Welcome to Oakland

by Williamson, Eric Miles

  “You from England or something?” I said.

  “Australia,” he said. “And I’ve been dumpmaster all over the world. England, Wales, Scotland, India, New Guinea, Argentina, Alaska, the Farallons, half the civilized islands in the South Pacific.”

  Nights Jones welded. He welded anything made of metal—old kitchen sinks, car parts, shorn girders, refrigerators, the legs of cheap kitchen tables, bent up and green brass lamps. He was making some kind of weird sculpture, a whacked out tower that didn’t look like anything, really, but a bunch of junk welded together and curving into the sky. He wasn’t building it to show off or to make some smarmy save-the-earth statement for all the world to see. He wasn’t raising it in fear of the apocalypse. Eventually, it would have to come down, be buried beneath tons of fill. No one even knew it was there except me and the other commercial drivers. Each day it would look a little different, a stove jutting out to the side and making the tower look as if it was going to topple over and crush his trailer. One night he welded a honeycomb of toasters together into a creepy chrome face that shot beams of light over the compound the next morning and sparkled like city lights during the next night’s moon. Once he collected all the banged up musical instruments—French horns and saxes and trombones and a corroded tuba and arranged them into an orchestra without players, and with his music booming through his speakers you could almost see the players behind those horns, old men back from their graves and children struggling with scales and generations of Oakland’s ghosts playing their lonely and spectral encore.

  He’d be up there every night anchored to his heap with a safety belt tied-off to some twisted lightpost or Chrysler bumper, his torch aflame and sparks showering down through the maze of metal, and he made a moaning sound that you could hear even over the blasting of Beethoven or Stravinsky or Bach’s Passion of St. John.

  “What’s this thing you’re building?” I said.

  “What do you think it is?” he said.

  He smiled. His teeth were crooked and green and brown and one of them was black.

  “I don’t know what it is,” I said. “That’s why I asked you.”

  Jones said, “It’s mine.”

  Jones, he’d invite me over to his compound for dinner once in a while, and we’d eat like kings. I never asked him where he got the chow, and he never told, but he’d have food spread out across a pair of tables and the food steamed in the cold air and there was always enough to feed ten porkers. The dump kids stood in the shadows and their hungry eyes slimed and shone and Jones waved them to the table and told them to take as much as they wanted and they did. They loaded food into their pockets and carried more in their arms than kids could carry, food spilling on the ground as they ran and seagulls and rats and cats swarmed over the droppings. And when we finished eating, he used a rusty snowshovel and scooped the food off the tables and tossed it down the hill toward the bay and you heard the shrieks and scurries and clack and slobber of fowl and rodent happy.

  One time after feast, the both of us tight and full and I’d brought Busch beers and we’d knocked back a few sixers, he stood up and said, “Come for a stroll with me, mate.”

  He poked along on his skinny legs and used an aluminum cane even though he didn’t need one. He smoked a pipe and the tobacco smelled like cherry and tree bark. We walked along as if cruising through a treeless park, away from his clean-fill area and toward the shit.

  “You hear that?” he said.

  “What.”

  “The breathing,” he said.

  Waves crunched and foamed against the garbage shore. Gulls trotted along and their babies squawked for food. A police siren dopplered down the Nimitz freeway. Somewhere a firecracker or a gunshot.

  “The breathing,” he said. “The sigh and exhale of the earth.”

  He reached down and held out his palm as if about to feel for the heat of a manifold or radiator, and then he said, “Listen to it breathe.”

  I leaned down. He was talking about the hiss of the methane gas, the little geysers of heated garbage cooking.

  “That’s the earth purifying itself,” Jones said. “Making itself clean again. Everything in the world becomes the earth’s garbage. The animals, the plants, the people, and all they make and unmake becomes the earth’s garbage. And the earth,” Jones said, and he looked at me serious and stern, and then he kind of smiled a bad tooth smile, “the earth don’t care one bit it don’t. The earth just cleans its own self right back up. That’s what I’m talking about.”

  He took something from his pocket and then leaned back down. He clicked a Zippo and held it for a second, then touched it to a jet of gas and the gas popped into a blue flame and it hissed louder as it licked the air.

  I looked back at Jones’ compound. A wind blew across the ocean and through the Golden Gate and skimmed the bay. Jones’ lights swung like the lanterns of the dead and his metal junk sculpture danced in the shadows.

  After work I went to Dick’s to complain and drink away the ache.

  Louie poured me a draught and a Scotch when he saw me walk through the door, and the place was nearly empty since my route began early in the morning and I usually finished up before everyone else got off work, day’s end whistles and bells sounding around Oakland’s factories and wharves and warehouses. A couple hungover waitresses drank bloody Marys and Old Gull, toothless and wearing his fisherman’s floppy, sipped martinis. Old Gull nodded, and I nodded back.

  Louie leaned over the bar and blew cigarette smoke. “Hey hey, young T-Bird Murphy,” he said. “You come on over here. I got some words I need to be talking with you.”

  “What.”

  “Your papa is worried,” he said. “About you he’s worried.”

  “Worried,” I said.

  “He won’t say nothing to nobody, but I can tell, and so can everyone else.” Louie looked over at Gull. “Gull,” he said. “Hey. Bud Murphy—what’s he think of T-Bird here?”

  Old Gull’s face pinched tight, and he sucked in his lips. He closed his eyes and looked down at his martini.

  “See?” Louie said.

  “Well.”

  “Your papa he’s always bragging about your jobs,” Louie said. “But we all know and so the fuck do you.” Louie cracked a beer and handed it to me. He said, “When you’re not working is most of the time. Your papa he ain’t fooling nobody no one. Not no one round here.”

  “I got a job,” I said.

  “Scab,” he said.

  “I’m steady.”

  “You need to settle down and get a career. Where’s your kids? When I was your age I had three kids.”

  He smiled and he bucked his hips and he winked. “Time for T-Bird to get to work!”

  “Need a woman to have kids,” I said.

  “Women,” Louie said. “They’re everywhere. You just hang on to this job of yours long enough to show you not some flake, they’ll be crawling all over you. You see.”

  I looked over at the waitresses. They looked at me through the bloodshot. They nodded that Louie was right.

  After my route one night I went to Archibald’s Playhouse where old black dudes played jazz and Mr. Beasley spent evenings listening and drinking gin. The guys at Dick’s didn’t know it, but I’d sneak over the tracks to the nigger neighborhood and hang out at Archibald’s as often as I could. I wasn’t black, so I couldn’t ever be a true regular there, but for a white boy, I was regular as a man could get. Before I lost my teeth at the quinceanera, every other week or so I’d sit in with the old black dudes who played there night after night since the beginning of time and would probably still be playing there after the last shiftwhistle of doom. The train moaned past every hour, its horn rumbling through the jazz. The howls of dogs ached in the police siren night. Archibald had painted the splintering wood bright purple, so bright that even at night it gl
owed and shone. It was the only building in the neighborhood without graffiti or burglar bars, the only lot around that didn’t sparkle with broken glass.

  I parked my scow in the lot and walked right on in there, and I brought my trumpet case inside with me in the event someone stole my scow and took my trumpet along for the ride.

  Oscar James waved at me from the bar. Oscar was the best altoman I’d ever heard. He could make his alto do things that no one else could or had even thought of. He never talked about the men he’d played alongside, and if anyone ever mentioned the old days Oscar’d cut them a look that shut their traps cold. What people said when he wasn’t around, though, was that he’d played alongside Arnette Coleman, Cannonball Adderly, alongside Miles and Trane and Art Blakey and Max Roach and even Clifford Brown. He’d done something, though, something horrible and unspeakable, something that blackballed him forever and for good. People conjectured up all kinds of stories, everything from turning in the guys using dope to wrecking record contracts of guys he was jealous of to actually sticking the needles into the arms of some of the men who allegedly O.D.ed themselves. No one at Archibald’s had a problem with Oscar, though, because whatever’d happened to him, whatever he’d done, was long in the past and he’d paid. He didn’t have any toes and he only had three fingers on each hand. One of his eyeballs was gone and he wore a black patch like a pirate to cover the hole.

  At Archibald’s I was one of the only regulars who had all his parts, teeth excepted. Most of the men were missing something, an arm, a leg, fingers, an ear, one of their hands. But you never heard such men play. Everyone who came to Archibald’s could play a horn or bass or piano or drums, and there they’d be, up on the plywood platform stage, rickety old men and young men with instruments customized to accommodate their deformities—a one-footed drummer for instance with a double pedal rigged with wires and pulleys so he could knock the bass drum and work his high-hat with one foot by rocking that foot back and forth heel to toe—playing like men possessed with angels and devils and playing like men about to die but whose music warded off the escorts into the next life, whose music went so far beyond anything the gods could muster, the gods themselves cowering and wilted and shriveled, subdued by the cries of earth and men and the jazz that is both.

  Walker the bartender saw me and set a Bud and a Scotch on the bar.

  “You ripe,” Oscar said.

  “Not that much,” I said.

  “Ripe. What you been doing? Digging in dumpsters?”

  “Garbage truck,” I said. “Drive one. Pays the bills and more glamorous than running a cash register. The chicks, man. I do it for the chicks.”

  “Yeah,” Oscar said. He pointed at my horn case. “You gonna play tonight?”

  I smiled, flashed my toothless gums.

  “Whose lady you been messing with?”

  “Wish I could play,” I said.

  Oscar said, “We always let you.”

  “Always let me,” I said. “But never get me a gig. I’m the sit-in man.”

  “That’s cause you sound Mexican. You be playing them straight chords and shit. Sound like a machine. Some kind of mariachi accordion harmonica machine. That horn of yours all razzle dazzle custom going to waste on your white ass.”

  “What you expect? Miles? Clifford Brown? Maybe Clark Terry? It don’t sound bad when I play. Least I don’t crack my notes, dried up worn out lip like some these oldsters round here.”

  “Yeah,” Oscar said. “Like some us oldsters round here.”

  He lifted his whiskey and we tapped glasses together and he put his arm over my shoulder, turned us toward the band.

  I swigged Scotch and tasted the fume of garbage, the sour, the childhood scent of going to the dumps with Pop and the joy of backing up the service truck and kicking and throwing junk into some pit or onto a sagging heap of old bicycles and tree branches and splintered dressers and toys, toys as far as you could see, toys I knew were broken but wished weren’t. Scotch is the best thing for getting rid of the taste of garbage. Rye whiskey is pretty good, too. Vodka doesn’t work for shit.

  The guy on stage sitting in was new. I’d never seen him before and he was light-colored and gray-bearded and playing a beat up old silver trumpet, so wrinkled with dings and dents and varnish-stripped and corroded that it didn’t even reflect light. Red and green rubber bands held the bell-tube to the body.

  The band played “Love For Sale” and the soloist took his turn and when he played he hardly played at all, a note and then silence, but it wasn’t silence because he was still blowing through his horn and moving his fingers, and even though he wasn’t playing notes you heard what he was playing, the clicking of valves against pads. Someone turned up the mike and then you heard his airsong, the whispers of breath through horn, the phrases and pauses and whole notes and half notes and runs through scales and leaps through octaves of air, pushing song rather than vibrating it, solo bleeding into the room.

  He tried for a high note and you heard the pinch as he stretched, and he cracked it.

  And even though it sounded good, even though it sounded right that he’d cracked that note, I leaned over to Oscar and said, smug as shit, “See.”

  “Yeah,” Oscar said. “See.”

  “Mistake.”

  “You think so,” Oscar said. “All those men playing the gigs, they cracking notes too. You know so yourself.”

  “I don’t crack notes,” I said.

  “That’s might white of you.”

  I showed him my pink palms. “You black dudes have all the gigs locked up. If I had a steady gig, I wouldn’t be driving a garbage truck.”

  “You ain’t getting no gig ain’t got no teeths,” Oscar said. He laughed. “T-Bird, you got the blues for sure,” he said, and he pinched his nostrils closed between his fingertips. “Baby boy, you got the blues. You got the ‘Ripe Boy Blues.’ Problem is you don’t know how to play them.”

  I laughed, and we drank up and got another round and we drank that one down too.

  “Where’s Mr. Beasley tonight? Already liquored up and gone home?”

  “Mr. Beasley,” Oscar said. He waved for another round and he looked at me and when the drinks came he handed me mine. “Mr. Beasley, he dead.”

  We drank them down.

  “No one told me,” I said.

  “You got to come round more,” Oscar said. “He wasn’t your only friend round here.”

  “How?”

  “He was tired,” Oscar said. “That’s how most all of us die. We gets all tired out.”

  I couldn’t stop thinking about that trumpeter and his not-notes that were notes and how good he sounded, how much better he was than I’d ever be. On the way back to the dumps I decided to drive through a fancy neighborhood, Piedmont, plenty of hills so juice would leak from the back of my scow and onto the street where in the morning when the sun came up and the sons of bitches got ready to go to their cushy jobs stealing money from people who worked for a living the juice would ripen into a reminder that there are some things that just won’t go away no matter how far you cart them. When I got back to the dumps, I found a good hill to park on and I took my trumpet out of its case and I looked at it and imagined myself playing, imagined listening to the sound of my horn get soaked up without any effort on its part to linger, and the more I imagined playing, the more I wondered what was wrong with my horn and with me and why neither ever seemed to sound quite right.

  On the north side of the Bay Bridge freeway interchange, where I-80—the freeway that goes all the way to New York City—meets the Pacific Ocean, mud flats stretch along the edge of the bay from Oakland and through Albany and Richmond and Pinole and all the way to Vallejo, where the Sacramento River fans out and dumps its silt. The flats used to be nesting grounds for birds, they used to be oyster beds, they used to be red with brine shrimp. When
I was a kid, Pop took me and my brothers to the flats and we ran along them, mud sucking at our shoes and pants legs, oysters and clams and mussels squirting water through the mud and into the air like little geysers, protests that made us happy and made us want to stomp the mud more.

  On the flats people gathered the washed-up wreckage. They collected the bottles and the drifting planks from bulldozed houses, the floating toys and syringes and life-savers and they made sculptures—a train, complete with engine and all the kinds of cars and the caboose, an Aztec sun that was as big as a house, a sundial that actually told the time of day, driftwood families standing in the mud, a mini-San Francisco skyline that if you looked at it right obscured the real one sitting beautiful and unattainable and chortling in the gold-leaf distance across the bay.

  In the neighborhood, just off 98th Avenue, Mr. Bronsky had been building an iron ark since before I was born. It was huge—took up five or six lots—browned with rust and every night after he got off work at Anchor Hocking he’d be welding and grinding, rattling with an air-hammer socket, banging nuts onto bolts and riveting and about once every five years he sandblasted the entire ship, hanging from ropes and scaffolds with the sandblast hose between his legs and gently sweeping the spray back and forth and back and forth again. He was a strange one, Mr. Bronsky—never came into Dick’s and never talked to anyone at work, but we all liked him plenty. There wasn’t a one of us didn’t wish he’d get to be on that loony ship when the big one blew or quaked in Hawaii and sent a tidal wave or tsunami our way, a giant wall of water roaring across the Pacific and standing taller than the TransAmerica tower in S.F., when that wall blasted San Francisco and Oakland and rolled all the way to the Sierra Nevadas and the flood we’d all been waiting for finally came and submerged all the shit, washed it clean and pure and permanent. Mr. Bronsky would have time to finish his ship, though, because the flood wasn’t coming any time soon and we all knew it and we bided our time and waited and we waited some more.