Big Dreams

by Bill Barich

  Being trapped in stalled traffic reminded me of my own childhood in Levittown, where an identical crippling rush had begun in our town at dawn, clogging the highways to Manhattan. My father spent half his energy trying to outmaneuver the other commuters, always searching for a new shortcut or a secret back road, leaving a little earlier or a little later, and coming home on summer evenings exhausted, ornery, and soaked in sweat.

  It was hard to credit the fact that Hercules had been rural in character not so long ago. It took its name from the Hercules Powder Company, a manufacturer that had supplied dynamite to the forty-niners. Originally based in San Francisco, the company had moved to the East Bay in 1866 when the city had closed in around its explosive operation. Other noisome industries followed it to Contra Costa over the next few decades and located on Carquinez Strait—a smelting plant, a sugar mill, and some oil refineries.

  In the late 1880s, there were four miles of docks and granaries on the strait at the town of Port Costa, a world leader in the export of wheat. Now Port Costa was a quaint village wreathed in chemical fumes from the refineries, and Hercules had seventeen thousand residents and houses sprouting like mushrooms after a rain.

  In Pinole, I turned around, doubled back on Highway 80, and left the freeway to have a closer look at Hercules. Immediately, I made a wrong turn on a freshly paved road and got lost in a new industrial park where the streets were called Alfred Nobel, Linus Pauling, and John Muir. Muir was a dead end that stopped at a plain building with bold letters on its façade, BIO-RAD. Not good, I thought.

  On the other side of the freeway, I found a signboard with arrows pointing to various subdivisions. As ever, the developers had showed a warped brilliance for nomenclature, rivaling the titans in Detroit who’d christened a fleet of Firenzes, Fiestas, Siroccos, and Tauruses. Hercules consisted of such tracts as Mandalay, Seasons, Caprice, Tiffany Ridge, and the Heights, names that had a fairytale piquancy bordering on the nonsensical. It was not so much a real town as a planned community, that bastard child of market research and unintended irony.

  A pristine vision of Utopia burned at the heart of every planned community. Anyone who bought a home in one was choosing to break bread with likeminded Californians in a place that had no history and nothing to offer that couldn’t be had in any other suburb.

  In Hercules, nothing unexpected would ever happen. Everything was nice. Everything was ordinary and familiar. The neighborhoods were clean and neat, and the parks, gardens, jogging paths, and tennis courts were well tended. The town had the uniform appearance of any late-century subdivision in the state, sunny and bicycle-strewn, its streets oddly empty of people.

  Only when you drove out a road past Marsten Ranch did the torture of supreme orderliness drop away. The rows of houses stopped abruptly, and you were back in the fields of Contra Costa again, in the wild oats. Unimaginable as it might seem, Hercules still had plenty of room to grow.

  ABOUT HERCULES I learned the following things: The town had been incorporated in 1900 and covered 5.5 square miles; its growth spurt had started in the 1980s, and it was adding about 2,000 new Herculeans a year; the residents were split almost equally between men and women, and they had an average age of thirty-two; there were 7,231 Asians; 6,700 whites; 2,150 blacks; 1,758 Hispanics; and, as at Sutter’s Nueva Helvetia, a smattering of Pacific Islanders. (Such densely Asian suburbs were not infrequent in California.)

  The median price of a single-family house in Hercules was $224,100, slightly higher than the median price ($219,400) for Contra Costa County. That compared favorably with the median price of a home in San Francisco ($298,900), but an Alturan ($47,200), a Yrekan ($66,600), or a Sacramentan ($115,800) would surely find it outrageous. The town’s zip code was 94567. Willie McGee, the Giants’ outfielder, lived there. Hercules had seventeen cops, a fire department, and no library.

  ROADS LOOPED AROUND SAN PABLO BAY, Highway 80 tying into Highway 37 at the base of Solano County, where the towns were growing even faster than those in Contra Costa. The new subdivisions in Solano didn’t come with schools, so the old schools in the district were overflowing with new kids from, say, Canyon Meadow or Terrace Gap. The county needed about one hundred new classrooms each year, but it did not have the $9 million required to build them.

  California as a whole faced the same problem. Its educators wanted $11 billion to renovate and run the public schools for the next five years, but they would be lucky to get half of it. So the children in the old schools, those whose parents couldn’t afford to educate them privately, used the old textbooks that were missing pages and played in playgrounds where the drop from the monkey-bars was onto concrete or macadam. The good teachers struggled to hang on, but they couldn’t afford a home in Canyon Meadow or Terrace Gap without a second income.

  In some Solano County districts, the students were stuffed into portable classrooms with waferboard walls and scarcely any windows. The schools in other districts carried a double load, four hundred children in a space designed for two hundred. In California, only the prisons were as overcrowded as the public schools.

  MARIN COUNTY, where I picked up Highway 101 in mid-July, was an older suburb, as well as the wealthiest county in the state. It still had decent public schools that weren’t terribly overcrowded. It had a good public hospital and fine libraries that were sometimes as plush as private clubs. Insofar as California had a real paradise, Marin was often rumored to be it. The houses weren’t affordable ($354,200 median price), but how could they be? Paradise was supposed to be exclusive.

  Although the Bay Area was a bastion of racial diversity, Marin County alone remained almost monolithically white. Its great-looking, ideally fit men and women seemed to have been bred in a secret Aryan laboratory somewhere in the woods. Their children were bright and perfectly proportioned. Even the therapists, hypnotists, personal trainers, and realtors pictured in the ads in the Pacific Sun, a freebie paper, had an aura of glamour.

  Anybody would recognize Marin County as an integral part of the California myth. It belonged in California the way palm trees and blondes in bikinis did. It was a place where the term “laid back” had acquired new meaning.

  Hot tubs and saunas were everywhere, and the Stress Patrol was out in force. You could have your cares massaged away at any number of spas and health clubs. Biofeedback counselors were available to clean up your karma and reroute any chakras or negative vibrations that might be adding to your percentage of body fat, a figure that any true Marinite could recite at a snap of the fingers.

  For all its wealth, Marin wasn’t intolerably ostentatious. The money was often new, but it could still be as quiet as the money in Greenwich or Hyannisport. In such high-end towns as Belvedere, Tiburon, Ross, and Sausalito (median price, $500,001), you saw matrons in muumuus shopping for kiwi fruit right next to the leggy young girls on their mountain bikes.

  The residents of Marin were liberal and voted Democratic, but each town had a supervigilant bunch of cops who loved to write parking tickets and enforce the tiniest laws on the books. They were like an upscale version of the cops in “Mayberry RFD” and tried hard not to be discriminatory, but they didn’t always succeed.

  Despite its flaws, Marin had a signal advantage over most other California counties. The effects of human habitation had not yet overwhelmed the lavishness of nature.

  Who wouldn’t want to live in a rambling, brown-shingle house in Mill Valley (median price, $445,300) on the wooded slopes of Mount Tamalpais, a holy mountain to the Miwoks? Surround the house with some oaks, say, and some madronas and fragrant bay laurels, and give it a deck with a view of all creation. You’d be close enough to town to walk to Banana Republic and buy some neat safari-esque clothes and then sit reading and sipping lattes among the great-looking guys and gals at the Book Depot. Disease and despair would never find you.

  Although Mill Valley was a commuter town, it had done an excellent job of disguising itself as a resort hamlet for the idle rich. Guards were posted at its borde
rs to drive away the bad news, and the roads going west ran into open land and past beautiful, unspoiled dairy farms and on out to the ocean, to calm harbors and deserted beaches.

  Mount Tamalpais watched over Mill Valley and all of Marin, somber and brooding one minute and light-filled and welcoming the next. Wispy clouds and scraps of fog got caught in its tall forests. In spring, there were babbling brooks and waterfalls. Five manmade lakes, the county’s water supply, were deployed around its slopes and stocked with rainbow trout. Sometimes you could wander for hours on the mountain and never see another soul. Mount Tam had some walk-in campsites, so I walked into one and pitched my tent for a couple of days.

  HIKING AND DREAMING ON DEAR, old Mount Tam. Days gone by, in that long-ago time of shedding a skin, I had dived into the ease and the sensuality of Marin County with a recklessness that would have given poor William Brewer the shivers.

  Sausalito was the place that tugged at me then. Some evenings after I’d finished work as a stockboy at a book warehouse in San Francisco, my first California job, I’d pile into an old car with a few equally disheveled friends to drop into the inviting contours of that bayside, Mediterranean town. I’d think of Napoli or Amalfi. I’d think of romance.

  Our first stop was always Sally Stanford’s restaurant on the water. Sally had earned her grubstake by once running San Francisco’s finest whorehouse. Her dining room was done in plush, red Victoriana and could have doubled as a bordello. She was short and crusty and had a nose that was not unlike the beak of the bright-green parrot that sometimes rode on her shoulder. Sally knew what it was like to be young and let us drink at her bar despite our faded jeans, occasionally addressing us in the manner of a drill instructor.

  “Boys,” she’d say, looking us up and down as she marched by, “I don’t care about your clothes or your hair. You can stay here as long as you behave like gentlemen.”

  We always behaved like gentlemen.

  From Sally Stanford’s we would proceed to the No Name Bar, where serious intellectuals discussed the fate of the planet and actual published writers played studious chess. The writers fascinated us. They were the last of the bohemians and lived on houseboats anchored in the bay. They wore flannel shirts, sweaters from the Orkney Islands, and stupid Greek fishermen’s hats, as though they’d been casting nets into the surf all day and dragging it for inspiration, but we loved them anyway.

  We drank Anchor Steam Beer at the No Name. It satisfied us beyond all other beers because it was brewed in San Francisco. It meant that we were really in California sitting on a back patio of a bar in full winter, gabbing, having brilliant ideas, and watching actual published writers play chess. Someday, we believed, the writers would see how special we were and would want to speak to us. They would want to hear our brilliant ideas.

  After the No Name, we browsed at The Tides, a bookstore next door, where the coffee was free. In a buoyant mood, we would ransack the shelves for books that would take us a little farther along the path that we were traveling toward our new, barely conceptualized selves—books of poetry or fiction or esoteric religion. Nobody ever bothered a customer at The Tides. You could read quietly in a corner, undisturbed by any conventional notions of commerce.

  Then we were off to The Trident for a nightcap. What a cocoon it was, all creamy wood and brass fittings and green ferns dripping from pots hanging from the ceiling! The food served there was inarguably Californian. The sandwiches came with such strange savories as alfalfa sprouts and lecithin, and we ate them in a vaguely hopeful way, wishing that their organic, healing properties would offset any harmful effects of the beer.

  The waitresses at The Trident floated to the tables on clouds. They were dippy, barefoot, lovely, and always a little stoned. They called themselves Sunshine and Ethereal and wore long dresses that you could sometimes see through if the light was right. To gaze through transparent cloth at an illuminated mound of Venus was to experience the divine. They didn’t care if they showed us a glimpse of their breasts as they bent to serve us, because mere mortals weren’t ever going to touch them, anyhow. And we had no hard feelings, either—it was enough just to be gathered up in their smiles.

  Mellow in Marin. Sitting outside on a moonlit deck, we stared at the black water and pitched our alfalfa sprouts overboard. The waitresses flashed their breasts and smiled. The Trident was a great California Ship of Fools, but we had no desire to get off it. If this is La-La Land, we thought, please bring us another helping.

  MARIN COUNTY HAD ITS DARK SIDE, too, like every other place on earth. San Quentin prison, an ugly cluster of aging buildings in the shadow of the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge, dated from 1853. Every man who was sentenced to die in California had a cell on the prison’s Death Row, because it had the only gas chamber in the state—one of the few states that still had a death penalty.

  There were some rundown subdivisions in Marin that had gone to drugs and Heavy Metal. And in San Rafael, the county seat, you saw Hispanic men hanging around outside a Burger King and a 7-Eleven to look for day work, just as their brothers were doing across the bridge. The men lived in the Canal District nearby, a raunchy backwater, often six or eight to an apartment, and whenever they had a problem or needed advice or got into a scrap, they turned to La Familia.

  La Familia was a social-services agency on an ordinary block in an ordinary neighborhood in San Rafael. Alejandro Montenegro, its executive director, was Chilean by birth, although his mother had owned a British passport. Montenegro was a reddish man—reddish hair and beard, a fair complexion. He was gracious and polite and owned a doctorate in psychology from UC Berkeley.

  Montenegro had not always been a social worker. He had first used his background in psychology as an image consultant, putting pretty faces on otherwise faceless corporations. He had lived in London for a time, but he had found the English to be passionless and told me a story about a friend of his mother’s, Lord B., to prove the point.

  Lord B. was the CEO at a prominent head-hunting firm. When Montenegro went to the firm for a job interview, he was dressed in his best suit and tie, every inch of fabric neatly pressed. Lord B. had glanced at him perfunctorily and had jabbed a finger at his feet.

  “Those brown shoes won’t do, my boy,” Lord B. had sniffed.

  La Familia was definitely part of the brown-shoe universe. It resembled every other underfunded social agency in California, furnished with the same Salvation Army furniture and equipped with the same motley collection of dime-store coffee mugs.

  In his office, Montenegro said that he had no idea how many Hispanic immigrants lived in Marin, even though he’d been on the job for five months now. The estimates ran from eight to twenty thousand. The men who showed up at La Familia were in the United States illegally, almost without exception. They spoke no English and came not from Mexico but from Central America, Cuba, Peru, and Brazil. Often they were the poorest of the poor in their own countries, making them, as Montenegro noted, among the poorest people anywhere.

  The men usually crossed the border alone, hoping to save enough money to later import their wives, their kids, and even their parents. There were more opportunities for work than you might think, Montenegro said. Marin was a garden spot with thousands of trees to be pruned and thousands of flowerbeds to be weeded. If a man worked ten days a month, he could make his nut and even put some cash aside by sleeping on his uncle’s floor.

  Whenever work was plentiful, the men caused no trouble. It was the slow times, the dead-broke Saturday nights in an inhospitable land, that led to the loud music, the drinking, and the knife fights. In the past, agents from the Immigration and Naturalization Service had conducted wholesale sweeps through the Canal District, but they were forced to stop because they had bagged many legal Hispanics with the undocumented ones, leading to charges of racism.

  Montenegro was frank about playing the race card. He glanced around at his humble office and said, “It’s the only weapon we have.”

  He believed that the veneer
of tolerance in Marin County was very thin. Neighbors around La Familia complained incessantly about the men lounging on the steps or leaning against a fence, but when Montenegro met with them to talk about the problem—if it was a problem—they could not elaborate. The very presence of the men, it seemed, was objectionable.

  The INS had recently taken a new tack in its campaign. Agents waited for somebody to be hired outside Burger King, followed him to the job site, and arrested him. Those who got caught had almost no recourse. They were proud Latinos and often refused any help, even from La Familia. Montenegro had once suggested to some of the men that they draw up a standard contract to use with their random employers, but they rejected the idea. It would be too cold and too formal, they felt.

  I asked him about the future, but he wouldn’t venture a guess, except to say that the men would keep coming, regardless of the obstacles. He wished that the people in Marin were easier to deal with—he thought that they took criticism personally, while in San Francisco he had been able to hammer out agreements in the framework of a debate.

  Still, he loved living where he did, in Sausalito. It reminded him of Viña del Mar, Chile.

  “Same weeds, same plants, same everything,” he said, sounding just like the Sikhs in Yuba City.

  For Alejandro Montenegro, there were really just two places in the world to live, Sausalito and Viña del Mar.

  SAUSALITO MEANT little willow in Miwok. Twenty years, twenty years, and now The Tides was gone, Sally Stanford was in her grave, and the actual published writers were nowhere to be found. The Trident was as insubstantial as a figment. The waitresses had changed back into Betty and Joan and were probably living with their stockbroker husbands and their kids in Caprice or Tiffany Ridge.

  At Cafe Trieste on Bridgeway, I bought a cup of coffee and walked along the docks past sloops, yachts, and dinghies, high on the morning light. A black cat materialized and courteously refused to cross my path. Instead, she hopped up on a railing and purred for some attention. When I reached out to pet her, she nipped at my hand and bit the flesh between thumb and index finger.