Big Dreams

by Bill Barich

  People kept coming to Fresno, anyway, despite the problems. The young people weren’t leaving, either, as they were in so many other places in the state. Construction projects in the county were proceeding at a record pace, and so were requests for building permits and zoning changes. Downtown Fresno made no pretense that it was anything other than a center for banks and government offices. To shop and have fun, everybody went to two big malls.

  Preservationist issues were seldom addressed at planning sessions in Fresno. Any hearing to discuss them, I was told, would be so lightly attended that you could fire a shotgun blast into the chambers and not hit a single soul.

  IN THE FRESNO BEE, I read that Nisshinbo Corporation was going to open a $59 million textile plant in Fresno. Japan M & A Reporter, a trade journal, had recorded 187 Japanese-American business deals in the previous year, and 59 of them were closed within California.

  The Japanese liked to invest in electronics, computers and telecommunications, and banks and services, but they also dabbled in chemicals and food. Kyotaru, a sushi chain, had just bought eighteen Arby’s roast-beef outlets, for example. It was said that the corporate concerns in Japan responded to California’s mild climate, its unique blend of farming and high-tech, and its air of promise. The only state that got anywhere near as much money from them was Texas.

  The economic ties between Japan and California were strong. Of all the commodities exported from the state, $8.3 billion worth had gone to Japan in 1989, more than twice as much as went to Canada, our second-largest customer. California cities ran vigorous campaigns to market themselves to investors on the Pacific Rim. Fresno had an Economic Development Corporation that did the prospecting, making cold calls to firms and pitching them on what the city had to offer.

  One of Fresno’s major incentives was its Enterprise Zone, a concept that had originated in England. In an Enterprise Zone, the rules could be bent slightly, the red tape could be cut, and the entire process of permits and hearings could be streamlined. The land could be sold at rock-bottom prices. A company located in the zone got tax breaks and preferential treatment.

  A California trade office in Tokyo had channeled the Nisshinbo deal to Fresno. After the initial contact, a protracted period of negotiation had followed. Executives with the EDC had come to expect this.

  “An American firm plans for one year and takes five years to implement the plan,” one official told me. “The reverse is true of the Japanese.”

  Nisshinbo was buying thirty-six of the two thousand acres in the Enterprise Zone and being subsidized by the Japanese government. In its first phase, it would build on only eighteen acres. To induce Nisshinbo to build on the other eighteen, Fresno had agreed to pay the development fees. At the Fresno EDC, the Japanese were regarded as very clever businessmen, capable of winging it as they went along, applying innovative tools to each new venture, public or private.

  So clever were the Japanese, in fact, that they had acquired such California jewels as the golf course at Pebble Beach and the Beverly-Wilshire Hotel, not to mention the wineries up north and Columbia Pictures in Hollywood. The transactions had not gone unnoticed. There was a nasty streak of anti-Japanese sentiment fermenting in the state, and it found expression among TV commentators and other media pundits, and in the Letters-to-the-Editor columns in newspapers.

  “Twenty years from now most of us will work for Japanese-owned companies,” wrote a San Jose man to the San Francisco Chronicle. “We will need to learn Japanese in order to talk to our supervisors. Few of us will be able to afford houses so we will rent tiny apartments from Japanese landlords. Automobiles will be too expensive to buy, but when we need one for a special occasion we will rent a Japanese car from a Japanese rental agency.”

  The blame, said our distraught scribe, fell to Ronald Reagan, the Ultimate Californian.

  THE FIRST THING KAZ FUJISAKI DID when I visited the Nisshinbo plant was to hand me his business card. After that, he led me to a conference room, paused on the brink, and changed the little sign outside from Vacant to In Use. This seemed to satisfy him.

  Fujisaki, a Nisshinbo director of marketing, wore a dark-blue tie, a white short-sleeved shirt, and polyester slacks. I believed that he would never voluntarily waste a second. Up front, he informed me that Nisshinbo was not buying any real estate or golf courses in Fresno. He would mention golf and golfing often during our chat, always dismissively, as if he’d rather run naked down Tulare Street than swing a sand wedge.

  Fujisaki was precise in answering questions. He gave multipart responses—Reasons One, Two, and Three. He had lived in California since 1983, most recently in Los Angeles, so I asked him how Fresno compared.

  “It might be a little boring if you were a bachelor,” he said. “Nothing much to do on Saturday night.”

  For a family, though, Fresno had lots of advantages, Fujisaki thought. His two sons had made plenty of friends and really enjoyed the town. Mrs. Fujisaki wasn’t adapting quite as easily. In L.A., where there was a big Japanese community, she didn’t need to speak English well, but in Fresno that had put her at a loss. Other Nisshinbo employees were around, but they had dispersed themselves deliberately to a variety of neighborhoods, so that they couldn’t be accused of clumping up.

  The Nisshinbo plant was almost completed. Technicians were installing the textile machinery as we spoke. Fujisaki apologized for using only Japanese-made machines. The technology, he said, was too advanced for American parts to be interfaced. Soon thirteen young women from Japan would fly to Fresno and start training California workers. He allowed himself a smile at that, as though the training would meet an unexpressed, unconscious need.

  Two other cities, Bakersfield and Riverside, were finalists in Nisshinbo’s search for a plant site, and I wondered how Fresno had won. There were five reasons, Fujisaki told me.

  One, the word Fresno stood for superior cotton in Japan, although the very best cotton was Pima from Arizona. Two, there was easy access to the cotton in the fields of the San Joaquin. Three, the city was a strategic location midway between San Francisco and Los Angeles, good for exporting to the Pacific Rim. Four, there were the incentives of the Fresno EDC. And five, there was a readily available work force.

  Fujisaki explained further about the work force. If you looked at the unemployment rate in the U.S.A. over the past ten years, he said, you saw that it averaged about 6 percent in most of the country. In Fresno, however, it rarely dipped below 12 percent because of the seasonal workers on farms. Textile manufacturing relied on unskilled labor, so Nisshinbo was gambling that it could find a core of about two hundred people who wanted to work year-round and could be taught the Japanese way of doing things.

  The workers, in all probability, would be Hispanic. That was another clever stroke, it seemed. By virtue of the work that they did cheaply on farms, Hispanics could be seen as the Koreans or the Taiwanese of the San Joaquin, a great source of economic potential.

  The only criticism Kaz Fujisaki had about Fresno was that it took forever to push papers through city hall. Nisshinbo staffers were required to grab a number from a rack and wait in line behind guys in Can’t Bust ’Ems who were after a permit to build a chicken coop. That didn’t happen in Louisiana or in Texas, where the authorities greased the wheels.

  “Well, something is better than nothing,” Fujisaki said, in the way of someone who has long since given up on the idea that a paradise existed anywhere on earth.

  He invited me to come back and visit again when the plant was in operation. We got up and left the conference room, and Fujisaki paused to change the little sign outside from In Use to Vacant.

  HEAT AND DUST, DUST AND HEAT. A sign along a dirt road: Chile Pickers Wanted, 14 Cents a Pound. Cotton fields dry and brown, the tender green of baby crops. Thick clusters of pink and white oleanders on highway islands, where Mexican illegals sometimes slept. Billowy turkey feathers blowing about on a turkey farm.

  Bill’s Bait and Tackle near Mendota. Minnows, crickets, an
d two cases of handguns. The big stink of sun-warmed cow manure. A man in an onion field, hoeing down the rows. A grocery store advertising peda bread. A variant of pita?

  Said the clerk, “I don’t know. I’m not Greek. I’m not even Armenian.”

  Deep pockets of shade, full summer coming on.

  Somebody on North Valentine Avenue was marketing pit bulls for twenty-five dollars a pup. Tracts, apartments, a trailer park. A yard sale offering hubcaps, wheel bearings, car seats, chains, and bike pedals, the sum of it swimming in oil.

  At the Hmongs’ compound, home of Fresno Cambodian Buddhist Society, a monk in a saffron robe padded out barefoot to get the mail. He had a look of bemusement on his face—the mail ! The compound was neatly fenced. Photos of monks and parishioners were tacked to a bulletin board. Yellow-flowering squash grew in a little garden by the monks’ white house.

  Two competing signs: PEACHES; PEACHES.

  I stopped at a warehouse where the farmers were Japanese-Americans. An older man in a Panasonic cap fiddled with his hearing aid and said, “They had an earthquake in Los Angeles this morning.”

  Cardboard flats of fruit with that rosy, peachy glow and a marvelous smell. One box was marked RIPE FOR ICE CREAM. I bought a half-dozen plump freestones from a shy young woman for $1.50. They’d have peaches through August, she said, five different varieties, including Elbertas.

  “You don’t find many Elbertas in San Francisco,” I told her, and she lowered her eyes and blushed.

  CHAPTER 16

  FRESNO TO KERMAN, then south to Helm and Five Points and across the California Aqueduct again to Coalinga in the desiccated wastes below the Diablo Range, where the grandest fete of the year was the annual Horned Toad Derby. During Derby week, the citizens hung a banner downtown that was so frayed and sun-bleached it inspired no confidence that the event would actually occur. That was in keeping with the spirit of things, really. Horned toads were scarce, veering toward extinction.

  Coalinga knew plenty about loss. Some of the world’s richest asbestos deposits surrounded it, but asbestos miners were hard to come by anymore. The oil in the famous Coalinga field didn’t flow as freely as it once did. You had to feel for a town whose chief claim to fame was that a monster earthquake had almost leveled it on May 2, 1983.

  I was in a new part of the San Joaquin now, a tougher part. The land was drier, whiter, harder, more trashed and scorched, and even less forgiving, although it didn’t seem possible. Trees that had found a purchase in the crusty alkaline soil shimmered greenly in the heat, while buzzards and red-tailed hawks hunted for carrion by riding the thermals that bounced off the mountains. The parched air made my throat scratchy, and my eyes began to burn.

  In places like Coalinga, there were pockets of substantial wealth, fortunes earned in oil or in cotton, but borderline poverty was the norm. The streets in town were flat and dull, and the faces passing often appeared to be without prospect, robbed of hope, heavily lined, and singular in their avoidance of any upbeat emotion.

  Coalinga was a corruption of Coaling Station A, a stop on the Southern Pacific spur that was added in 1888 to permit access to some lignite mines, but a petroleum boom had put the town on the map. Oil had first disclosed itself by bubbling up in diatomaceous seepages in the foothills, and enterprising men had scooped it up in cans and sold it from corner to corner.

  By 1897, Blue Goose Well, 1,400 feet deep, was producing as much as a thousand barrels of oil a day. Other fertile pools were discovered on the west side in 1900, and Coalinga had its own version of the Gold Rush, that old California story retold, fueled this time by another mineral and giving rise to a Whiskey Row with gambling, prostitutes, and thirteen saloons.

  People used to say that Coalinga wasn’t known for its farms. All it raised were jackrabbits and hell.

  The oil fields nearby were not so munificent now, but they were reliable. Everywhere rigs pecked at the earth like big, mechanical birds, dipping their beaks up and down. Chevron had outfits working, and so did Shell, but whatever profit they made did not readily spill over into town.

  At the local museum, all alone among the exhibits, I looked at some chunks of asbestos with their terrible fibers and at some materials pertaining to the Horned Toad Derby. I looked at photos of the earthquake aftermath, too: houses unmortared and reduced to piles of bricks, streets splintered with foot-long cracks, and the contents of shelves dumped and broken. When I stepped outside, I saw waves of heat ripple off the pavement, one hundred degrees and counting, and listened to a withered old fellow prescribing a cure for Coalinga to his equally bent companion.

  “What Coalinga needs,” he said, “is a damn prison.”

  THE SAN JOAQUIN VALLEY HAD A NEW NICKNAME, Prison Valley. There were prisons in Madera, Corcoran, Delano, Avenal, and Wasco. In other sections of the Central Valley, in Chino, Folsom, lone, Soledad, Stockton, Tracy, and Vacaville, there were also prisons. More prisons were being built in California than anywhere in the world. Frequently, they were built on farmland stripped of its value, gone to pebbles and hardpan. Corporate farmers, the titans of agribusiness, often sold the dead land to the state for a handsome score.

  If you thought of prisoners as a new sort of crop, drought-resistant and growing incrementally, the future in California seemed bright. In the early 1970s, fourteen out of a hundred convicted felons were sentenced to a prison term. The current ratio was thirty-five out of a hundred. Drugs were an excellent fertilizer, and the crop tended to reseed itself. A high rate of recidivism was guaranteed. No wonder, then, that prisons were known as “gray gold.”

  Avenal was just down the road from Coalinga, so I drove over to take a look at it. Along the way tumbleweeds blew across Highway 41 and caught in fences. A single black cow stood in a huge field that was so dry and rock-strewn that my eye couldn’t pick out a hint of green. The temperature kept rising.

  Avenal made Coalinga look like a cultural mecca. How poor, small, and isolated the town was—as isolated as some towns in the backwaters of the Far North. The distance from Avenal to a supermarket or a movie theater was about thirty miles. Nobody wanted to live there. Correctional officers earned $2,400 a year in hardship pay just for working at the prison. The warden got as far away as he judiciously could and had a house in Hanford, near Fresno.

  Asking around town, I learned that the prison had come to Avenal through the efforts of a local pharmacist, Nick Ivans. He had read an article in the paper about how the state had $495 million to spend on prison construction, so he and some other town leaders began their successful lobbying.

  Avenal State Prison, built in 1988, was a Level Two facility for lower- to medium-security inmates. It had 3,034 beds, but 3,289 cons had to jostle for space two months after the cells were opened for business. There were about 4,200 inmates now.

  Around Pelican Bay State Prison, I had witnessed a weird euphoria and had seen the impact a prison could have on real estate speculation, but only in the San Joaquin did I hear about the most significant wrinkle in the scheme—prisoners could be counted as residents of the town or city where the institution was located. By kiting its population with bad guys, Avenal had set itself up for an annual bonus of several hundred thousand dollars from various state agencies, earning funds that it would not have been eligible for otherwise.

  No other bonus seemed to be accruing to Avenal, though. The vaunted boom was sounding no more loudly than the tap of a spoon against a washtub. A new motel, its parking lot empty, had rooms by the month, the week, and quite probably by the minute. A new apartment complex let the public know that it was “Now Renting,” as if the privilege had not been available yesterday.

  Hillside Vistas, a proposed subdivision, amounted to an arrow pointing to open fields. Foxborough had fared a little better. A few three- and four-bedroom houses had gone up, but the carpenters had put down their hammers halfway through some others, leaving behind framed walls and two-by-fours in stacks. Tagged stakes marked the borders of many lots where no houses st
ood. Instead of lawns, weeds sprouted copiously from the annealed and useless earth.

  Through Foxborough more tumbleweeds were rolling, great, thatched spheres bowled across the plain by unseen hands. The smattering of luckless owners who’d closed escrow before the demise had a view of migrant shacks, laundry hanging on clotheslines, and scrawny children with even scrawnier dogs.

  A Mexican man moved along the semipaved streets of Foxborough, pushing a white cart and crying, “¡Helados! ¡Helados!” His icecream bars found no takers.

  For a long time, I studied the tumbleweeds and heard the vendor’s plaintive cry, thinking with a warped brilliance brought on by incipient sunstroke that the California Department of Corrections ought to cut a deal to buy the unsold Foxborough units at a discount and transform them into prison adjuncts for the bedless cons of Avenal. The houses could then be allotted by crime, with the rapists here and the molesters there, all the bug-eyed killers and the narco-creeps thrown together on the same block to create an entire suburb dedicated to casual mayhem and first-rate violence.

  The plan had a simple elegance. It would please everybody from developers to reprobates to penologists to homeowners who were concerned about drugs and crime in their suburbs. They all came out ahead. Any way you looked at it, from any angle, the plan was a winner.

  CORCORAN STATE PRISON, where Charlie Manson was taking a long vacation from the streets, was not far from Avenal, so I made an appointment to talk with Warden Bernie Aispuro there. Aispuro had put in forty years of service at California’s penal institutions and was the ranking warden in the state. He had worked at Soledad, Tracy, Susanville, and San Quentin before coming to the San Joaquin, and Corcoran was his last stop before retiring.

  A sharp, chemical stink infected the air in Corcoran. It came from a plant that processed cotton and alfalfa seeds. The plant belonged to J. G. Boswell Company, an agribusiness titan in the West. Named after a retired colonel from Georgia who’d established the company in 1924, Boswell held more than 140,000 acres of farmland in California alone, the Miller and Lux of its time. Its fortunes had been built on irrigation and on loans made to other farming concerns in the San Joaquin, and its global operations were directed from some high-tech offices in a Los Angeles skyscraper.