The Story Behind the Story:    Desert Angel

I had just entered the locked psych unit when a loud bang froze everyone in the hall. I recognized the sound (hand slapping safety glass, common on a locked ward) and went to the door at the end of the corridor to see whether I might calm the angry girl standing there.

“I’m breaking this down,” she said, pointing to the door as I approached her. “Everybody hates me. I’m the best ball player in the school and they won’t let me on a team. Around here if you’re gay, you’re barf. I’m going to jump in front of a train.” The railroad tracks were in her line of vision, a hundred yards west of the locked unit. They mirrored in an awful way the red suicide marks that traveled up her arm from wrist to elbow.

Turns out she didn’t escape to become another train fatality. At least not that year. After some work with a counselor, the girl became an emancipated teen and moved away from disapproving parents who were both on parole at the time for drug sales and assault. She changed schools and became the only girl in the starting lineup on the boy’s baseball squad.

Girls like this that I met in hospitals and schools became the prototype for Angela Ann Dailey, Angel, in my latest book, Desert Angel.

I write stories about a subculture of teens that is often uncelebrated by the mainstream, and my characters, like Angel, are based on real people that I have disguised in order to protect their anonymity. I met them, listened to them, admired their courage, and wondered where they found the willingness to persevere. Their strength and resourcefulness, the same qualities I had to search for in myself as a teenager, are central to my writing.

I usually start a novel with a true situation that has haunted me:

Hear the Dead Cry – a high school girl my daughter’s age, kidnapped and never found. Lizard People – a boy with a psychotic mother who begins to lose his own boundaries as his life becomes increasingly difficult until he winds up on the psych unit himself.

The Interrogation of Gabriel James – a boy who does everything he knows how to save a shy girl with a bizarre and secret home life.

Desert Angel – a girl pursued by the man who abused her and killed her mother.

As I write, in my mind I’m looking through the computer screen as if it were a window. Each story grows organically. I don’t outline or try to steer my characters. I believed Angel would run rather than surrender after the villain tried to kill her the first time. I did not anticipate that the first people Angel would encounter as she fled would be a Mexican-American family, some of whom were in this country illegally.

My wife, daughter, and I had lived in interior Mexico for a year and were profoundly affected by the kindness, warmth, and altruism of the families we happened to meet. I asked a young woman who works with the immigrant population in Southern California to help me with the colloquial Spanish in the novel. Her experience with Mexican-American family culture matched mine. So, though I had not planned for Angel to meet this group in the story, I was surprised and delighted by their appearance. Angel’s journey unfolded naturally since many such families live in that area by the Salton Sea. In fact, on my next trip back there, I discovered that the closest home to the genesis of the story was actually occupied by a Mexican-American family. (Of course, not the characters I had already made up!) In the book, Angel could not have met a finer people than Abuela, Ramon, and Rita to teach her the qualities of compassion and trust.

In a way, this style of writing is therapy for me. I often get to feel some resolution in the novel that I have not experienced personally. In Hear the Dead Cry the cheerleader is found. In real life Redding California, she was not.