They’re Playing GTA

What I’m about to tell you is investigative journalism.

This is a literary page.

Fictionalish real investigating.

The, what if?

Research that connects through my fictional yet always probable ideas.

I have a twenty-five-year-old. I have a twenty-three-year-old who is almost twenty-four. I have an eighteen-year-old. I raised them by myself in Los Angeles, which means I made my house Grand Central Station, because when you’re one adult and three kids you don’t get to be the house nobody comes to. You get to be the house everybody comes to. That was the deal. Some days none of my three kids were even home and the house was still full.

And they spanned everything. Elementary school, middle school, high school, all at once, all three institutions covered by my three children, full coverage. I moved here in 2010. Or 2012. I can’t remember if it was 2010 or 2012. I still have one kid with one year left in the system.

I know the children of Los Angeles.

I know their problems. I know their finances. I know how they make money and where they make money and where they spend it. I know where they steal. I know where they lie. I know who’s already sober and who has never once been intoxicated. It goes that far. I know the ones who got clean at nineteen and the ones who have never had a sip because their dad is a producer and they’ve seen the movie. I’ve fed them. I’ve driven them. I’ve heard them through walls. I have been, for over a decade, the ambient adult in the room, and the ambient adult in the room hears everything, because nobody’s performing for the ambient adult. You’re furniture.

Today, after my morning walk in Griffith Park, I came home. On the way down the hill I smoked a joint. I stopped and talked to the guy who sells fruit and vegetables out of the back of his truck, the big white refrigerated van that parks in front of my house every day and sells by the pound, and I bought apples and peaches. The peaches are the size of a toddler’s face. Hold one up next to a toddler and the toddler loses.

I think the peach matters. I was standing on my street holding a piece of fruit that had clearly been bred. Somebody had decided, over decades, that a peach should be bigger than is reasonable, and then engineered it, and then put it in a refrigerated van, and then drove the van to my house. The peach did not evolve. The peach was marketed into existence. I didn’t know that would be relevant. My brain doesn’t stop, and it flagged it, and I put the flag in my tote bag from the Anne Frank house with the peach.

Then I came inside. I made my coffee. I sat down. I had walked the dog. I had walked myself. I had smoked myself. I had bought a peach the size of little Timmy’s face. I was relaxed.

I turned on KTLA.

I hear Frank, the head anchor, say, look at this close call between a great white shark to Tupac playing and a man on the beach. And then it cuts, with no transition, the way local news doesn’t do transitions, to another street takeover in Los Angeles. Another one. This time at a liquor store. And it shows, again, what it always shows now: a hundred men, all dressed the same way, with power tools, breaking movement, and I’ve watched enough of these clips, I’m a person who watches KTLA relaxed at nine in the morning, and they all look like the same clip. Same cars, too. The cars are all kind of the same. Same era, same tint, same everything. It looks like a cast.

And this, my people, is where the investigative journalism begins. Because I believe I know what is happening. And it has to do with a video game that comes out in November.

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Here we go into the episode.