Welcome to Oakland

by Williamson, Eric Miles

  So here’s this score in front of me, and all the guys are there, Campos, Polizzi, Shapiro, Jorgensen, Louie. To make things even more fucked up, Pop, my father Pop, walked in. And Pop was a real musician. He’d played in the Oakland Symphony. He could play “Carnival of Venice” on his trumpet and he knew his way around the piano’s ivories. He wasn’t a bar bum like me, Pop. He walked in and his arms were slick with grease and motor oil and his knuckles leaked from banging around under the hood of some fucked up Plymouth or Rambler. Pop walked in and saw the bunch of us sitting there in confused gloom and he said, “What the fuck?”

  “Blaise,” I said.

  “That bitch,” he said. “What she do to him now? Fucking bitches. Why can’t they just steal our souls and leave us the fuck alone? What she do this time, the bitch?”

  “He’s in jail,” I said.

  Pop looked at Jorgensen. “He pop her one? About damn time,” Pop said. “I thought you were his friend. Bail him out. When you pop a bitch, especially an ex bitch, it’s only a couple grand bail. Judges understand what a man’s got to do sometimes.”

  Jorgensen, steroid pumped Navy SEAL wide as a lube bay solid as a girder Jorgensen, he broke down. He choked, and then he sobbed, and his eyes glazed and got water. We looked away, but Pop didn’t. Pop stared at him. He gave him that look none of us ever want to get, that look that says, You’re a piece of shit, asshole, and you know what? You, amigo, are not a man to be counted on. You are someone I will not call when the hour is late and the situation is critical. You, fuckup, are on the B list.

  “Well?” Pop said.

  “You want me to kill myself now?” Jorgensen said. “I’ll fucking do it,” he said. “I will.” And he flipped out some big knife from somewhere in his vest and held it at his gut. “I don’t care. Just give me the nod.”

  “Hold off, Hoss,” Pop said.

  “Pop,” I said. “Jorg tried his best. The feds got Blaise. He’s gone. Adios motherfucker gone, bye-bye,” I said. I said, “But he left this.” And I handed Pop Blaise’s score.

  We all looked at Pop, watched him flip through the pages, watched the expression on his face. He first looked at the pages with scrutiny, brows knit. He pulled a Roi-Tan from his coveralls and lit it and puffed hard. Then he raised his eyebrows, and he looked at us over his plastic Clark Kent black-rimmed glasses, looked at us like he’d heard something we’d said but wasn’t sure exactly what it was, like he was checking on us, looked at us as if we’d done something questionable and a bit on the shady.

  He took his time. We drank some cocktails. It was getting on in the day. Louie’s triplets walked in.

  “Out,” Jorgensen said.

  “They stay,” Louie said.

  Jorgensen gave Louie the look.

  “They’re my sons,” Louie said.

  They looked mean as shit. Two of them were packing—you could see the bulges under their arms. They ordered cocktails, and Ed the Jew paid. Then he bought a round for the house, un-Ed-like. Since cheap-ass Ed the Jew bought a round, so did Shapiro, not to be out-Jewed by Ed the Jew. And since the Jews were buying, shit, all the Catholic WOPs and the Portugees and Swedish Jorg and Heinz-57 me, we all bought rounds, and hell, we each had a dozen drinks lined up and Louie’s boys kind of liked that and so did we.

  We were getting pretty jolly. The triplets joshed at Louie.

  “Fucked our mama and left,” they said. “Made some triplets. Triple shot. Think you have one big-ass dick, don’t you?”

  “You little wops haven’t seen a dick till you’ve seen mine, boys,” Louie said. “You think you got dicks like your daddy? Triplets. Each one a third of Big Papa.”

  Louie slammed one back—he was drinking his chick nigger Crown Royals—and then he said, “So let’s see them, boys. Let’s see.”

  And Louie asked them if their dicks were as big as his, his big dick triplet-making Italian baby-maker. “You think you’re the only kids I have out there? I probably got fifty or sixty of youse.”

  The triplets stood up, all three of them and all at once and they dropped their pants and even though they all looked exactly the same in every way we could tell, drawers down they didn’t, and everybody started chanting, “Louie, Louie, Louie,” and Campos chanted a little too enthusiastically and when he saw us look at him he toned that shit down is what he did. We don’t need none of that shit at Dick’s, not even when we’re drunk. We chanted “Louie Louie Louie” until finally Louie stood on the bar and dropped his drawers and flopped it out, and holy shit. No question about Louie, no way. It was so big we probably all wanted to see him bone a woman we knew. He said, “That puppy’s how you make triplets, boys,” and we cheered and the triplets looked sheepy at first, because they knew it took a dick that big to leave a woman and her triplets and make a man’s life for himself, and then they looked really proud. They wanted to buy Louie a drink and they wanted to buy us drinks too and we let them.

  Pop said, “Trumpet.”

  “What,” I said.

  “You got your horn?”

  “In my car,” I said.

  “Get it.”

  “My drink,” I said. “After.”

  “Get it,” Pop said, and he meant now.

  When I walked outside my eyes blinded white. It was near sunset and the fog had curdled in and the fuzzed air was electric. Birds flopped and fell through the mist like dark ashes from a big burn. You could hear the trains, their whistles and their wheels grinding on the iron rails, the crunch and slide of metal on metal. Somewhere a pile-driver slammed rhythmic and sure against concrete, breaking the foundation of a building that once served a purpose. Something burned and smelled like rotted dog. You couldn’t make out the writing on the billboards on the other side of the street, but you could see the beer bottles and the bikinis and big sweaty tits. Warning buoys on the bay sounded low and plaintive, and they sounded more like they’d lure sailors than avert them. Sure as shit I’d go toward those bouys, so beautiful and home did they sound. Come home, T-Bird, they called. Come home. On the Nimitz Freeway the semis slicked across the asphalt and circulated the air, and birds and crickets and frogs—frogs in Oakland?—even frogs belched a song in the drape of fog.

  Oakland is at its best, at its most beautiful, when you can only see twenty feet of it. Oakland is the most beautiful place on the planet, and I know, because I am a tuning fork over the asshole of beauty. Every note the city makes is tested by me, tuned by me, translated by me. I see it, the beauty, everywhere, in the dandelions on the lawn being poisoned by the suburban lawn fanatic, in the rust on the wall of the warehouse graffitied by the home boys, in the dead duck hanging by its ankles in the Chinese grocery, in the fat roll of the retard Martinez boy who sacks my groceries at Pete’s Market in the hood, in the drool that hangs perpetually from the dwarf Tony Costello’s chin because his brain is so fucked up he can’t even breathe without his sister Maria alongside him saying, “In, out, in Tony, out Tony, in Tony, out.” I see the beauty of slathering Dobermans and Pit Bulls ripping apart trespassing children, of bloodslicked sidewalks, of pools of beer vomit and hurled vital organs in alleys behind bars, of mounds of dogshit wiggling with worms like living beings, those shitpiles brooding like unfathomable heaps of intent lurking over an unknowable primal cause, of lecherous teenage girls licking their lips on streetcorners for pervert Midwestern military boys on their first trips away from their small town shitholes, of old ladies lifting their dresses and pissing in the gutters and smiling all the while, as they should. Nothing is more beautiful than the will to live amid absolute desperation. Hope is for assholes. Only the most sublime of souls can know the beauty of despair.

  Our beauty, our beauty in my neighborhood is this: the world, asshole, is only what you can see of it. When you can see only very little, you see it better, you see it more true. We’re cloaked in a shroud of fog in Oakland, smothered
. Choked. We can’t see the next street corner. And so we examine what we can see, and we know it. We know the cracks on our sidewalks. We know who lives in what apartment. We know the other senses—we know what it smells like when we pass the Borges house, when we walk past the GE plant. We know what the asphalt feels like under our work boots and our out-on-the-town Florsheim wingtips. We feel the acrid tingle of scorch and burn chemical plant burnoff in the morning hours before the inspectors and OSHA druids crawl out of their suburban huts to tell us what to do and when. When the refineries overfill and resort to burnoff our skins wrinkle with petrochemical joy and familiar dread and relief. We are alive.

  If the shit we see is shit outsiders think ugly, it’s because outsiders are used to the shit they think is beautiful and don’t realize the ugliness of their own digs, the ugliness of their maids, their antiseptic European and Japanese cars which have never been stained with sex or shame, the ugliness of their perfectly squared bricks and their steamcleaned tiles, their gardeners, their plumbers, the people who work for them, us. But since we are us, we can see beautiful shit they cannot see. We can see the beauty in a well-made fence, a properly poured driveway, a pregnant and fat and sad Mexican thirteen year old angel, a well demolished building. We, we who live in the ugly, we know beauty that doesn’t get into fancy magazines in the offices of doctors and divorce lawyers.

  And while I stood outside Dick’s, fetching from my car the family trumpet I’d been to some debasing but to me honoring by playing it in Mexican nightclubs and bars instead of in symphony halls and recording studios making money for fat fuck white shirt sweat face no counts, when I stood outside it came to me that my place, my home, my Oakland, my Dick’s filled with drunken maniacal loyal and good men, my place on this planet was a good place, a good place that even though rough and harsh and miserable and awful was nonetheless sacred. My Oakland was mine, and it was Louie’s, and Jorgensen’s, and Shapiro’s, and the Oakland of every other Oaklander that mattered, and we worked and we worked and in Oakland we would die and we would die beautifully and fulfilled, having done everything we were meant to do.

  When I walked back inside, I couldn’t see a thing except the bar lights, neon. The guys were quiet, working their drinks.

  “Give me the horn,” Pop said.

  He oiled up the valves and he looked at me as if I’d just handed him a turd. “You ever polish this thing?” he said. “You ever grease the fucking slides? You ever empty the spit-valves? You ever fucking play it?”

  I looked at the ground his barstool rested on. “Day job,” I said.

  “Day job what?”

  “Day job keeps me busy.”

  Pop shook his head slow and with a combination of sadness, loathing, and repulsion. Nobody worth a shit ever let his day job get in the way of what he was really all about. Day job. If you can’t do what you want after work, then the awful truth is you don’t want anything. Drink a goddamn beer, fuck your depressed fat wife, and sleep the good hours away, slob.

  Louie poured me another Scotch, and Pop flipped through Blaise’s folder once more, studying certain pages, whipping through others. He drank water.

  Jorgensen sat staring at himself in the mirror behind the bar, looking through the bottles and post-it notes. The triplets were pretty hammered now, and they giggled like girls. The phone rang and no one picked it up. A wife, probably. They do that, even though they know where the hell we are. Shapiro and Ed the Jew were talking about money. No shit. That’s all they ever talked about, as if they’d invented it. Otherwise, they hated each other, called each other kikes and Shylocks and fuckwads. But when they were both at Dick’s, they talked cash, even though neither of them really had any. Otherwise, they’d be drinking somewhere else and not hanging out with us. Some non-regulars walked in but Jorgensen didn’t notice. They walked back out anyway. If I walked into a bar like ours that wasn’t mine, I’d walk out too.

  “Percussion is important,” Pop said. “In this piece.”

  I nodded.

  “Who else here reads music?”

  I said I didn’t know.

  “Any of you morons read music,” Pop said.

  One of the triplets did. So did Ed the Jew and Shapiro. Jorgensen said he was a mean drummer, played in the military band before he wised up to the action and became a SEAL. Weapons make their own sweet tune, he said.

  Pop said, “Make yourselves useful.”

  “I can play the trumpet line,” I said.

  Pop sneered at me. Tires squealed and someone screamed loud enough outside to make everyone look at the door.

  “Jazz,” Pop said.

  “Sorry,” I said. And I was.

  Pop gathered us around, and he made us rehearse, telling us what lines to read. The triplet used a spoon and a half-full water glass. Ed the Jew and Shapiro, they volunteered to play the call-drink bottles with their porcelain fountain pens, lining up the bottles in ascending order of volume and therefore pitch like beautiful and expensive booze marimbas or xylophones. Pop told Jorgensen to use coffee cans and tomato cans and a barstool, beat upon by a spoon, but Jorg said no fucking way, he was all about the body, and would only use his hands and fingers and fists against his body, and Pop said Sure Jorg without missing a beat.

  “How about me?” I said.

  “You turn pages.”

  I said, “Give me a break.”

  Pop said, “Someone who knows how to read music has to turn the pages.” He said, “This piece calls for a musician, not a jazz player. I’m on horn.”

  Louie poured another round. We drank it. Pop said it was time. And we played.

  It was the most strange and weird and sweet and horrible depressing thing any of us had ever heard. We smiled, even though we thought we didn’t want to and knew we shouldn’t. Sometimes sad shit does that to you.

  It started out with just the Jews clinking away on their marimba/xylophone booze bottles, fast and frantic, some kind of jungle melody, running up and down the bottles, the notes jumping across each other, not chromatic but instead in thirds and fourths and sixths and octaves, low-high high-low, clinking and the notes banging against the mirrors and against the linoleum floor, an echo but not a deep one, an instantaneous reverberation that ricocheted against the notes and created a shrill harmony like the way sometimes the sound of a jackhammer meshes with the sound of the traffic. Then while the Jews were playing, and they were truly playing those Jews, playing as if they were telling us the parts of Exodus that we never hear about in the Bible, telling us about the angst and joy of Biblical Hebrew party-your-ass-off drinking and fucking and praying to a God that had the power to wipe out the Gentiles with a breath and would, while the Jews were summoning up their ancient Jew-god of vengeance and laughter and justice, the triplet Italian Catholic joined in, and he wanted to show that even though his dick wasn’t as big as Papa Louie’s his soul was bigger, and because Louie had abandoned him and fucked him over and made him a bastard forever, he might not have had as big a dick but he had bigger balls, a louder and more resonant howl, a howl that would call forth the bestial demons of all the yet known hells and all the hells to be for eternity and after that too and it would be a howl that redeemed. That little shit played a water-glass like he was knocking on the doors of a heaven made just for bastards, and he was going to be let in, he was.

  When Jorgensen’s part came in he peeled off his vest and his shirt and his pants and Jorg stood there in his military issue tightie-whities. None of us had ever seen him in anything but a long sleeved shirt, protective cover since he worked as not only an assassin but a demo-man and steel-worker, when not blowing up buildings, welding, showered by sparks and flame, Vulcan at his forge.

  First of all, Jorg was one big sonbitch, but we’d all seen big motherfuckers before. I’d worked with a construction worker just out of Quentin, a black dude named Fish who was three hundred f
ifty pounds of iron, veins bulging through his skin like cables. Hell, Rich Kuam, who didn’t come around much anymore because he’d finally met a hooker he liked and married her and now he was in some kind of domestic lockup, Kuam was big enough to carry a hooker on each shoulder, and we’d seen him walk into Dick’s plenty of times like that. Kuam would save his money up instead of going out on dates, and twice a year he’d drive up to the Mustang Ranch just outside of Reno and he’d get two hotties, bring them back to Oakland for the whole week, and they’d play house. He never shared. He was never broke. He always had something to look forward to. He was always happy. Kuam, he had the right fucking idea.

  So when Jorg took off his shirt we were impressed but not shocked. What curioused us was that he was covered, I mean covered, with tattoos. No skin showed that wasn’t inked. And you see the shadows of tattoos through his shorts, too, like bruises. All the way up to his neck, down to his wrists, his entire feet, excepting toenails. I bet the flats of his feet were artworked.

  There was nothing trendy about Jorgensen’s tattoos. They were battle scenes, kills. None of that skull and crossbones dragon big-tittied women Celtic weave scorpion cartoon character Harley Davidson I’m tough because I wear leather and drive a motorized bicycle horseshit. Jorgensen’s tattoos featured himself, sunglasses and all, Jorg in the jungle breaking a drug lord’s guard’s neck barehanded, Jorg in a warehouse scoping a suit-wearing diplomat in the high-rise across the street, Jorg on his belly in the sand taking out a sheik with some kind of telescope machine gun rifle, Jorg in D.C., the capitol in the distance, slitting the throat of a businessman right there on the mall, a crowd strolling past oblivious, Jorg in scuba gear attaching a mine to a yacht, the water clear and the fish sparkled with color. Hundreds of tattoos Jorg had. We were glad he was our friend.

  His tympani part came, and Jorg was not only the best killer we’d ever known, but as he stood there in his underwear his hands became a blur, open-palmed at first then high notes slap-clapping cup-handed against his inner thighs. He must have been one hell of a drummer before he found other trades more spiritually satisfying. Then his hands flashed faster and higher, Jorg tightening the cup of his hand and moving down his leg along his calves, p’pop pap, p’pop pap p’pop pap, cracking like gunshot and gattling crossfire.