Welcome to Oakland

by Williamson, Eric Miles

  “Nice try,” Bucky said, and he reached for the trumpet.

  “One more,” I said. And I put the horn to my lips and I blew. I blew a long tone, a mid-range G, soft and light and delicate like lace, and then everyone was quiet because it wasn’t just a note, it was one of John Hunt’s notes, one of those notes that makes you stop and listen because it’s pregnant and you know something’s coming that’s going to make you feel relieved. I held the note as long as I could, and then I dropped off it and muttered with a flutter of valves, and then picked up a lower note and held it, popping the valves breathy once in a while to hint at the notes even farther below. And then I did a couple of John Hunt jumps, ba-dee, boo-whee, boo-dee, going up and up, jumping ladder steps through the range, and then when I’d reached as high as I could go on the 7-C, I flittered backleaps down through the bars, thirds and fourths and punching tight and loose and bee-bopping down and fading and then coming to rest at the bottom of the horn, fade and fade and then hiss and more hiss.

  I said, “Thanks.”

  I didn’t look to see their expressions, didn’t look at Bucky. I just handed his horn back to him and I said, “Thanks,” and I walked off.

  He ain’t getting that blowjob the sexy bitch promised, is what I thought.

  I’d thought I’d feel really good about it, showing the rich fuckers how they didn’t know shit and could do even less. But I didn’t. I felt really rotten. It didn’t make sense. I felt like an asshole. I feel like that sometimes.

  Fish and me didn’t talk about it.

  After work, when we were standing around in the sunset stripped down to nothing but our pants and workboots and blowing each other off with an airhose from the compressor, I saw the dark-haired girl and one of her friends standing beyond the construction zone and watching us, watching me.

  The next morning I stood on a street corner somewhere in downtown San Jose crazed and sore, sweating and shaking and feeling like I was going to hurl out an organ. I was still drunk, but I was also stoned on something else and I didn’t know what it was but it made everything sharp and clear and bright, the edges of the buildings suddenly something I noticed, the cracks and webs in the plaster, the spiders ducking in and out of tiny holes, a trail of ants marching like businessmen through a crack in a windowledge. A shopping cart coming down the sidewalk being pushed by a toothless hag wearing a sweatshirt for a headdress made a noise that was louder than any train that ever cut through a city and I could hear the ball bearings in the metal wheels, the squeaking of the wheelbraces twitching back and forth. Every building’s paint seemed a slightly different shade even though they were all painted either brown or white and usually just looked like a smudge of filth. Three cats fought somewhere behind the row of not-yet-open storefronts and I heard a big rig fire up its diesel on the other side of the world.

  My back burned with streaks of pain and I could feel sweat bead and trickle slow in salty ball bearings and then pool along the waist of my pants. I reached my arm around and wiped my back, and when I brought my arm back around I looked at my hand and it was slick with blood. I pulled up my shirt and turned so I could see my reflection in a storefront window and my back was carved up, long bleeding scratches crisscrossing and curling and sometimes broken like the dividing lines on an interstate. I heard the blood leak.

  A cop drove slow past and the cop gave me the get moving or I’ll pound you look and I dropped my shirt and started walking and trying to remember what had happened. What I knew for sure was this: I’d followed the girls to an apartment complex somewhere off Capitol Expressway in San Jose, and I’d gone into their flat. It was small and stark and sweat stains streaked the walls and cut gullies through a hundred years of foulness. They both played clarinet, and music scores lay about like old newspapers and an old upright piano pressed against one of the walls of the main room. Some of the white keys were missing and the keyboard looked like an ugly smile.

  “Connie really likes you,” the blond one said when the sexy dark-haired girl went to the bathroom.

  I smiled through my black teeth.

  “But you’ll need a shower. You can use ours,” she said.

  “You got any dishwasher detergent?”

  She laughed. “The dishes are clean.”

  “It’s the only thing takes this crud off,” I said.

  She went into the kitchen and Connie came out of the bathroom and sat down next to me and started kissing me and running her hands under my sweatshirt. I saw the other girl peek around from the kitchen, and when she saw us she ducked back and made like she was doing dishes. Then she coughed a couple of times and when I opened my eyes she was standing there in her panties and bra and she had that space between her thighs that makes me think nasty. She had a decanter in one hand and three glasses in the other.

  “We should have drinks,” she said. And she sat down on the dusty couch next to us and poured into the glasses and Connie stripped down to her panties and bra too. I drank my drink, it tasted like vodka and pepper, and the blond poured me another, and Connie downed hers and the blond poured for her. One of them took my sweatshirt off. There was a hand on my thigh working. I got really happy, and I took off my glasses so I couldn’t see.

  More drinks and then Connie’s passed out and sprawled on the floor like a chalk crime-scene outline. The piano and sheet music disappear and I’m kissing someone and I hear the blond screaming at me, “You’re such a fucker. How can you do this to Connie? She’s my best friend, you fucker. Oh, you’re such a fucker.”

  Then I’m on a street corner in downtown San Jose.

  I still had my wallet, and change weighed down my pocket, and nothing was missing but my soul. I didn’t know where the apartment complex was, where my car was, where I was. I found a payphone and called my crazy friend Blewer, the writer. I told him I needed help, and he couldn’t refuse since I’d bailed him out of jail twice, once on a DWI and the other time when he got jailed for telling the president of the college he worked for that he was going to set himself on fire and walk through his living room. Then I bought a beer at a 7-11, a 24-ouncer, and sat on the curb next to the other shellshocked niggers.

  When Blewer showed up, I showed him the scratches and told him what I remembered and that I might have gotten laid but I wasn’t sure, and he laughed and laughed. He told me to read some books and I’d feel better.

  I’ve read a lot of fucking books. They’ve never made me feel any better.

  From down the street police sirens sounded. A train of garbage scows headed toward Pop’s wedding and skidded to a stop like some obscene herd of tailed-up elephants, and you could hear the trash shifting back and forth in the slosh. It was the Vieira men, the other guys that worked scab with me, established men who rented houses that had driveways and yards they could park their scows in at night, men who came home at night to good meals and good wives. Sheets of sluice spilled, and if the orange-rind sulfured smell of the dumps hadn’t already been in my nose I’m sure I would have smelled the juice. The cops got closer, nearly a dozen cars, lights flashing and sirens full tilt and they pulled to a double-parked stop and in the middle of the train was Pop’s Ford Fairlane, and he’d had it painted white and shiny and he’d gotten new chrome moldings and slapped on some mags a set of 60-series Goodyears and we all knew where he got those and that unless he’d rigged the books there’d be hell to pay from the boss when he went back to work on Monday.

  The band’s drummer was changing the skin of the bass drum. There was a logo on the new skin. It read, “Bud’s Hot Five.”

  When Pop stepped out of the Fairlane, everyone was silent for a second. We couldn’t believe what we saw.

  Pop looked like something from a black and white movie, all decked out in a tuxedo and top-hat, his barrel chest making the jacket hang as if he had his shotgun holstered at his side beneath. He wore shiny white shoes that looked like they’d n
ever take a scuff, and you just knew that his cane was really a sheath for a sword. He looked like the classiest gentleman that ever stepped foot in Oakland.

  Someone let a war whoop, a call we’d all heard and that most of us had brayed, our neighborhood battle cry, the one you heard on both sides of the creek when there was about to be a shootout or a serious block-fight, the sandpaper-throat gut-chuck vein-pop call of joy and hate and don’t-you-fuck-with-me-or-mine that was followed by everything true and honest and without censor or restraint.

  Everyone made their way to the Markstein truck and grabbed handfuls of beers and started chugging, chanting, “Bud, Bud, Bud! Bud, Bud, Bud!” and they laughed a lot at the pun. Two fatties—both of them with skinny rednecks—lifted their tube tops and cupped their boobs for Pop, and everyone cheered and some people laughed. The boobies weren’t that bad, actually. They would have been really great boobies, first class, if they’d been attached to other women. Boobs are like that sometimes.

  “My aunties,” Rhonda said. “Lura and Tura, my mother’s sisters,” she said. “Twins.”

  “Quadruplets,” I said.

  “They have really big tits,” Rhonda said.

  “They’re both on the big side.”

  “Still,” Rhonda said.

  She looked sad. She was looking at her own tits.

  “You don’t have anything to worry about,” I said.

  She looked at me with eyes that made me want to drag her off to a place without factories or warehouses, without garbage dumps and seagulls carrying the guts of anything once living and now dead into the sky to make the sky stink as bad as the earth below, a place that smelled of pine trees and licorice and eucalyptus or the Pacific or fields of poppy, a place of all that was good and right about California, the place Spaniards found when they sailed up the coast in galleons and thought they’d discovered the Garden of Eden and knew that God and the angels had protected this paradise from the evil of man. I wanted to tell her that she was the most beautiful woman that ever walked the planet, and that if she’d marry me, now, on the spot, I’d care for her the rest of her days and caress her wrinkles when she was old and drink wine with her over a smoldering pit of coals while the sun set over the world and while we both died at the same time, our breaths wheezing their last as we embraced for the final time.

  I wanted the pickup truck, the barefoot kids, the single-wide, the fishing rods and a workshed, and I imagined myself working on a car in the winter and my knuckles bleeding from banging wrenches against manifolds and my woman, my Rhonda, bringing me coffee and brandy and red rags to wipe my forehead. I saw myself with a child, a son, my son, a trumpet in his hands, his lips pressed against the mouthpiece, the fingergrips too big for his small hands, his mind focused on pressing the valves at the same time as he shot his breaths and remembered the names of the notes, and me sitting beside him next to the music stand, the transcribed sheet music of Charlie Parker’s “Ornithology” spread out and the only etude my son would ever need to know, he, my son, the child who would redeem every fucked up thing about my own fucked up family, he, this son of mine, the light burning through generations of soot, of grease and oil, of concrete dust and asphalt fumes and the noise of the jackhammer, he, my son, the reward for work well done and honestly performed. My child, Rhonda. Give me my child. Your tits? I love them. I love them with or without you, but with you they may suckle my son, and you, mother of my child, you may be the redeemer of centuries of Murphy toil and anguish and drunken earth-soaking tears and faux joys of men bruiting in the flickering fires of hearths of desperate hope. Your tits, Rhonda? They’re just swell with me.

  “Really,” I said.

  I tossed back my beer. So did Rhonda. Lots of people were tossing back beers. Lura and Tura hadn’t pulled their tube tops back down. Pop was walking toward the Markstein truck, and every three or four steps he chugged a beer someone pushed his way. It was going to be a good wedding.

  A white Cadillac pulled up, tinted windows and brand new with gold insignias and gold-plated lug nuts. The door opened and a dude in a shiny silk suit stepped out. His gray hair reflected the sun and he was tall and skinny even though he was old, skinny like he’d never eaten a bag of Fritos or chugged a twelver in his life. He stared at us for what seemed like a flick of time but we all knew that for this dude it must have seemed an hour, his eyes going pale and shaky as he took us in, the truck drivers and jackhammer operators and cops and the titty twins dangling and no one in the crowd who didn’t have perma-filth scored three layers of skin deep, no one of us without biceps bigger than his pinhead. He walked around the Caddy and opened the passenger door and a woman took his hand and he brought her to a stand. He took a pair of sunglasses from his coat pocket and slapped them over his eyes so he couldn’t see us as good.

  His bitch wore a white dress, low cut, slit up the side to show some leg. Her titties nearly dropped out when she stood, and she had to rearrange the dress to hold them in. The diamond on her finger as big as a hubcap.

  It was my mother.

  Pop acted like he didn’t give a shit, stood there in his suit with a beer in each hand and his tie crooked and his Florsheims spotted with foam.

  He acted like he didn’t care, put on the face, but we all knew he did. Mom—she was the reason Pop ended up living in a trailer next to a gas station. He’d married her when I was already born of another man, and he’d raised me, the bastard son, along with two sons she’d popped out for him, one of which was no doubt his own, and while he’d been working four jobs trying to give her everything she wanted—a new Chevy Impala, a new house, new clothes, her own washer and dryer and a fancy television/stereo console—while Pop was driving a tow truck, pumping gas, working as nightwatchman at a junkyard, and spot-gigging in the Oakland Symphony on his trumpet, Mom was boning the Oakland chapter of the Hell’s Angels.

  The night he beat her up, she hopped the fence and told the bikers, and when they came round the block on their choppers, Mom sitting bitch behind one of Barger’s boys, Pop was ready for them. He’d unfolded a lawn chair on the driveway and he’d cracked a beer and sat down. He was tipping the beer back when the first chain cut the air and cracked his chest into splinters. Me and my younger brothers, Kent and Clyde, watched from the living room window as the Angels tore into Pop, and each time they’d knock him over he’d set the lawn chair back upright and crawl back into it and take another swig from his beer. When they finished with him, he was sitting upright in that chair, blooded. And that’s where he was when the cops showed up, Mom stepping out of the lead car, and took him off to jail for beating Mom.

  When he got out of jail, she’d given away or sold off all the things he still owed money on, divorced him, and stuck him with alimony and child support. It was damn near impossible for Pop to get a job, since he was an ex-con, but Joe Fernandez, owner of Joe’s Tire Service, which operated out of a Mohawk gas station, owed Pop a favor for something Pop had done that no one ever talked about, so Joe gave Pop a job. Pop lived in the office of the Mohawk, slept in a swivel-chair with his feet propped up on the counter, until he saved enough money to buy a 19 foot Airstream trailer. Joe let him park it next to the Mohawk, behind the stacks of truck tire casings.

  We kids lived with Mom for a while, hopping from house to house, staying with Hell’s Angels and dopers and hippie freaks and fags, living in the projects for a while, the only white kids always and getting slammed around like dogs. To this day I get a physical reaction when I’m in sight or smell of a black ghetto, and I get sweaty and my insides get quivery as if I’m a kid again and a herd of niggers is about to beat the living fuck out of me. I can’t shake it, and I’ve tried to, but I can’t. If it had been a goose-stepping army of Krauts, I’d feel that way about them. But it was niggers. And they truly loved beating the shit out of little fat white boys. Their parents had taught them we—little poor-boy white trash geeks—were the reason the
y were niggers, and wasn’t no way we were going to convince them otherwise.

  I can’t even write about the stuff we saw or that happened to us, and I don’t want to either, and I probably never will, either, because it might make you think I was asking for your sympathy and compassion. It was bad though, and kids usually don’t realize when things are bad because they’re kids and whatever their lives happen to be they just assume that their lives are normal, that there isn’t any other reality. But it was shitty enough that even we knew it was fucked up, it was wrong.

  Mom got tired of us after a while because we got in the way of her fucking, and she shucked my brothers into foster homes and ditched me with Pop, and eventually Pop got all three of us and we all grew up in that trailer, Pop paying child support and alimony to her the whole time.

  The only times Pop mentioned her was if one of us did something wrong and got caught. Then he said, “You want to live with your mother? You think the grass is greener on the other side? You want to live with your mother, you just keep fucking up. You keep fucking up, you live with the bitch. Understand?” And we cried and shook and begged Pop to forgive us. We told him we’d never get caught again.

  I hadn’t seen her in a few years, not since she brought her last husband to town to flash him around. The last one was younger than me, and he worked for the railroad riding around in a caboose, easy money union job. We got drunk together, him and me and Mom, and the last glimpse I had of him was Mom smacking him around because he’d forgotten to bring her some booze.

  And here she was, Mom, slutted up and stepping out of a Cadillac with some swanky dude that wasn’t pimp and had bucks anyway, that looked like his loot was earned easy and long, that stood and carried himself like a man from a world none of us had ever known or ever would. He seemed nice, and there was a dignity about him that was disarming, that made it so even though your first instinct was to bitch-slap him and take his lunch money you knew you shouldn’t because he was not deserving of a bitch-slap at all. Instead, what he deserved was to be commended, to be stepped aside for. He made you feel ashamed of hating rich people, made you suspect that not all of them were assholes that would fire you and starve you out just for shits and grins. We wanted to hate him, we knew we should hate him, but we couldn’t. And that made us hate him more. Otherwise, we’d have to hate ourselves.