Before my last gig as a decent trumpeter, before I had to become a scab and drive a non-union garbage scow, my girlie friend, Agnes, with whom I’d never been in the sack because she was saving herself for marriage—she was in the process of re-virginizing herself out of guilt because she’d humped about ten thousand black dudes and the entire Castlemont High football team—and who I loved because I hoped someday she would not only fuck me but make me some babies, said, “You got to get a real job. What kind of fool are you? It’s freezing in here. Why? Because you live in a dump. A dump without heat.” She had one of those black accents white girls sometimes get when they like fucking black dudes. “You think there’s a future being a white boy playing in a Mexican band?”
I’d like to tell you I’m not sure why I was even with her in the first place, but I’d be lying. Back then I thought I loved her. Back then I thought she was the love of my fucking life, and I walked around with a hardon all day every day just thinking about her. Now, though, and a lot of time has passed, I know why I was with that bitch. I needed to have a woman around, someone to make me feel like I was a man, a man who was desirable and who would one day make me some family. That’s the way I used to be. I’ve been with some serious bitches over the years, and for some reason I still can’t figure most of them have been even more fucked up than me—junkies, vegetarians, feminists with all the stuffings—hairy legs and armpits, bumperstickers, ugly clothes, pierced eyebrows and nipples, no makeup—booze soaked sad-eyed slump-shouldered wrecks, chicks who were man-beaters, shopping addicts, self-helpers, hookers, most of them at some point boned by their daddies and uncles and priests. I tried hard and tried but somehow I never landed the kind of woman I actually wanted, a good one like a nympho or a stripper, or, better, both.
I finished greasing the third-valve slide of my trumpet with key-oil and began on the valve pistons, unscrewing them, wiping them down with an old teeshirt, oiling them and testing the slick with flurries of my fingers.
“Just look at this dump,” Agnes said. “That’s what I said, dump. This hotel is a dump. No bathroom, no heat, no electrical outlets, a lightbulb hanging from a wire from the ceiling. Dump dump shithole dump. Don’t you get tired of putting the dresser against the door at night? Don’t you have any respect for me?”
I nodded.
“Why don’t you ever let me come with you to your gigs? You never let me come with you. It’s the bitches.”
“I’m going to write a symphony,” I said. “An orchestral work using African percussion and Eastern winds and Oriental chord structures, a New World symphony to put Dvorak to shame. Music has become too polar, either savagely simple or refined into meaninglessness, and if I can just combine the two poles, I’ll be able to create something beautiful.”
“I don’t know what the hell you chattering about,” Agnes said. That’s the way she talked, “you chattering about,” putting on a fake ghetto-nigger accent. Her mother was a goddamn English professor at the community college. She could have talked white, or at least redneck like her father, if she’d wanted to. Another bitch rebelling against her parents, and Agnes had rebelled by going as low as she could go, all the way down to me.
“You sure talk the talk. I’m going with you tonight,” Agnes said. “Where you going tonight?”
“A quinceanera.”
“What?”
“A formal party for a Mexican girl when she turns fifteen,” I said. “The girl becomes a woman. Cauldrons of food, dancing, booze, music, goat’s head soup.”
“You the big time. Big time almighty, playing a birthday party.”
I wiped the excess oil from my trumpet and buffed the bell with a tee-shirt I used as a chamois and set the trumpet into the crushed purple velvet of the case.
“I’d rather be playing birthday parties than sitting behind a desk all day or driving a garbage truck.”
“If we ever going to get married,” Agnes said, “you needs to gets a real job.”
“The other night,” I said, “you were asleep I snuck out and took my trumpet with me and I drove out to the country. I drove out to the coast and took my trumpet with me and I drove with the lights off for awhile. When I flipped them on there was a white horse ahead on the road.”
“You was juicing again. That’s what you was doing, sitting around getting all liquored-up while I be sleeping. You always wait for me to go sleep before you do shit. I go to sleep, and then you just do shit, and shit.”
“And I pulled over and took out my trumpet and I played. Horses grazed on the hill. I played and the horses kept grazing and even though they didn’t act like they could hear me I knew they could hear me. They grazed and I played and it was serene and magical and beautiful.”
“You didn’t even tell me where you was. I was sleeping and you was out having a good time.”
I don’t know why, but I wanted to make her fell really rotten, like she’d missed out on something, so I started making shit up. I said, “Then a marvellous thing happened. I put down my horn, set it in the grass, and the horses started circling around me, walking, slow at first, about a dozen horses ringed around me and walking in a circle. Just like that. Then they walked faster and they walked faster and soon they were trotting and then running and then they were a blaze, a gray and white and black and pinto wash of streaks and spots, their manes feathered back in wind. And I ran. I ran with them, Agnes, and I caught ahold of one by the neck, an old gray horse with a sagging back, and I swung up onto his back and I rode him, the two of us together running in a circle with the other horses. And in the middle of the circle there was my trumpet, silver and black with sky and pin-dotted with stars, reflecting.” It was a really cool lie. I smiled.
“Spare me the tears,” Agnes said.
“And then I came back here,” I said. “To you.”
“I’m coming to your gig tonight.”
“You shouldn’t.”
“Leaving me in the middle of the night. A fifteen year-old and all her young pretty whore friends?”
I nodded. “And all of them want to fuck me.”
“I’m coming.”
Agnes lifted her skirt. Her panties were old and white and baggy and the elastic bands around her legs were frayed. I approached. She dropped her skirt back down and pressed it against her thighs with her hands.
“Fat chance,” she said. “That’s all you want me for is sex.”
It was one of her favorite tricks, pretending that she was going to give it up and let me finally fuck her at last and then shutting me down cold. I’d come home and she’d have let herself in and she’d be sprawled out on the ratty couch wearing stockings and garters and lacy panties and a black bra, looking like the whore I wanted her to be for me. And I’d climb on top of her and shove my cock against her through my pants, grinding. She’d let me finger her and mash her clit and roll it around between my fingers, but when I’d start unzipping, she’d clap those legs together and tell me no. One time I’d had it and I took my pants off anyway and started trying to work it in. “You fucker,” she said. “You fucker! Get that penis away from me,” and the way she said it, penis, was as if my cock was some kind of disease, some kind of plague, an old truck tire in the yard gathering water and scum and crawdads and dead mice maggot-eaten and foamed. “I’ll scream,” she screamed. “I’ll call the cops. You’re trying to rape me, you fucker!” The dick shriveled up right quick. I was pretty screwed up about the whole fucking business already, since I’d never yet been laid. I was screwed up, but Agnes was even worse. She was “re-virginizing” herself, she told me, and I had the blueball coconuts to prove she was doing a good job. Agnes felt guilty about her ten thousand fucks and the Castlemont High football team, and the way she figured it, if she went long enough without a dick reaming her cooze, she’d grow her cherry back. She was pulling out all the stops, too, re-virginizing. Not only had she decide
d to tie-wire her quim shut, but one night she used me as her Father Confessor, seeking absolution through detailing everything she’d ever done with every man she’d ever fucked, telling me everything. It took two solid days, no sleep, to get through her epic catalog. When the confession was finally over, she felt a whole lot fucking better about herself. She was happier than I’d ever seen her. She was fucking beaming.
I pretty much felt like shit, though. It was like some kind of torture listening to her go through the list, telling me about the blowjobs, the places she’d fucked them—in parks, on beaches, in a treehouse, on a pool table with the bartender watching, in a ditch alongside I-80, the backseats and front seats of every make of car in the world except Ferrari and those foreign cars that aren’t Japanese or VWs, even once in the men’s room of our Mohawk station while I was working the pumps—how many times she’d fucked them in a day, the sizes of their dicks, how many gallons of cum she’d swallowed, how many gallons leaked out of her cunt and down her leg, the texture of the cum, the taste of the cum, the color of the cum, the sound of the cumblast, the smell of the cum, how it dripped off her tits and how she wiped it with her hand and put her fingers in her mouth and sucked, how she liked it in the ass and how many times she’d fucked five guys at a time, how five was her very favorite! number of guys to fuck at a time because no matter what there were always three of them hard, one for each major hole.
About twenty guys in and I cracked the whiskey and started drinking. Fifty guys along I ran out of ice and chugged from the bottle. Somewhere around a hundred and twenty I felt water well in my eyes and I was through two 1.75ers of booze, the gin bottle now empty and my tequila next on the list. Midway through the second day of confession I broke down and started sobbing, and it seemed to egg her on more, and she went back through a bunch she’d already told me about and filled in some details she’d missed. She told me it was necessary for her to confess all so that she could be entirely pure for me, so she could be my virgin. By the time Agnes the Virgin finished my head was swirling and I couldn’t look at her without imagining all those dicks and Agnes working them over. I’d cranked four bottles of booze, and I was nowhere drunk enough. I couldn’t see and had a hard time standing, but I was sober as a Mormon.
Agnes said, “Take me to your gig and show me you love me.”
The quincenera was being held at the Community Center, a dumpy sad place that held bingo night Wednesdays and checkers Saturday nights, oldsters in their wheelchairs propped on walkers shooting their social security checks because what the hell, what else were they going to do with all that money and all those years of time? Me and Agnes were the only white people, and only the members of the band would talk to us, would look at us when we spoke, and me and Agnes sat alone at the band table during breaks, me drinking plastic cupfuls of keg beer and Agnes chugging gallons of Courvoisier she’d brought along because no matter what the Mexicans could have served it wouldn’t have been good enough for her.
On the buffet table was a bubbling cauldron of goat’s head soup, the eyeballs boiled away and yellow foam gurgling from the sockets, hairmat horns unraveling, whole onions floating like blossomed flowers in the broth.
During breaks cumbias and rancheras played over the P.A. system, and the old white-hairs taught the little girls the dance steps, the girls standing on the old men’s shoes and the old men whirling.
“The Mexicans got it right,” I said.
“What?” said Agnes.
“The Mexicans,” I said. I turned my head back to the dancers.
“What,” Agnes said. “What you talking about.”
I told Agnes that even though she’d rather be a nigger, most of the time if I had my druthers I’d of wished I was a Mexican, someone from a wonderful and ancient culture, someone who knew who his goddamn parents were and who his grandparents were and who knew his cousins by name. American white people can rarely trace their family tree back past their grandparents, and if for some reason they can, they probably got it wrong, because only the women know for sure who the fathers are, and the bitches they don’t tell. We don’t have dances like the Mexicans do, not even us Micks. Sure, there’s always some traditional Irish dance troupe that knows how to do a jig the right way instead of the drunken pogo-stick bounce we do at Dick’s when a Raider breaks someone’s leg or neck, but it’s not like the Mexicans who all and every one of them knows how to dance a salsa or a cumbia. Our traditional music is plastic mass-produced sentimental relic of the times when our people had some nads, something quaint we whip out for parades to try to prove to the rest of the whites that we have something resembling a history or a culture. But in America that shit gets bled out of us pretty quick. We’re too busy being mean and shitty not only to everyone else but to each other. The Mexicans, though, their traditional music is still the stuff they dance to, still the stuff they listen to. Drive through the farmlands and listen to your goddamn radio. Their music isn’t something they drag out of an archive or museum once a year, it’s alive now and part of who they are. Then watch white people dance: it’s ridiculous and it’s ugly, just a bunch of history-less dorks, no tether no anchor no ballast no honor, shaking their fat bellies and wagging their asses and flopping their titties around, about as graceful as a herd of water buffaloes. Go to a Mexican nightclub and sit back and watch a culture celebrate itself, celebrate life and procreation and black-tie death and the births of blood.
We took the stage, a rectangular plywood platform gussied up with linoleum tile about six inches off the tiled floor. Nacho counted us off, and we played. I’m not going to launch into a musical reverie about how well we played, how we soared with the music gods and how all the people in the crowd didn’t even dance, so entranced, so mesmerized were they with the miraculous beauty of the music we played for them. I could tell you all kinds of shit like that and go on for three or four pages, getting lyrical on your ass and showing off how well I write about music, since before I started writing books I was a musician, and a pretty good one, too, sometimes, and because I was a musician and even though I couldn’t play with the union big-bands or the nightclub Negroes, nonetheless I knew what music was about and as a result of the combination of my experience with music and my devotion to being able to write about my people and my neighborhood I’ve somehow hit on a few formulas and patterns I use when I write about music, certain sound patterns and ways of matching the rhythm of words with the cadence of musical sound. I actually think about the pitch of the word as you hear it in your head when you’re reading, and if you go back through what you’ve read, or if you read my other book and consciously listen to the tones of the words, you’ll recognize passages from Mozart’s Requiem, from Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, from “Suzie Q” by Creedence. This time I’ll spare you the musical rapture and cut straight to what happened.
What happened is this. We were playing some hokey ranchera and I looked out at the crowd and they were dancing but there were Mexicans in the crowd who weren’t dancing who were instead knifing people. Blades flashed everywhere I looked. Mexicans don’t shoot people, but every one I knew carried a stiletto or a switch or a barber’s straight. And they’re quick whipping those blades, too. You don’t want to piss a Mexican off in a lonely place where there aren’t other people, because he’ll dice you up before you can blink. Steel flashed and I looked over and Agnes was dead and the crowd was pushing toward us on stage, such that it was. If it’d been a real job with a real stage, elevated, I wouldn’t have gotten my front teeth knocked out. I’d have just stood above them and watched the spectacle, because there’s nothing like a serious blade fight for special effects. Instead I had my trumpet up to my lips since we hadn’t yet stopped playing and some Mexican fell back and against me and jammed my mouthpiece down my throat, knocking my front teeth out en route. You know how hard it is to play trumpet without any fucking teeth? Try it sometime.
When I got back to the Lemmington I scooted
on over to Duke’s apartment and knocked on his door.
“You look like shit,” he said. “Let me get you a cocktail.”
Duke was forty years older than me, but he was my best friend in the world, and he was everyone else in the neighborhood’s best friend too. I don’t usually describe the way people actually look, and Duke didn’t look all that different from the rest of the old dudes—short, beer belly, balding and the hair he had gray, tee-shirts he should have thrown away a century ago but that he still wore and that rose up across his gut and showed flesh, pants that hung low on his ass and showed the crack when he sat or bent over, but Duke had eyes that weren’t like ours. His eyes should have drooped and gone dull long ago, but instead they blazed with not flame nor fire but voltage, electricity. His eyes were that pale blue that gives you the creeps on anyone else, but that on Duke bred trust. You knew that Duke would do anything for any good man, dog, woman or child. When one of us ended up tanked and in jail on a DWI it was Duke we called and he’d be there no matter what time after closing to bail us out.
One New Year’s Eve I was with my buddy Ben (I can’t tell you the rest of his name because now he’s respectable and a lawyer with loads of kids and a house worth a couple million, L.A.) and he was frying and so he made me drive his Chevy Vega, stick. I’d never before driven a stick and I was about two bottles into the evening, but at least I wasn’t frying on acid. So I tried to drive us home. It was more than usual foggy and I rolled down an overpass and cut right at the corner but the car didn’t cut and instead skated across the asphalt in slow motion like cars always do when you’re wrecking them while drunk and the car plowed into a house, plunk, not a slam but a gentle ride over the curb and across the lawn and into the house, the nose of the car inserted. We tried awhile to back out of the house, shifting from first gear to reverse and back and forth like that, but the car wouldn’t budge and the rear tire just dug a rut in the lawn, and it used to be a nice fucking lawn that lawn. Ben even pushed his weight down on the back of the car to help it get some traction, put his shirt under the wheel too, but nothing we tried could get that Vega unlodged from the house. Funny thing—there were people home, we found out later, and the dude who lived there was a Catholic priest, but his lights never came on, and I’d plowed into his bedroom to boot. I don’t know what set Ben off, but the next time I looked in the rearview I didn’t see him, and I got out of the car and looked around and then I spotted Ben and he was running down the street calling out the names of presidents—Garfield, Coolidge, Hoover, Taft, some fuckers I never heard of—his arms at his sides and flapping as if he was trying to lift off like a pelican. I decided fuckit, and I ran home like a criminal. If Ben wasn’t going to stay with me, I wasn’t going to take the full rap for what I’d done. I was a sniveling shit.
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