by Bill Barich
For now, though, he had to choose what to read on-stage. He was torn between two pieces. The first was a wacky, audience-friendly story about a cow, while the other was a much more deeply felt story that was exquisitely turned. Yourgrau asked for my opinion. Glancing at the youngish audience, men and women in their twenties and early thirties, I counseled him to go with the second piece. Youth would respond to its subtlety and its emotion.
The poet-boss of the Cafe Largo series was our emcee. He was from New York and had the kind of radiant flush that envelops somebody who has jumped from an airplane and landed unexpectedly on his feet. He introduced the first two readers, actorish men of a sentimental bent, each capable of being moved to extremes by the drama of his own life. Then he introduced Yourgrau.
In a matter of seconds, after Yourgrau had read just a few words, I began to cringe. Disaster lay ahead. The subtlety of the story was too subtle, and the emotions were too finely put. Here was an example of real literature, and the crowd didn’t have a clue what to do with it, so they started chattering, ordering drinks, and looking at their watches.
For five slowly decomposing minutes, Yourgrau died an unnatural death on-stage before returning to the bar. “Thank you very much for your advice,” he said.
The next reader was a starlet in a mini-skirt and patterned tights. Her poems, such as they were, had to do with bad relationships. The men that she knew were fucks, bastards, and assholes, always letting her down and leaving a pair of beat-up Tony Lama cowboy boots under her bed.
The word fuck brought down the house. Deafening applause greeted the brand-name reference to Tony Lama.
She was followed by a man who punctuated his existential dilemma by slapping himself in the face. Poetry was being transformed in Los Angeles, turned into a Three Stooges routine.
Yourgrau suggested a late supper at a famous hamburger joint in Westwood. We had to wait in line for twenty minutes to get inside. The menu advertised “Quality Forever,” a heavy burden on the cooks. The two featured burgers were the Steakburger (“Our original, 1928”) and the Hickoryburger (“Our original, 1945”). I couldn’t tell the difference.
“Chili sauce,” Yourgrau said, pointing to some fine print. “Homemade.”
SOMETIMES I WOULD SIT by the swimming pool at the Gigliottis’ house and listen to the birds singing and try to believe that I had really been to the Far North, that it really existed. It seemed to belong not only to another lifetime but to another century. I saw all the felled trees of the Far North traveling south to become tract houses, and all the water of the Far North flowing through the pipes and the toilets of those houses, and wondered what the Far North was getting in exchange.
Then I remembered all the little video shelves in hardware stores and Indian gift shops, and all the Hollywood videos stacking up in them like Big Macs, and I saw the Wolfgang Puck nouveau pizzas going into the freezer case in Hoopa Valley and saw the teenage daughters of loggers in their patterned tights and their mini-skirts chasing millworkers in Tony Lama boots and writing poems about them, and I thought, Well, maybe it’s a fair deal. Or maybe not.
AND YET IN THE MORNING the sun rose in triumph again, rose beautifully, achingly, reductively, still collecting its residuals. After packing my bags for my last month on the road, I assumed my accustomed position by the pool and watched Aaron and some friends playing a vigorous game of paddle tennis. They had a bristly overabundance of energy that seemed to lap and flow around them, something sharp and animal pushing against the shape that was meant to contain it.
That evening, Aaron planned to host a big barbecue. This would be a signal event, I was given to understand, because a few girls had been invited and might actually show up.
In the late afternoon, freshly showered, Aaron began his advance prep. One friend had stayed behind to help him, a plumber’s apprentice who’d suffered a hernia and was living on disability pay. He was a little older than the other boys in the posse and always had a terrible crimson sunburn, as if he could never quite remember when it was time to get off the beach. His main function, I thought, must be as the designated beer buyer, his legal I.D. in hand.
The Red Hot Chili Peppers roared from the stereo while Aaron laid out the steaks and tore some lettuce for a salad.
“I know everybody in the band,” he said with authority to his pal.
“Cool,” the plumber said. He seldom said much more than that.
Aaron had forgotten to buy some charcoal, so the boys zipped to the corner store on their skateboards, scooting along in a gnarly twilight zone between childhood and manhood. When they got back, they developed a case of the party jitters and kept checking the clock at five-minute intervals, wondering where their guests were. I could feel the helium escaping from their balloon. A half-hour went by, and then another boy finally knocked on the front door. He was the first and the last guest to arrive.
The defection of the girl guests was a major disappointment. After Aaron had the barbecue fire going and had thrown the steaks on, he phoned one of the backsliders, a friend named Thor, and vented his anger.
“What do you mean, man? You’re cooking dinner for your Dad?” he shouted into the receiver. “You’re eighteen years old, Thor! You’re supposed to be rebelling against him. Don’t tell me you have rebelled. Your rebellion got squashed, dude. You got squashed like Tiananmen Square!”
In the dusky shadows, the three boys sat at a table outside to partake of a desultory meal—another barbecue in California. They picked at the food and made halfhearted jokes about the missing girls. What a complicated world they were inheriting. They had to survive in Los Angeles, where illusions and realities were hopelessly entangled and expectations were astounding, where even a hamburger had to be more, much more, than a simple patty of ground beef.
CHAPTER 24
SO WITH A SIGH of relief tempered only by the melancholy understanding that I had failed to become rich, famous, or transcendentally beautiful in Los Angeles, I dodged the usual freeway spillage and made it to Long Beach, twenty-three miles away, where the motto was Urbs Amicate, the “Friendly City,” and the circus had just left town.
Long Beach felt like an anticlimax after L.A. It also felt like a refuge. The smell of things burning was gone from the air, and the locals would need a dictionary to find the meaning of apocalypse. They were people who could be counted on to attend the farewell tour of Gunther Gabel-Williams, the fabled trainer of big cats, whose relic circus posters were still plastered to walls and billboards.
Long Beach was the fifth-largest city in the state, with a population of about 425,000, but it was virtually untouched by sophistication. Its chief tourist attractions were the Queen Mary and the Spruce Goose, Howard Hughes’s 200-ton flying boat, which was now a Walt Disney production. Brochures reminded you that Disneyland itself was just across the Orange County line.
The 1950s were not forgotten in Long Beach. All along the ocean, I saw little beachfront motels offering weekly rates for suburbanites on vacation. The motels frequently had a maritime motif and showed anchors and ships’ bells in neon. Aging sailors presided over them, navy pensioners with daunting brush cuts and a marked distaste for anything modern.
The city came by its conservatism honestly. Earlier in the century, it had been known as “Iowa on the Pacific” because so many elderly Hawkeye farmers had retired there to die. They lived on their savings in efficiency apartments and were so numerous that a corn-on-the-cob picnic at Bixby Park might attract fifty thousand of them.
The newspapers back home were captivated by the farmers’ migration and dispatched their writers to Long Beach to file reports about such esoterica as the practice of sunbathing. In 1937, Harlan Miller of the Des Moines Register had this to say about his journey to the Coast:
At seven A.M. the clang of horseshoes begins. The retired farmers are at their chores, pitching ringers.… Day has begun in the coastal paradise where thousands of Iowans go before they die.… Behind the beach stretches the gaudy �
�Pike,” the amusement artery line with open-fronted refreshment rooms and counters, its games of skill or chance, souvenir bazaars, liquor shops open even on Sunday.… Here a retired elder whose mortgages have gone a little sour can romp with discreet lavishness.…
Although the sunlight in California could be blinding, Miller said, the farmers didn’t need any movie-star “smoked glasses” to protect them. They had toiled in the fields of Iowa and had no fear of wrinkles. He heard them complain about the quality of western beef and cast aspersions on the fried chicken, but they loved the warm weather and wouldn’t trade it for anything. What a thing it was to feel welcome on earth at last!
The Hawkeye spirit still lingered in Long Beach, armored and wary. The beaches in town were sometimes as modest as the sandy, lakefront strips at midwestern fishing resorts, and hardly anyone wore a bikini. Sometimes the beaches looked out on manmade islands where oil was stored. The islands were named for dead astronauts, Chaffee Island and Grissom Island.
A lid was clamped on the downtown area after dark, Main Street again capped and shuttered and losing out to the life of shopping malls. The skyscrapers and hotels fronting on the ocean, monuments to redevelopment, had a sepulchral isolation at night and seemed huddled together to keep some unseen threat at bay.
The U.S. Navy was a major employer in Long Beach, with three active battleships home-ported to the naval shipyard, but the off-duty sailors didn’t stick around to carouse and play as they used to do. They couldn’t afford the housing prices in the city, so at the end of their shifts, they became commuters and went home to such suburbs as Lakewood, Carson, or Torrance instead of spending their money in honky-tonks.
The few honky-tonks that were left in town had been banished to the urban fringe, hidden as they might be in Iowa. Soon I came to recognize a familiar litany painted on stucco buildings in faceless neighborhoods: Cocktails, Beer, Wine. Often Girls was appended to it, and then the front door was not wide open but instead guarded by a muscular, long-haired greaser whose schooling had stopped somewhere shy of the eighth grade.
One night, cruising, I was drawn into Angel’s, where the girls danced almost naked and did what they could to shake their rigid silicone breasts. The breasts had a remarkable shape and design. Maybe it was the navy presence that caused me to search for a military analogy, but they looked as indomitable as nuclear warheads. Bump into a nipple by accident, and you ran the risk of blinding yourself.
At Angel’s, the specialty of the house was hot-cream wrestling, a variant of mud wrestling during which the strippers coated themselves in what looked to be slightly heated Gillette Foamy and did some sloppy Greco-Roman posing for a rowdy crowd of college kids, a few navy lads upholding tradition, and workers from the many oil refineries around.
Oil had always figured prominently in the life of Long Beach. At Signal Hill, a township nearby, geologists had discovered a huge oil field in 1921, tapping into gushers that had yielded about 250,000 barrels a day at their zenith. Some pumps were still dipping into the ooze of the hill with those curious, birdlike motions I’d seen around Bakersfield.
Big tankers brought crude oil to the city from Alaska and abroad, discharging more than 145 million barrels of it annually at the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles on San Pedro Bay. All the important oil companies had storage tanks there. They funneled their stock to refineries such as Atlantic-Richfield’s in Carson, where about 5 million gallons of gasoline were refined every day.
The refineries also handled oil piped in from the San Joaquin, and whenever the wind failed to blow, or whenever it blew the wrong way, you could taste and smell a thick petroleum haze. It was a fact of life in Long Beach, and though the haze sometimes made for a pungent olfactory experience, it had the beneficial side effect of keeping trendy Angelenos from those midwestern beaches, preserving the flavor of another era.
LONG BEFORE THE Queen Mary became a Disney tourist attraction, it used to carry passengers across the ocean, and Matthew Faulkner, late of Cornwall, England, could remember arriving in the United States aboard it as a child. Faulkner had stayed where he had landed and now found himself in the same boat as me, unable to deny that he’d turned into a Californian, however reluctantly. Whenever he went back to England for a visit, the folks regarded him with both admiration and suspicion, but he was not unhappy to have surrendered his birthright in exchange for a life in Long Beach and a position as a vice-president with the Chamber of Commerce.
When anybody asked Faulkner about Long Beach, he was never at a loss for words, and the boosterish words most often on his lips nowadays were Pacific Rim. I had no doubt that he would agree with Henry Huntington, who had addressed southern California’s prospects in foreign trade in the 1880s.
“I believe that Los Angeles is destined to become the most important city in the country, if not in the world. It can extend in any direction as far as you like. Its front door opens on the Pacific, the ocean of the future. Europe can supply her own wants; we shall supply the wants of Asia.”
Huntington was prescient, but he had erred in omitting Long Beach from the equation. Quietly and efficiently, the city had been stealing some of Los Angeles’ business.
Among its new waterfront skyscrapers was a highly visible World Trade Center that was destined to be second only to the World Trade Center in New York, the biggest on the planet. The plans called for four office towers, a hotel, and many shops and restaurants in a 2.2-million-square-foot complex—a living, breathing hothouse for the generating of capital.
The project was a true Pacific Rim venture, undertaken jointly by Kajima International of Japan and IDM Corporation of Long Beach. IDM, a consortium, had some American partners, but it also included several Japanese banks.
In Faulkner’s office at the World Trade Center, I learned that Long Beach had been limping along as a dying navy town until the Alaskan oil boom had started around 1975. By chance, the Port of Long Beach had proven unusually suited to handling the cargo on tankers, and it had added to its capacity ever since, bringing in more container terminals and giant gantry cranes. The nearby Port of Los Angeles, which was annexed to L.A. through the harbor towns of Wilmington and San Pedro, was similarly equipped and also expanding.
The Port of Long Beach afforded shippers another advantage in that it was located in the only foreign trade zone in southern California, which meant that certain imported goods could enter the United States and not be hit with a customs tax.
Both ports did a lion’s share of their trading with Pacific Rim countries. The trade accounted for as much as three-quarters of each port’s annual gross receipts. Automobiles headed the tally of imports, to the tune of some $30 million a year. Next came shoes and other footwear, followed by data-processing machines, motor vehicle parts, and tape players and recorders.
Oil was the primary outgoing cargo. The last sawlogs from our dwindling forests were shipped from Long Beach, too, and cotton, wheat, hides, and corn were exported in some quantity.
The economic prospects in Long Beach seemed bright, indeed, but Faulkner didn’t want me to think that the redevelopment scheme was trouble-free. He directed my attention to the Long Beach Airport. It was smack in the middle of the city and had no room to grow.
Land everywhere in Long Beach was at a premium—that was why there weren’t any new subdivisions around or any affordable houses. Only two large parcels were still available within the city limits, Faulkner said, and the Disney organization was studying one of them.
“What for?” I asked.
Faulkner shrugged. “They’re very secretive, you know.” But he assumed that they must be thinking about attracting the captive audience at the Queen Mary and the Spruce Goose nearby. He made the Disneys sound like the Rosicrucians.
Faulkner’s main concern was that Long Beach might become too bland as the port grew and the redevelopment continued. Money had a way of driving out diversity. Some chamber members were already demanding a united front to put a best foot forward.
SOMETIMES WHEN THE WIND FAILED to blow in Long Beach, or when it blew in the wrong direction, I thought I could smell a trace of fish in the petroleum haze, a whiff of mackerel essence, but I must have been imagining it. More fish used to be landed at San Pedro Harbor than anywhere else in the country, but now the commercial fleet was down to about thirty boats, and navy subs on maneuvers ripped through the fishermen’s nets.
“All they had to do was look,” John Emirzian told the Long Beach newspaper after losing a $3,800 net.
The paper was in trouble. Its circulation was in decline. In southern California, below Los Angeles, nobody wanted to be informed. They just wanted to be entertained.
Long Beach had a symbol of what life might be like away from the petroleum haze. It was Lake Tahoe. The cool, clear lake, the snowcapped Sierra Nevada, and the air-conditioned casinos were pictured often on billboards and advertised in the media.
At a Chinese restaurant one evening, a man across from me was chatting up a waitress, trying to seduce her with the lake, with its icy cleanliness, saying, “Close your eyes and try to imagine it, baby. It’s twenty-six miles long and eleven miles wide.…”
You could see her going to Lake Tahoe in her head, sniffing at the comforting mountain air and watching this man, this stranger, put dollars on a counter to pay for a hotel room.
My waiter, a Vietnamese youth, was listening, too. He was ready for Lake Tahoe. He lived in Alhambra now and wanted to go to college, but he couldn’t save enough money.
“Used to be, I think, you work hard and you get ahead,” he told me, accurately handicapping the angles. “Now you need ideas!”
