Welcome to Oakland

by Williamson, Eric Miles

  He looked at me and yelled. “Where’s the main?”

  “What?”

  “The fucking main. Where’s the water main in these shitty little houses?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” I said. “I don’t live in a house,” I said. “Sir,” I said. “We get our water from the gas station. Through a hose.”

  Shit oozed. It rolled slow across the floor like lava from a shit-volcano. FatDaddy got on the phone and called Jay Ellis, the neighborhood plumber. About a week before, Ellis had fixed the float on FatDaddy’s tank. Ellis was famous because whenever he showed up on a toilet job, before he even talked to anyone he’d just march into the bathroom and barehanded stick his fist into the toilet and feel around. Pop once asked him about his method. “Two reasons,” said Ellis. “Reason one—the homeowner is usually so sicked out that they go away and let me do my job without standing over me like a foreman. Reason two—you can find things with your fingers that you can’t find with a tool.” Ellis winked at Pop. Pop said, “Reason three—you’re a sick fuck and you like the feel of shit between your fingers.” Ellis permanently smelled like shit, and he tried always to cover it up with Old Spice, but all that happened was that he smelled like Old Spice and shit. To this day, I still can’t smell Old Spice without a whiff of shitstink somehow wafting into my nose.

  I smell Old Spice, I smell shit, and I think of Jay Ellis.

  Ellis showed up on the scene and said, “Hey hey, T-Bird. What you got here. Still at work on that lawn job of yours?”

  FatDaddy said, “I’m paying for you to fix my plumbing. You talk to me, plumber. Shit boy.”

  Ellis said, “I’ve unplugged a lot of your toilets, toilet guy! My favorite was the Nixon. And do I have an idea for you! What you need to do is make decals to stick to the bottom of the can. Targets. Imagine, politicians, ex-wives, ex-husbands, the Kansas City Chiefs logo, the democrat elephant, the republican donkey, a Mexican flag, Martin Luther King, a plain old bull’s eye—what the hell. After the Nixon I liked the Confederate flag theme. I’ve been meaning to buy one of those.” Ellis started whistling Dixie and doing a little dance. “You have a hell of a business going there.”

  “You’re fucking A,” FatDaddy said. “I own it. I make the money. I design the toilet seats, and my crew of hired apes makes them. Need a job?”

  Ellis walked into the bathroom, FatDaddy following, their feet slopping around in the curd, and Ellis did his toilet-fisting trick, the water splashing onto the bathroom walls and onto FatDaddy’s chest when Ellis’ fist hit the light brown pool. FatDaddy gagged and slopped out of the room. “Hey you, you little shit,” he said.

  I looked at him.

  “Yes, you. Aren’t you supposed to be mowing my yard? I’m paying you good money to mow my yard, and you’re just standing around with your finger up your ass. You’re as bad as the apes at the plant. You’re probably related to them, aren’t you. Inbred Catholics. Get to work.”

  The briar patch awaited. It was a month into the job, and I’d cleared about a quarter of the yard. Summer jobs sucked.

  Ellis came outside and crawled under the house. When he came out, he was covered with cobwebs. He looked at me and smiled. Then he winked. He told FatDaddy the pipes were rotted and that he was lucky it was only the toilet and not something worse.

  “Worse?” FatDaddy said.

  Ellis said, “It can always be worse.”

  “Just fix it.”

  “Will do,” Ellis said. “You’ll need to take out that carpet and get someone in here with a wet-vac or else the wood will buckle and you’ll lose your floor. I recommend Camozzi Carpets. They do insurance jobs. And you should probably call your adjuster.”

  When Camozzi Bill showed up in his white van he’d brought Dan the Dope Man, the biggest stoner in the neighborhood, wild curly red hair and standing about eight feet tall, sunglasses always. I’d told Dan the Dope man about FatDaddy’s deal with me when I was filling the Camozzi truck.

  FatDaddy sat stewing on the back porch, watching me work while the Camozzi men rolled up the shit-sopped carpet and lugged it into the back of their truck. When they plugged the wet-vac in and flipped the switch, something exploded beneath the house and everything electric went dead.

  FatDaddy said, “What the fuck.”

  “Can’t vac the place without power,” Dan the Dope Man said.

  “Fix the power, then,” FatDaddy said.

  “Don’t mess with electric,” Camozzi Bill said. Dan the Dope Man nodded. He wore those sunglasses, but I could tell he was looking at me with an eye-smile. Dan said, “Probably best to call Gutierrez. He’s the best electrician in town, and he works cheap. No green card. If he doesn’t do a good job, you can just call la migra, get him deported.”

  “Call him. Goddamn it, call the wetback. Shit. Who built this crap-for-house?”

  Camozzi Bill said, “That would be Mr. Williams.”

  Bill’s last name was Williams. His father was the contractor, and anyone who counted in the neighborhood would have known at least that, if nothing else. The Williams family built the community center, the Elks Lodge, most of the houses in a twelve block radius, and Old Bob’s Harley Davidson dealership. They built the park.

  “Someone needs to tell Mr. Williams he builds shitty houses.”

  “I’ll make sure he gets the message,” Bill said.

  “You do that. Now call that beaner and get him over here to fix my electricity so you can vacuum up that lake of shit.”

  “Will do,” Bill said. “Sir.”

  Bill and Dan the Dope Man lit smokes and Bill said, “Take a break, kid.”

  “I can’t.” I was sweating like a baker.

  “I’ll mow,” said Camozzi Bill, and he took the mower and cracked it into the berry bushes.

  Dan the Dope Man took his leathers from his back pocket and bent over and started yanking bushes at the roots, throwing tangles of vine and thorn on the porch at FatDaddy’s feet.

  “That’s the boy’s work,” FatDaddy said. “I’m paying him, not you.”

  “Nothing for us to do,” Bill said. “And we’re on the clock, by the way. You want us to go? We can go, sir, but I’d advise against cutting us off. Floor’s more expensive than our time.”

  “Thieves,” FatDaddy said.

  Gutierrez showed up and went under the house. He came back with a fistful of wires melted together and scorched.

  “The wiring it’s fine,” Gutierrez said. “No problema with the wiring of this house. The problem is this, Senor, Senor Slattern. You have too many bugs. The bugs, the termites and the other bugses eat through the wires and the wood and I think you have a big problema, my friend.”

  Things got rough on FatDaddy Slattern, and no one could quite figure out why. We racked our brains and none of us could make any sense of it. It was as if some biblical curse had been visited on the poor son of a bitch. It was like everything that could go wrong for him did go wrong. The bugs? Termite infested, his house. And then a plague of ants after the carpet was reinstalled, almost as if the Camozzis had treated the carpet with sugared water, which, of course, was such a mean trick that no one would hardly ever do such a thing. The house’s wiring turned out to be much worse than initially anticipated by Gutierrez. It seemed like every time FatDaddy flipped a light switch, something shorted or caught fire. FatDaddy had to buy a new fire extinguisher every week. His phone bill included calls to Cambodia that he swore he didn’t make but that he had to pay for because when they called the Cambodia number to verify, the guy who answered the phone said he’d talked with Mr. Slattern often, that Slattern was always calling, actually, that their conversations were about designer toilet seat design. He racked up thirty-three traffic tickets in a six day stretch, getting pulled over every time he put his car in gear and sometimes getting tickets when he wasn’t even driving. He got
a ticket for parking within five feet of his own driveway. Unsafe lane change. Failure to signal. Chickenshit tickets galore. At restaurants his food always tasted like someone had pissed on it. One time he bit into a sandwich and the deli worker had accidentally used gobs of killer Chinese mustard instead of a thin spread of American yellow. Somehow his mail stopped coming, and when he tried to track it down, he found it’d been forwarded, and not just forwarded, but forwarded first to another address in Oakland, then to Sacramento, to North Highlands, Elverta, Rio Linda, to San Leandro, then re-forwarded to San Lorenzo, then to Hayward, to Boulder, Colorado, seven consecutive addresses in Houston, Cypress, Texas, two different addresses in New York City, Queens, Freeland, Washington on Whidbey Island, Boulder Creek, California, Salem, Oregon, back to Houston, to Knob Noster, Missouri, to McAllen, Texas. He went for a haircut and ended up having to get a crew-cut, so screwed-up a job Joannie did, and she was really sorry about it and promised to do a better job the next time he came in. Joannie would have her mother, Mama Hernandez herself and in the flesh, do the job, and do it right.

  Now the fire, the fire was a bad thing. The family FatDaddy was sleeping—around three in the afternoon they took family naps—and I was mowing. In Oakland it doesn’t rain between May and October, and when it’s hot you can hear the weeds crackle and snap when the oxygen in the plants’ cells explodes. Stand in a field in California summer and it’s like you’re in a bowl of Rice Krispies, as if billions of microscopic firecrackers are exploding, as if the earth is burning itself alive. And you don’t just hear the fire, you can feel it, you can feel the heat, feel it torch. FatDaddy Slattern’s yard sang with fire. That it would catch was inevitable. It wasn’t my fault. The mower did it. I got a running start on a bad patch of weeds and the blade hit a rock, part of a buried granite fountain. The blades made a spark, the spark caught the weeds, and before I knew it the yard was afire, and the house caught, and I tried to let the family FatDaddy Slattern know their house was on fire, really I did, but they were sleeping too hard and I couldn’t wake them up by yelling and the doors were locked so I couldn’t get in and they didn’t hear me knocking and I knocked as hard as I could but I had to get out of there or else I’d have been burned alive.

  “That’s how it happened,” Mr. O’Shaunessey said. “Right?”

  I said, “Right. Right,” I said. “That’s what happened.”

  FatDaddy stood there in his shorts, rolls of blubber white and jiggling as he shook his fist at me. The Sanchez brothers, firemen, held him back. “Arson!” FatDaddy yelled. “The little Mick white-trash piece of shit burned my house down. I’m pressing charges. You’re out of your league, boys.” Fat Daddy laughed, and his laugh was kind of spooky. “Do you know who I am? Do you?”

  “I believe everyone here knows who you are,” said O’Shaunessey. “And yes, perhaps, Mr. Slattern, we are out of our league. Have you ever considered that there could be more than one league? That the league you’re now playing in is not your league, but ours?”

  “Do you know who I am?”

  “I don’t claim to know much,” O’Shaunessey said. “But I do know who you are. Do you know who I am? I am the Fire Chief,” O’Shaunessey said. “Mower blades set off the blaze. Your yard was a fire hazard. That is my official and legal forensic opinion.”

  “He hasn’t paid me yet,” I said. “There’s nothing left for me to mow. My job’s done. He owes me seventy-five cents.”

  Everyone looked at him with eyes that said, Pay the boy.

  “Fuck you!” Fat Daddy said. “Fuck you!”

  Mama FatDaddy joined in. “Yeah, fuck you. Do you know who my husband is? Fuck you all.”

  It wasn’t a very dignified thing for them to say, not for people of their position and social standing.

  “Fuck you!” FatDaddy said. “You’re all in it together! Micks, WOPS, wetbacks, niggers, chinks, hairdressers, niggers, Portugees, niggers and niggers and goddamn niggers, all of you. Fuck you! You’re all a bunch of Mick WOP wetback niggers. All of you. Niggers.”

  Somehow FatDaddy tripped, and he lay face down in the burnt and now hose-watered lawn. When he stood up, he dripped black char sludge, his face slick. The char smelled good. It made the factory stink go away. Oakland could smell a whole lot of a fucking better if something was always always burning, instead of only burning once in a while.

  Everyone was still looking at him hard. Pay the boy.

  FatDaddy walked into his charred house. He sifted through the smoking cinders and found his pair of pants and lifted them like he was hoisting a burned up tent. Coins dropped into the ashes and black sludge. He threw some change at me. I leaned to get the quarters, and O’Shaunessey said, “No, son. Mr. Slattern will hand you your pay.”

  FatDaddy just stood there. “Pay the boy,” O’Shaunessey said.

  FatDaddy looked at O’Shaunessey, and then you could see FatDaddy look around at everyone else. There were probably a hundred of us now, and FatDaddy first tried to look at people’s eyes, but pretty soon he was just looking at something on the ground in front of each of us. Without looking up he trudged through the slosh and cinder toward me. He stooped. He picked up the coins and counted out three quarters. He handed them to me.

  “Thank you Mr. Slattern,” I said.

  I didn’t want to, but I smiled at him. It was one of those smiles I get when I’m really happy or I’m really guilty or when someone thinks I’m guilty and I’m not or there’s something I want to say but I can’t get up the balls to say it.

  FatDaddy didn’t say anything.

  Mr. Slattern decided to move away from the neighborhood. He closed his shop, and moved his designer toilet business to another town, a town in Southern California, he said, somewhere where people would appreciate his artistic contribution to culture, he said, to shitting, we said. His daughter made her parting rounds, boning everyone who’d cut her a line. People made jokes about her huge nose, about how she could snort more than a horse through that schnoz.

  FatDaddy tried every moving company in Oakland, Mayflower, Berkins, the Carlisle Brothers, even Yandell, who didn’t do private moves. They were all tire accounts at the shop, and for some reason they were all booked, booked for a long time. He tried Perkins Movers, he tried Schlimsky’s, Flores Home Movers, Fernandez Trucking. Everyone was booked solid for the foreseeable future. Finally Mr. Slattern had to call Manero U-Haul. They had a truck, but the problem with U-Haul was that you had to haul it, which meant that FatDaddy would have to load his own truck, load his fire-scorched furniture and custom toilet-seats himself. That FatDaddy didn’t want to do, so he called everyone in the neighborhood looking for manpower. We were all busy. Business had really picked up, it being the end of summer and all. It was amazing how much work everyone in the neighborhood had all of a sudden.

  He got his truck, and he pulled it up to the heap of black ashes that was once his house. He made his coke-slut frog-eyed zit-faced daughter do most of the work, picking through the ashes for family portraits and toilet seats of note, the especial ones, specially the Elvises, FatDaddy’s favorites. When your house burns, there are some things you just don’t want to lose, some things you just can’t replace.

  We watched. We sat on lawns across the street from FatDaddy and his daughter and Mama FatDaddy. We sat on folding chairs with jugs of lemonade and Spanada and more cigarettes than a human being could ever smoke in a lifetime. The women sat with packs of Pall Mall’s at their sides, the men with cases of Oly. The Costello brothers brought fireworks, and we had Fourth of July again.

  When FatDaddy and his daughter were loading their couch, he looked over at us. Mama FatDaddy sat in the cab of the truck sweating. Pop was standing up and making a speech. He did that sometimes, Pop. He made speeches about the bourgeois and the proletariats, about the chains that shackled the workers and about the revolution that would someday come and torch the fortresses of th
e oppressors. Pop was always talking some big words shit none of us understood but all of us agreed with. He pulled a plaster bucket from the side of the Couto house and he stood on it, and he said, “The sovereignty of the worker is his birthright. The infrastructure of the rich is mounted on the backs of the poor. We must control the means of production. The factories belong to us! We produced the capital. We built their houses. We unstop their toilets. We,” Pop said, and he looked at FatDaddy Slattern and his chest swelled with air, “we mow their fucking lawns!”

  No one understood a word Pop said, but we all cheered, and the people who had beers downed them and cracked some more.

  FatDaddy sweated, and his daughter shook with coke need. She wasn’t getting any better looking. She looked better when she was watching television. Her eye wandered less, and her nose didn’t get the noontime shadow like a giant sundial.

  Manny U-Haul Manero said something to Pop, and Pop smiled kind of small and sly. FatDaddy’s truck was finally loaded. Mama FatDaddy looked like she was ready to pass out sitting there in the cab. She hadn’t waxed in a few days, and the red beard was replaced with a black shadow. The daughter sat in the passenger seat and she looked at us. Some of the guys who’d fucked her were sad to see her going. The ones who hadn’t fucked her wished they had, of course, because everyone wanted to fuck and fuck and fuck, but they didn’t wish too much that they’d fucked her since there were other coke whores around who had smaller noses and had lesser snort quotients. Hell, Laureen Moone would fuck anyone for a line, and she was pretty good looking to boot, twelve years old and not only ready to rock but rocking away, and even though everyone said she had some weird kind of smell, not crustacean but instead mollusk, like an abalone, the smell didn’t stop anyone from doing the boink with Laureen. The San Leandro Marina was her favorite spot, and Jeff Carlson had a van that all the teenagers and some of their fathers would line up behind waiting their turns. Laureen was really popular, and everyone liked her. They didn’t get much better than Laureen, is what people said when they came into the Mohawk station.