“Mission?” Jorg said.
I tell people I said no.
My first job was shoveling shit at the Mohawk station, Snookie the dog’s. I didn’t get my allowance, a buck a week, until I’d shoveled the Snookie Cookies. During the rainy season, I followed Snookie around with the shit-shovel and waited until he squatted. You ever tried shoveling rained-on shit off asphalt? It’s damn near impossible, and the shit sticks to the shovel, gets down between the oiled gravel and you shove the runny shit around the lot. Catch it fresh, though, and you can scoop it just like you’d scoop any other shit. The entire alley behind the Mohawk and Webb’s Painting was a smear of dogfood light brown shit, and when you walked across it, your feet slid like you were on oil. Our trailer was at the end of the runway, like Snookie’d crapped out a brown carpet for us. The dry season was better. Let the shit sit for a week, it turns into white powdered shit, like chalk. You can sweep that shit with the push-broom right into the shovel in five minutes flat—a whole week’s worth—collect your buck from Pop and go buy 20 packs of baseball cards.
My next job, when I turned ten, was manning the islands, pumping gas and checking the air pressure in the tires and checking the oil and transmission fluid and radiator and wiper fluid and air filter and washing windshields and handling the cash and running the credit cards through the press, access to the till, trusted. I had my own blue shirt, button-up, nametag. T-Bird, stitched in red, white background, red stitched circle around it, same as Pop and Joe and Steve Bolero. I was really good at my job. Once I even got a tip from a customer.
“Look, Pop,” I said. “That guy gave me a dollar. A tip.”
At first Pop looked pissed. Then he looked sad. He lit a cigar and leaned back in his chair. Snookie curled around his feet. “I never got a tip,” he said. “Put the money in the till.”
“Why?”
“Because you need to start paying back the money you steal.”
“I don’t steal.”
“You think I can’t add?” he said. “You don’t get fifty packs of cards on a buck,” he said. “The till.”
“Has Joe noticed?” Joe owned the Mohawk.
“Joe can’t count except on payday,” Pop said. “I can. And I’m your father. And you’re so fucking stupid that you got caught. If you’re going to steal, don’t get caught.”
“Sorry.”
His face got serious. “Don’t be sorry,” he said. “Just stop getting caught, for fuck’s sake. I’m not going to bail you out.”
“What?”
“The reason so many niggers are in jail is because they’re so stupid they get caught. If you’re going to steal, and everyone steals, steal like a Mexican.”
“Mexicans go to jail too,” I said.
“Not as much,” Pop said. “Not as much as the niggers.”
Early on I figured out how cool and how awful jobs were. Jobs were cool because you got paid, that’s why. There are other reasons why jobs were cool, but I couldn’t think of them.
I could think of lots of reasons why jobs sucked, though. Someone telling you what to do, someone criticizing you after you’ve busted your ass and done your best and telling you that you, not the job, suck, you don’t cut it, you’re lucky you’re not fired. I started mowing lawns, pushmower, as a side job from my regular job at the Mohawk. A buck a yard, front and back. Took me about three hours to do both yards, so I was making pretty good cash. Mrs. Couto brought me a pitcher of iced tea one time. Mr. Goulart, Tony Goulart’s father who had a milk-route in San Francisco and one time took me on his route delivering wire racks of glass milk bottles to Chinese restaurants and old people’s porches, Goulart’s father once gave me two bottles of chocolate milk while I was mowing his yard. But FatDaddy Slattern, one of the only blue-eyed white guys in the neighborhood, and he had a daughter who though she’d hump all the teenagers wouldn’t talk to any of us so stuck up a little bitch was she—what the fuck they were doing in our neighborhood we never figured out but what we suspected was that the fat fuck didn’t care about his family so cheap was he and all he cared about was packing his fat bank account with the money he made owning his custom toilet seat factory—Slattern’s Designer Johns—Slattern gave me my first lesson on how shitty bosses can and are likely to be, because that’s how they end up bosses. What FatDaddy Slattern did was when I asked him if I could mow his lawn he said yes, sure, you can mow my lawn, but I can only pay you seventy-five cents. A dollar is too steep. Front and back, seventy-five.
It was hard to see inside FatDaddy’s house, he was so wide. But when he turned to the side I caught a glimpse. His daughter sat on the couch watching TV. One of her eyes was fucked up, just rolled around like a frog’s. She was a teenager, and her face had so many pimples you couldn’t tell she had pimples. Her skin was flaming red and crusted yellow from pus, and it was a face no one would want to touch. You wouldn’t want her to leak on your hand. Everyone knew she’d do coke with anyone who had it, and anyone who had coke could fuck her. The trick was porking her without touching that face of hers.
Next to her and eating ice cream from a bucket and smoking cigarettes was Mama FatDaddy. She scooped a glob of ice cream with one hand, and before she finished chewing she brought her cigarette to her mouth. Her cigarette was stuck in a silver cigarette holder, and the way she held it let you know that somewhere in another universe she was a movie star. Not in this one, though. In this one she was as big and round as FatDaddy himself. Her face was always burnt red in the shape of a mustache and beard from where she waxed every morning. Sometimes the wax wouldn’t get all the hairs and there’d be stray black wires pointing out like miniature pieces of rebar.
FatDaddy’s walls were lined with his custom toilet seats used as picture frames. A zebra fur seat hung over his fireplace, Slattern family portrait behind glass framed by the ring. They looked like yokels trying to pretend they weren’t, fat toothless farmers and their horsey wives (a Jew in the mix, most likely, though FatDaddy was the kind of man who’d never admit it) wearing their home-sewn Sunday best, the babies wall-eyed and drooling. An Oakland A’s toilet seat hung next to a Raiders seat, pictures of Elvis grinning. Two oversized toilet seats, one decorated with teddy bears the other with ducks and both big as car tires and made for asses like FatDaddy’s, framed pictures of his zit-faced horse-nose daughter when she was a baby. It looked like she had zits even then. They were pretty cool toilet seats, actually. I wished I had one.
For me, money was money, and I’d rather be making it than not making it, and so I shook his hand.
Shaking someone’s hand in my neighborhood is not a thing lightly done, not when you’re a grown up, and moreso not when you’re a kid. When you’re an adult, a handshake can be negated by a lawyer, or an ex-wife, or by having had too many to drink at Dick’s. But when you’re a kid, a handshake is your only currency, it’s all you got, and in my neighborhood we remember every childhood handshake that was ever true, and we remember every one that ever was bullshit, that was a lie. And in my neighborhood we do not forget. Ever.
I shook FatDaddy Slattern’s chicken-fat slimy hand, and the four-hundred pound toad-face crushed my hand when he clasped it, to show me what a man he was. “It’s a deal, then,” he said. “Seventy-five cents for the yard, front and back.” He smiled big. He’d made a deal. My hand hurt like fuck, but I wasn’t about to let him know.
And a deal that fat fuck had made, too. The front yard, the yard people saw when they drove past his peeling paint dump, plaster Jesuses littered around the lot to show how God and all his soldiers protected him from the likes of us, one Jesus holding a Bible opened to the Ten Commandments, plaster Jesuses and birdbaths that had so much birdshit they looked like melted candles, his fancy yard’s lawn wasn’t that bad except for the maneuvering around the Jesuses and the birdshit birdbaths. That took some work, but that was part of the job. Fine. When I finished FatDaddy Slat
tern’s front yard, though, after four hours, I tried to push open the side gate, and what I found out after trying to push open that gate let me know the difference between FatDaddy and me. Me? What you see is what you get. I wear jeans and tee shirts. I own one tie, and every motherfucker in the neighborhood has seen it, because it’s the one I wear at funerals. Me? I’m the kid who shovels dogshit at the Mohawk station and lives in the trailer next to it. I’m the kid who empties the trailer’s toilet tank once a week one bucket at a time into the station’s women’s room pot. I’m the kid who fills your tank and checks the air in your tires. I get straight A’s and I play trumpet and my trumpet is held together with rubber bands and solder joints. I once won a golf tournament with a 3-iron, a putter I’d found on the green, and sand-wedge. Whopped some rich boy ass. When I won by six strokes, the rich fuck clone-kid fancy haircut golf-cart button-up collar tee-shirt pussy from the other side of town, the hills, broke all his clubs over his knees, his fancy cleats a-sparkling in the sun-glint. He wore one of those hats that doesn’t even cover your head, that only has a visor. I gloated and danced on the green, an Irish jig I’d seen Pop dance at the Elk’s lodge when something he’d done but couldn’t talk about outside of the lodge had made him really, really happy. I’m T-Bird Murphy and I’m named after the man who bought my mother cartons of cigarettes when she was pregnant with me, pregnant not by the man who raised me, Pop “Bud” Murphy, but by party-boy Cigogne perhaps unless my mother had just fingered him because his family had more cash than the Hell’s Angels who were boinking her too and at the same time and all at once, by the fuckdog boy who schtupped my mama, and I’m blind in one eye, I have bowed legs, and my nose is Jew, my hair blond, eyes the color of wet concrete. Look at me: I’m T-Bird Murphy. The iron-on patches on the knees of my jeans cut into my skin and when I take off my pants there’s red marks to prove. My clothes are second-hand, and the kids make fun of me for it because they’ve caught me wearing clothes their parents have donated to Goodwill. You fuck, FatDaddy Slattern: take a motherfucking look, if you care about the future of your family, your useless progeny. I am what I appear to be. That’s what I fucking am.
But not you. Check out your yard. Your yard, your front yard, the one people see, is just like the other people in the neighborhood. You have plaster Jesii, weeds, maybe a fountain. You’re pretty special for your ornamental iron over the door and the windows, but you know the iron don’t make you safe against us, not much. Your ornamental iron might keep us from taking your television out, but the iron don’t keep us from getting in with a flaming cocktail. What happens to you if your house catches fire and you can’t get through your barred windows and doors? Your bars keep you in as much as they keep us out. And if you don’t think so, think a-fucking-gain.
Your back yard isn’t what you want people to see. But it’s what you are, and what we all suspect people like you to be but we rarely get verification. Your back yard is what you are, and you don’t want us to see it, but you’re so greedy and slovenly and indolent that you can’t help revealing it to us when there’s a profit of cash in it for you, even though, and you never realize this, cash profit doesn’t wash for much in the long run, not when there’s more of us than you. When I pushed the redwood gate that led to the backyard, it wouldn’t open. I pushed and pushed, tried jiggling the latch, but no go. I leaned into that gate with all my weight. Nothing. Finally I knocked on FatDaddy’s door and told him about the problem of the gate. He smiled. One of his teeth was green. He was eating a rack of spareribs, and juice lined the creases in his chins and dripped on his fancy button-up shirt, pink. “Can’t get the gate open, little man?” he said. “How you going to do the job, how you going to get paid, you can’t open the gate? You out of your league, boy?”
“I just can’t figure out the trick,” I said.
“There’s no trick,” FatDaddy Slattern said. “It’s a matter of playing in the big leagues. Boy.”
He led me to the gate, yawned, bit off a strip of sparerib. “Ribs smell good?” he said.
I said yes.
“Pretty good ribs,” he said. He tore into one. “Damn good ribs,” he said. “Big league ribs.”
FatDaddy ripped another strip with his teeth and then he threw the rest of the rack down in the flowerbed dirt. He smiled when I looked at them, those ribs in the dirt. Some meat still hung on them. He turned around and pushed his ass into the gate and bucked backward. One of the redwood boards cracked. The gate opened.
“That’s how we do things in the big leagues,” he said.
I saw the problem with the gate. Problem was the weeds were taller than me. And not just regular weeds, foxtails and dandelions, no. These were serious weeds. Thorned blackberry bushes, sticker bushes, vines. The yard was a primordial tangle, four feet tall and buzzing with yellow-jackets and bumble bees, feeding. It was the kind of thing you see growing against the warehouses, lining the railroad tracks. It was the kind of thing you could see from the BART train’s elevated lines in the nigger neighborhoods. The yard didn’t need a lawnmower. Not even a bulldozer. That yard needed fire.
FatDaddy’s teeth glowed red with barbecued crud. He laughed. Juice sprayed. I ducked but he still got some in my hair. He laughed again. “You look,” he said, and he laughed and then he laughed so hard he coughed. He bent over a little, and juice spilled out of his mouth and he choked and then he laughed and he choked again. “You look surprised!” he said, and he just kept laughing.
He said, “Welcome to the big leagues! Seventy-five cents for the job,” he said. “And the job’s half done!”
He was right. I’d made a deal, and I was going to follow up on my end, do the job. I’d shaken hands. But I’d learned a lesson, too. Watch out for the fuckers. I’d been treated pretty shitty in my time already. I was in fifth grade, after all, and I’d seen shit already that even I knew wasn’t shit like normal shit, but was special shit that only I had borne witness to. I’d seen Hell’s Angels gut Black Panthers. I’d seen Hell’s Angels beat the fuck out of a cop who’d come to break up a party at our house, beat him into burger and haul the mess off in the back of a pickup truck. I’d seen Hell’s Angels beat the fuck out of each other, for fuck’s sake. I’d seen some harsh shit in my time. My mother took me to the Berkeley riots so I could experience the expression of the people. Pop took me to James Jones’ church in San Francisco where I got to see naked pregnant ladies giving blowjobs while The Doors played on the PA and a movie screen showed slides of someone swirling ink and oil around on glass. I wasn’t all the way innocent. I’d seen what knives could do, and I’d hidden in my bedroom closet during fights and heard gunshot and the scuffle and shuffle and removal. I’d had the shit beat out of me by some badass hungover motherfuckers, and I’d been violated in every way a boy can be violated, but I’d never, never before been betrayed. This was something new. This was something fucked up. This was something I had to think about.
I’d learned a lesson. Watch out for the fuckers. But in order to watch out for the fuckers, you got to know how to pick them out, how to spot a fucker in a crowd. It’s not always that easy. Fuckers are some of the best around at disguising their fuckerness. That’s part of what makes them fuckers. I’d been conned by a fucker, and I took stock. It wasn’t going to happen again. Some ways to spot them, that’s what I needed. I made some.
Thirty-two aspects of Fuckers, Qualities of and How to Identify:
1.If they’re fat, if they don’t work as hard as the rest of us, they’re probably a fucker.
2.If they’re fat and they wear nice clothes, have a nice car, or live in a house they don’t rent, they’re probably serious fuckers.
3.Fuckers don’t have breakfast at Dick’s, and when they have drinks after work, they drink alone.
4.Fuckers have British last names.
5.Sometimes Mexican.
6.Fuckers make you check the air in their tires. They make
you wash their back windshields.
7.Fuckers don’t watch football, usually, but if they do, they don’t root for the Raiders.
8.If you’re a fucker, your wife has the kids and you don’t pay child support.
9.Good men with ex-wives live in trailers, garages, and if they’re really lucky, apartments.
10.They don’t live in the house they bought.
11.When a fucker buys groceries, he doesn’t even make an attempt to bag.
12.Fuckers don’t eat linguisca. They eat steak. They eat steak at breakfast, steak and eggs. They eat steak at lunch, Philly. They eat steak at dinner, steak and lobster. They like cows a whole fucking lot.
13.It’s part of their fucker genetic makeup.
14.When you’ve finally spotted a car in the junkyard the same year as yours, the same model, with all the same options, the same color with the same interior, a fucker will have spotted the same car and instead of inspecting the car for which parts he wants, he’ll wobble back when you’re not looking to the office and buy the whole fucking car, just to be sure you don’t get a single part you need. He’ll junk his leftover parts, leave them for the monthly hard-trash pick-up just to spite you.
15.Never raid a fucker’s trash.
16.A fucker will tell everyone in the neighborhood he saw you at his curb raiding his garbage.
17.Fuckers file taxes using the long form.
18.Fuckers wear cowboy hats and don’t ride horses or tractors.
19.Fuckers don’t make their kids work.
20.Fuckers let their kids be fuckers.
21.They encourage them to be fuckers.
22.Have kids who are fuckers.
23.Are glad they have fucker kids.
24.To be a fucker, you have to believe in God.
25.God is the ultimate fucker.
26.Fuckers don’t think God is a fucker.
27.The haircut of a fucker: over ten dollars and done by a woman.
Welcome to Oakland Page 8
