Welcome to Oakland

by Williamson, Eric Miles

  28.When fuckers fuck women over, they think they’re doing something really fucking funny.

  29.When fuckers fuck men over, they think they’re doing something really fucking funny.

  30.In my neighborhood, fuckers fuck, but eventually they get fucked.

  31.Eventually they get fucked like they never imagined a person could be fucked.

  32.Fuck fuckers.

  FatDaddy stuck his hand out again, to reaffirm the handshake, and I put my hand into his sauce-clotted mitt, and he crushed it again, squeezed so hard I thought he’d broken bones, and he might have. Three of my fingers were purple for months after that handshake. They’re crooked even today from that oath. Fucker.

  I went home and told Pop.

  “You made your bed,” he said. “Lie in it.”

  I went to the back of the trailer and sat on my bed. I sat there a long time. My brothers fell asleep before me. Pop was on his kitchen-table foldout bed watching the news. He got up and stood. The trailer rocked. He opened the refrigerator. He handed me an open beer and sat down on the edge of my bed. “He’s a fucker,” Pop said. “And you’re not the first one he’s fucked.”

  I took a swig.

  “You don’t like the deal he made with you?” Pop said.

  I shook my head no.

  “Why not?” Pop said. “Why the fuck don’t you like the deal? You made it, didn’t you?”

  I told Pop why I didn’t like the deal. I didn’t like it because I’d been deceived. I didn’t like it because FatDaddy Slattern had betrayed me. He lived in the neighborhood—wasn’t he one of us? Didn’t FatDaddy Slattern understand that none of us wanted to live there, in shithole Oakland, and that for some reason he was living there too, for some reason he, FatDaddy, was such a fuckup that he’d landed on our turf? By definition he was a loser, and the only thing losers can do to exert power over their lives, to have some semblance of control, is treat their fellow losers as they’d have themselves treated. I didn’t understand, at the time, that losers, sometimes, true losers, are different from regular losers, losers who’ve lost their children and homes and incomes to cunts and their lawyers. Some losers are such losers that they want to exert their loserness over others, to bring them down to depths of loserness most losers could not conceive of. The losers of the losers crave only this: they want others to lose more than they’ve lost, to lose worse. The worst of the losers, people like FatDaddy Slattern, hate their lives, hate their fatness, hate their children, hate the wives who’ve spawned their disgusting progeny who hate them and keep living only because they hope they’ll outlive their loser parents so’s they can enjoy their inheritances. True losers hate everyone because they know they’ve never done anything in their lives worthy of love, of respect that is not born of fear or greed. They’ll get theirs, of course, their non-taxed inheritances of money made on the blood and sweat of my Oakland people losing limbs in factories and dropping dead making aqueducts and falling off bridges they’re constructing over ravines. They’ll get all their parents wanted for them. Their parents were prefuckers, antefuckers, the fuckers of precedence. Fuckers originales. But the worst of the losers have no one who will come to bat for them when things get bad, and that’s why they spend their whole lives trying to make money, trying to accumulate power, capital, to insulate themselves from the world. People where I come from insulate themselves from the fuckness of the world by being loyal to the people they love and who love them back. Can’t fuck with a loved man, or woman, in my neighborhood. Can’t fuck with someone who’s loved, and that’s a fucking fact. Try it, shitbag, and just you see what happens.

  I didn’t like what FatDaddy had done to me because he was rich and lived in a house and had a yard and I was only trying to do an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay and he’d fucked me, the fucker. He had the money to do me right, and he didn’t.

  “Let people know.”

  “Who?”

  “Let people know,” Pop said. “You got friends. Use them.”

  I swigged again. “Who,” I said.

  “Everyone in the neighborhood, everyone in the town who pulls up to the pump. You tell every motherfucker you ever come in contact with,” Pop said. “Spread the word.”

  “What do I say?”

  “You say the truth,” Pop said. “Try it. See what happens.”

  So that’s what I did. I’d be pumping gas and a customer would say, “Hey hey, T-Bird, how they hanging?” and I’d say, “Not good,” and I’d put on the face like I’d been beaten and bitch-slapped and tossed in the dumpster with the Snookie cookies. “What?” they’d say. “Whassup?”

  “FatDaddy,” I’d say. “He conned me. Seventy-five cents,” and I’d tell them the story.

  I told the story to everyone, and not only that, I told the story to everyone who counted in the neighborhood. When Joe and Frank Camozzi of Camozzi Carpets needed fleet work done on tires, I told them the tale of FatDaddy Slattern. When the Yandell Trucking Company guys fueled up, hey, FatDaddy Slattern took me for a ride. The Concrete Wall Sawing men, all ex-marines running jackhammers and blowing C-40 and taking down buildings, when they came in I told them of the FatDaddy Slattern adolescent labor rape. Frank Carlito needed five old inner-tubes so his kids could ride the Sacramento River and I told him about my summer of bushwacking and mowing. Sometimes Pop would help out. “Hey, you know what that fuck Slattern did to my boy? My boy who was making a buck a yard, a yard a day? He fucked my boy is what. His yard is nigger, twelve feet high and nothing but vine and empties. My boy’s been mowing and chopping and sawing and bee-stung for a month now, lost thirty bucks or maybe more while he’s doing FatDaddy’s yard instead of moving on to other yards. FatDaddy Slattern is a nigger, and a nigger fucked my boy, right up the ass, the nigger. What you think of that? You think that’s right? You think that ought to go unnoticed? You think this isn’t something the neighborhood needs to look after, to settle?”

  And Pop meant it as a question, too. He wanted them to answer, and he wanted them to answer, “Kill.” He wanted them to answer, “Kill the fucker,” but in Oakland-speak. He wanted them to say, “No problema.”

  And a whole hell of a lot of them did. They said no problema without saying a word, Oakland style, a bit lower lip, a nod, a slow close of the eyes, a stone stare.

  Pop told some shit to the men, and he crossed the line and talked to the women too, told all of them and every one. When someone’s wife would pull up at the pump, Mama Fernandez who might have been related to all of us, or Mrs. Flynn who worked for the phone company and who was probably mother to the rest of us, when one of them would pull in, Mama Fernandez who ran the firehouse dispatcher and Mrs. Flynn whose sons, all eleven of them, represented the most terrifying posse in Oakland other than the unnamed nigger posses that couldn’t be identified because they didn’t have fathers but were instead born of virgin nigger birth, their mothers fucked by angels of God, usually whitey shitbags if we tell the truth which we usually don’t in matters like this, Mrs. Flynn with her eleven sons and still more beautiful than any woman alive even though she had the eleven kid fat, her face shimmering like a moon hubcap in the lights of a gas station canopy, brilliant, Mrs. Flynn whose sons kept killing themselves when they were just on the verge of getting out of the neighborhood, one son a concert pianist who offed himself the morning of his first San Francisco solo concert with the symphony, another son bullet in the head before the California Demolition Derby Championship with his ’56 Chevy Mauler Special, Mrs. Flynn long-suffering and tough as rebar and who knew how to take care of a drunken man, Pop told Mrs. Flynn. And telling Mrs. Flynn had some repercussions. She was a Swede, Mrs. Flynn, and Swedes aren’t like the rest of us Mexicans, Italians, niggers, Irish, Spics, Portugees, and shit like that. Swedes have a sense of not only loyalty, like all of us have, but they have a sense of justice, of what not only is right in term
s of our families and our neighborhoods, but of some kind of right that isn’t like right we know. It’s a right, a this is the way the world should fucking work, that is way more serious than any of us ever even consider. The long white beards of old Swedes are “Fuck you” to not only the hippies and the rednecks but to every one and all of us. No one but a fucking Swede can wear a beard like that and get a drink at Dick’s. No one but a Swede can wear a beard like that and walk into someone’s home and sit quiet during the conversation while the folk talk shit about their family, about other people’s families, about politics and movie stars and physics and theories of existential import and sit there quiet and somehow be right about everything even though they’ve said nothing. Those beards command respect that none of us can ever have, because those old Swedes care less about shit than we do. They’ve got some old world shit in them that is immune to our American pretend-we’ll-kick-your-ass shit bullshit. They are not people to be messed with, Swedes. Or Norwegians, or Hollanders, or swamp-true Germans, or any of those white-haired psychos. And don’t you try to mess with a true-bred nigger, either. Those purple motherfuckers have the same attitude: you mess with one of me or mine, you’re gone. No questions, no negotiation, adios kimosabe. You don’t very often meet a pure-bred nigger in Oakland, but when you do, he’s got a face that lets you know who he is and where he came from, and where he came from is a lot fucking worse than were you came from, because he’s not a slave nigger sold off by some two-bit chieftain, but he’s a real nigger blue-blood sonbitch who’ll just as soon slice you and drink your blood from your skull as talk to you, because you’re a lower life form, some kind of devolved un-human less-than piece of shit that doesn’t rank higher than a yak. You can’t kill an old nigger, and you can’t kill an old Swede, because not only has the old Swede, like the old nigger, been dead since he sprouted pubic hair, but he’s been alive longer than anyone you know. Those crusty motherfuckers—and they’re all crusty motherfuckers, even if they’re only twelve—those crusty motherfuckers do shit calm. You never hear of a Swede gang-war, but you think they don’t have them? What kind of stupid fuck are you? They rumble over turf just like the rest of us. But they rumble serious. Think about it: Jorgensen’s a Swede. And Pop, he enlisted Mrs. Flynn and all her boys that were alive. “My boy’s a lawnmower, and he’s been fucked with. Slattern. FatDaddy. You know him.”

  We all do.

  Pop had them all on the case, Joey Medieros the carpenter who’d finally finished doing his time for accidentally killing a wife with a nail-gun, Big-Bob Jones who’d made the papers when his ex left him and he’d dumped fifty ISOs into the bay, all their cargo sunk to the bottom and Big-Bob laughing when they hauled him away not to jail but to the loony-bin where he got to fuck the loony girls, all of them. Flann O’Shaunessey, the precinct’s Fire Chief, one of the semi-regulars at Dick’s and who Pop had gone to Oakland High with back in the days—Mr. O’Shaunessey came into the Mohawk station and Pop pulled from the filing cabinet a bottle of Jameson’s he’d bought special to share. That bottle went empty and Pop had to break into the storage room fridge for the Oly. Before O’Shaunessey got into his red Fire-Chief Impala, he handed me a beer. “It’s the last one,” he said, “and you need to be the one to drink it.” He started his engine, but he didn’t put his car in gear until he saw me polish that can off.

  Pop called the Corollo family to duty, seven brothers strong and beautiful and evil to the right people, who’d take care of any business they thought needed just treatment. The Corollo brothers were serious people, Joe most of all, Joe whose face was expressionless wax and though Italian his hair blond and eyes pale blue. Joe never said much, never more than a yes or a no, but somehow everyone wanted his opinion about matters of import. Someone would unravel their tale, their problem, their dilemma, and after a longwind hour of spilling would look to Joe and he’d just say, “Yes,” and the seeker of counsel would nod and do according to Joe’s bidding. You didn’t want to mess with the Corollo brothers, nope. One of them, the eighth brother, had been killed by a crew of Mexicans, dragged the way my brother was dragged, it being a traditional method of whacking someone in the neighborhood. The crew was all minors, and when they got out of juvy, one at a time when they turned eighteen, they didn’t come back to the neighborhood, didn’t disappear like what usually happens in our neighborhood when we wait for fuckers to get out of juvy. What they did was appear, one body part at a time, all around town, a finger—middle—on the steps of City Hall, a tongue on the porch of a Chinese fish market, eyeballs in a bucket of bait at the pier. One of the Mexicans’ mothers found ears with her morning milk delivery. One of the fathers found a shriveled bloodless dick in his lunchbox next to his twin-pack of Twinkies at work at the docks. Parts were abundant. It’s really creepy when you think about it, how many parts of a person you can spread around a town. Lungs, testicles, noses, bones, carefully brain-scooped sawed-up skulls, toes, ankles. Each of the Mexicans was scalped, and each of the scalps ended up in fancy-schmancy shops specializing in shit for trendy people who worshipped ancient cultures, turquoise, skin drums and stretched animal hides imitating some kind of divine talisman and drums made from logs, as if the niggers and the Indians and the Pacific Islanders were some kinds of Bachs and Mozarts and goddamn fucking Mahlers. The scalps were works of art, according to Joseph Pappas the cop. He said that he’d get a call every time one of the Mexicans was let out of juvy, and the call wouldn’t be that something was stolen, but that something had mysteriously appeared in the shop, some work of art, a hair-piece of some sort dried and stretched across a hubcap. “They’re really quite original, actually. But we’d really prefer to deal with an agent than with the artist directly, especially in this fashion. It’s a bit like, like extortion? We can’t sell something on commission unless we know who we’re selling it for. You know, whoever is making these is an artist of the first order, tapped into the primal instincts of man, into our purest soul.” Pappas would say, “You got that right, lady.” When ears were found they were always nailed to the wall of Club 17, the Mexican salsa and merengue nightclub, ears hanging from the wall bloody and listening.

  When the main man of the town, Mr. Brown, pulled up to the pump, Pop whispered. He whispered a long time, and then he called me to Mr. Brown’s car window. “This is the boy,” Pop said. “My son. FatDaddy Slattern did that to this boy, this boy my son.” Mr. Brown shook my hand. I tried to pull my hand away, but Brown held my hand close. “My shake counts,” he said. And I believed him. And in retrospect, I was right to do so. We all suspected Jerry would be mayor of Oakland someday, even though he was white. Nut-case Brown, who thought everything could work out. He was rich but he drove a four-cylinder rice-banger and he wasn’t afraid to come into Dick’s once in a while and tip one with the likes of us. When Daddy Borges pulled up at the pump, Daddy Safeway Manager Borges who could cut you a break anytime if he was checking the groceries, mis-add your bill and give you a steak or two blocks of fancy cheese, Pop let Daddy Borges know the score on FatDaddy Slattern.

  FatDaddy Slattern was getting to be really well known.

  And I mowed. I chopped. I swathed. I cut and I ripped and tore and yanked and tore and tugged and bled. I leaked more blood into FatDaddy Slattern’s yard than I had in my body. Every day I worked on that yard of his, sun-up sun-down. I’d shove into the briar, and the blades, spinning, would jam. Alto, motherfucker. Every shove I’d have to untangle. And with every shove bugs from some fancy designer continent would get pissed off and fly in my face, green and shiny roaches, golden gnats, grasshoppers as big as my fist and in every weird not-Oakland color you can imagine, pink and shit like that, purple. And while I mowed, while I sweated 10-30, FatDaddy Slattern, who didn’t seem to have any job other than watching me and getting his money’s worth, watched. He watched, and he liked it. He watched me, seventy-five cent little loser white-trash shit. He liked watching the grandson and the son and the boy of his lessers schlog it out in
the fields, in his home, in his back yard, he the nigger overlord, me the nigger. He liked to watch. He’d sit on his back porch drinking gin, fat and sweating and bits of lawn and weed and thorn ground into lawnmower dust crusting the crevices of his chins. He’d sit there smiling and drinking cool iced drinks and telling me, “Hey, there,” he’d say. “You missed a spot. There.”

  For some reason, things started going wrong around the Slattern house. I always started work at seven in the morning, and each morning FatDaddy Slattern would hear me on the pushmower and he’d open the back door and stand there in his boxer shorts that he must’ve had to buy at some kind of fatass specialty shop or had made for him. He’d stand there picking his ass, really rooting around like he was ripping something from his insides, and drinking a cup of coffee. Sometimes Mama FatDaddy would join him and she’d watch me, too. She’d stand there in a tee-shirt that was supposed to be a nightshirt but because she was so fat didn’t even cover her baggy white panties. She’d stand there eating ice cream and smoking and farting, and you could hear those farts, and, worse, you could smell them, awful beef and pork farts that smelled like the animals weren’t yet dead when she ate them, and you could actually smell the pig, smell the cow, as if somehow the whole animal she’d consumed, and the smell of a Mama FatDaddy Slattern fart was the smell of a refrigerator in the backyard that’s been there for three months and you’ve just opened it up, summer, and someone left eight pounds of bologna and burger and bratwurst and when you open that door you’re hit with the black and green fog of moldering death. That’s what a Mama FatDaddy fart smelled like, and that’s the smell I began work to every day, death and rot. You know what I’m talking about. And if you don’t, you’re one lucky motherfucker. I’d tell you to hang out with Mama FatDaddy Slattern sometime, morning, but these days we don’t know where the family FatDaddy is.

  Mornings at seven I’d begin work on my only job, my seventy-five cent pushmower lawn job going to make a living as a hardworking Oakland boy what I’m going to do. I’d be a-mowing and the sweat started quick, and then something would happen. One morning a pipe burst and FatDaddy heard it go and his toilet overflowed, the gigantic FatDaddy-sized shit he’d taken before coming to watch me work spread out over carpet and his hardwood floor and flavored with pork scent piss.