Welcome to Oakland

by Williamson, Eric Miles

  And there were people I didn’t know, that no one knew, relatives no doubt of Mary, and they didn’t look like the rest of us. They were either skinny whelps with pockmarked faces and long hair, junkies and cranksters, or they were fat chumps who wore plaid shirts and khaki slacks like Baptist preachers from Mississippi or Texas or even worse, and the fat dudes and their blimpy wives with birdish haircuts looked like they spent all their time shaving and plucking nose hairs and waxing their blackheads off so that their faces looked doughy and pink like the feet of pigeons. They were all fucked up and they knew it. They hovered together like a bunch of hogs protecting themselves from butchers. They were even afraid of the scarecrow half of their own family.

  Granddad Murphy trotted over to me on his club feet. His hair was wild and gray and his teeth shone like he’d buffed them.

  “Playing?” he said.

  “Jazz,” I said.

  He shook his head in sadness, then shrugged. “With the niggers?”

  “They do it better than us white boys,” I said.

  “They let you play with them?” he said. “You must be pretty good. They never let me even sit in. Not even once, those coloreds.”

  “Using the family trumpet,” I said. “The one you and Pop played. When he lets me.”

  “Just don’t be using it when you drink,” he said. “The sugar gums up the works. And the alcohol don’t clean it out, either,” he said. “Don’t clean out the sugar.”

  His new wife rolled over to us. She was fat and blind. But he said she was a great lay. The best fuck of his life, he told me, was one time when they pushed the single beds together and humped so hard they split the beds apart and ended up on the floor bucking like mules and nearly broke their backs. “That’s the way to fuck,” he said. And his shit-eating grin told me it was true.

  Granddad Murphy pinched his newest wife’s ass and she giggled and the soapy rheum in her eyes glowed as if she could see something. He leaned close to me. “Weddings,” he said. “They’re the best place in the world to get laid.” He winked.

  He was right. The women who aren’t getting married get gooey and drunk and I’d seen it hundreds of times before playing wedding gigs on my trumpet. When that bride throws her garter, there isn’t a one of the babes isn’t wishing she was going off on some romantic week-long fuck-fest camping in every National Forest in California in some swank rented motor home off the Courtesy Chevrolet lot.

  And if you’re in the band, if you’ve got a horn up to your lips and you’re breathing your soul through the silver pipes of a trumpet or vibrating your lips on the gin-soaked reed of your sax, the curve of the tenor up against your crotch all night long and all the gals just a-watching you writhe against it, the bass guitar slung just below your nuts or your fingers tripping and stroking the ivories of the Hammond—if you’re in the band you’re guaranteed the bitches are going to be all over you by the end of the reception, especially right before the bride and groom take off for their night of bang-bang. They envy the bride, and they know what she’s going to spend the night doing, and they’ll be damned if they ain’t going to get banged and give the dude a better show than the bride will give her groom. After the show’s over, when the divorced dudes are whaling, harpoons poised over the cows, the band dudes are running lines and blowing smoke with the babes, who always pretend that their ride home has already left. Man, you could be playing in the corniest cumbia and ranchera band, the lamest salsa or merengue ensemble, and as long as you’re up there on stage, you get first dibbs on the goodies. You could be up there doing nothing more than playing the cowbell with a drumstick or stroking the wooden fish and all you got to do is stare into the eyes of one of the bridesmaids a few times and the first time you get a break, the first time you don’t have a part to play in a tune, she’s tugging you out to the dance floor and mashing her titties against your chest and doing the grind thing to check out your package. I’m not kidding. Check it out for yourself.

  So Pop’s wedding—What I’m thinking? Get laid. Get laid. It’s time for your balls to drop, young man. This time I’m not going to chicken out, and I’m not going to get so drunk that I don’t know if I got any nookie or not. Pop’s getting married, and I have a better job than he does, and he shouldn’t be the only one around here who can nab some pussy.

  Murphy men always outlive their women.

  Not that the gals don’t try their best. Hell, they do everything they can think of to outlive us. They poison us with boxed and canned chemicals, they screw our best friends before and sometimes after our nuptials hoping we’ll get in duels over their honor and die with bullets between our eyes, they make us take the nastiest, most dangerous jobs since building the fucking pyramids. They screech about the long hours we work and the connections we have to maintain after work at Dick’s, and they nag us into strokes and heart attacks. But no matter what they do, no matter how hard they try—and you’d be surprised how hard some of them have tried, knives, guns, emptying the liquor cabinet into the toilet hoping we’ll beat them for it and end up jailed with the niggers and get sodomized to death—or worse—we outlive them.

  By far. We outlive them by generations. I mean, a Murphy man usually buries four or five bitches before he’s through. And as far as I can tell, this’s been going on since the old Irish famine days, when a Murphy man would eat half an earth-apple a day and his family would stuff their faces fat with mutton, and they’d all die young and he’d have to hitch-up to another wench. Granddad Murphy had already outlived four.

  A chick with a really good body and a pimpled up face, looked like one of the crankster clan, walked up to me. Her dress was thin and tight and white and she wasn’t wearing a bra and her nipples punched out like lug nuts. She had a beer in each hand, and she finished one off and tossed it away and cracked the other and took a big guzzle.

  “Are you T-Bird?” she said.

  “That’s me.”

  “You’re going to be my big brother,” she said, and she smiled and her pimples went away. “I’m Rhonda.”

  I thought, Shit. Oh shit.

  “I just graduated,” she said. She smiled again, and she kept looking at me. “From high school. Right after my eighteenth birthday.”

  “Aren’t you a little old to be Mary’s daughter? She’s not much older than me.”

  “I’m her step-daughter,” Rhonda said. “What’s that make you and me?”

  Mary’s little kids ran over to us. The boy had yellowed skin and kinky orange hair and wore a Raiders tee shirt. The girl was fat and round and probably only ten but her hair was in pony tails and her skin was deep brown and she looked like an ancient Indian squaw ready to sprout the grays.

  “How about grabbing me a couple beers,” I said.

  “I was just going to ask if you wanted me to get you one,” she said. She smiled one of those smiles your sister-to-be isn’t supposed to smile at you, or anyone else. And I watched her walk toward the Markstein truck, and she turned around to see if I was watching and smiled again when she caught me.

  I couldn’t see a panty line beneath that tight white dress, but it looked like she had on some of those whore panties I’d seen in Hustler, the ones with the string that runs up the ass and up over the hips.

  I got a hardon, of course. It seemed like my hardon never went down. Even in the scow, that smell everywhere and nothing to look at but heaps of trash, I always had a hardon. And I was twenty-one years old and I’d never gotten any nookie I could remember. It wasn’t like I hadn’t had any chances, I was just the world’s biggest chickenshit. I’d had plenty of chances. Hell, I’d had women actually tackle me at bars and nightclubs during the breaks at gigs I was playing on my trumpet, tearing at my jeans and yanking at my dick. But I’d get spooked, and I’d shove them away and scram on out of there, go back to the bandstand and make like I was checking the equipment or oiling up the valve
s of my horn. I’d be shaking and scared. I was the biggest coward on earth, and sometimes I even wondered if I was fag.

  But I knew I wasn’t, because it was chicks, not queers, that I thought about when I’d get a thinking hardon. If it wasn’t bad enough that I had a hardon when there weren’t any chicks around, imagine how bad it got when a babe was anywhere near. My dick was like a goddamn divining rod over the worldwide ocean of cunt. And the women, they knew. Hell, how could they not know unless I was wearing a trenchcoat or hunched over at a barstool, as had become my custom. Some babe—hell, even a below average piece with some special good part—a sexy pair of eyes or long legs or the right mouth or good tits—would walk into the bar and boing! I wouldn’t be able to walk for the rest of the night and I’d have to jack off forever and ever in my scow just so I could get some sleep.

  It didn’t take Rhonda long to come back with the beers. She brought four, since she’d finished hers off. Two for each of us. We cracked a couple open and knocked them together and when she drank from hers she didn’t look at the can but looked at my eyes, and she stood close to me and I felt really wicked and nasty. Like some slime from Arkansas or Eastern Oregon or Warrensburg, Missouri.

  I slammed my beer and cracked another can.

  And Rhonda slammed hers and did the same.

  “Sorry for the smell,” I said.

  “What smell?” Rhonda said. She tipped her head back and sniffed, and I thought I was going to die looking at her neck like that.

  “I drive that scow over there,” I said. “The dump.”

  “I know,” she said. “My mom told me you had a steady job,” she said. “Non-Union.” She looked at me nasty. “Scab,” she whispered, and the word never before in the history of man sounded so good.

  “I won’t be a dumptruck driver forever,” I said. “I play trumpet. I might go to college. I have a laborer’s union card. I have options.”

  “Well,” she said, “you don’t smell to me. Not one bit. I wish I could smell you. I got really drunk one time, and I fell down a flight of stairs and knocked my head. It was pretty bad. Hospital and everything. I can’t smell or taste anything.”

  “Whiskey’s like water?” I said.

  She nodded. “Do I smell?” she said. “I can never tell. I worry about it sometimes.”

  She leaned close to me, pressed against me so I could smell her and my face was nuzzled in her armpit and sandwiched against her tit and that was it. I never felt anything so good. I was a goner for sure.

  A train was coming, and the ground started shaking, and the kids ran to the tracks to see how close they could get and feel the wind sucking at their faces. You could tell it was a long train by the sound of the whistle, the pitch getting higher and higher, and you could feel it rumbling and punching down on the wooden ties and slick iron rails and everyone there on that GE lawn turned to watch it, and you could tell that everyone brewing up on that lawn wished he was on that train and rolling away and away.

  A couple of years before I might have gotten laid, but I couldn’t be sure, so it didn’t really count.

  I was working a gunite job shooting concrete on mesh to make the mountains for a ride at the Great America amusement park near the Lockheed plant in the South Bay. The ride was called The Demon, and the mountains were supposed to be black, so we had to dump hundred-pound sacks of powdered concrete dye into each batch we shoveled up. The powder fogged into the air from the churning paddles of the gunite rig’s hopper, and it was always hot near the rig and you sweat a lot shoveling sixty ton of sand and breaking four hundred sacks of concrete a day. By lunchtime my face and neck and hands were black and shiny as wet roofing tar. Even my lips and teeth and tongue were black. The lower rims of my eyes should have been blood red, but they looked like black worms. The only thing that got that crud off my skin at night was powdered dishwasher detergent, the grainy kind that grates your skin until you’re red as a stoplight.

  The amusement park wasn’t open yet. They were waiting on us to finish up The Demon, the year’s main attraction. We were already a few days late, and so the bosses at Oakland Gunite Company had two crews working twelve-hour shifts round the clock, a thirty minute lunch break after the seventh hour.

  Great America hired a bunch of high school kids to be the Great America Marching Band, and they practiced corny Sousa marches and showtunes all day long. If the gunite rig or compressor ever stopped, all you could hear were songs like “76 Trombones” and “It’s a Grand Old Flag,” and it made you want to fix the rigs yourself and get back to work. And they were snots, too. I asked one of them once, a punk trumpet player with a perfect face, what kind of horn he was playing, and he said, “An expensive kind of horn.”

  One day during lunch break the band was taking a break too. My friend and shovel-mate Fish, a black man bigger than any man who’s ever lived and stronger than two, walked alongside me. At the workers’ cafeteria we ate buffet salads so we wouldn’t get cramps when we went back to work. When we left the seats had to be scoured, and one time some kid started to give Fish some shit about the mess we made from the black dye and Fish just looked at him hard and said, “I don’t want to have to go back to Quentin,” and nobody ever messed with us again. On the way back to The Demon we passed by the band members, I saw the perfect-faced punk sitting on the step of an imitation old-town store, and I stopped. He even had blue eyes. I hated him.

  “That’s a trumpet, right?” I said.

  He sneered at me. He said, “An expensive trumpet. Get it right.”

  I said, “Can I try it?”

  He looked at me like I was nuts. I could see him looking at my black hands.

  “Please?” I said. I pulled a clean white cloth from the inside of my hardhat. “I won’t touch it with my hands. I’ll use this.”

  Band members crowded around. Lots of them were girls. They were all good looking, pretty boys and girls whose dads were rich and moms were the kind of good lookers that rich men always get because good lookers are trained from birth to go for money like dogs are trained to shit on command. They were the kinds of kids who could afford to take crappy minimum wage jobs in the summer for “life experience” instead of because they needed the cash themselves or had to fork over their checks to their parents. The kind of fucks who work because they like it, and they like it because they’re not really working. Shopping mall bitches who work for a day at a vet clinic because they think they like animals until one pukes or shits or pisses or bleeds on them, and then they only like animals that aren’t sick or bashed into pelts. Caddyboys who get new cars when they turn sixteen and spend their weekends washing and waxing and Armor-Alling the leather so much that they can’t even take an onramp curve for the slime-slipping across their seats. These were the kinds of kids that used to drop down out of their fancy hills when we were in high school and trash our old beat up cars. Once or twice a year they came to our school in their Porsches and BMWs and Jaguars and destroyed the junkyard heaps we’d repaired into barely running condition—smashed our windshields and slashed our tires and spray-painted their school logo over the bondo and primer of our twenty-year-old Ramblers, Falcons, Galaxies, and Polaras. In retaliation, we stalked them at their local hangouts, late, and with baseball bats and tire-irons evened the score—not on their cars, but on their bones. Nothing ever happened to the rich kids for destroying our cars. We told the cops, the cops asked for our proof, we told the cops we were eyewitnesses, and the cops said the eyes ain’t proof. We, on the other hand, went to juvy for assault and battery. At crosstown football games, halftimes when our fat little cheerleaders sweated away with their ragged and frayed pom-poms, they drove around the track in Corvettes and Porsches and landed helicopters on the field with their dads the city councilmen or state reps or doctors jumping out and waving at their bleachers.

  “Let him try, Bucky,” they said. “Let’s hear him play us a song.�
��

  Their teeth were white and straight and you could actually see them sparkle in the sunlight.

  A dark-haired girl who looked sexy and naughty even in her wool red-white-and-blue marching uniform sat down next to Bucky and whispered in his ear.

  “OK,” Bucky said. He set the trumpet in my handkerchief.

  I made like I had never held a horn in my life. I grabbed it like I was holding a basketball. I said, “Like this?”

  “Show him how to hold it,” the sexy chick said. “Give him a chance.”

  So Bucky stood next to me, showed me where to put my fingers, and I put the mouthpiece to my lips and honked a blast that sounded like a diesel’s airhorn.

  Bucky smirked, and everyone else laughed it up pretty good.

  Fish stood back and shook his head and smiled a little smile but it wasn’t a smile of being happy. It was pained and sad and he crossed his arms over his chest like a prison guard.

  Bucky’s mouthpiece was a 7-C, standard school issue, the mouthpiece you use when you’re five or six years old and thereafter if you suck, like Bucky did. It’s like playing a trombone. You never miss a note, but you can’t hit anything higher than a D. I wasn’t going to be able to rattle off a primal scream like I could have with my Shilke 6A4A lead piece, my scorcher.

  I thought about John Hunt, one of the oldsters at Archibald’s playhouse, who had only half an upper lip and had to play to the side. His range was only an octave and a half, and most hornsters can do at least three. What John did was use the notes he had by leaping between them. He never played two notes next to each other, but jumped around, knocking notes back and forth that no one had ever considered coupling.