Big Dreams

by Bill Barich

  It used to be that a man might show up a little drunk of a morning, Rintoul told me, but now, in spite of screening tests for drugs, a few workers relied on cocaine and speed to propel them through. That upped the ante, in terms of accidents.

  “At least you can tell when a person’s been drinking,” he said.

  If I wanted to see how perilous oil-field work really was, Rintoul went on, I could go to Oildale, where many workers lived, and count the missing fingers and the missing limbs.

  Loggers, millworkers, fishermen, and roustabouts. If you’re a working stiff, I thought, California is not the Promised Land.

  These days, the big oil companies continued their policy of cutting costs, occasionally at their own expense. As an example, Rintoul cited the Exxon Valdez, which had foundered, he believed, because Exxon had stopped paying for a pilot ship to guide it through the narrow channels up in Alaska.

  “Penny-wise and pound-foolish,” he said.

  PETROLEUM CLUB ROAD, Shale Road, Midoil Road, and Gas Company Road were all byways in Taft, a desert town almost naked of vegetation. If shade could be bottled and sold, you could make your million there. Taft was renowned for its hard-nosed attitude and its redneck bent, going Bakersfield and Oildale one better. The town had not even considered integrating its schools, Rintoul told me, until its football team had started losing games to schools that had admitted blacks.

  He remembered a time in his youth when Cab Calloway had been invited to appear at a charity event in Taft. There was plenty of consternation among the citizens, and a bargain had to be struck. Calloway and his band would be allowed to play, but they had to agree to stay somewhere else and be gone before dark.

  Rintoul remembered sweeter things, too. He remembered being in kneepants and riding his bike ten or twelve miles to a gas station built all of wood. At a “little-bitty” counter, he bought wonderful chili beans for a dime a cup. Along the road, he passed the local bootlegger’s house, which seemed like a palace to him with its hardwood floors and the two grand columns that marked the driveway.

  He remembered old friends and acquaintances and took me to the cemetery in Taft and walked me around it. A Lufkin pump on a timer began dipping on a hill behind us, the sound of it metallic and clanking. The country around Taft was not as harsh as it looked in high summer, Rintoul said. In spring, it could be spectacular.

  “You ought to visit then,” he advised me. “There’re wildflowers all over everywhere.”

  THE PREMIER COUNTRY-MUSIC radio station in Bakersfield, KUZZ-AM and FM, didn’t play very many Buck Owens records, even though Buck owned the station and was the boss. He didn’t test well with the listeners, and neither did Merle Haggard. They preferred the sanitized songs of Garth Brooks and Clint Black to the gritty twang born during the diaspora of Okies and Arkies to California.

  The real Bakersfield Sound cooked. It had some Woody Guthrie in it, and some Bob Wills, too, some rumbly washboard stuff along with the creak of a front-porch rocker and the sizzle of fatback bacon in a pan. It went in for mother-of-pearl buttons, biscuits with gravy, grits, and whiskey straight from the bottle. It tore you up with its melancholy, but it still made you want to dance. It was what you heard on the air twenty years ago, when Buck Owens had bought the station.

  Evan Bridwell, KUZZ’s program director, was also perplexed about the listeners’ preferences. He felt that Bakersfield had the potential to become a Nashville West, but he had learned that the fans of country music were sometimes an enigma wrapped in a question.

  “This is one tough town to impress,” Bridwell said, stating the obvious. In the new Bakersfield, he thought, all that mattered was selling real estate.

  Buck Owens was not anywhere around KUZZ. Thanks to Dwight Yoakam, he had been liberated from an enforced retirement and was out touring again. His nephew, Mel, really ran the station, but Buck had an office suite there that was done up with the obligatory gold records. Its centerpiece was a piano upon which penciled songs-in-progress were spread, their penultimate notes still trapped in Buck’s head.

  There were photos of Buck playing golf with Presidents Nixon and Ford in his “Hee Haw” days. There was a very conspicuous photo of Buck and Dwight Yoakam. Buck’s gap-toothed grin was sizable.

  In Buck’s private bathroom, above the sunken tub and the Jacuzzi, some tiles in the storied red, white, and blue of Mr. Parker’s underwear spelled out BUCK OWENS. But the sign that said it all was the one over his desk, a link to Dust Bowl memories and the long haul to California: Poverty Sucks.

  IN OILDALE, the blue-collar poor were making their last stand. Here, Merle Haggard, the holy infant of country heartbreak, had been raised in a converted railroad boxcar, but there wasn’t any monument to him. Folks in Oildale were too busy trying to pay their bills.

  Oildale had no suburban frills, just trailers and bungalows. Residents parked their old cars in claustrophobic alleys between them, sometimes never to be moved again. Some alleys were death rows for automobiles. There were constant disputes about who had the right to which alley space, and men had been shot with handguns for violating a code known only to the killer.

  In Oildale, there was a hapless store, Life Is a Beach, that sold bikinis and other swimwear appropriate to a seaside that was as distant as a fantasy.

  The public life of the town revolved around two saloons, Bob’s and Trout’s. Oil-field workers still in their oily clothes drank at them with their tidy brethren who were about to depart for a shift. The armless and the fingerless were indeed propping up stools, just as Bill Rintoul had predicted.

  Hard-faced young women in tight jeans stuck out their butts while bending over the pool table, having left the kids with a neighbor. The older women of Oildale watched in disgust from the bar. They were consigned now to the droopy men sitting next to them, earnest losers whose eyes brimmed with self-pity—the prey of skip-tracers, fellows who would as soon disappear into Mexico as come up with the monthly rent or alimony. So devoted to failure were these men that if you confronted them with a door marked “New Life,” all fervent opportunity on the other side, they would not be able to open it and instead would set to king it until they broke a toe or somebody called the police.

  In the afternoon glare outside Trout’s, I saw a California vision. Down the main drag swooped a biker in mirrored shades. He had a sweaty red bandanna wrapped pirate-style around his head. Riding behind him, arms circling his waist, was a little boy in a baseball uniform wearing a crash helmet. They sped down North Chester Street to Bakersfield Junior League ball park, where Pop dismounted and replaced his son’s helmet with a baseball cap.

  THU LE OWNED L’EAU VIVE, a Vietnamese restaurant, that was in a Bakersfield shopping center. She was among the second generation of immigrants to come to California from Vietnam, part of a much more substantial and heterogeneous Southeast Asian wave that continued to wash over the state.

  The Le family had tried living in San Francisco first, but the city had stretched their pocketbook, so when Thu Le’s husband got a job in the oil industry, she was glad to relocate in the San Joaquin. She had been in Bakersfield for thirteen years now and seemed to be liking it less and less. The town was losing its semirural character, she thought, and becoming more like a suburb of Los Angeles.

  Although business wasn’t terrible, L’Eau Vive was for sale. Thu Le had two teenage daughters, and she wanted to quit working and spend more time with them before they left home.

  “Once they marry, you never see them again,” she told me, fluttering her hands in the air.

  When I walked in, the restaurant had been jumping with loud rock music. Thu Le changed over to a classical tape and came to my table to apologize for the disturbance. It was her children’s doing, she said. She had granted them a kind of holiday and had let them dress in their street clothes instead of the more formal Vietnamese attire that they usually wore while they were at work.

  Thu Le performed some mental reckoning and guessed that her daughters were about
55 percent Californian. They loved California, in fact. To keep them in touch with their roots, she and her husband took them regularly to Little Saigon in Orange County and immersed them in the culture of the old country.

  “We feel lucky to be here, but we love Vietnam,” she said, pressing a hand to her sternum. “Would we go back if we could? Yes, we would.”

  One of the Le girls brought me a menu. I did my own reckoning and judged her to be at least three-quarters Californian. In the new California, I reflected, things would be measured by the yardstick of Saigon, Phnom Penh, Rawalpindi, or Guadalajara, not by the European standards of my forebears.

  As I was paying my bill, Thu Le gave me a business card certifying her as a color analyst and image consultant. I must have looked puzzled, because she began to elaborate, gesturing toward some shelves behind the cash register that were stocked with cosmetics in jars and bottles. Beauti Control Cosmetic Boutique had manufactured them all, and Thu Le had attended a BCCB school to master the subtleties of their application.

  Beauty had interested her even in Vietnam, she said—she was a striking woman, after all. The accent at home, however, was on a natural look. A woman attained beauty by eating well, caring about her health, and working hard. No woman would ever dream of putting on any makeup until she was married, and then she would wear only what her husband desired.

  Thu Le felt that her BCCB clients in California might rebel against such a beauty regimen, especially the hard work. They had come of age in a different tradition, she told me, and had been taught to rely on cosmetics to do the job of nature.

  SOMETIMES DURING MY FINAL DAYS around Bakersfield it seemed to me that the entire San Joaquin Valley ran on beer. As each sizzling afternoon limped toward its conclusion, I could sense a buildup of dust on my teeth, like a strange, agricultural form of tartar, and I began to look upon the usual remedies of iced tea, ice water, and Diet Coke with disdain.

  Only a daily ration of Bud or Coors or Rolling Rock would do the trick, so by five or six o’clock I’d visit a deli or a grocery store for a refill. I had learned to rank the stores according to the relative frigidity of their stock, cold beer being words that were much bandied about in the valley and often used with impunity.

  In the San Joaquin, I drank beer at low-rent taverns and high-class bars, in Taft and in McKittrick and in Ford City, and at last I drank some beer in Buttonwillow, a prosperous town of about two thousand, where I stopped after a ride out to the Temblor Range by the San Andreas Fault. The fault had ruptured in 1952 and had dealt Bakersfield some significant abuse, but there wasn’t much to see other than dry creekbeds, salt lakes, and abandoned mines.

  A solitary buttonwillow tree stood at the north end of Main Street in Buttonwillow. At that spot, in 1895, the great cattleman Henry Miller had built his headquarters, naming the post office and the railroad station after the landmark tree. Pumps and derricks had taken over from the cows, and now cotton grew thickly in the fields around town, often watched over by quietly affluent farmers of Italian descent who were capable of hiding a few thousand dollars in cash beneath a mattress.

  Buttonwillow, then, on a Friday afternoon toward quitting time, with the air stinking of oil and gasoline. Ahead, I saw four or five cars parked by a storefront from which all manner of merry noises were issuing, and after a brief second of foreboding that recalled the standard hitch in consciousness preceding any cowboy’s plunge through the swinging doors, I slipped into the BS Saloon.

  The BS was storming. Friday was payday, and checks were being cashed. Oily galoots drank in boisterous knots, their faces raw and beaming. At a pool table, a gigantic machinist was bashing at balls and saying that he still owed the damn IRS five grand, but who cared, really? His daughter was his opponent. She was big, too, and she didn’t care, either. It was good not to care in Buttonwillow on a Friday afternoon.

  The bartender, Betty Stiers, resembled Tuesday Weld. She was the eponymous BS and owned half the bar. There were three bars in Buttonwillow, she said, but hers was the only one that might qualify as a joint. Buttonwillow was her hometown. She had come back to it lately after a long time away working as a legal secretary in Tracy, in the Bay Area. Tracy, once a country town, was too hectic for her now. She was a country girl at heart.

  “I like to look out the door at those cotton fields,” Betty said dreamily, and you knew she meant it.

  In her year or so as a co-owner, she and her partner had brightened up the BS. They’d stripped the walls and had painted them. They had papered over the men’s room with a spritely print of horses galloping, but when I went in I saw that some dim-witted prankster had already marred the print by drawing an arrow to one nag and writing beneath it, “Sea-fucking-biscuit.” The future of the bar’s new finery could be predicted.

  The afternoon wore on. I talked with a man who contracted to supply work crews to the oil companies. Things were tough in the fields, he said. The companies were more demanding than ever. They were outlawing beards, ordering the workers to show up in reasonably clean clothes, and forcing them to keep pace with a clock whose hands spun faster and faster. They were after soldiers, not employees.

  The crews were angry and depressed, the man said. A few workers in any crew were on drugs, he guessed, regardless of any testing procedures.

  Maybe we were speaking too loudly, or maybe I was asking too many questions. From a dark corner of the BS, a fellow stepped forward to confront me. Jet-black hair fell slackly to his shoulders, and he had the disagreeable odor of somebody sweating out booze from the night before. He wanted to know what the hell I was doing in Buttonwillow. What about a business card? Didn’t I even have a business card? A real writer would have a business card.

  Intimidated, I fished around in a pocket, found Thu Le’s card, and decided against trying to pass myself off as a certified color analyst from Vietnam.

  “Why, you’re just a fly-by-nighter!” my accuser wailed. He pointed a finger at me, like some grand inquisitor, and wailed again. “He’s just a fly-by-nighter!”

  It would be unwise, I realized, to overstay my welcome. After a round of hasty good-byes, I made for the door, half-expecting to be hit from behind with a barstool leg. But I got to the car all right, took a deep breath, and saw that the BS was a perfect bookend to Twenty-two Mile Roadhouse, one a greeting and the other a farewell. In my head, I heard dear old Baker pounding the ivories and collected myself for a trip over the mountains and into the Mojave Desert, leaving behind the farms, the heat, and the light—the summa of the San Joaquin.

  You don’t know me, but you don’t life me.…

  CHAPTER 19

  THE MOJAVE DESERT in August. I had done better planning in my time.

  From Bakersfield, I drove east to where the San Joaquin Valley ended around Lamont and Arvin and continued on into the Tehachapis, a fault-block range that marked the southern terminus of the Sierra Nevada. Some people believed that the mountains were the true dividing line between northern and southern California. They were not as grand or as intimidating as the mountains of the Far North and were forested mainly with scrubby oaks rather than tall pines, firs, or redwoods. The hillside grasses were tinder-dry and smelled of fires waiting to burn.

  At Tehachapi Pass, at an elevation of 4,604 feet, Refugio Rangel was selling some miniature windmills from his pickup truck on Highway 58. He had a broad Hispanic face and a watch cap pulled down over the tips of his ears. His windmills were arrayed on a shoulder of the road and ballasted with rocks. The blades spun madly. Tehachapi Pass was among the windiest spots in the state and gave him an ideal showcase for his wares.

  “I’m here most every weekend,” Rangel told me as he hammered together a new windmill. “I come up from Arvin.”

  Rangel knew the Tehachapi country well, having studied it on his hands and knees. Before retiring, he had worked for many years as a laborer laying water pipes in Tehachapi Valley, all the way to the local prison. He pointed out the prison for me, a malign shape in the middle of
some apple orchards.

  “I don’t expect to get rich on these,” said Rangel, grinning at the very thought. “I just do it to keep busy.”

  While he kept hammering, I sat on his tailgate and took in the view. The canyons were littered with clothing that the wind had robbed from unwary tourists—hats, sweaters, scarves, and T-shirts. Big winds were common in the Tehachapis, often gusting to fifty or sixty miles an hour on the most ordinary days.

  William Brewer had gone on about the winds in 1863, calling them “unruly” and saying that they blew “most fearfully.” At the same time, he was charmed by Tehachapi Valley, “a pretty basin five or six miles long, entirely surrounded by high mountains.” The pasturage was so fine that a half-dozen Methodist families from Missouri had settled there. The Piker men raised cattle. The Piker women were devout and liked to dip some snuff after their church services.

  There were still some cattle in the valley, and the settlers were still arriving, too, forsaking the congested suburbs around metropolitan Los Angeles for the budding subdivisions of Tehachapi. I could see hundreds of new houses below me, their red-tile roofs often packed in so closely that they looked like the heads of matches in a matchbook. The settlers were said to be pursuing that phantom, a simpler life.

  Tehachapi Pass had always been a major gateway to the state. Route 66 ran through it out of Arkansas and Oklahoma and had emancipated the Dust Bowl hordes—Sam Cravens off to pick zucchini with his uncle, and Woody Guthrie plucking his banjo and singing, “If you ain’t got the do-re-mi, boy, then you can’t get into Ca-li-for-nee, boy.” Charlie Manson might have traveled the same route on the lam from West Virginia.

  In 1876, the Southern Pacific had opened the Tehachapis to rail travel by completing the staggering task of looping some tracks over the mountains. It was on an SP train from Des Moines, Iowa, that a young sportscaster at radio station WHO had made his first trip to California, ostensibly to cover the Chicago Cubs’ spring-training camp on Santa Catalina Island, off Santa Barbara.