer, he decided to go off on his own to visit his older brother in the prairie town of Estevan. It wasn't that he was unwanted, he would later say, it was just he wanted to give his parents some peace of mind.

During his summer stay in Estevan, Warren always appeared happygo-lucky (“I put on a false face, smiled”), but quite frankly, “Estevan sucked. I just didn't feel comfortable there. I didn't feel right. I was younger, smaller.” Later, after everything that happened “with the murder and everything,” one memory of that summer would emerge to Warren as if it had been an unheeded warning.

“Me and my brother were driving to a party, and this cop pulls us over, and he asks me my last name. When I told him Glowatski, he kind of smirked, and he said, ‘Another
Glowatski,
huh?' and he shook his head. I didn't want that stigma.”

Warren asked his dad about their heritage, and his dad just said something quick about Poland, but he didn't want to talk about it much, as if he had no interest in traditions and legacy.

All summer, he saw violence and parties. There were fights at the parties, and parties at the fights. “I was too young to be in that scene,” he admitted, and his only good memory was of an older pretty neighborhood girl who pinched his cheek and called him “little cutie.” Otherwise he learned of neither art nor philosophy, and only of how it felt to be an outcast, which to him meant, “I didn't feel comfortable. I didn't feel right.” There were bonfires in the gravel pits and he got high, and stared at the flames and the dust. His mom called him and said she missed him and she was so lonely and could he please come home? He felt guilty and loved, and in this way, he went back to Nanaimo.

His absence had not seemed to improve relations between his parents, and shortly after his return, they fought loudly and cruelly over the happenstance of laundry. His mother did not want to do his father's laundry, and his father screamed prophetically: “I'm going to Vegas. I'm going to meet a rich widow. And you won't be seeing me and Warren ever again.”

The next morning, Warren and his father left in the trailer and moved to the Fort Victoria Park in View Royal, not far from the train tracks. Warren didn't mind leaving Nanaimo because it was “quite a dump,” just doughnut shops and movie theaters and huge malls and nothing much at all. Warren loved View Royal right away, for there was the Gorge, silvery and blue, and the mountains, which seemed to float in the sky as if suspended, their snow-topped peaks rising from the clouds. On his own, he went to Shoreline School and registered himself. (“Teachers are a bunch of yammering idiots,” his father often said.) A tall and pretty girl with curls down to her shoulders told him, “I'll show you the ropes.” She told him he was such a little cutie. He met Rich and Erik, two handsome boys, who said they were members of the Crips, the Los Angeles gang often sung about in songs by Too Short and Snoop Dogg and Spice 1. Though the boys in View Royal had never met Crips from Los Angeles, the gang was part fantasy, part dream, as alluring as the mafia was to Josephine. To be a Crip meant you carried a certain menace and, more importantly, a private elite membership in a respected tribe. Rich and Erik showed Warren the black “C” tattoos on their hands. (“I've had the tattoo since I was twelve,” Rich would later say, while testifying at a murder trial.)

Girls at Shoreline said Rich looked like L. L. Cool J. They called him Richie D., and around that time, Warren began to call himself Warren G. Erik wore his baseball cap just tilted perfectly to the side and also knew every song by Too Short and was impressed that Warren knew the lyrics so well. Rich and Erik and D'Arcy beat him into the Crips and, after this initiation by pummeling, they said, “You're part of the family now.”

Though older boys in View Royal may have scoffed at Warren G. and “his whole gangster act,” older boys were unaware of the care and attention he brought to his outfits, which were, perhaps, both costume and disguise. He favored white. The color was distinctly his own, and it set him apart from his fellow gangsters, the members of the CMC (Crip Mafia Cartel). For the members of the CMC, blue was mandatory, red forbidden. White was Warren's personal choice, and an unlikely one, for black may have better created the look of a badass he aspired to. At 5'4 and 115 pounds, Warren was far from a thug, and in fact could not have been cuter and, despite his knowledge of lewd song lyrics and his tempestuous domestic situation, innocent. Never has a boy looked more as if he wandered out of a fairy tale. His eyes were immense, and his eyelashes were long, and his expression was earnest and longing and always, always hopeful. He was possessed of the certain androgynous beauty that appeals so strongly to girls who have not yet turned sixteen. Like heartthrobs of past and present (that year it was Leonardo DiCaprio), Warren G. appeared neither manly nor mean, and in fact, his soft beauty suggested he might really need to be saved.

“Hey, little cutie,” the girls all said, the pretty girls of Shoreline. They teased him and called him Little Romeo. While his father spent weekends gambling in Las Vegas, Warren hung out in View Royal, and all the pretty girls gave him their wallet-sized school photographs and on the back of their portraits, they drew hearts and wrote of love forever. He was given photos by Felicity and Angie and Katie and Willow and Chelsea, Oressa, Maya, Tara, Brandy, and Marissa, but Syreeta was the one he would fall in love with, almost right away.

She was younger, in the ninth grade. He saw her in the hallway. He gazed at her as she walked away. At Diana Davis's fourteenth birthday party, he spoke to her for the first time. On the porch, he asked her politely if she would like to go out with him.

Syreeta replied: “As long as you don't mind that I'm getting braces in the morning.”

He'd laughed, said he didn't mind at all, and they'd kissed on the porch, and in the morning, she called him, and she made him laugh again.

“You remember who I am?” she said.

“Of course.”

“You remember that we're going out?” she asked. How could he forget? He'd thought she might not have wanted to go out with him because Syreeta was considered to be the most beautiful girl at Shoreline School. (“I liked her smile, I liked her shiny hair, I liked her smooth skin.”)

On the day his father moved to California, Warren G. packed his few possessions into his duffel bag. Among those few possessions were his Spice 1 and Too Short and Geto Boys CDs, and his three pairs of white baggy jeans—one given to him by his new friend, a tall and earnest basketball player named Dimitri. He packed his sweater with the Mossimo logo. He'd asked Syreeta to bleach the sweater for him because the sweater was cream and he thought cream was an “ugly” color and he wanted the Mossimo sweater to be white.

Syreeta thought it was mean of his father to not even ask Warren if he wanted to go to California. His dad said he was getting married to a nice lady he'd met in Vegas, and she lived in the town of San Clemente or San something. Later, no one could remember the town of the rich widow, only that Warren's dad had left his son to go live with her there. Syreeta thought Warren's dad just grunted out the invitation rather halfheartedly, like this: “I'm going. You comin?” but Warren didn't see it that way, and he hugged his dad and told him he'd come and visit him at Christmas, after school was done, and he told his dad again that he didn't really want to leave Syreeta and he was “comfortable” in View Royal.

When he packed his duffel bag, he felt a momentary sensation of fright. He wished suddenly he was moving into Syreeta's home, for if View Royal was heaven, the home of Syreeta Hartley was the highest part of heaven. Her house was all white. The rugs were white and the walls were white and the sofa was white. The whole place seemed to shine and illuminate him when he walked in, onto the white carpets and past the Marc Chagall print where a man seemed to float in the sky holding on to a cello. He found her house “relaxing” and “peaceful.” He'd asked Syreeta if it would be possible for him to move in with her,
just for a while, just until he got his own place, but she told him her mom thought this was “not a good idea.” Warren did not tell Syreeta that he was disappointed. He just packed his duffel bag and prepared to leave the couch of the trailer where he had slept for almost every year of his life.

When his dad left for California, he said to Warren what he always said when he left.

“See you in the movies.” That's what he always said.