The Bird Streets

By K.R. Rieber

Being the heiress to the Montoya Fortune has placed a huge X on my back. You think I can afford your mistakes?

It's August 1998 and anti-heroine Alieta Montoya takes to the road after playing a role in the assassination of her mob-boss father Carlos Montoya on Miami Beach. With news of his killing making national headl

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Degree Press
• Release date: Jan 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9781636762265

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The Bird Streets

The

Bird

Streets

k.R.Rieber

New Degree Press

Copyright © 2021 k.R.Rieber

All rights reserved.

The Bird Streets

ISBN

978-1-63676-590-7 Paperback

978-1-63676-228-9 Kindle Ebook

978-1-63676-226-5 Ebook

I fought with my twin, the enemy within.

—Bob Dylan

Contents

Author’s Note

Part I

Chapter 1.

Death of a Mobster… One Bastard Daughter, 
Little Havana Roots and a Cemetery Full of Cubans…

Chapter 2.

Old Friends… Strong Drinks on Empty Stomachs… The Final Run Around Town

Chapter 3.

Blackbird Flies Down Collins Ave in the Dead of Night… Close Encounters of the Freaky Kind

Chapter 4.

Runnin’ to Leave Time Behind…Drugs, Grandma, and Cash Advances

Chapter 5.

Baggage and a Burner Phone… A Blackbird Hits the Road

Chapter 6.

The American Dream,a Beauty Queen, and the Capital Regime…

Chapter 7.

Out of the Fringe, Canyon Ascension to Mulholland Drive, Butler Banter Goes Awry…

Part II

Chapter 8.

A Venice Bar Stool, Familiar Faces, Red Thorns,And Some Big Moon Eyes…

Chapter 9.

Hush, Said the Money, A Man Named Seskin, Home to The Grand Havana

Chapter 10.

Heiress Tendencies,Cheerios Encounter in the First Degree…

Chapter 11.

Graced in Green Fluorescence, The Santa Monica Skyline, Rocky Waters and a Silver Bullet…

Chapter 12.

Cocaine Lips… Red Light Madness… Harvelle’s on a Sunday

Chapter 13.

Sex, Drugs, and Hollywood Demagogues

Chapter 14.

Play Girl Bunnies, Acid Tongues, Indecent Self-Exposure and LSDreaming…

Chapter 15.

Rituals at Dawn, Sacrificial Lambs, Abusive Power in Action

Chapter 16.

A Drive Around Town… Dark Desires Over Dinner for Two at The Polo Lounge Avec Dom Perignon…

Chapter 17.

Psychosis Grips, A Search for Solace… Power Struggles of the Real and Imagined

Chapter 18.

Fresh Delusions… Breaking Points and Shattered Souls

Chapter 19.

Smoggy Sunrise and a Colt .45... A Fugitive End

Acknowledgments

Appendix

About the Author

For my divine family

who hold me in the light, through all of the dark

Author’s Note

Listen close and listen clear,

A heightened-reality unlike any other is near

In this story you will hear,

Of a woman on the verge in the Bird Streets,

Undone, yet

Without fear

~~~

In fall 2017, I sat sipping coffee with a good friend in his well-lit, old-Hollywood-style kitchen. A former production executive at Miramax who often engaged with Bob and Harvey Weinstein, my friend sat on the phone with an old colleague discussing Ronan Farrow’s latest and most trying journalistic pursuit yet, his publication in The New Yorker, From Aggressive Overtures to Sexual Assault: Harvey Weinstein’s Accusers Tell Their Stories.¹ History was unfolding before us like the annual rolling out of a red carpet at Cannes.

The uncertainty of the moment was just as potent as the Stumptown coffee we choked back, the bitter caffeine strong in our morning brew. The entities of distress and relief were present with us at the table, difficult to sit with and hard to digest.

I recall the morning, watching my friend’s expression morph from horror to sadness, to pure repose doused in an unthinkable cloak of anxiety. The whole thing was wrought with a thick stench of catch and kill.

I sat and pondered the power of Universal Collective Experience and how the public sharing of these narratives created channels of connectivity between Victims and Survivors. As I sat with my own lived experience, my own trauma, I felt connected to the larger group of women and men who had gone through similar experiences. I felt my story in theirs.

As many voices surfaced, the common denominator and painful tie in over ninety narratives where rape, abuse, and assault had been systematically covered up and protected featured one name in the marquee, Harvey Weinstein.

It became clear that media institutions were not sovereign truth-telling entities, rather extended arms of a larger network of men who wanted to suppress employees’ voices and reporting in the name of status quo, capital profit, and personal political gain.

The power of Fear and Money, which on occasion interlock hands and take a long walk down Fifth Avenue just for the hell of it, hold systems of corruption together like fundamental bedrock. NDAs are shoved into broken cracks in the pavement like prayers pushed into the Western Wall, seen by some and not heard from again.

The trend of rape culture did not end at his name, as stories continued to flood out across print and TV, more accusations entering the mainstream, calling out this kind of cover-up at the highest echelon. Hollywood institutions began to crumble. The Truth was pouring out and began to connect a group of men and women who had never been able to express or share their narratives around their assaults before.

Through the process of coming into my own story by way of connecting with others, a lightness I had once lost began to slowly return.

As a human race living on Planet Earth, the experience of humanity unites us as we navigate and function together within the many systems that comprise the global economy. Our similar stories and shared experiences connect us, especially during disaster and hardship.

Under corrupt tyranny, unchecked power, dark money, and secretive regimes the songs of unsolicited sexism, abuse, disaster, and corruption are sung, and ultimately, this is to the benefit of no one except those profiting off the silence of those who try to tell the Truth.

The one reality we are all most familiar with allows us to experience life under the guise that we have control over what happens to us. Without the illusion of control, reality as we know it shifts completely.

A new wave of feminism was taking over, continuing the decades of work begun by Tarana Burke in the late 1990s, furthering the rights and equality of women and men who are survivors of sexual assault, lifting their stories and breaking collective silence by saying #MeToo. An evacuation of Truth was nearing and fast.²

As these two veterans of Miramax continued to process and understand what was happening with their former boss, I sat processing the news in my own way.

Once exhaustion was felt on both ends of the line, the two said their goodbyes and hung up.

Afterward, we cooked brunch at my good friend’s West Hollywood apartment, tucked away on a side street covered by overhung green foliage and fauna, where the streets steepen toward Runyon Canyon. Runny eggs, goat cheese, fluffy baguettes were toasted, and pan-fried, supplied by the grocery store Pavilions just a block away on Santa Monica Boulevard.

We went on with our day. Everything was fine. But was it really?

We could sense the volcanic eruption brewing right beneath the surface of Hollywood’s tectonic and rotting veneer. A disaster scene out of a summer blockbuster film was soon to propel Weinstein’s secrets to the surface and transform the landscape of Hollywood forever.

I’d like to thank my dear friend Louis as this conversation, like many others we’ve shared, all touching on life, love, sex, marriage, work, power, and the world at large, greatly inspired me and the makings of this project.

Thank you for always playing into my narratives and never placating them.

~~~

As a cathartic piece of narrative medicine and a way for me to process my own experiences creatively, I also realize this novel may trigger some, and I want to acknowledge this now. Many scenes and topics may be experienced as a retraumatization and illustrate trauma that may be uncomfortable for some readers to engage with. Cathartic as it is to write, reading about such experiences can be intense without proper preparation. The Bird Streets contains depictions of sexual violence that some readers may find upsetting or traumatic.

Every character in this book is a fragment of a somewhat sick, absurdist imagination—a place I frequent often. While cultural embodiments are represented, names of cities and long-standing institutions which appear throughout the portal in this fictional world, The Bird Streets is something entirely different and is based in a reality of its own conjuring and should be seen and experienced as such, a culmination of experiences real and imagined.

There are no obvious conclusions to be drawn or assertions to be made from the text, an account of not entirely one story but many: some of mine and some of yours. May the greater metaphors prevail throughout.

—K.R.

---

1 Ronan Farrow, From Aggressive Overtures to Sexual Assault: Harvey Weinstein’s Accusers Tell Their Stories, October 10, 2017.

2 Sandra E. Garcia, The Woman Who Created #MeToo Long Before Hashtags, The New York Times, October 20, 2017.

Part I

1.

Death of a Mobster… One Bastard Daughter, 
Little Havana Roots and a Cemetery Full of Cubans…

You killed him.

The voices bounced around inside Alieta Montoya’s fragile mind, shrieking between her sweating temples as she stood in a field close to the neighborhood of Calle Ocho in Little Havana, Miami.

There had been only one man in her life she had tried to love, the only man who had ever broken her heart. That man was her father, Marco Montoya, and he was about to be six feet under.

A migraine was coming on and quick, making its way around Alieta’s pounding brain. She rubbed her palms together, feeling the moisture build between them.

She turned her back to the crowd looming larger than life behind her in the Catholic cemetery, facing her father’s casket.

The wood was shellacked in a comically shiny veneer, and Alieta caught a glimpse of her contorted reflection in the dark box. One of the beneficiaries to a pending fortune, an heiress to the Montoya estate, she could feel all eyes, every ounce of attention on her, on the day of her father’s funeral. Maybe it was nerves, maybe paranoia, but the voices didn’t stop.

She silently willed herself to calm down, not to panic, as the priest began to read The Blessing.

Shut up, Alieta fought with the voices, which continued to scream mercilessly from ear to ear.

Rosa Montoya approached quickly behind her. Alieta could sense her mother’s presence. Rosa’s blatant and looming disapproval could be felt from miles away before she’d even say a word.

A green dress? To a funeral? Really, Alieta. Are you okay? Rosa chided, attempting a tone of concern. Alieta gave her mother a sarcastic smile.

What’s so perverse about a green dress to a funeral, anyhow? Alieta felt the stream of endless thoughts slide around her mind as the soft silk cascaded down along her ribs, the fabric clinging to each curvature of her muscular perimeter, and a madness bubbled beneath her skin.

No. I’m not okay, like, at all. Not at all. Alieta shook her head. Where’s that motherly intuition when you need it… She muttered under her breath, glaring at Rosa.
Well, try to breathe. Rosa pressed, her brows furrowing with annoyance. Tension flared between them in the ether all around.

I’ll be able to breathe when the money hits my account, Alieta shot back. The cemetery was quiet around them, the two Montoya women in a crowd full of gangsters, demons, ancestors, and angels. The life Alieta found herself in did not feel like hers. Her mother even felt a stranger as they stood at odds.

The damp Miami inland air was not mixing well with the ten Marlboro reds Alieta had chain-smoked just before the funeral. Or the fat scoop of cocaine she’d snorted off her pinky finger acrylic nail right after she’d run out of smokes. The heat suffocated Alieta’s already-impaired lungs and her hands trembled incessantly.

You may be an heiress, but you don’t need to act like one, Rosa said, it’s not necessary, this attitude. Whatever you’re trying to prove… Get it together and act right.

Alieta grazed her nails against her father’s casket as her mother spoke, her hands pale against the dark enamel that embraced the departed vessel.

I’m doing what I need to do, Alieta said, if I’m going to get out with what’s mine, she crossed her arms over her chest. You’ve never been one for sharing, and if there’s one thing you’ve taught me, it’s how to fight for my piece.

Why are you acting like this? Rosa tempted a fight so cold it was hard for Alieta to resist, but she didn’t have the capacity for it, not now, and definitely not after the burial.

Everyone dipped their heads in mourning. A bright Little Havana sky hovered above them, and the sun poured down over the Montoya name. Alieta felt Rosa reach for her hand, and Alieta pulled away from the attempts at closeness. Her father’s body entrapped inside the casket, a reminder of everything she’d never had in a family.

This is me. I’ve always been like this. You’re just coherent enough today to hear it, Alieta said, turning away.

Alieta felt the sun’s roasting light beat down on her already sweating shoulders. She sniffed the stagnant air, inhaling notes of cumin and garlic, no doubt originating from a big crock of sofritos cooking up in a kitchen nearby. Alieta’s mouth watered with hunger.

Two hours