Welcome to Oakland

by Williamson, Eric Miles

  Giant cranes walked back and forth over the barges and ships picking up containers and stacking them in iron cities, making streets and alleys and condos bigger than any project or apartment complex you’ve ever seen. Get a set of cutting torches and some window frames and those containers would beat any Airstream or double-wide around, and they’d all beat the hell out of a stationwagon or a dump truck’s cab. All those places to live in stuffed with boxes full of things for ritzy people in the suburbs to buy and wear out and throw away. Televisions and new refrigerators and walkers for their snotty brats and new dressers for their fancy bedrooms with attached bathrooms and curtains that matched their gold-threaded comforters.

  Across the bay San Francisco glinted on the water and lit the fog into a halo. Cars tinseled across the Bay Bridge, and millions of champagne glasses bobbed in the water. Somewhere my dead brothers fed worms. My mother was humping my newest stepfather in a field, and Pop snored and had workmares, remembering in his slumber a tag he’d forgotten to put in the till, a tire he’d patched improperly, a boss he’d offended that would sic his sons on him in the night. I could see the dumps from where I stood, dark hills rising against the glow of the bay, and I could see the glow of Jones at work on his crazy junk sculpture, and seeing that glow, knowing that Jones was at work shoving his metal into the air and ramming it up the asses of the gods, I felt good. I felt as if everything made sense and that in this world there are some things they can’t take away from us and those things are the things we make, the things we create just for the hell of it without any hope of ever making a buck or fucking someone out of their check. Someday I was going to buy me a mountain, a granite motherfucker, and I was going to spend the rest of my life with a jackhammer in my hands blasting away the excess until what was left of that mountain was a reflection of my own soul, a big-ass monument to work and honor and fear and courage and the blood of the bone.

  I lit a cigarette and stood looking at my car for a while, then walked up and knocked on the window. A door opened.

  It was Harrison’s son. “We like T-Bird,” he said.

  The rest of them were asleep, coiled up together. Yolanda sat up. Her teats were black and swollen and her nipples were hard like tire-valves in the cold. I didn’t know what to say.

  “We have a guest,” she said. “Let me pour you a drink.”

  She cracked open an Olympia. She handed it to me. She said in a low voice, “I have a sister, now, and my mens have a new wife. To help me out.”

  I drank beer.

  “She nice,” she said.

  I nodded.

  She leaned into the car and pulled a blanket back to show me.

  It was a white woman. She had a plumpy face. Her hair fell across her cheek.

  Yolanda pulled the white woman’s hair aside.

  It was Mary, Pop’s fiancée.

  I pulled up in the Mohawk lot around noon. My load was full from the morning rounds and leaking pretty bad so I parked near the curb so the ooze would smear into the street. Snookie was chasing his tail between the pumps, going round and round and snapping at his tail with his teeth bared as if he’d kill that tail if he ever caught the fucker. Pop sat in the office doing the books. He’d nailed pictures of Kent and Clyde, my dead brothers, above the register, and pictures of his soon to be step-kids leaned against the wall. One of them was a chick my age, and she didn’t look too bad except she was pimply. Pop had framed one of the pictures of his father, Granddad Murphy, standing on a rooftop in Oakland, the squat skyline of San Francisco in the background, a roofing rake in his hand, a sober look on his face and his little club feet astraddle a bucket of tar. The sky was cloudless.

  “Drinking?” Pop said.

  “Never,” I said.

  “Well I’m not lighting a cigar until you get out of the room,” he said. He smiled some.

  “Pop,” I said.

  “Is this a social visit?” he said. “I got work to do.”

  Snookie yelped. I looked through the window. His tail bled. He started chasing it again.

  Mary’s clunker pulled up and she got out. She looked good, had her makeup done good and her hair brushed. She wore her waitress outfit, and she’d bought a new skirt. She walked across the lot to Pop.

  I walked to my scow and opened the door and stood on the running board.

  “Baby,” Pop said.

  She handed Pop a paper sack. “Sandwiches,” she said. “I need my man strong. Roast beef, ham, cheese, pastrami. We need to keep your energy up.”

  Pop beamed. His face had a hardon.

  She put her arms around his neck and smashed her titties against his coveralls. She kissed him, tongue.

  “Hey,” Pop said.

  “Hey hey,” I said.

  “Ain’t she the best bitch around?” Pop said. “Ain’t she just the living shit?”

  “One swell bitch,” I said.

  Pop smiled. He pinched her ass through her skirt, or maybe from under it. I couldn’t tell.

  Mary giggled.

  A couple of cars smashed into each other in the intersection. The drivers, a man in a Ford and a woman in a Dodge, got out and slammed their doors shut and started swearing at each other.

  Pop started laughing, and Mary laughed too.

  Day before Pop’s wedding, day’s end, the sun setting brown beyond the dumps through the coaled filth of stagnant carboned East Bay factory diesel air. The airshit hung low, and the dumps were so high now that I was above the crud. I could watch it move, the air, watch it move like greased burlap, slow and slushing and with waves that if you listened close you could probably hear cream against the shores.

  And I could see the neighborhood, 98th Avenue stretching from the dumps where I sat in the cab of my dump truck all the way to the Oakland hills, to the Mormon Temple squat and gold-spired and guarded with an army of angels whose names I couldn’t pronounce, to the forest line that sliced the concrete like the laughter of an unassailable enemy, to the glint of lakes shimmering with a sunlight that only shoreline owners ever saw. 98th Avenue ran the length, from shit to Shinola, serf to Czar, from us to them.

  These are the roads my grandfather built, I thought. These roads. My roads. But these are not my roads. We do not own what we build, only what we buy. And blood is not legal currency. It don’t buy more than a decent bottle once a month. I could see that neighborhood of mine pretty clear, and I was building a dump that would become a playground for people who hated me and thought I was an insect if they thought about me at all and who would play a well-funded tax-deductible cosmological Mexican tune and do a hat dance to that tune on the sod-turfed lawns and chase me and all my kith and kin around like roaches while we dodged their shiny heels, finally squashing our guts with an obscene whoop of triumph.

  Jones made me dump half my load on one hill, and half on another. He was working on two conelike peaks. “I have to vacate by morning,” he said. “I have been fired, terminated.” And he went back to work.

  He’d torn down his compound, speakers and televisions and tables ground into the dirt by the iron belts of the bulldozer, floodlights turned into glitter. He’d moved his trailer to the dump’s entrance, and it was hitched up to an old Chevy Impala.

  The dump was starting to not look like a dump anymore. The hills weren’t rounded, the graceful sweeps of the canyons and valleys were gone. What was once something that looked planned and nice was starting to look haphazard, jagged. The hills were scarred, the valleys were rubble, and the once calm methane gas-jets were blasting so hard the air was thick with dust. I wanted to smoke, but there was no way I was going to light one up, not in that hissing fume. The dumps looked like shit.

  Jones was moving earth. He was going to show those blueprint suits they’d fucked with the wrong man. He was going to mess up everything like any man would, waste it thorough and comple
te and proper so that it’d take them a year to re-survey and plant their little red flags marking out the elevations for the foundations of their country clubs and fancy restaurants and swank condos. He worked it hard, and the dozer sweated brown hydraulic fluid from its hoses and tubes, and oil and grease bled black from fittings and bearings, Jones atop his machine methodically pulling levers and working the pedals, moving mounds and cutting trench, cutting caves and gullies and razing rounded hills into buttes.

  “Jones,” I said, and he didn’t pay attention. I yelled, “Jones!” and he kept a-dozing, working the pedals and levers, his white shirt becoming brown with dust, his red bow-tie coming untied, face streaming with mud-gullies of sweat.

  He’d circled his sculpture with mountains of fill, and all you could see of it was the tip poking above the hills—last night’s work—a rusted sheet of corrugated tin that had been stripped off some old shed swaying slow in the breeze. Welded to the tin sheet were a few dozen handsaws. They looked like teeth.

  “Jones!”

  He turned and looked at me, and it seemed like he looked at me forever. He was smiling, the few teeth he had brown with caked dirt. I couldn’t smile back at him, I just couldn’t do it, and then he turned and looked at the mounds circling his sculpture and he gunned the engine all the way up and threw the dozer into gear and it lurched forward, black smoke chugging from the exhaust pipe like a warflag in the air and the scoop hit the mound and the garbage shifted forward. He backed it up and charged again, and the mound shifted forward more, rebar and dirt and garbage crunching so loud the earth shook. He backed up again. It was going to take him a while to finish the job, and he had to have it finished by morning.

  I climbed out of my cab, and I stood there and I looked at Jones, sweating and at work, and then I walked over to the row of parked dozers. I fired one up and I put it in gear and threw one lever forward and pulled the other back and it ground a circle as it spun around and then I pushed both levers forward and made a run for the hills that circled Jones’ sculpture.

  Jones saw me coming. He revved his engine.

  He made his run.

  It only took us a couple hours to bury Jones’ sculpture, to obliterate it from the world. We sat next to the Cats and Jones split a six pack with me. We didn’t say much, just sat there and stared out at the ruined dumps and San Francisco beyond, its lights clear in the fogless night. A breeze wisped the sounds of tug and barge, seamen telling each other splendid lies in voices that were older than any voices that have ever been spoken.

  The little girl we’d seen dancing on the dumps stood atop the highest mound with her arms at her sides. There wasn’t any music, but she started moving, slow, deliberate, tranced. She danced with the grace of a nation and a people that had either not yet appeared or had been long since expired, and her dark silhouette against the shimmer of the San Francisco skyline and the lights of the Bay Bridge moved like a ghost, like a blessing.

  And me and Jones, we watched her and we finished our beers and we did not speak. And then she was gone.

  Jones, he’d looked peaceful, content, as if burying his own sculpture was the logical consequence of the labor of life. But then he looked at me and his face changed and he gave me some kind of look like he was sizing me up. Then he stretched his arms out wide, like he was gathering up the dumps, the bay, the whole earth, and he said, “I’ll tell you something.”

  He turned to the side, his arms outstretched, then turned all the way around like that, like Moses parting great seas of trash, and he said, “I’ve worked all over the world, and seen every kind of garbage. Every breed of man makes its own kind of garbage. Different chemicals, different foods, different soils and concretes for clean fill, different botanical mixtures, different deads. But the garbage,” he said, “the garbage, mate, when it’s all packed tight and together, the garbage—it all smells the same.”

  Jones was gone, towed his trailer right on out of there. Everything was quiet, and the dump fires were dark coal, the lights of San Francisco and Oakland and Berkeley sparse, buildings lit only a floor at a time while the janitors did their work. Cars on the Nimitz sounded like gusts of wind, and you could hear the scuttle of night beasts and the flutter of roosted birds ruffling their feathers to keep themselves warm. The chain link fence creaked in the breeze, and the dump smelled bad because Jones had shifted things around, exposed the compressed rot.

  I climbed out of the cab of my scow and walked to the center of the dump, what used to be a crater but was now a mound, and I stood at the base of the mound and leaned down to listen, and I heard the methane hiss.

  I took my Zippo from my pocket and clicked it open and spun the flint-wheel with my thumb and looked at the flame for an instant and then swept the flame across the ground. Two jets popped to life, blue fire. I circled the mound, torching, and then walked away from the mound, my lighter close to the ground, listening for the hiss and lighting jet after jet, first dozens and then hundreds of gasjets wagging in the black sulphur night.

  I must have been at it for a couple of hours, and the sun still hadn’t begun to rise, and the dumps were lit like some strange voodoo-man’s den of candles, thousands and thousands of tiny blue and orange and red and purple and green tongues licking the air just above the ground, curling through rock and mud and steel and smoking styrofoam and plastic and paper and the smell like arc-weld ozone, dry and harsh and electric.

  And when I’d lit enough, I climbed to the top of the mound beneath which Jones’ sculpture stood and I looked out over the bay at the lights of the city, and I looked back down at the flaming dumps, each gas jet like a home, a campfire, a porchlight left on in welcome, and I sat down and I closed my eyes and I knew that I would never sleep again, not ever.

  I wanted always to know what happened next.

  It was the day of Pop’s wedding. Pop hadn’t shown up yet, but the wedding crowd was beginning to assemble on the big lawn in front of the General Electric plant.

  Pop set up the wedding for a Saturday night at sunset, after everybody got off work so they could sleep away their hangovers on Sunday and not miss any ball games and make it back to work Monday just fine.

  The GE lawn was a magic place. When we were kids, my brothers Clyde and Kent and me played football on the lawn, and other kids played there too. The school lawns were just dirt and weed clearings no good for anything but blowing up firecrackers. You get tackled on a school lawn you’re likely to get your face broken and a mouth full of rocks. The GE lawn, though, the GE lawn was always green, even in the summer, and it was moist and cool from being watered every night. We came home to the trailer wet and muddy and laughing and listened to the A’s on the radio while Pop barbecued burgers on the pit.

  Pop wanted the wedding ceremony held outside, in the sunshine, and the GE lawn was the biggest open space around that wasn’t a field filled with and concrete and re-bar rubble and rusted washing machines and burned out cars—insurance jobs rigged by Joey Polizzi and his brothers. Besides, Pop was connected—he knew the night manager of the GE plant personally, and got special permission to use the lawn for his wedding.

  From where I sat at the dumps, the cracked vinyl seat pinching my ass and the smeared window obscuring my view, the gulls clouding above the haze, from where I sat I saw Pop’s wedding assembling just a quarter-mile down the hill, across a lagoon, everyone dressed up in their respectful best, cars and trucks and vans shined and polished in respect. Those shined cars—each of them a day’s work—and seeing those shined rigs—something you didn’t get a raise for doing—seeing what the town and neighborhood was doing for Pop—it made me understand just how truly big Pop was not only to them, and not only because both of his sons had been killed, and not only because he’d taken me on even though I wasn’t even his own kid—seeing what the folk were doing out of respect for him and admiration and approval of him, it made me more proud than any other
son has ever been of his pop. I was the son of Bud Murphy. I wasn’t his best man, but I was the best man he had left in this world.

  The street was lined with cars and work trucks from nearly every business in the neighborhood. The Camozzi brothers were there, and all the drivers, a long row of white Camozzi Carpet vans lined up on one side of the street. Joe and Frank Camozzi opened the back of one of the vans and pulled a carpet out and carried it on their shoulders to the center of the field, and then they unrolled it and it was red as blood and long and beautiful against the green grass. The Yandell Trucking guys were there, and some of them had even brought their shiny big-rigs to add to the spectacle. One of them was blasting his airhorn and I heard it loud and sharp all the way to the dumps. The Markstein Beverage guys brought a beer truck that was loaded with cases of Bud that were about to be reported stolen. You could see the Concrete Wall Sawing guys and their pasty brown trucks, demolition men with arms as round and solid as telephone poles from running jackhammers all day long, bearded and walking around slow and limping from getting slammed by falling cinder blocks and slabs of concrete. Neighborhood kids played football on the lawn and a short fat kid dragged three other kids all the way to the endzone and scored a touchdown and everyone cheered. One of the Markstein guys opened the back of the truck and started handing out the beers.

  I drove my scow right on up to the wedding. When I pulled up and the guys saw it was me they all held their noses and laughed, and I took a bow.

  The band pulled up in two old Cadillacs. One was a hearse with plenty of room for drums and the electric Hammond organ. The band was a bunch of players I didn’t know, black dudes and white dudes both, probably fancy guys who played San Francisco. They looked like pros, had that walk that says, Hey, I don’t sit around wishing I was playing—I play.