 Penguin Random House Audio presents Before We Were Wicked by Eric Jerome Dickey Red For You by Dion Graham We are torn between a nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known. Love is an untamed force. When we try to control it, it destroys us. Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness. Alejandro Jodorowsky, Chapter 1, Los Angeles, 1996. That Friday night we'd been sent to club fetish by our employer, San Bernardino. I was a bill collector, a small-time enforcer, and had to talk to a stubborn man about an overdue debt. It was ninety days late with the Ducats. That was the night I met her. I was driving. At the top-down of my convertible bends, warm air turning cool as we moved through desert country down unforgiving La Cienega Boulevard. La Cienega was Spanish for the swamp, and rightfully so, since it was always inundated with traffic. My co-worker and I had rolled north from the edges of Culver City to the overcrowded area up into Hollywood. Had left the working man's zip codes around 10 p.m., and mixed in with the pretenders and tourists, rockin' BMWs, Lamborghinis, and Maserati's. A couple of DeLorean DMC-12s were on the road with the luxury and sports cars. A Ghanaian who called himself Jake Ellis was at my side. He was my wingman. We were well-dressed, fashionable. As I walked us from Lamert Park to the plastic and pretentious side of Los Angeles, the mile-and-a-half stretch of sunset between Hollywood and Beverly Hills, known worldwide as the Sunset Strip. Bright lights, six lanes of snarling traffic, hundreds of clubs and bars existed on a snaking street that stretched from the bustle of downtown LA's Garmin District in her skid row to the Oceanside Mansions of the Rich and more famous than Rich in Malibu. One end of sunset was poverty and obscurity, and the opposite end was fame or fortune, or fame and fortune if enough people loved your acting, your directing, or the cocaine you sold. That 22-mile boulevard was a metaphor. It was every man's journey. Not many made it from crackland to cocaineville. Men like me had started in the middle, but still had spent all of their lives trying to make it from one end to the other. Women had done the same. I wasn't even halfway. Most days felt like I was still at the starting gate, but I was young. I had time. As we crawled past the comedy store, Jake Ellis asked, Brav, we sent. Checking out droves of foreign women as the club hopped, I nodded. We said, bro, we said, you strapped? Yeah, but I'm leaving it in the stash spot. Security's gonna search us. Jake Ellis nodded. Some fine women out tonight. Always. From all over the world. Every woman in the world ends up here at some point. Women in Ghana and Nigeria still look better. I'll bet they do. How would you know? You say it over and over. I cruised the section of West Hollywood bounded by Dohani Drive on the west and Crescent Heights Boulevard on the east, went down a mile and a half of that metaphor called the Sunset Strip, where celebrities went to overdose curbside, hollered at a few honeys from the car, took advantage of rocking a convertible, then turned back around, headed to our official destination. The strip was in party mode. It was always in party mode. When the sunset, the lights were brighter than Vegas and the sky was polluted with billboards pimping out the latest up and coming Hollywood movie. People sat in traffic, bumper to bumper from sundown until two in the morning, headlights for miles, brake lights for days. The mile and a half commercial strip was packed with restaurants and clubs. Sunset Boulevard was drug central, cocaine university, the Hollywood culture on steroids. Jake Ellis asked, learned from that girl you broke up with? I called La Peter a few times. That's a couple of messages of my pageant number. Nothing. She's got a new dude and she's not looking back this way. So it goes. None many women can handle what we do. Never should have told her. I told you that for-