This was preamble, prelude, the foreground noise of some Los Angeles Oakland Sacramento Lodi Watts Modesto San Diego Compton Fresno San Francisco Los Banos static of Blaise’s mind. The frenzy and rhythm of Blaise’s deliberate suck-ass life—and all of our lives suck because we want them to, no other reason—the nicotine and narcotic haze of vodka and bliss, of hopes unfulfilled and a baby ripped from his womb and umbilical chord trailing along the asphalt, a bloody line purpled with vein and white with curd as he watched the bitch-driven car slide away and gone and gone forever-fucking-ever and more and more permanent and ongoing, perpetual, done: the frenzy of Blaise’s life he’d claim unwanted but desired sure, the mess that was his life scratched onto the symphonic page, and us playing it.
And I turned those pages, what I did. I turned them and with each turned page I felt my heart speed. My heart sped and raced and the reason it went fast was because I was jealous. I was jealous and envious of the accomplishment of Blaise: he’d done something. He was somewhere off in Fed land jailed and manacled and probably getting cornholed by some FBI faggot in a suit but we were playing the work he left behind. When you die, will you have left anything behind but your genetic filth? Ask yourself.
I had a stomach urge to kill Blaise, to eradicate him, to erase him from neighborhood and personal memory. We all want to kill people we envy, don’t we? And we would, too, if we weren’t all chickenshits, scared of the law since there’s no need to fear someone’s friends and family. Most people can’t get pissed off enough to kick the neighborhood’s nasty and barking dog. Most don’t even have the guts to bitch-slap someone who’s fucking his wife, or his cheating wife, for that matter.
It sucked to be turning the pages for Blaise, for Pop, for Jorg and the Jews and the triplet. They were playing something, and I was spectating, onlooking the place from which I’d sprung, watching my Oakland instead of being part of it. I’d always felt this way, as if I somehow did not belong there, as if somehow even though Oakland was the only thing I knew, nonetheless I was not of Oakland. And this fucked me up sure. Fucked me up in ways that I don’t think I can even explain here, here where I’m telling everything I think because I truly don’t give a shit about your opinion of me, you fuck. I never felt part of Oakland because I thought I was way too smart to be bred of that shithole, and I knew I lived in a shithole, but at the same time I could never live up to what was good about my Oakland, the Oakland of Pop and Grandpop Murphy, the Oakland of Shapiro and the retard Martinez, the Oakland that no matter what was my home. Here they were all playing, and I was turning pages.
Pop’s line didn’t sound like that of a trumpet, and I looked at the score and saw it wasn’t. He was playing the flute’s riff, whistling plaintive through the percussive jackhammer airgun glim and scint. Pop played and more air came through the horn than note, a high note above the clink, a stream of precious metal, a wiggle cutting through sound like something sharp and narrow and tinsel through a vibrating wall of iron. He played, and I listened, not only to Pop but to all of them, even to the New York boy, and while listening a wash of contentment came over me like the cum of a woman, a gush. It was not my job to participate in this. It was not my job to be this. It was my job—and this job had been conferred on me by powers distant and serious—it was my job to understand this, and to make you understand it.
So get this: we were at Dick’s Restaurant and Cocktail Lounge, Oakland, California, warehouses surrounding our bar, docks in the distance, cranes groaning back and forth across tracks and dropping ISOs from ships to trains that would take them to trucks and to your fucking grocery store. We were at Dick’s and our friend Blaise, our friend, had been lost, and he’d left us something. He’d lost his baby, his wife, his perspective, his will, but unlike you, unlike what you’ll do when you vanish, he’d left something behind for us, something of substance, not just some photo album or his great-grandmother’s fucking China. No, Blaise had not left us a trust fund or a coin collection or some piece of dirt we didn’t want and wouldn’t know how to farm. Blaise had left us what obsessed him, what made him Blaise, the reason he was willing, maybe eager, to lose that kid and that wife. What kind of man is this? This is the kind of man I want to call late at night, when I know no one else will answer the phone. This is the kind of man I want to get hammered with. This is the kind of man I want to be.
Pop, bearded greased coveralled Pop, his note was not just what there was of that symphony of Blaise’s, of ours. No. There was more, and there was more beauty and more disdain. Blaise had it nailed, hammered to the subfloor. He somehow knew us better that we did. He knew something about us that all of us suspected, that all of us might have been able to say in a small hours drunk flicker. He knew it, and we’d never heard it said. Not to ourselves nor to anyone else. But Blaise was saying it, and he was saying it without words, without all the bullshit innuendo of language. He might have been a genius, Blaise, if genius is the ability to tell us in words of our own, in expressions of our experience, in tones and hushes of our recognition, that which we know when we hear or see or feel it but which we have not expressed ourselves. This is why Mozart and Miles Davis and Shakespeare and Leonardo make us cry, or at least forget ourselves and our bullshit for an instant, even the most brute and flat-headed among us. Genius echoes the best in us, calls back our howls to us with something even we can understand and with the grandeur each of us knows some instant in our lives to be the essence of what we could have been. It lets us know that even though we’re as shitty as we suspect, we entail the greatness of all that is full and human. Genius is some cool shit.
That’s what we were getting from Crazy Blaise. We felt pretty damned good. Like we were part of something we didn’t deserve and yet absolutely did.
The men of Dick’s didn’t make it through the symphony. Louie’s boy broke his tumbler and booze splintered glass exploded over the bar. Jorgensen got goofy crazy, beating on his back and the soles of his feet, and he scrambled some phrases and couldn’t focus on the sheet music and find his place again. He’d been doing some weird shit anyway, not really reading the music but instead playing his own personal version of Blaise’s symphony. Shapiro and Ed the Jew stopped playing the bottles and started taking turns popping shots, since Louie didn’t care about anything but seeing to it his boys had a good time and didn’t decide to kill him. And Pop’s lip was giving out because it had been a long time since he’d played horn. Blood spittled out the bell and hung at its lip like pink drool.
Louie poured a round of shots, Blaise’s Absolut. We lifted a drink in toast, but none of us clinked glasses.
We didn’t say anything. We didn’t look at each other. We drank.
Dick’s is the vortex of the sadness of the world, and sometimes it’s almost too much to bear, and since I’ll always be considered a Dick’s regular, sometimes I think there’s something wrong about me. But then again maybe, just maybe there’s something absolutely right, something pure and transcendent, something that was meant to see and to feel the pain of the world and take it all in and process the raw horror into a thing crystalline and beautiful, crushing garbage into fine gems. I’ll always end up living a dump of my own and I’ll always be damned happy about it, happy because I know, I mean I know, that someday things are going to change. Sound ridiculous? Oh, yes, it is, and I know it, but I am by nature ridiculous. I am the Absurd made flesh. And I will endure. And I will prevail. One fine morning I’ll wake up and look out over the wasteland of pickled and shredded souls and my vision will transform the bile of the world into nectar. And I will not be alone.
Before I went into hiding in Missouri, the Hell’s Angels threw a party in my honor at Dick’s, and this was a big deal. Some people go their whole lives without being thrown a party at Dick’s, Rich Kuam, for instance. Why throw him a party when all he did was save his money to rent whores, while the rest of us actually married them and had to own up to the consequences of cuntery. Jorgens
en?—throw a party for Jorg after he’d taken care of a problem, make his victory public, and we might become his next problem. Some things you celebrate, and some you just tip a toast. But they were throwing me a bona-fide party, no bitches allowed, as is right and proper. Bring a bitch into a mix of men and we get distracted even if her fat rolls flop over her knees while she’s bent over at her barstool and her halter-topped titties wag over her belly button like water balloons. And if we’re not distracted, we don’t talk right. We either censor or we pump it up. We call them “ladies,” because they don’t (or pretend they don’t) understand that “lady” means “cunt” at Dick’s restaurant and Cocktail Lounge.
The party was after the California No Smoking law was passed, which forbade smoking in public places, bars included. What the fuck is that, anyway? Cops learned the trick about that real quick, too. In California smokers step outside the bar for a smoke, since they can’t fire up inside, and when they do, the cops throw them against the walls, give them the drunk tests, the breathalyzer, the walk, the fingertip to nose, the flashlight in the eyes, and then they haul them all away in the paddy wagon for public intox. The Angels fixed that. First of all, in our neighborhood, the cops come from the neighborhood. No one else will or can work there. So cops? No problem. Shit, most of the neighborhood cops were all at my party, anyway. But what the Angels did, just in case some non-regular got some idea in his noggin to wander in on the party, find us smoking, and call cops that weren’t our cops, some California Non-Smoking SWAT Task Force or some shit, was they posted two guards at the door. The guards would say, “Regular, or non-regular?” The unsuspecting non-regular would then take stock of the situation, look around and see parked on the sidestreet fifty or sixty Harley choppers and another thirty or forty pickup trucks, women standing around in the street and smoking cigarettes and passing around bottles of wine and waiting on their men so they could get home without getting DWIs, and they’d just turn and walk away. I got to stand guard with Charlie for a while and play like I was one tough dude, interrogating.
They were all there—not only all the regulars from the neighborhood but all the bikers from my youth, Fat Fred, Domer, Uncle Ray, Budley Johnson, the Flynn brothers Jimmy and John and Ricky and Chuck, Sonny, Dodge, Bingo. Some of the old bikers had beer bellies now, some wore button-up shirts with their names embroidered in red. Most had gray hair or were shiny-head bald. Budley wore overalls and walked with a cane and looked like a dignitary, some kind of Hell’s Angel Oakland blue-blood aristocrat, and when he spoke, everyone around him went quiet and listened up. They recognized me from my author photograph, even though that picture doesn’t look like I do now. In that photo, my hair is greased back, I’m not wearing my black plastic nerd glasses, my eyes are glazed with drink. Ok, well, my eyes are usually like that sometimes. In the picture I was two hundred twenty pounds, but by the time my suburban divorce was complete I’d lost sixty pounds and looked like a holocaust survivor, hair gone gray, veins mapping my forehead, cheeks sunken and even my fucking hat size shrunken half an inch. I was so loony the Dick’s crew once sent Jorgensen to look after me, sent Jorgensen to make sure I didn’t go on a murder spree and ruin the glorious fucking life I had ahead of me.
The party was as much for them as it was for me. They wanted me there as much to tell me their stories as to celebrate my version of their stories. They crowded around me like I was some celebrity, like I was a hero. They bought me drinks, told me to have whatever I wanted, and I knew enough to order well drinks, not call drinks like some asshole. Louie would slip me a Jack or a Chivas once in a while, and he’d just nod and pour himself one too, tipping it back with me. And man, they told me some stories.
They told me stories about the biker days, about the glory of the sixties and the early seventies, about Livermore and Altamont Pass and why the Stones were sniveling shits and why the Angels were right. Every time Sonny would walk away they’d tell me Barger stories, about how he’d taken care of them all, and they asked me if I remembered the collections he’d taken for groceries for me and my brothers and my mother, how Sonny Barger would bring home an Impala full of Safeway to feed not only us but all of them, how he fed my mother and us kids and how anyone who fucked with any one of us was meat, and how, folks, to this day, even though Sonny might not deliver the order, I the only remaining Murphy boy am immune from harm, how if anyone fucks with me they not only have the Oakland Chapter to answer to but Sonny himself, because he loved my mother, like they all did and will always. They told me stories about the time my mother got pitched from the three-wheeler, and how I’d gotten it wrong in East Bay Grease, how it was actually Budley, not Fat Fred, who was at the wheel and how when my mother’s head hit the barbed-wire fence-post it split open and her brains wormed out and Budley pushed her cracked skull back together with his hands and held her brains in, riding in the rumble seat of a three-wheeler all the way to the hospital in Modesto—50 miles—her brains trying to squeeze through the cracked skull as if to spill onto the dust on purpose, like the brains themselves did not want to be in the skull but wanted to escape, wanted to be free. They told me that the accident made the papers because a hundred Hell’s Angels lined the entrance to the hospital where they were stapling my mother’s skull back together, and the Angels wouldn’t let the cops into the building, or the press, because Budley had had a few to drink and it was bad enough that he’d wrecked and split my mother’s skull like a coconut, he didn’t need to go to jail to boot. He loved her, and fucking her up was punishment enough. They told me about how, shit, I thought my father was really the McClellan’s Air Force Base fuckwad my mother had claimed to be my father but that the fact was that I could really be any of theirs, because they’d had some wild orgies—Jimmie Flynn said of all the chicks my mom was his favorite—and there was a chance that I could be any of theirs, that any of them could be my father, and that’s why they all loved me. Kid, you didn’t think your mother wanted to buy the house on 62nd Avenue, right behind the National Headquarters of the Hell’s Angels, just because she thought it was a groovy neighborhood? Oh, I think I’ll move right into the center of black degradation and horror, right into Oakland’s war-zone where being the wrong color gets you diced! Oh, Bud Murphy, baby, let’s move into the heart of white trash nigger cross-the-line bullshit and get ourselves killed! I didn’t think she wanted to move there just because it was swank, did I? I wasn’t that fucking stupid, was I, college boy?
The Angels told me stories, and I listened, and I got drunk as shit is what I did. It was a night of the long knives at Dick’s Restaurant and Cocktail Lounge.
There’s something authentic about men who love you even when you’re at your worst, because ladies don’t. When you’re at your worst, ladies jump ship. Ladies think, Shit, I can get a better man than this man I’ve broken, than this sniveling heap of knee-begging weeping simpering child-support-paying alimony-doomed piece of faggotry. Ladies compare notes about how bad we are and use their cunts to get themselves some lawyer or doctor or real-estate agent or some fucker with a GTO or some house on Skyline he inherited from his bloated fatass parents who inherited it from their fatass parents and on and on all the way back to Adam and fucking Eve, the original capitalist land-owning gin-rickey drinking on the porch while the niggers work slavelords of all, especially of men from Oakland.
Things went pretty great until I got more drunk than usual and started whining about my divorce, and I whined a lot. Then I started breaking things, bottles and chairs and probably a couple fingers that were purple for months afterwards. Jorgensen’s eyes got wide. Sonny talked low with people. The Flynn brothers walked off to conversation. Someone bought me a drink. Someone threw a bottle against the wall.
Someone bought me another drink. I had a lot of fucking drinks in front of me. I drank them best I could. I did a pretty fucking good job.
Jorg and Sonny pulled me aside with serious intent.
I can’t remember wh
at they said, not exactly. I’ve spent a lot of time like that, not remembering what people said, not exactly. Someone started playing pinball, and the jukebox played Creedence Clearwater Revival, our band. Listen to those guys some time. They’re from Oakland, too. They know the score. Fogerty got jacked out of his royalties by the record companies, of course—he was an artist not some business fuck—and ended up broke and playing motels on I-5 while gray-hairs and sweaty businessmen and road-whores danced and drank watered-down cocktails and pretended like they were fuckable, when John Fogarty should have been President of the United fucking States of fucking America. Creedence was on the jukebox, someone played pinball, someone yelled something really loud and a cue-ball slammed into the wall like a cannon blast, broke a mirror and Louie shrugged. “Bad place for a mirror,” he said. I remember that. Bad place for a mirror. Most places are.
Another cue ball sailed past. The mirror was already broken, so it didn’t break this time.
Someone kicked the jukebox because the record was skipping. The Flynn brothers lit some joints.
“Address,” Jorgensen said.
I shook my head no. My head was hanging, my head.
“Three hundred Angels mobilized in two days,” Sonny said. “On the street in front of her place.”
“Her father’s place,” I said. “Gardeners. Witnesses. You can’t get all of them,” I said. “Can you?”
Sonny stared at me.
Jorgensen pulled his sunglasses from his vest and snapped them on. He smiled slow.
Welcome to Oakland Page 7