by Jim Miller
We finished our coffees and headed back up to the office together and, much to our surprise, Neville was there. He looked drawn and tired, like he’d been pulling all-nighters during finals weeks.
“Boys, we’re done,” he said without any lead in to cushion the blow.
“Motherfucker!” I said angrily, but before I could really lay into him, he stopped me.
“Listen, I know, you’re right,” he said. “This is terrible form, but I thought I could pull it off.” Neville went on to explain that his “trust fund” had long since been exhausted and that he’d been trying to make a go of it as a “real” business for the last year. We’d been treading water for most of that period until he started losing accounts from the big advertisers. After a while, even the discount ad space had stopped selling. The big papers were taking a beating too, he noted. Apparently, he had spent the last few days trying to secure a loan to keep us afloat for another few months, but he couldn’t get it. Now, Neville, like us, was broke and out of work.
“Welcome to the high life,” I said slapping him on the back ruefully. Matt said something else, equally stupid, and we all went out for a beer. After Neville’s confession, I felt oddly liberated. We talked about my Bobby Flash story and he said it sounded like a good book, but publishing was in the tank too. Neville thought he might try to get a teaching job, but full time jobs were hard to come by and he didn’t have any experience. Matt said, “We’re so fucked,” and we all laughed a hearty death row kind of laugh. When we finished our beers, I shook hands with the guys and went back up to clear out my desk. It had been a good run.
I took the bus back up the hill in a daze, almost missing my stop. When I walked by the Turf Club, I thought about more drinking but decided against it. Back at my place, I was greeted by a message from Hank. It was bad news. Trisha had lost it and attacked Kurt with a frying pan in the kitchen one night. He got a bad cut and actually called the cops to file charges. Trisha had moved out, into her Mom’s place, and Hank was living on a friend’s couch. I had a laugh at the thought of Kurt getting KO’d by a frying pan like a character in an old Warner Brothers cartoon, but I knew this was bad. When I called Hank’s cell, he confessed that he’d dropped all of his classes so he could work more hours at his latest coffee house job. We went back and forth about this, but it ended with my inviting him to come down and visit. He agreed to come. I didn’t have the heart to tell him about my new life as an unemployed journalist, nor did I think it was a good time to tell him about his newfound heritage. That could wait for later. Lacking a good way to avoid my own situation, I got off the phone abruptly, but felt bad about it.
Once I was off the phone, I changed my mind about drinking, grabbed a Stone out of the fridge and sat on the porch to think. My options in San Diego were pretty limited and I didn’t have contacts in LA anymore. The big papers wouldn’t touch a guy like me, and I had no degree and no other skills. Things weren’t exactly coming up roses for me on the porch. I took a sip of my beer and watched a pick-up with a Raiders shield on the back window drive by with the stereo blasting Rage Against the Machine. It made me think of Shane and the job offer for the internet magazine. Maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad gig after all. I took another sip of beer and gazed at a red Mini Cooper rolling by with the local news on. The radio said, “Frank Antonelli announced plans today…” before it faded into the distance.
I finished my beer and got up to call Shane to see if the job was still available and find out if they might have some work for a restless twentysomething with no degree or experience in the “collective” field. When I made my pitch, Shane laughed and said he would see what he could do. He sounded excited and that cheered me up immensely.
Once I was off the phone with Shane, I decided to call Hank back and apologize for giving him the bum’s rush.
“That’s OK, Dad, I didn’t notice. Is something wrong on your end?” he asked earnestly. This led to a long pause before I bit the bullet and confessed.
“Well, I did lose my job today.”
“Shit, you’re kidding?” he said, clearly taken aback.
“Nope, I’m afraid not, kid. But I do have some good news for you—and a proposition.”
“What? What is it?” he asked, excitedly.
“It’s a surprise,” I said. “It’ll have to wait until I see you.”
“You suck,” he joked.
“I know. Talk to you later.” I hung up, hoping that Hank wouldn’t be disappointed with my revelation about his great grandfather and my crazy-ass plan for his future. If he was, I didn’t have much else to offer.
Hank came down within a few days and he helped me pack up my things. Then we went for a long walk to Balboa Park. As we hiked down a canyon trail, I told him what I’d learned about Bobby Flash and he listened with rapt attention. After that, I filled him in about his great grandmother still being alive. He was intrigued. When we got to the Prado, we sat down next to a big fountain and I asked him if he’d be interested in living on the Lost Coast for a while. Without hesitating, he said, “Really?” like I’d just informed him he’d won the lottery. When I warned him it would probably be hard farm work or something like that, he still seemed fired up. There was a spark in his eye. It was the same look he had as a little boy when I told him we were going to a ballgame or Disneyland or some other cool place. I thought for a moment about how odd it was to only know your son through a series of episodes, always interrupted by a good patch of time. We’d never spent more than three days at a time together, but I still felt I knew something about the core of him—I was in his blood and in his heart. I decided I should show him Bobby Flash’s letter to my dad when we got back.
It was a beautiful day, not a cloud in the sky, and we walked over to the sculpture garden for a sandwich, talking about what it might be like on the Lost Coast on the way. It was going to be our big adventure.
When we got back to my place, I took out the pictures of Bobby Flash, and showed Hank the letter. I’d never seen him look so serious. He read it and reread it. Once he’d finished with the letter, he picked the pictures back up and stared at them both for a long while. The look on his face was somewhere between wonder and disbelief. Finally, after he’d glanced back at the letter for a third time, he looked up briefly at me and then out the window nervously, at nothing in particular.
“How can you be sure it’s actually from him?” he asked tentatively.
“Good question, I suppose. The writing on the back of the photos matches the letter, and the picture is certainly Bobby Flash too. Let me show you something else.” I got up, took my satchel from my desk and dug out the mug shots, the print outs of the pictures I got from Wayne State, and the photos Pete gave me, along with Gus’s, Molly’s, and Herman’s letters. After Hank took those, I passed him Bobby’s diary. He looked them over carefully, for a long time, and nodded his head slowly as he compared the other pictures with the photos from Betty.
“Plus the timeline makes sense,” I continued, once he was done. “And who the hell would take the time to make this shit up to fool a young man? What could be the motive? I know I don’t have a birth certificate or anything, but I’m pretty damn sure.”
“I didn’t mean anything by it, I just…” he stopped himself and looked at me defensively.
“I didn’t think you did, Hank,” I assured him. “It’s a trip, no?”
“It sure is,” he said lightening up considerably. “Holy shit, my great great grandfather was a revolutionary and an outlaw!” Hank picked up Bobby’s final letter again, reread it and looked up at me.
“What’s the poem?”
“It’s Walt Whitman, from ‘Song of Myself.’” I walked over to my bookcase, grabbed a copy of Leaves of Grass, and opened it up to section 46. Hank took it from me and read it silently at first. When he was done, he looked back down and read part of it aloud, “Long enough have you dream’d contemptible dreams/ Now I wash the gum from your eyes/You must habit yourself to the dazzle of the li
ght and every moment of your life/Long have you timidly waded, holding a plank by the shore/Now I will you to be a bold swimmer/To jump off in the midst of the sea, rise again, nod to me, shout/And laughingly dash with your hair.’”
“Beautiful, no?” I said.
“Yeah,” he said, nodding. “Fuck yeah.”
I laughed and asked him if he wanted me to order some pizza, but he didn’t answer. His head was back down, in the book, lost in thought. I let it go and just sat there across from him, for how long I don’t know, watching my son read the poem that his great great grandfather, the Wobbly, would have hoped he would read after he was long dead.
To save money, Hank and I both sold our cars and combined the funds to get a used VW van. It seemed perfect, and we both joked about our new hippie wagon. We drove out of San Diego the day after we bought the van and stopped at Betty’s house in Santa Monica. I stood and watched as she looked at Hank with the same sense of wonder that she had when she first looked at me. There were tears in her eyes and I could see that Hank was moved when she put her hand on the side of his face. We had tea and told her about our impending journey and new home and she thought it “sounded grand” that we would actually be together for the first time. After the visit with Betty, we grabbed the few things Hank had stored in the garage at Kurt’s and got on the road again, stopping in Paso Robles for the night. We had dinner at the restaurant in the Paso Robles Inn before hitting the sack. When I asked Hank how long he thought he’d want to stay up north, he smiled and said, “Why don’t we just get there first?” I let it rest. He was right, what was the point of trying to write the end of the story in the beginning?
The next day, we drove up through San Francisco and, after we crossed the Golden Gate Bridge, we decided to take the slow route up the Pacific Coast Highway. Hank had never seen the North Coast so he was enraptured with the scenery, staring off at the sea through the fog that clung to the hills like smoke on a fire. The luxuriant green coast and ragged cliffs made me think of Ireland. I put on Astral Weeks by Van Morrison and even sang along to a song or two. This was met with some friendly derision. The CD ended after what seemed like a million bends in the road, and it started to rain gently. We drove on for several hours without speaking, as the sound of rain lulled us into a meditative space. There was nobody else on the road but us for a while and it felt like we were heading to the end of the world. Finally, it began to get dark and we stopped at a cheap motel in Fort Bragg and slept like the dead.
In the morning the storm had passed, and the sky was clear and the air was crisp enough that we could see our breath. By the time Highway 1 hit 101, we were in the thick of Redwood country. I rolled down the window and breathed in the smell—dense and sweet. Hank was sitting beside me quietly, smiling. I passed a few logging trucks and put some Neil Young on the CD player, which seemed perfect. Hank nodded to me and we kept on, cruising through Garberville, Phillipsville, and Miranda before stopping for gas in Myers Flat as Shane had warned us to have a full tank for the drive to Petrolia. Once the tank was full, I called Shane on Hank’s cell phone to let him know we were getting close, and we were on the road again. After we left Myers Flat, we hit the Humboldt Redwoods State Park in no time, turned off 101, and began our trip through the heart of the forest, down a steep switchback road to the Lost Coast Highway. Along the way, we saw a bear, a group of deer, and a myriad of blue jays flying above us. At the tiny town of Honeydew, Hank put on a Wilco CD and, when we hit the flat stretch that would take us to Shane’s cabin, I found myself swept away by the beauty of the world. When the guitar solo on “Impossible Germany” began to soar in layers of ascending sound, I saw a hawk gliding above a golden field full of grazing cattle and felt as if I was deep into the texture of things, like we’d dived into a nineteenth-century landscape painting and taken up residence. It was—I feel dumb saying it—a moment of perfect grace.
Soon, we hit the tiny town of Petrolia and drove over a little bridge that crossed the Mattole River. We drove alongside the river for a few minutes until I saw a hand drawn sign that said “Welcome Jack and Hank.” Here I turned down a long gravel driveway and saw Shane waving from the porch of his cabin. He greeted us and informed us that the other folks who lived near him were out for the day. It turns out that my fantasy of a big hippie commune in the woods was pretty crazy. In actuality, everybody in the collective had a place of their own. What they shared was labor and funds. Shane said he’d explain more later. For the time being, we hopped in the back of his pickup and drove down to the beach. We parked the truck in a little dirt lot and followed Shane as he led us along a sandy trail that hugged the green hillside by the ocean. The hills were covered with white Queen Anne’s Lace, yellow tarweed, purple lupine, and orange poppies. We looked at the cows up on the hillside and stopped for a moment to watch some seals frolicking on the beach. Hank even spotted the tail fluke of a grey whale out on the water.
As we kept going, I noticed that we were the only people on the trail. We hiked on for a couple of miles and walked across a beach covered with pristine sea shells and a forest’s worth of white-washed driftwood, before heading back up a hillside and turning down a path that brought us to a little cabin. We walked over and Shane opened it up. There were two cots on opposite sides of the cabin and a little desk with a couple of chairs. Shane told us that the only power came from solar panels on the roof and showed us to the outhouse in back. Then he walked back into the cabin and grabbed us each a beer he’d left with some ice in a big, old, metal cooler. We strolled out onto the front porch and sat down on the wooden steps. I took a deep breath of the salty air mixed with the scent of wild flowers. You could see a lighthouse in the distance. Hank told Shane that it was more beautiful than he could ever have imagined. We sat and talked about what the work would be like and I told Shane about the end of the Bobby Flash saga.
“You should write a book about it,” Shane said.
“Who in the world would publish it?” I replied. Still, I was proud to be the heir of that legacy, no matter what the future held. It was late afternoon and the sun was getting low on the horizon, a golden road on the azure sea. I raised my beer and toasted us.
“Here we are,” I said, appraising our humble new home, “in utopia.” Hank and Shane laughed. It was going to be a hell of a time.
About the author
Jim Miller is the author of Flash and Drift, both novels. He is also co-author of the radical history of San Diego, Under the Perfect Sun: The San Diego Tourists Never See (with Mike Davis and Kelly Mayhew) and a cultural studies book on working class sports fandom, Better to Reign in Hell: Inside the Raiders Fan Empire (with Kelly Mayhew). Miller is also the editor of Sunshine/ Noir: Writing from San Diego and Tijuana and Democracy in Education; Education for Democracy: An Oral History of the American Federation of Teachers, Local 1931. He has published poetry, fiction, and non-fiction in a wide range of journals and other publications. Currently he teaches English and Labor Studies at San Diego City College. As a young man, Miller was a bouncer, a factory worker, a warehouseman, and a laborer in his late father’s home repair business. A proud union member, Miller does political action work for his local. He lives in downtown San Diego with his wife, Kelly Mayhew, and their son, Walt.
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Flash: A Novel
By Jim Miller
© 2010 Jim Miller
This edition © 2010 AK Press (Edinburgh, Oakland, Baltimore)
eISBN : 978-1-849-35056-3
Library of Congress Control Number: 2010925759
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