Mr. Slattern pulled down the sliding door of the U-Haul and he didn’t look at us as he walked alongside the truck to the cab. He had some kind of FatDaddy Slattern radar going that was honed in on that cab, as if he didn’t have a hundred people lining the street in lawnchairs smoking and drinking beers and watching every slug move of his sweat blubber body lumbering. He was focused.
I felt kind of sorry for him, actually. He didn’t really need to pack up and move. He just needed to admit what he’d done. He just needed to apologize to us instead of calling us niggers and wetbacks and WOPS and gooks and Micks and niggers some more. It was OK for us to call each other those things, because we were all in it together, all of us at the bottom of the cesspool of Oakland and slugging it out together. Those nasty names, when we used them, were us calling each other the names we knew the rich people called us, us calling each other those names in contempt not of each other but of those who would belittle and befuck us. My buddy Jim Johnston, half nigger, can call me a white trash Mick piece of shit, and that’s OK, because I’m white trash and he’s a nigger, so it kind of evens out. But if you’re in a business suit, and you’re driving a fancy car, and you call Pop white trash, you’re liable to have some get-back visited upon your ass, if not then and there eventually, and with interest on the wait. If FatDaddy Slattern would have just apologized like a man, come into Dick’s Restaurant and Cocktail Lounge and bought a round for everyone and a soda for me, maybe a linguisca sandwich, if he’d have come in, bought that round and said, “Gentlemen, ladies, I’m really sorry. That was no way to behave,” then he would have had most of us helping him rebuild his house and even buying those fancy toilet seats of his, which actually were pretty cool. Man, he had one that was all baseball cards, laminated to the seat, Willie Mays and Sandy Koufax and even Vida Blue. I wanted that one bad, but even though the fire had boiled the lacquer, he packed it into the U-Haul. A lot of people were sad to see his daughter in the U-Haul and going away forever, and I was sad to see that toilet seat go.
He wasn’t a man to apologize, though. Not FatDaddy. It wasn’t about to happen. He’d schlepp along the side of his truck like a snail with his head hung as low as his fat chins would let it hang, but he’d never, never apologize to a bunch of niggers and Portugees and wetbacks and white trash like me and Pop.
He climbed in, clicked the door shut gently, and started the motor. He put the truck in gear, and when he did, something whined metallic and harsh, and then the engine started a-clacking, and it sounded like not only the transmission went but like the lifters were banging up against the hood. He gunned the engine and then something kind of whistled. A cloud of white smoke came from the exhaust pipe, and then black smoke curled from beneath the wheel wells, and then from under the hood, and finally into the cab and out the windows. FatDaddy and his daughter got out of the truck. His daughter came around to the driver’s side and stood next to him. They looked at us. You could hear Mama FatDaddy cough or choke or gag. Nobody said anything. We looked at them. We went home. You could hear lawnchairs folding, beer cans crumpling, ice-chests rattling like pots filled with gravel, bottles dropping into garbage cans and some of them breaking, screen doors snapping gently shut and then their doors squeaking slow and sure after them, locks clicking home. The sun was setting, and the night was without fog or cloud, the hills where the rich people lived to the East glowing orange and the windows like stars burning out of the blackening mounds of ease. I wish I could say we heard the trains and the tugboats that night, that the train whistles lowed soft like moose and wild cattle, like buffalo, that the tugboats hooted calls that reminded us of the days when our grandparents had come to nearly virgin territory and heard those same tugboat horns and heard not labor and corporate drool but instead opportunity and food and shelter, that dogs instead of howling and fighting barked a symphony of primordial satisfaction. I’d really like to say that’s what it sounded like, but it wasn’t. There was no sound except the sound of us going home and to sleep. The sound of light dying.
I’d seen prettier nights, and have since, but not many. Not many at all.
I showed what I’ve written to my bartender, Dennis Rich, whose wife just left him here in Warrensburg, Missouri. She took the kid and the house and now he works three jobs instead of one. I slipped him a few bags of Wal-Mart a few weeks ago. I didn’t have the cash to do it, so I put it on a credit card. Hell, lots of people have done the same for me.
“Too much cursing,” Dennis said.
This far:
456 fucks and variants thereof
34 cunts
73 dicks (many of them the restaurant and cocktail lounge)
32 cocks
274 asses
270 shits
4 quims
6 coozes
9 pussies
29 fags
63 niggers
19 cums
79 bitches
16 whores
and 4 sluts.
I went through and cut some niggers. How many niggers does a man need?
I started this chapter just wanting to tell you about work, and so I told you about my first job—shoveling Snookie cookies for Pop at the Mohawk station. Then I decided to tell you some of the early shit-history of my life of labor, and so of course I had to tell you about the first crappy boss I had, my first direct experience as a prole with the evils of capitalism, mowing the lawn of FatDaddy Slattern. I could have just given you a couple of sentences, told you this: “I once spent two months mowing a lawn for seventy-five cents because the guy who hired me tricked me and I was brought up to honor a deal struck.” Instead, it took me thirty pages, two bottles of whiskey, three cases of Busch, two cartons of generic cigarettes and a week and a half of time to write about FatDaddy Slattern and the ways of my neighborhood because I realized while I was writing the section that people and their neighborhoods, people and their jobs, are inseparable. You can’t tell your own story without telling the story of your people, and so everything a narrator experiences becomes a universal, becomes a symbol whether or not the writer intends to do that kind of crap or not. And if everything is a symbol, if every person I describe becomes a type, a representative of something large, then my responsibility becomes and is and remains always heavy.
I don’t just have a charge from Pop and the Corollo brothers and the men of Camozzi Carpets and Johnson Western Gunite Company and Concrete Wall Sawing, but to all the men doing like labor living in like neighborhoods and having bosses like FatDaddy Slattern. You’ve had a boss like FatDaddy Slattern, haven’t you? And can’t you transfer your disgust for FatDaddy to your disgust for the boss who fucked with you, who might be fucking with you this instant as you hide from your work on the toilet, pretending to be taking a good long shit-break but instead reading this book while you’re supposed to be at your desk or on the line? Haven’t you at one time or another had your crew, your posse, your family, lay plans against, execute, and feel sad and satisfied at the same time, justice not always a pleasant but most certainly a necessary thing, the cosmos right just once? Chapter Two was supposed to very quickly (economically is the word I’m supposed to use here) tell my work story—shit-shoveler to lawn-mower to trumpet-player/construction worker and finally land on the time when I had to live in a garbage truck at the dumps, sleeping in the cab nights and running a route days.
Everyone I’ve ever shown my shit to tells me not to explain, not to tell what I want to say. Hide what you really think about things, and instead show events in a neutral and nondescript way. Never comment, never let the reader know that you feel anything about anything. Your narrator should be a cold observer, a camera that does not comment and that is just as electronic, passive, unhuman.
If you really want to say something, let one of your characters say it for you. Otherwise the reader will think it’s you saying and thinking those awful naughty offensive thing
s, and if the reader doesn’t like what you have to say, the reader might not like you, might not like You the Author, and that could harm your sales.
What a fucking shame—you mean someone might not agree with me? So few people will ever read my book anyway that it doesn’t really matter much to me if I piss a few off. Hell, I’d like to piss a fucking lot of people off. At least I’d be making the assholes feel something. People might not like you, The Author. Shit. My heart is all broken up about this. Honest. The real-life human being Blaise is based on read what I wrote about his crack up, and he wrote this to me: “You run the risk of the reader not liking the narrator.” Evidently what I’m supposed to do is write a riskless novel. Well folks, I think we have enough of those already. Hell, Updike’s written twenty or thirty of them all by his ownself. Add in the gutless nutless cuntless minimalists—Ann Beattie, Mary Robison, Frederick Barthelme, Jamica Kincaid, and the rest of their spineless inbred crew—toss in a crate or two of books by Ivy League pussies and award-winning jackoff artists writing about their European vacations and their days at the prep school and the times they’ve been slumming with people from my neighborhood and had an affair with one of us blue collar houseboys or pink collar waitresses and then felt guilty about it, their marriages going to shit because they copulated with someone other than their fat suburban spouses, mix into the soup an antiseptic dose of “classy” work written by private university-schooled smoothie minorities posing as people of color when their asses are whiter and their blood bluer and their teeth for damn sure straighter than anyone in my neighborhood—add in all that shit and I personally think we have enough perfect fucking fiction.
What we need is some imperfect fiction, some fiction that does not try to bring order to the chaos of life, but which instead tries to not only represent the chaos with chaos, but to cry anarchy, bring anarchy, foster and nourish and revel in the insanity that truly is life without a fucking trust fund, without a retirement, without divorce decrees crushing poor sons of bitches who couldn’t afford lawyers, instead giving up the lives of the crushed, the destroyed, the truly hopeless and therefore the most truly alive, attuned, nerves jumping and sparkling like exploding power transformers being pissed upon in black Oakland night. John Steinbeck might not have been the best prose stylist around, but at least he had something to say that mattered. Same with Jack London and Sinclair Lewis. And Theodore Dreiser wrote the crappiest sentences known to man, but Sister Carrie says more, hits home more truly and rocks more than any of Pynchon’s beautiful and expert and erudite jacking off. Fuck perfextion. Bend over, bitch. Let one of those perfect motherfuckers around me or anyone I know and we’ll slap the faggot and take his lunch money.
You want perfect? Read someone else’s fucking book. This book, if I’m doing it right, is anything but purrfect. I don’t want you to finish it and lean back in your expensive chaise lounge and sigh, reassured that all the stupid shit you’ve done in your life really all adds up to a fine and dandy ending, your fat ass retired and happy and laying out on a beach in Hawaii drinking cocktails and watching chicks you’d like to bone hula hula in front of you while you try to hide the hardon you wish were better than a half-limp slug of dried cottage cheese. I don’t want you to finish this novel and, if you’re the rich fuck I suspect you are (because unfortunately my people can’t read, and if they can they read something that matters to them like Sports Illustrated or Hustler), you think that the shit-for-life you’ve imposed on my people by your very existence is something that is not your fault and that everything works out in the end, your sins forgiven and your virtues rewarded in the great steakhouse in the sky, extra cheese and sour cream for the potatoes please, belch apres. Quite the opposite good sir, ma’am. I want you to finish my book and be a little apprehensive, just a little, a bit concerned ol’ boy, good lady, that maybe, just maybe, maybe we’re gunning for you. Maybe we’re just waiting for our chance to take you the fuck out.
What do we think about when we think about the terminal diseases we’ve contracted working in your shops and factories, on your construction sites? What do you think we think about in the Busch-drunk late hours when we’re paying you for our parking spots at your run-down factories with outhouses instead of toilets? What you think we’re thinking about when we’re signing our child-support checks to your daughters who married us because they wanted men but divorced us because they decided they wanted pussies like you? What we thinking about when we mow your lawns, unplug your toilets, drive past your houses with garages bigger than our apartments and trailers, when we see your daughters with braces while our daughters’ teeth are rotting out of their heads and turning them into sixteen year old hags? What you imagine we’re thinking when we listen to the news and hear that your hillside houses have mudslid down and you’ve lost your priceless furniture in the roll? You think we’re feeling sorry for you? You think we’re hoping that you and yours are all healthy and swell?
Don’t forget, Mr. and Mrs. Comfy: I’m writing this in my garage, detached, single-car, in Warrensburg buttfuck Missouri. I started writing this in the winter, wrapped in blankets and my fingers blue, dick shriveled and never coming back and snow on the oil-stained concrete floor not melting because even though I have a space heater it doesn’t do much because the holes in the walls and between the gray weather-worn wood slats whistle with subzero wind. Sometimes when the snow blows sideways flakes actually swirl in the night light like dust. I have a refrigerator, but it doesn’t even have racks in it, so I have to stack my food on top of my 40s and my twelvers of Nat Light. I ended up here because I was a good man and hadn’t learned the lesson I should have learned from my experience with FatDaddy Slattern. I live here because of the likes of you. Guess what? I don’t like you.
I started writing this in the winter and now it’s summer, and in those six months I’ve decided to drink instead of eat because it’s either one or the other on what’s left of my shit for check after I pay my ex. The booze I drink gets cheaper and cheaper. I fear the Night Train, and if you don’t know what Night Train and Thunderbird are, I’m really fucking happy for you. Really. For me it’s summer and I’m sweating on the keyboard. My computer is infested with roaches and spiders, and I sleep with the light on because if I don’t I wake up swollen and itching and fearing death by insect. The other losers in town all know my story, and they sympathize but they won’t front me a drink anymore. The women here spot me for what I am: broken, and when not broken, pissed. Get laid? Sure. Only the worst of losers would have me as I am now. My job sucks so bad I can’t even talk about it, and even if I told you, you wouldn’t believe it, so fuck you. Suffice it this: you’ve never had a job so bad, and driving and living in a dump truck was candy-times in comparison. Because of the things I’ve done, I live here under a name I can’t tell you. And I have the kind of job that goes with that kind of territory.
What I wouldn’t give to be able to have been born 200 years ago, born in a time when the property wasn’t all owned, a time when I could just start walking in any direction and when I found a place suitable plant my ass and call the earth home, no taxes, no social security number, no identity, no history. There’s not a cubic centimeter in the land I can go to and just sit there, just recline and watch the clouds whorl past without paying for the privilege of being, without worrying about either getting shot or jailed.
So I’m writing this book and by the time you finish this you’ll still not have known how I ended up here, because I can’t tell you. Sorry. At any rate, what I really want to write about, and what’s really the important thing about this chapter, is work. After the FatDaddy experience work became a thing different for me than it should have been. I didn’t want to ever work at something that wasn’t something I wanted in my bones to do, and that’s not what work is about. Work is called work because it’s not play, like playing a trumpet. Work is called work because it sucks.
Not getting paid for work wasn’t a problem for me. He
ll, most of life is work—doing the dishes, stitching up work boots with dental floss, cooking pasta when you’d rather be ordering a pizza but can’t afford it. Not getting paid to work wasn’t a problem, but not getting paid for working at something I didn’t like doing was. I decided at age ten that I’d never again work at something I didn’t like doing truly. I don’t do dishes, for instance. I have one Chinese plastic plate that I rinse off. I don’t do laundry—it’s cheaper to wear the fuck out of a tee shirt and then buy another at the Salvation Army than it is to do a load at the laundromat. If I was going to be prole white trash working grunt, I’d find something I liked doing, something I could talk about after work with the men at Dick’s and not only not feel ashamed, but feel proud, not for the dignity of the work or the rate of the pay, but because the work I was doing was something I loved, something that defined me, something I was.
Because of the FatDaddy experience, I worked hard at the trumpet when I was a kid. I practiced eight, ten, twelve hours a day, played until my lip bled and my fingers cramped. Some of the kids from the neighborhood had made it out by playing horn, guys like Jon Faddis, like Carlo Carrera. I got a room at the Lemmington Hotel before they remodeled it and made it a place for pasty-faced San Francisco trustfunders. Before the remodel it was a dank downtown dump hotel, and I lived with the tramps and the whores and the destitute, with those who chose simply not to participate, not to engage. I played skanky gigs on my trumpet in my old Mexican band, Los Asesinos, and every night I got some applause and some booze and some jack to shoot on rent and gas. I was flush, and life was good.
Welcome to Oakland Page 11