by Bill Barich
Still, he didn’t take it personally, the absence of ideas in his brain, and was glad just to be in the United States, big free country. It was harder for a Vietnamese to get in than it used to be, he said, and easier to get stuck at a refugee camp in Hong Kong.
Used to be, used to be. Another evening, at Pine Avenue Grill, where a department store used to be, the cashier, Lily, noticed my surname and said that I was her second Slav in a row. You looked for such small conjunctive treats when you worked an eight-hour shift behind a cash register.
Lily was a Slav, too, from Queens, New York. Her parents had brought her to California when they’d retired to Orange County, but Lily wasn’t ready to retire. She was twenty-one, red-haired, punked out, speedy, rebellious, and about to join the navy. Maybe. Lily was confused.
“I have some bad news for you, Lily,” I said, teasing her. “It doesn’t get any better.”
“Please don’t say that.”
“The positive side is that it doesn’t bother you so much.”
Lily pouted. “If I join the navy, I’ll get to travel, at least.”
“You’ll see the world, Lily.”
At my motel, I opened the windows to smell the ocean air and tried to block the petroleum haze. Colored lights were blinking on the dead-astronaut oil islands. I thought about the Slovenian Hall in Delano, platters of beef, Iowan picnics, Japanese investors, and knock-off Italian shoes made in Taiwan coming through the Port of Long Beach.
Then I lay in bed and tried to hold California together in my head, but I couldn’t, so I drifted instead and in half-sleep began ticking off a checklist of items you’d need to survive in the state once the calendar rolled over into the next century—goat cheese, arugula, condoms, yen.…
OUT ON SANTA FE AVENUE one afternoon, Keith Williams and Brittney Powers were painting a mural on a four-foot-high stucco wall that ran for thirty or so feet around the border of an older neighborhood. They were true artists and threw everything they had into their work. Passing motorists slowed down as if they’d been stunned by a bolt of sunlight and raised a hand in salute.
The artists were proud of their reception. They called the mural “Irie Park.” In the language of reggae, irie meant “to feel good.”
They were reggae fans, young black men in their early twenties. Powers wore a painter’s cap with the brim flipped up and had two earrings in one ear, a stud and a little hoop. His trousers and his sneakers were covered with paint, and his eyes shone intensely with pleasure, while Williams was cooler and more studied, a former hoopster in dreadlocks stepping back to examine the mural at a distance.
“It’s fresh,” he said, after a bit.
Powers cackled in joy. “It’s fresh, all right.”
They went at it again. I watched them, leaning against my car. They worked for the city in a program to paint over graffiti in rough neighborhoods and replace it with murals. Often they had the local kids pitching in. Williams was the captain of the team and always stuck an upbeat message or two onto a wall. He had done some painted backdrops for reggae bands and carried a looseleaf portfolio of photos and sketches and also some press clippings about his art.
Powers had his own notebook. He filled it with private musings, stuff that came at him when he was tired, late at night, rushing past his defenses—portraits of Prince and Mike Tyson, a whimsical drawing of Hitler going to hell in disco clothes.
The city gave the artists a van for their job. Paint cans and art supplies crammed the interior, but they still took their breaks sitting in back because they liked the shade.
They told me during a break about the seriocomic aspects of being an urban muralist. Finding a place to pee was a constant in the battery of problems that faced them. It could be acute in neighborhoods where trees or gas stations were rare.
The hose problem could also be severe. Brushes had to be rinsed, so it was up to you to befriend somebody who’d give you water. That wasn’t as easy as you’d think. People made excuses. They invoked a drought or wondered aloud if you might be a thief or a murderer who’d broken out of prison.
“So you’ve been everywhere in California?” Williams asked me, wanting to hear more about my trip.
“Not everywhere,” I said. “But I’ve seen a lot of it.” And I told them some of what I’d seen.
Williams had done some traveling. “You know where I’d go if I could? Someplace up north. Mill Valley, the Berkeley Hills.” He smiled dreamily. “All that green.”
I thought then that Californians must be unusual in their ability to imaginatively inhabit a place, sailing off in their heads into the great geographical diversity of the state. Maybe we were all Elsewherians in the end, committed to a terrain that only half-existed on earth.
Williams’s family roots were in Texas. Powers’s grandfather was a Louisiana preacher who’d come West with a dollar in his pocket. Williams had an apartment in Long Beach, while Powers lived at home with his mother. She was a teaching assistant in comparative literature at Cal State, Long Beach, where he went to school, majoring in video arts.
Powers was concerned that his own neighborhood was becoming less stable. An absentee owner had leased a house to a crack dealer, so zombies floated by at all hours. It distressed Powers that they always seemed to stop for a time in front of his house.
“You got that nice lawn,” Williams suggested.
“Yeah,” said Powers dryly. “They must be drawn to it.”
Powers believed that the press had exaggerated the amount of gang activity in Long Beach. He knew of a couple of big dealers who’d moved to Oregon and Arizona respectively because the police there were much easier to outfox. Some younger kids were in training and worked as lookouts and errand boys, but what else could you expect with the public schools the way they were?
The economy wasn’t much help, either. Powers shook his head at the idea of a minimum-wage job, flipping burgers at some franchise. Still, he was fond of Long Beach, and so was Williams.
“It’s a pretty good town,” Williams said. “It’s been good to me.”
“I’ve been here twenty-one years, so it must have some hold on me,” Powers chimed in. The intensity of his eyes brightened by a degree. “And when I’m visiting in Louisiana, being from California is like American Express Gold. The girls won’t leave me alone!”
That cracked up Williams. “I’m surprised you ever come back!”
Powers considered this in silence for a moment. It required a response. “I don’t like driving twenty miles to go to a party,” he said, putting the excuse out there like a trial balloon and hoping that Williams wouldn’t prick it with a pin.
Then their break was over. They closed up the van and did some random stretching to prepare for their next stint on the pavement. Williams opened a can of paint and started filling in the white space around some leaping basketball players.
The artists had impressed me with their lack of rancor. Williams and Powers were walking a hard road and knew that they were walking it, but they did it with joy and with spirit. They were both worried about money, though, since the funding for their program was in jeopardy in a way that funding for the World Trade Center was not.
As I was going, Williams came over and asked shyly if I made my living as a writer. I allowed that I did, sort of, with the usual pinching of pennies, and he confessed that he hoped to do the same as a painter someday. He’d had a recent show at a gallery downtown and had got some nice reviews.
“It’s one thing to be a starving artist,” he said, laughing at his predicament. “But it’s a whole other thing to be a starving black artist.”
Williams walked me to my car, and I had a wishful moment picturing him painting in a little cabin high up in the greenery of Mount Tamalpais.
BEAVER STREET in Wilmington used to be a tawdry strip that embodied the quintessence of every nasty dream born at sea, a sailors’ playground with bars, burlesque shows, and bordellos all competing for a chance to steal a fellow’s money. The actio
n had died there years ago, and now Wilmington was a poor, blue-collar town, an Oildale-by-the-sea that was a short drive from Long Beach. The population was about two-thirds Mexican, and many of the Mexicans were foreign-born.
Wilmington had some refineries and some scrap-metal yards. In a decaying building hemmed in by crashing winos and the salvation missions that served them, I found the International Longshoremen’s Union. Rene Herrera, the local’s president, had agreed to talk to me about how dockworkers were faring at a modern port.
I waited for twenty minutes in a lobby hung with old maritime photos, visions of Fred Sands dancing in my head, before Herrera finally summoned me. He was a burly, bearded man who looked as if he could carry a ton of bricks up a gangplank. A little gold cross dangled from a chain around his neck. Some cronies were listening in as he spoke on the phone, dealing heatedly with a grievance.
The arguing continued for a while. It was like watching a scene from an old movie that was paying homage to an ancient dialectic. Herrera hung up at last and stared at me in a distasteful way. I could have been a scab.
“So what can I do for you?” he asked.
“You were going to tell me about how it is for a longshoreman in Long Beach today.”
“Can’t talk about it. We’re in negotiations with the port.”
There wasn’t much Herrera could talk about. He had lots of excuses—it was a bad day, he was very busy. He suggested that I contact the union’s historian, but I was interested in the present, not the past. Maybe if we set up another appointment in a couple of days?
“Sure. You give me a call.” And I did give him a call, but Herrera was always in conference or on another line or out of the office, and he never got back to me.
Probably all the unions had to talk about, I thought, was the past. They represented just 16 percent of workers nationwide. The working stiff was dying in California, and the unions were dying with him.
THE COASTAL PLAIN between Long Beach and Los Angeles was a wilderness of tracts that were divided, one from another, by a haphazard sprinkling of strip malls and also larger malls where franchises competed for the dollars deposited in such unredeemable banks as Bellflower Savings & Loan or Lakewood Trust. Duplication and replication were the order of the day, and every new idea was quickly beaten into submission and copied not once but a trillion times, squeezed until nothing was left of its essence.
Weird start-up companies dedicated to the dream of someday becoming a chain, inchoate Von’s and Ralph’s and Wendy’s, were marketing every useless item under the sun, bassinets for pooches and mood rings made from wishbones, and they left behind them a trail of unhappy creditors in the wake of their inevitable demise.
This was the Land of No Return, of empty heads and turned-out pockets, a slice of the state that New Yorkers always held up to scorn in their overarching paranoia about California.
Again, the story was familiar. The plain had once supported dairies. There used to be bean fields, fields of grain, and some orange and lemon groves. There used to be a paradise. Now you saw industrial parks with chainlink fences. You saw architecturally redundant plants built by military contractors such as McDonnell Douglas, where riveters fortunate enough to still be employed worked overtime to meet their monthly mortgage payment.
You saw many refineries because the plain was suffused with oil. The refineries belched their petroleum haze, and it blended with tailpipe effusions and the spent diesel fumes from Los Angeles International Airport to produce a truly creative smog.
So putrid was the air in Torrance, a suburb not terribly far from the ocean, that more than a hundred people had just filed a class-action suit against a Mobil refinery, charging that its emissions were responsible for causing respiratory problems, skin rashes, blisters, and cancers of the nose and throat.
The coastal plain was fraught with wonders. In Torrance, a little three-bedroom house twenty yards from a refinery had an asking price of $219,500. In Paramount, the city manager was swaggering because a new refinery there would furnish enough new revenue in taxes to add a sergeant and a detective to the task force fighting gangs.
Over in Compton, the gang kids were plugging one another with the sportive alacrity of hunters after quail. In Carson, there was a Choose-’N-Cut Christmas tree farm next to a Rockwell International plant. And in Lynwood, the citizens were trying to recall some city council members who’d changed the name of a street to honor Martin Luther King, Jr.
“Let’s face it,” said one of the accused defensively. “Would anybody have cared if we called it John Wayne Boulevard?”
All these things were really happening in California.
THE OCEAN, yes, brings us sanity. At the pier in Redondo Beach, a seaside town, the new Californians were reliving the great, unpack-aged American boardwalk-and-arcade adventure and recapturing the lost innocence of a public space in the process. Honest life was bubbling and spurting everywhere as they kissed beneath lampposts and mugged by a statue of George Firth, the hero surfer.
They were eating crab, fried clams, pizza, kimchi, tacos, and steamed rice while they held hands and argued and giggled and fell in love. There was scarcely a white face among them.
A Korean woman was teaching her four-year-old son to play Skee-Ball. Honest life! The boy didn’t have a clue what to do. It was late August, but he was bundled in layers of clothes. He would roll a ball, and the ball would roll back at him. Finally, he picked up a ball and flung it at the target. His mother didn’t mind. She yanked at the zipper on his snowsuit to keep the breezes at bay.
Out on the pier, anglers were hoping to catch some dinner. A stout Mexican in a flowered shirt reeled in a tiny octopus that was clamped to his hook. He treated it as gently as a kitten, easing it free and letting it crawl over his forearm. The octopus lurched forward on its little tentacles, its blob of a noggin bobbing.
“Let me tell you, this is some kind of strange feeling,” the Mexican said, displaying his arm and chuckling over the mysteries of the deep.
There was a Vietnamese family fishing nearby—a mom, two grandparents, and five children. The oldest boy, who was seventeen, had come to Redondo Beach alone from his home in Cerritos early that morning. He had wanted to land a big halibut and have a Polaroid of himself and the trophy fish posted in the bait-shop window, but he’d been unlucky so far and had decided that it was time to drop the pretense and torment his smallest brother.
“Look!” he shouted, snagging his hook on an underwater ledge and straining against the bend that it put in his rod. He struggled for a couple of minutes, then let the line go slack. “That was it! That was some big halibut!”
His brother had obviously been through the drill before and wasn’t having any. “It could be anything that lives in the sea,” he said.
The grandmother smiled and patted him on the head.
Soon the older boy had a strike for real and brought in a small, flat fish that would not have made a trophy even in a world where fish were rare.
“Number ten,” his mother said dismissively.
I asked her, “Is it a flounder?”
“No, halibut. But too small. He must throw it back.”
“Flounder are smarter than halibut,” the small brother told me.
“How do you know?”
“Nobody catches ’em so much.”
In the observable fact, there is always wisdom.
A SUMMER MORNING in Long Beach, the blue of San Pedro Bay and the sky hazy with petroleum. Ships coming to port from all across the globe.
The Admiralty Bay, a tanker from Valdez. The Kauai from Honolulu bringing pineapples. The Hyundai Challenger out of Yokohama. The Samoan Reefer from Porto Armuelles loaded with Chiquita bananas. The Novo Mesto from Inchŏn with a cargo of shoes and purses.
Around Point Fermin they went, past the lighthouse and Cabrillo Beach to cut through the San Pedro breakwater and enter the harbor at Angels Gate. Or they rounded in from the east and entered through Queens Gate, a gap between the
Long Beach and Middle breakwaters.
Ships laden with fish pulled into Fish Harbor, off Terminal Island, where trucks parked on Bass Street, Tuna Street, and Sardine Street awaited them. Ships in need of repair glided along the Main Channel and under Vincent Thomas Bridge to the Turning Basin, then swung west to Todd Shipyards.
Passenger ships docked at passenger terminals. There were terminals for bananas, autos, gypsum, and borax.
Container ships made up the bulk of the fleet after tankers. They were serviced at container terminals at both ports. Giant gantry cranes did the unloading. They stacked the rectangular containers like children’s blocks. There was no mess. Nothing spilled out, nothing slopped over.
It used to be said that a longshoreman never had to bring his lunch to work because he could eat off the docks. Here an apple, there a banana. Life slopped over then, it spilled out uncontained.
Longshoremen still worked the port, but there weren’t many of them. Nobody ever got laid off, but nobody ever got hired. The longshoremen looked at the gantry cranes and knew their future.
On the docks, you heard the grinding of machinery and the muffled roar of traffic. Seabirds circled on the wing. Gulls, cormorants, brown pelicans. The air smelled of gasoline.
CHAPTER 25
ORANGE COUNTY, the home of Disneyland, had a history of giving rise to fantasies. Helena Modjeska, a Polish actress renowned for her Shakespearian roles, was among those who had succumbed to its allure. Before emigrating to Anaheim with her husband, Count Charles Chlapowski, and some friends in 1876, she had rhapsodic visions of what her new life would be like. Poland was under the Russian boot at the time, and intellectuals in Warsaw and Cracow looked on California as a country of light, air, and magic, where the forces of repression did not exist.
In a memoir, Modjeska recorded her feelings as she was about to embark:
Oh, but to cook under the sapphire-blue sky in the land of freedom! What Joy! I thought. To bleach linen at the brook like the maidens of Homer’s Iliad! After the day of toil, to play the guitar and sing by moonlight, to recite poems, or to listen to the mocking-bird! And listening to our songs would be charming Indian maidens, our neighbors, making wreaths of luxuriant wildflowers for us.…
