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I had stacks of books on my floor and in my closet. They were toppling over, brimming with events of the 1920s that would have surrounded Alice. So, though I could never know all the facts, I imagined her life. Her father went off to fight in the First World War. Her mother stayed behind – Alice watched her vote for the first time in 1920. In 1923 she flounced down the street, singing the most popular song, “Yes, we have no bananas! We have no bananas, today. We’ve string beans, and onions, Cabashes, and scallions, And all sorts of fruits, and say!” She watched as skirts rose from the ankle to above the knee. She grew up and started rolling her stockings down. She wore makeup in public, favored Maybelline because it promised “Eyes that Charm.” She smoked Virginia Slims. She left dance marathons with blistered feet after doing the Charleston for hours. Though she knew they were just passing fads, she loved playing mahjong and completing crossword puzzles. She listened to Jelly Roll Morton and Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Ted Lewis. She swooned over Rudolph Valentino. She heard a line from Mae West’s play Sex in 1926 – “When women go wrong, men go right after them.” She lived in the Chicago of the Pacific, read F. Scott Fitzgerald novels, and carried a garter flask. Then, by December of 1929, Alice was in love. She’d been dating him for years; they were practically engaged. She had already bought and wrapped his Christmas presents – a stylish oak-brown Stetson hat and a deluxe set of Rolls Razor (which promised one-blade safety). She planned a special Christmas celebration, a fancy dinner featuring her in new heels, a dress belted low and carelessly across the hips, her hair freshly permed, him tall and handsome in his custom-tailored woolen suit and new Stetson. After a night of dancing they would return home, listen to their new Bosch radio, kiss. But no, it didn’t happen that way. Instead, he left her for a dame with longer legs and a flatter chest. So, dressed in crinkled silk hidden under raccoon fur coats, Alice robbed service stations. Sheroared off with Dorothy in a new black Chrysler Roadster. She bobbed her hair short and tucked it under a colorful, close-fitting hat. She slipped through unmarked doors into the wild party atmosphere of speakeasies. When she and Dorothy sauntered into her hotel room to find policemen, she didn’t cry – she grinned. Alice would have started her prison sentence right around the time Al Capone finished one of his. The matrons placed her in Cottage Number 2, El Mirasol. She craved her Blue Moon Girl full-fashioned silk stockings, available for two dollars at only the finest stores. She was one of the older girls at the cottage, so she commanded respect. She passed matches through cracks in the walls to girls in neighboring rooms, so they could indulge in cigarettes and carefully blow the smoke out of the windows. She resented every dirty uniform she washed at the laundry. She missed the feel of a gun in her hand. I spent hours lying awake in the darkness, thinking of Alice when I should have been sleeping. Already an accomplished procrastinator, I waited longer than usual to run errands, complete assignments, or even take showers. I signed on to read fifty samples of writing for a new literary journal, but I found myself searching maps for the intersection of Locust and Broadway instead, trying to figure out where Alice might have been before she was arrested. Some days I would take a break from searching through books or the Internet, look into the mirror, and notice my bloodshot eyes. One morning I realized with a jolt that I was about to be late for an appointment – I had been looking through advertisements in the 1920s and had lost track of time. As I sped along the 73 South, I turned up my radio and laughed as I heard lyrics from a U2 song: But I still haven’t found / What I’m looking for. I doodled along the columns of my notebooks, looking down to notice I had scribbled “A.L.F.” a dozen times. I stared at my wall for hours, immobile, thinking of other places to search for Alice or imagining the crimes. C.C. Tenkhoff, I saw, had a large moustache. Now Alice was wearing a blue silk dress, matching one from the cover of Vogue. One night, when I finally fell asleep, I dreamt of her, walking down a bustling Broadway Street, losing me in the crowd. *** I woke on November 9 to find an email about Alice and Dorothy from the archivist at the California Archives. “Unfortunately,” it began, “I didn’t find a lot of information on them in these records.” She listed the entries from the Inmate History Registers. The only new information the archivist found was that the girls were sentenced by Walter J. Desmond in Superior Court, and their sentences lasted until March of 1932. No specifics on the girls – no descriptions of their appearance, no new details on the crimes. But now at least I had a judge. I called back the Public Records Ombudsman at the Department of Justice. I knew the laws concerning freedom of information meant court records had to be relinquished. I explained that I had a judge’s name, and presumed that the court case would have been The State v. Alice Le Fevre. The ombudsman asked that I make my request by e-mail, promising to check the records right away. I started dancing in my kitchen, and sprinted up stairs three at a time to send the message. The next day I received a response: “We have searched the legal indexes and databases available and were not able to locate any case records regarding Alice La Fevre or Dorothy V. Trone.” Also: “In response to your request for court records, the Attorney General’s Office/DOJ generally does not maintain California superior court records unless they are part of a case. Therefore, these records are not available from the DOJ.” The email recommended that I contact the California Superior Court instead. I replied, explaining that I had already tried the Court House. If the court and the Department of Justice don’t have the records, where are they? On November 16, the Friday of a long week, I received a response. “Given that these records are 77 years-old, it is reasonable to conclude that they have been destroyed…” I didn’t finish reading the e-mail. Instead I closed the Internet, shut my laptop, and hurled a half-empty water bottle at my wall. It was time to give Alice up. As much as I wanted to slip through secret back-alley doors, steal cars and hold up service stations with her, she had eluded me. It had been fun to live in the 1920s for a while, but I had to return to 2007. That night, a friend and I were heading to see Live Nude People, an improvisational comedy show that encouraged crowd participation. Those who came in costume would get to enter the theater first, and we wanted good seats. I threw the necessary gear in the back of my car and hurried to the show. There were roughly thirty people milling around when we arrived. Some of them were in plain college attire, jeans and sweatshirts. Others wore black-and-white striped shirts. But the majority had tied bandanas across their faces. I looked at my friend in her trench coat, and smiled as we cocked our Nerf Guns. The theme for the night was Cops and Robbers.
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| UCI | School of Humanities | Literary Journalism |