Welcome to Oakland

by Williamson, Eric Miles

  Her husband nodded like a social worker, or a pussy-whipped piece of shit with no guts no balls and no sense of when it’s time to dump the bitch or at least crack her one good, but Mommy’s face as I talked began to contort, to writhe and twist, her lip curling, her eyes fuzzing over and then flickering like chrome in the sunlight.

  Her husband went into the bathroom. While he was gone, my mother began quivering and twitching. I lit a cigarette.

  I poured myself a drink.

  Then her face wrenched, and she opened her mouth, and she howled, and the howl was in the voice of a man. She kicked and flailed her arms, and then she clawed at her face with her fingernails and said, “Bad. Bad. Bad.”

  “Hey,” I said, calling to her husband. “You need to come out here and deal with this shit.”

  He walked out of the bathroom and pinned her down on the couch and stopped her from scratching her eyes out. I remembered I’d forgotten to take the trash to the curb that morning.

  “It’s George,” her husband said. “One of the bad alters.”

  Her husband began his routine: he told my mother that he was locking George into an air-tight casket. He used both words and hand gestures to catch George, to open the casket, to stuff George into the casket. He even tightened the screws down. His hand gestures kept getting interrupted because whenever he’d let go my mother’s wrists, she would scratch at her eyes, so he’d have to grab her wrists and pin her down again. Finally he managed to padlock the casket shut and blast it into outer-space. He even equipped the casket with its own rocket propulsion system, because my mother asked how the casket could keep on going forever just on its own, without any help. In outer-space, my mother’s husband kept telling her, George could never get to Molly or any of the other good alters. It worked, and my mother stopped trying to scratch her eyes out. Funny thing, though. She didn’t draw any blood on that face of hers. She was a fuck of a lot better scarring her sons than she was ripping into herself.

  I’ve seen plenty of the “alters.” Sometimes they call me at night when my mother has slipped away and she’s on the freeway being driven around by a bad alter, or even a child alter who is afraid of driving. Other times they call me and cuss me out.

  So I knew that my mother was going to flip out, lose it for everyone at the wedding to see so that they’d pay attention to her and not to Pop, upstage the wedding and draw a crowd of sympathetic onlookers to console her and tell her everything was all right.

  Father Camozzi was about to wrap it up and pronounce Pop and Mary man and wife. They put the rings on each other. Pop got one of his old wedding rings shined up special for the new marriage, and he got Mary a ring from Franco Flores, who specialized in watches, rings, and stereos. Her ring had a diamond on it the size of a doorknob, and it only cost three hundred bucks. Flores told Pop she could wear it anywhere this side of East 14th Street. They kissed, and Pop grabbed Mary’s ass and lifted her wedding skirt. Mary grabbed Pop’s cock. We all cheered and clapped and laughed, and then the band played the recessional march and Lura and Tura lifted their tube tops and wagged their titties like water balloons and Pop and Mary walked through the crowd, Pop’s hand on her ass still and Mary tugging away. We threw rice at them. Pop was really happy.

  The band kicked it into gear and played a disco song, one of the old black dudes trying to make his voice sound fag. People danced. Kids threw footballs and frisbees. Kegs bubbled and slobbered on the grass. Rhonda stuck her tongue in my ear. I got a hardon.

  My mother leaned against me and pressed a fake tit against my chest. It felt like an overinflated inner-tube. She said, “Bad. Bad. Bad bad,” and Gail had a look on his face like he’d eaten something nasty and was about to fart and was really working trying to hold that puppy in. Lura or Tura was standing next to Blewer and banging her tits against his chest, and her husband, Leroy, eyed Blewer pretty good. Grandpop Murphy’s wife stood up and danced like she used to be a stripper a million years ago when she wasn’t fat and old and blind.

  Pop walked up to the band. They cut the disco crap mid-riff. The amps buzzed and we were quiet. Pop took his horn from its case. It shone through its soot tarnish. His hands were inked with grease even though he’d probably scrubbed them raw with an SOS pad. He took the mike and said, “This song is dedicated to my bitch!” and the band kicked in and it was a slow blues, “As Time Goes By,” sleazy and sexy and washed with all the sadness and joy and asskick hosewhipped gruel of our place, of our Oakland, of the docks and piers and factories and of the railroad tracks and the slaughterhouse fume and the Hershey acrid stink that somehow became chocolate, of the General Mills plant that made you yaak your throat into your hands when you walked past, of all the Chinese and Negroes and Japanese internment survivors and of the Okies like us who came to CA desperate for a vine to bite and a piece of dirt that would give grain, and the beat of the music and the walk of the bass and the slow and sparse chords of the Hammond organ slipped into the air like the slimy ooze of late night tenth time in the day fucking. Man, those boys set down like there was only, in the universe, the song they were playing, the great and almighty song of fuck and fuck and more fuck more.

  And Pop brought his horn, the old family trumpet that had been the trumpet of his father before him and that someday when I could again play and when Pop deemed me worthy of the horn’s ancestry would be mine, brought the horn to his lips cracked with ten worlds of radiator fanned wind and creased with valleys of oil and grease that would never wear away, brought that horn up and pressed his lips to the mouthpiece and with the bellows of his chest, with the force of all his anguish and love and lust and will to endure, the force of all that constituted what he was and the force of what he would be and had been, the force of a man who should not be standing surefooted and planted but who should instead have been piledriven into the asphalt earth like the ruins of a splendid society the likes of which man would be better off never having known—with force and yet restraint, the restraint of a million years of doing the shit work for brutes bigger or smarter or less compassionate and therefore more powerful, the restraint of the man at work upon whom his family depends for sustenance, for bread and water and fire and skins, the humility and seething rageboil of a man for whom a ten-state murder spree is never more than an insult away, never more than a single instance of despair from becoming a plan, a vocation, a mission, a relief and justification for a life of endless and constant pain and silence and sucking it the fuck up. To be an American, to be an American and a man, an American a man and a working man, is to be a sultan of restraint, gorgeous enslaved and eager quims wagging in front of your face and you with no hint of hardon. If there weren’t laws and we weren’t so shitscared of them, each of us each day would kill, and not just kill with discretion, but with sure and steady and satisfied impunity. Find me an American man who claims he does not want to kill at least once in a day each day of his life, and you’ve found one lying son of a bitch, one you’d better watch out for, because he just might want to kill you. Trust me. I never lie.

  And even though I shivered watching Pop swell I wanted to see Pop other than he was. I had some questions I wanted to ask Pop.

  I wanted to ask Pop why he quit playing his music though Pop had made excuses, blaming the bitch, the whore, the cunt, the cooze, my mother, the cause of all that was shit in not only his life but in the lives of all men, my mother the ruin of Oakland, the downfall of the unions, the reason the gooks kicked our asses in both Korea and Nam, the reason the blacks overran the nice neighborhoods of old, the reason car parts were going over to the metric system and hardworking American mechanics were having to retool their socket sets, my mother the slut behind the conspiracy to destroy the non-homo white male and replace him with a pantie-weary army of three-piece Florsheim-wearing faggots—that’s why Pop couldn’t play the goddamn trumpet anymore, for if he did, the divorce gods would descend and strip him of all he had left, his traile
r, his new bitch, and his tools.

  I knew all this already though, knew it by heart and by cadence, and I wanted to ask Pop if though he no longer played he still heard music in the world, if there was music in the clack of jackhammer, in the hydraulic moan of dynahoe, the whine of Bobcat and the arc-sound wrecking ball swing, if now that he spent his time breaking down truck tires and felt in his hands the sledgehammer instead of the trumpet, felt his viscera vibrate with the rhythms of air-compressor instead of with string-bass and piano and his own fingers caressing the pads of the trumpet, if now that he beat things level with earth instead of ascending with the muses and angels he had achieved some hidden sinister goal, some act of revenge against himself, his family, his people, and his mysterious nameless gods. I wanted to ask Pop if the music of his past, the music of his blood, the notes of mothers’ and fathers’ voices before him haunted him in his dreams. I wanted to ask Pop if he was like an old piano whose keys had not been touched in a generation, the marrow in the white and black keys dried and drained for lack of touch, for lack of flesh on bone.

  When I was a boy I used to listen to Pop play trumpet at the Baptist church with the old jazzmen, white-haired men with workblacked faces wearing shipyard blues and machinist coveralls, their names stitched to their workclothes in red, horncases beaten like toolboxes. I listened to Pop and I sat on the pews and looked at the cross in the shadows of the after hours and the church smelled of cigars and gin and menthols, the pastor at the piano singing his chords as he played them, his voice many voices stacked upon each other as if Babel instead of being a cacophony of noise were instead language turned chorale and that chorale turned jazz-mass by the magical solo fugue of the pastor, his voice booming like a section of perfectly harmonized trombones. The drummers in this church and with my father not drummers but instead musicians who understood that the drum no more carries the beat than does the bass or the horns or the piano but is itself an instrument of music and each drumstick against calfskin or sheepskin contains within the stroke and impact the possibility of not merely a single percussive punctuation but the certainty of all notes playing at the same time, and each tom-tom and floor-tom and bass-drum and cymbal and high-hat contains in itself the expanse and range of the sounds of nature, the drum not something beaten, but something played, music lifting rather than being hammered out. The trumpets and trombones, ores mined from earth and forged and wrought into brass and silver extensions of veins and arteries and lungs and I would squint so bright were the starfires that shot from the horns twisting in the candleflames and pit-lights, these horns born in the fires of earth and even when pianissimo seemingly crouched and waiting to attack with the ferocity of beasts untamed and primordial with lust and passion and the sex of the earth’s ongoing creation, these primal heralds the troubadours of war, goat-hooved satyrs of cities ancient and rising phoenixed into the dark and darkening skies of jazz. The upright bass and its womanly shape, bassists never sitting but standing and not just standing but entwined with the wood and gut-string and pressed into the instrument like lovers into loved, always restrained, eternal foreplay, fingering the strings now in gentle strokes and now plucking as if to punish, and the sound of the bass itself rolling slow through the church. But none of these instruments, none of the sounds made by the transformation of nature into the appendages of man struck me as did the sound of my own father’s horn, and I could tell the sound of Pop’s trumpet amid a line of fifteen. I could tell the sound of Pop’s lips on the mouthpiece, the old silver Conn held together by Pop’s father’s own handicraft with soldering iron and file, its sound when Pop played cascading over the other players like a room of strings downbeating at the opening of a Mahler symphony, which I the child did not realize until the first time I heard Mahler, many years later when I was in college and trying to impress a girl and took her, therefore, to the symphony, where, when the downbeat of Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony stroked I said, “Pop,” and I wept, the girl at my side dumbfounded and saying, “Yes, it’s beautiful,” and I with my face in my hands saying softly and again, “You don’t understand, you can’t understand.” This sound which issued forth from my father’s trumpet was the wind pirouetting through the tulles, the sound of a storm-gale blowing over the open pipes of a playground jungle-gym, the howl of a chimney in a hurricane. Pop seemed to me then not my father alone nor the son of man but a being wholly inhuman, wholly at one with the elements from which the trumpet was made and those elements combined to bring the trumpet vibrating into life. And I (I remembered being too young to walk on my own, unable to speak the voices within myself) sitting in the pew and understanding that I was in a holy place.

  Pop, Pop—why did you give up? I wanted to know. I wanted to know if the lack of courage is something you began on your own or if it was something passed on through Okie shit blood, a trait sent down through the ages from the times when our people were beaten prostrate and humbled hopeless, our courage a vice and death-sentence, I wanted to know if the lack of courage was your personal and generational invention or if it was my destiny, a destiny I would have been better off not attempting to elude, a heritage I should have understood and therefore embraced and welcomed and coddled like a retard kid, mine.

  And Pop blew, and no telling whether or not the band knew the tune but no doubt they knew the song, negroes they, they knew the song because they’d sung it and they were singing it and they’d never in America cease to sing that fucker. They knew Pop’s song, because Pop was nigger as nigger they, and so was I, nigger me, and as long as we pissed and shat in the same plastic construction site outhouses we’d always be niggers together, our shit mingling in the bowels of every urban shithole in the world. Those black boys played a chord that so made Pop’s opening breath resound that there wasn’t a person on the GE lawn that didn’t know in their heart, in their gonads, that this note, this note that was a song, was something from Bud, from Pop, the father of us all and all us but me, a song we not only knew but all knew was a song that told our story, our stories individual and collective, the stories of our fucks and not-fucks, the stories of our divorces and our children, the ones we could never again see and the ones we never again wanted to see, the ones we’d raised and the ones we’d not been permitted to raise, the ones we’d rather have seen drowned in the San Leandro creek—the water that separates the Negroes from the not-negroes in Oakland—and the ones we’d kill the bitches to be able to raise the right way, the Oakland way, the way of Don’t you fuck and If you think shit well don’t, don’t, watch the fuck out Oakland motherfuck watch your ass bitch out right. Bud’s song, my father’s song, the song of Pop, had begun and all of us felt pride and guilt at the same time, at the same time felt guilt and pride and fuck you and up your ass bitch I’ll kill you and I’ll fuck you forever, and that’s the way good music works. Try me otherwise.

  He blew. Every note he’d ever played came back to me, the times he stood before the tropical fish tanks in the living room of our shotgun shack on 62nd avenue in Oakland, the fish themselves dancing no shit dancing to the sound of his trumpet, bobbing and swaying to the gentle and hatred echo of the bruits that issued from the metal of the family horn—I remember this with clarity that is bestowed only upon the cursed and the blessed—the fish somehow part of a universal dance that as a child only I understood, and only I will ever understand, for I am a child and always will be always.

  Pop blew and his horn shone and Pop stood in an attitude of dignity and propriety that bespake something beyond the gas station and the trailer in which he lived, which went beyond the dumps and the tracks and the warehouses and the junkyard dogs but which at the same time encompassed, and more: which embraced them all, which extrapolated upon the fullness and spectrum of life, which ranged between dock and soiree, between cheap beer and fancy Champagne, between worn out blowjob whore and gorgeous bimbo divorce queen, between us and them, and with Pop playing there really didn’t seem to be much difference between us and them at a
ll. With Pop playing, blowing his cracked-lip air-tone soul into and through and out of the horn of our family, it seemed and most likely was true that in this life of ours the only common denominator is song. Pop’s tone was so pale, so incandescent and yet ethereal, that he seemed to be playing ever more silently the more forceful he blew, as if the interposition of his being into the world was not an intrusion, not an interjection, but was instead being absorbed, embodied. Pop moved toward silence. Which made sense, which could only be, for when man made music to praise gods now dead and some recently forgotten he was attempting to silence the noise he had made, the noise which had chased the gods into circles more silent because only in silence can the whispers of the gods be recognized, so subtle are they and still.

  A man with a beard walked onto the GE lawn, his beard yellow he toothless, his mouth sucked in and lipless. His mouth moved as if he would talk but did not.

  A dog somewhere bleated.

  The yellow-bearded man pulled out his pud and began pissing, and above the music and the wedding assembly he said, “It will get colder.”

  He laughed and the flesh of his face bubbled obscene with unneeded skin and the man began chanting some weird shit none of us could understand. A song.

  The task of a man of music is to cancel out the noise of man. To disappear the noise man creates with noise more beautiful.