Welcome to Oakland

by Williamson, Eric Miles

  He snapped his sunglasses to his face, rolled up his scrolls, and marched on out of Dick’s. He had to turn sideways to walk out the door, so big were his shoulders, and so much equipment he bore beneath his vest.

  We didn’t see Jorgensen for two more weeks, and so we figured that nothing had changed, or would. At Dick’s things stayed the same. I kept playing Cumbias and Rancheras and Merengue with Los Asesinos at the Mexican nightclubs and weddings and quinceaneras and parties while working days as a laborer, my most recent gig running the tar mop on commercial roofs, warehouses mostly, nasty rusted oversized corrugated tin sheds, sweating my ass off in the crude oil steam, actually getting to like the smell. I didn’t ever get any nookie, but I’d come not to care, and I didn’t have the time anyway, because nights I’d read, hoping that in a year or two I’d have enough money to go to college and get some job like Blaise’s, some job I didn’t have to do shit for and get paid lots to not do it. I worked as an investment in future screwing off, delayed and splendid sloth. I wanted to lay around picking my ass, wearing boxer shorts and eating tortilla chips and chile con queso, drinking Olympia beers, eating linguisca, and, basically, living the high life. I’d seen enough of this life to know that everything ended in a big pile of shit, that marriages resulted in either divorce or enduring hatred, that children despised their parents forever and for good, that white people had committed such atrocities that there was no way the Mexicans and niggers would ever forget about it, that no matter what I did in life it wouldn’t matter, that, even if I were to become a fucking saint, canonized by the Italians as an honorary WASP degenerate who’d never been to a church of his own volition, that even if canonized I’d still be one dead and miserable motherfucker even after I’d done whatever ridiculous altruistic act of stupidity I’d done, saving some goddamn bunch of starving Aboes or some such shit—I’d seen enough of this life to know that I didn’t matter, and, somehow, somehow and oddly, this put me at ease. Knowing that I didn’t matter one fuck, that no matter what I did, no matter how hard I tried, no matter what I might accomplish, I was fucked and so was everyone around me—knowing all this somehow liberated me to be the selfish, narcissistic, self-deprecating, egotistical, ridiculous, venerable, and badass pathetic demon angel that I was and just might be and become. I was going to go to college and get myself educated someday, learn all the shit the rich people knew so that I could use it against them, annihilate them with their own crap, bury them in knowledge of their own researches and experiences but with my own special Oakland recipe and blend. When the revolution came, I was going to be at the front of the rabble wielding a flamethrower and a mace, my face contorted in sincerity.

  And so when I wasn’t working, I wasn’t chasing pussy, no. And not just because I thought I couldn’t get any, which I probably couldn’t have. There’s something about a nerdy ghetto boy that don’t get the chicks gooey. When I wasn’t working, I was—and I never let this on to anybody—I was reading. The librarian at Oakland Public Library was Mrs. Weismann, and I’d known her since I was in grade school. Even then she’d be shoving the right books my way, Jack London, Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Upton Sinclair, Twain. She gave me Marx, Nietzsche, Herbert Spencer, Walter Lippman, Sartre, Camus, Trotsky, and a bunch of people you wouldn’t have heard of because Mrs. Weismann knew some really cool books, she did.

  I never told anyone I was reading all those books. That’s not the kind of thing you admit in my neighborhood. You tell people that instead of watching the Raiders, instead of drinking beers, you’re reading books, and shit, you’re a faggot no one will ever talk to again, and sure as shit no one will ever trust you again, not with a head full of fancy commie artsy horseshit and floating around in the clouds looking down on everyone. You read books, you keep it to yourself.

  What kind of fucked with my head is that I worshipped both Nietzsche and Marx, and as far as I could tell, their ideas didn’t jive together. Marx was all for the working man, the guy on the construction site, the man working like a pig for the rich motherfuckers, for all the guys at Dick’s, for me. Marx was all about ripping the guts out of the swine like our bosses, like every one of the rich sons of bitches sitting on their fat asses up on their swank mansions in the Oakland hills. Marx, like us, wanted them dead. And Nietzsche, Nietzsche thought that the weak, the sniveling simps who were at the bottom of the social ladder, the downtrodden, the hopeless and the retarded and the maimed and the idiots who were waiting for rewards in some fantasy afterlife in which the rich and powerful were punished for eternity for being rotten to the weak—Nietzsche thought the lame got what they deserved, because the strong would always and eventually rise, would conquer and find themselves at the top of the heap, ruling the roost. Of course that’s where I thought I’d be some day. I’d outwork the weak, I’d outsmart them, I’d grind them into the dust. So reading both of these Krauts messed me up. I couldn’t figure out whether I wanted to lead the greatest worldwide union mankind’s ever known, or become supreme dictator of Oakland, the Bossman. And if I ever became Bossman, what would I think of the workers? And if I stayed a worker, what would I think of the Boss? Reading books was some tough shit.

  The day Jorgensen resurfaced was not a good day. Louie, the bartender, had discovered that not only had some chick he’d banged twenty years before given him a child, but that she’d popped out a set of triplets. Three boys, now men, and they all hated him, because all the mother had done for twenty years, twenty pissed off Italian Catholic years, is train them, train them to hate the motherfucker who fucked her and left her pregnant in the Bronx, where Louie was from, left her knocked up in a roach infested walk-up, and then blew out of town to California, where all the pretty people lived. Louie the deadbeat, Louie the louse, Louie the no-child-support no-Christmas-present no-christening-card no-graduation-present no-college-fund no-count piece of human shit.

  The triplets had come in at lunchtime, and Louie didn’t know at first who they were, and then the awful fact began to dawn on him, the fact that there were three, that he’d knocked up a Maria and she’d had not one child but triplets. They’d come into Dick’s Restaurant and Cocktail Lounge and bought a bottle of whiskey, bought the whole bottle, and told Louie they wanted three shotglasses. Louie looked at them, the three of them, huge Bronx men dressed in black tee shirts, muscles bulging, black Ben Davis work pants and even the baggy Ben’s weren’t enough to hide the huge thighs—these sons of bitches looked like they’d been working out their entire lives just for this meeting—and speaking in the old neighborhood accent and sounding exactly like him, looking exactly like him, four Louies at the bar all looking at each other, three Louies looking at Louie like they were going to kill him, talking about their deadbeat motherfucker father and how they were going to take care of his sorry ass, and just how they were going to do it, in great detail. They nailed that bottle, and they left Louie a c-note for a tip, the last tip Louie thought he was ever going to get, and he was sure that’s what the triplets had intended him to think.

  Louie was not in good shape. His hands shook when he poured our beers. And then, to ice it, Jorgensen walked in, and Jorgensen was excited, something we all thought impossible for Jorgensen, the levelest head of us all. His face was painted green and black. He was wearing his sunglasses. Sweat dripped down his face and smeared his warpaint. He had a big manila folder in his hand. He looked very serious.

  “Hey Louie,” Carlo Mendez said. “Hey, the scaries always go away.”

  Dave Campos said, “A triple-shot for Louie!”

  Jorgensen looked at Campos and Mendez with contempt. He said, “Non-regulars, out.”

  No one moved.

  “Now,” Jorgensen said. And he meant it truly. Something was up. Something was very wrong.

  The non-regulars were women. One of them ugly, the other a porky two o’clock special.

  “Don’t send out the beautiful ladies,” Shapiro said.

 
; Jorgensen said, “I will tell your tales first.” He said, “Would you like that, Shylock?”

  Shapiro turned to the women. “You have to leave,” he said.

  He tried to get the non-ugly’s phone number while he was helping her on with her sweater, but she’d have none of it. “Assholes,” she said as she stood. The porker was cool about the expulsion. She acted like it happened all the time.

  Jorgensen said, “The mission is complete.”

  He killed Blaise, what I thought. He tried to reason with the crazed alchemist composer, a struggle ensued because Blaise doesn’t have the common sense of a turnip, and Blaise lashed out, and Jorgensen, trained to react and to kill before being killed, Jorgensen whipped out some knife or pistol or grenade and stuffed it down crazy Blaise’s throat and that was that, end of Blaise. And now Jorgensen was human. Jorgensen needed help because he’d murdered someone without the sanction of the U.S. of A. Jorgensen never understood that you don’t get medals for killing people unless you’re killing people you don’t know and who’ve never done a fucking thing to you. Half of us had either killed someone, had someone killed, or had someone in the family do one or the other. Killing people—that was what you did when the cops you knew couldn’t do it for you. But you don’t get caught doing it. It’s always funny, that. Kill a burglar, kill a junkie, kill a fucking hobo child molesting shitbag, kill someone who stole the car stereo that took you six months of eating cheap to save up for—take five hundred bucks’ worth out of his esophagus—and you go to jail if they catch you. Kill some sandnigger riding his camel across the desert because some bucketheaded moron following orders and giving orders tells you to do so, you’re a hero. Whatever it was Jorgensen had done, he wasn’t happy about it. Not at all.

  “Blaise is gone,” Jorgensen said.

  He took off his sunglasses, and he looked at us, and the look was one of shame.

  He said, “I have failed.”

  If I hadn’t have known better, known it was sweat trickling from his forehead, I’d have sworn I saw a tear.

  He set the manila folder down on the bar and sat on a stool. The Raiders were not winning, Louie was a mess, Shapiro’s wife had given him “one year’s notice” again, threatened to leave him again and for good this time, told him that if he didn’t shape up and start making more money like a man, if he didn’t give her a real home, she was going to dump him. “And then she went shopping,” Shapiro said, “bought a bunch of expensive organic vegetables and fruits. Do you know how much that stuff costs?” It was shaping up to be a pretty rotten day.

  “Jack Daniels,” Jorgensen said, and we all knew that something was seriously wrong. No one ever ordered stuff like that except non-regulars. Why buy Jack when Beam gets you just as drunk and costs half as much? Sure, you get a hangover, but hell, if you haven’t had much to eat, you can even get a hangover from beers if you drink enough.

  Louie lined him up. Jorgensen tossed it back. “Another,” he said. Louie poured. Jorgensen drank. “Bottle,” Jorgensen said. Louie slid the bottle in front of him. Jorgensen drank.

  We just watched him, sat quiet and sipping. We knew eventually, when he’d had enough, he’d cue us in to the score.

  Jorgensen drunk is not a good thing, usually. It doesn’t happen often, because Jorgensen doesn’t like the mop-up work afterwards, retracing his steps and fixing the shit he’s fucked up, making all those phone calls. That can be some real work. Sure, when there’s women and when he’s happy, he’s a good drunk, like anyone is when he’s got a woman wants to go home with him. But when he’s going to go home alone, and when he’s not happy to start with, and when he gets drunk, and especially when someone messes with him, then, then Jorgensen drunk is not a good thing. He’s pretty quick with those knives of his, Jorgensen. He could be just sitting there at his stool, calm as ditch water, and if he’s had enough to drink, and if someone crosses one of his lines—and still no one is quite sure of what those lines are—they shift around all the time—once Polizzi ended up with a broken finger for having coffee with cream instead of tough-guy black—if someone crosses the line the next thing you know Jorgensen has one of us on the ground, three or four knives in his hands, one of them at our throat.

  “I was posted in the park, approximately two hundred yards from the residence of the target,” Jorgensen said. “In a redwood tree.”

  And he told us what happened. “Feds,” Jorgensen said. “Stupid fuck started making house calls at the homes of kidnapped girls. Kidnapping, federal. Not good.”

  Jorgensen said he was perched in the redwood, binoculars trained on Blaise, when he saw the vans and unmarkeds silently coast to stops to either side of Blaise’s, engines turned off, vehicles in neutral, stealth mode. Two SWAT teams in full combat gear and two carloads of COs emptied onto the street and fanned out, surrounding Blaise’s apartment building. The exterior units used ropes to scale the walls, the interior units poised at the rear and front entrances. Then they stormed, crashing through Blaise’s door and windows. They trained their weapons on Blaise, smashed his face down on his manuscript, manacled his wrists and ankles, and carried him down the stairs, depositing him in the back seat of one of the unmarked cars. Blaise was limp, as if he hadn’t a muscle in his body, and he didn’t say a word. Jorgensen said he thought he saw Blaise smile.

  Jorgensen looked at me. “T-Bird, I give you the remains of Blaise.” And he handed me the manila folder.

  It was Blaise’s symphony, scored, eighty pages, stopped mid-phrase in the ninth movement.

  Jorg said, “Is it any good, or is it as insane as Blaise?”

  Everybody knew I played trumpet in the Mexican bands around the Bay Area, and they thought I was pretty damn good, too. But I knew I was only good enough to sound badass at a wedding or a bar, far from being good enough to play with the pros. I stopped practicing hard when I went to a concert one time at Cal State Hayward and heard a dude, a kid, a kid still in high school at Castro Valley High named Jeff Farrington. This pimple-faced nerd-glasses wearing little shit was still in high school and he was playing with the university jazz band, and when he soloed, it was like nothing I’d ever heard except when I heard Wynton Marsalis playing with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers at the Keystone corner in San Francisco. Marsalis was nineteen years old, and so was I, and he played so fast and so perfectly, and the fucker played with Art Blakey, holy shit. He was late for the concert, Marsalis, and when he came in, Julliard buttwipe, it was like some god had descended, some god in diapers. It made me ashamed of myself, and I got really drunk and smoked the pot that was being passed around.

  But Farrington, Farrington was another story. This guy was white, and he was a nerd like me. He was white and a nerd and he played like he had the wisdom of some biblical character burned into his bones, coursing through his veins. Marsalis played like someone who would be good someday, someone technically perfect with no soul, even though he was black and their soul-quotients are supposedly exponentially larger than those of us whiteys. Marsalis played like he’d never taken a lesson from Miles Davis or Clifford Brown, like he’d never considered not filling space with sound, like he had to hear himself and didn’t give a shit about the music of the world, the music of the air, of the clinking of the cocktail tumblers. But Farrington, Farrington playing in the sterile and snotty atmosphere of a university auditorium, Farrington knew about the music of the spheres, and he used the music to his advantage, playing only when he needed to, pausing sometimes to let the greatness of what he’d just blown sink into the ears and bones of the audience. When I heard a white boy, one of mine, when I heard a white boy doing these things that at the time I’d never considered, it put me in my place. It let me know that there are some things about creating art that cannot be learned, that either you got or you don’t. And I knew I didn’t. And on the construction sites, I worked harder and with more seriousness, because I knew that I wasn’t a trumpet
player because of gift, but because of inclination. My only gift was that I could labor for sixteen hours straight, keep up with the best of the Mexicans, and not pass out. My gift was that I was born to build pyramids, and if I couldn’t build them, I’d grease their stones with my guts.

  Blaise’s score? I couldn’t read that motherfucker. I could read treble clef, and only in the key of B-flat, the key of the trumpet, which meant that I could read music written for tenor sax and for trumpet, and that’s it, no mas. All that other shit, the key of E-flat, the key of what the fuck ever, bass clef, pentatonic this and mixolydian that, it was all a foreign tongue to me. I couldn’t even play chopsticks on a piano without fucking it up, and plenty of times I’d tried.

  Some guys, they can look at a score and actually hear the music, hear all the instruments playing, hear what the piece would sound like in a concert hall. They can look at the notes on the page scattered all over the place like some spattering of ink drops and they can see the mess and their brains instantaneously translate the medieval secret code gibberish into a hundred and twenty musicians moaning a note, moving through a phrase, swelling to a crescendo, banging the muse. Not me. I see that shit and all I can do is peck out the trumpet line, my eyes only seeing two measures ahead. With jazz and improv it’s different. You follow the pulse of what’s being pumped into your balls because your fluids are flowing, because there’s this stuff in you while you’re playing that isn’t there when you’re not playing that you can tap when you’re playing and spill out into the bar. When you’re playing jazz, it’s like being drunk out of your mind and babbling to your favorite woman, trying to convince her of how sexy you are. And you’re succeeding. As a legit musician, though, as a legit straight up tux-wearing soldier, as one of those guys who knows the ins and outs of how all this stuff theoretically works, as one of those guys I suck.