On a previous job I had the employees participated in a team
building exercise, much like the Myers-Briggs system. This exercise identified
what the employee would bring to a team; an organizer, a leader, the member
that would get the project off the ground, the mediator, etc. The object of this exercise is to build teams
that would include at least one of each of these strengths, and bring the
project to a successful end. Bill Beverly has done something similar in a LA
gang setting in DODGERS, published by Penguin Random House.
This is an ensemble piece with characters that represent the
best and worst parts of a team. There is East a 15-year-old who has never
experienced a childhood, raised in the drug world of East LA. East is the loyal
one. He can always be relied upon to follow the rules and do what is expected
of him and get the job done. He is the order keeper. Ty, 13, Easts psycho,
younger half-brother with the gun. He doesn’t think beyond aiming and pulling
the trigger. The trigger-man. The brains of the outfit is Walter, intelligent, always
thinking ahead, knowing how to get things done. He is the strategist. Rounding
out the crew is Michael Wilson the older college boy from the hood who is to be
in-charge. He is a chance taker and never follows the rules. He is the fuck-up.
The story begins in an LA ghetto at The Boxes, the hood
where the boys live and work for Fin, the boss, the main supplier of drugs and
East’s uncle. Due to a momentary lack of focus, the drug house that East is
responsible for is raided by the police. Holding East responsible, Fin sends East
with this crew of boys to Wisconsin to take out a murder witness before he has
the opportunity to testify against Fin’s organization. Piling into a van the
boys head in the compass direction E.
“Only once did East turn and look back. Everything he recognized was already
past: The Boxes. His gang. His mother.” The further east the boys go the more
the mission goes awry. The boys begin to rely on their own selves to get
through this task as they become estranged from the comfort of their gang life.
East is the one who becomes more independent, realizing there may be something
more than the gang life at home even as he finds himself friendless and alone in
America’s white Midwest.
This book has won awards as best crime novel and best debut
for a reason. The prose is poetic, many times I jotted down quotes and passages
I want to remember. "It took a moment for East's eyes to read the scene. He could see the valley's depth, feel the real wind dipping down it. But he could not convince himself that is was real. Space both vast and unattainable, opening up between the blue walls of stone. The air below was cold, he could feel it, a reservoir, and he could sense something about the chasm, all the time piled up there. Close to forever. More time than he had in a hundred lives like his."It also evokes a sense of place from the LA ghetto The
Boxes where the boys live, to a stop on the way east at Las Vegas Casino, to a
rest stop in Utah where big-rig truckers and families in SUV’s mingle to take a
break from white-line-fever, to the white American Midwest."The farther east they got, the dirtier the toilets. Like every toilet in the country has been cleaned the moment they left LA, and none of them since." Bill Beverly shows
us this country can be strange, scary, and unfriendly once we leave the
comforts of what we know. I cannot recommend this book highly enough. It is the
best book I read in 2016, and that is really saying something.
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