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Welcome to Oakland Page 14

by Williamson, Eric Miles


  At least the smell died down at night.

  Seagulls clacked along fat and happy, and rats played in puddles. Across the bay San Francisco glittered beneath a smear of fog and the water rolled slow like tar, garbage and dead fowl adrift and caught in sludged foam you could tell was green even though at night it looked black. Thousands of hot methane gasjets hissed sulphurous and steady, millions of tons of refrigerators and diapers and water heaters, mattresses, boxsprings, deodorant cans and twisted swing sets and empty bottles of malt liquor compressing into fuel enough to power Oakland for the rest of time, and from the garbage dump mountains the shit-fume exhaled up into the world again, spouting up like geysers through dime-sized earth-assholes. Cold nights the methane geysers steamed, and at each plume a seagull stood straddled, walking a tight circle, wings outstretched like vultures over roadkill and the steam hissing at their wings and curling around their shoulders and necks and faces and their beaks stretched to the black and gray sky as if sighing permanent sighs.

  I didn’t like living there any more than the next guy, but since Pop was getting married, I didn’t have any other choice. I wasn’t the only one who lived there, either. I had plenty of company. Campfires flickered against hills of garbage, tinfoil and broken glass spangling like orange stars. Shadows paced. Once I heard the sound of people screwing slow and miserable. I was only at the dump temporary. I was only going to live there until I had enough money for a deposit and first and last months’ rent. Then I’d have a place to park my garbage truck legal.

  I’d run out of money for campground living, and I didn’t have a check forthcoming, and so I’d sleep in my car, which would have been fine with me. Problem was I kept getting hassled. If I slept in a fancy neighborhood where people lived in houses, dogs barked all night and the cops noticed my beat up old car and shined the flashlight though my window and woke me, ran me through the drunk tests, searched my ashtray and then gave me tickets and told me to get the hell out of there. If I stayed in a regular neighborhood, someone’d bust out one of my windows or a kid would stab one of my tires for shits and grins, and one time some asshole pissed through my cracked-open window and doused me and took off when I sat up and he ran off down the street laughing and cackling, his pecker still out and swinging and streaming and piss glinting like tinsel under the yellow streetlight. And you don’t sleep in your car where there’s warehouses. You just don’t do it. Downtown? Nope. Try a park or an empty lot or some tucked away corner of dark—cops love those places. So when I finally got a job driving a dump truck for the father of one of my high school buddies, I figured, Cool—I’ll just sleep in the lot at work. Trouble was there wasn’t a lot at work. Mr. Vieira was an independent contractor. He rented his trucks out to Oakland Waste Company, and the truck was the driver’s responsibility. You either took the rig home at night, like most of the old dudes did, or you left it at the dumps and picked it up in the morning before your route. I was an independent contractor, and I had to find a place to park the damn thing myself.

  Independent contractor, shit. That’s the nice way of saying the rotten truth, which was I was a scab, and the only thing lower than a scab is a scab who’s not ashamed of being a scab. Scabs take your paycheck, your food and your rent and the money you might have spent on your last beer, and they deserve to die. Scabs are lower than lawyers. They’re lower than the women who sic lawyers on their men. Scabs are scummier than friends you think are your friends and who hit on your woman when she’s drunk and you’re not looking. And I was a scab, and everyone in the neighborhood knew it, and it sucked hard. Mr. Vieira ran a scab outfit, I worked scab for him, and my dump rolling down the road was an insult to everyone in the neighborhood.

  Just try parking a garbage truck somewhere other than a yard. It’s hard enough even if it isn’t a scab truck that everyone hates. You want to see a bloated white-shirt lawyer shitbag get pissed? Park your garbage truck on his block. I love those guys, those money fucks, the way their whores have those distorted faces that look like they used to be cutie little rich bitch cheerleader faces that got swelled with Crisco lard and you know damn well the dudes have been getting handjobs on San Pablo since the day after their bachelor parties, the fatso wives getting nookie about once a century and that one time knocking out another future fattie idiot homemaker. I love them. I really do. You think I’m kidding.

  Can’t park the scow on one of those greenback streets, and with commercial plates, hell, you can’t even park it in front of a friend’s house or in his driveway. You can’t even park a rig on his lawn. The cops give you tickets, and even your cop friends, the guys you grew up with and smoked pot with and sold with—even those guys won’t let you park, cause they’re afraid to get cited by their captains, cause captains always come from the fancy neighborhoods where people own. You got a goddamn motor home and piss yourself in your adult diapers, you have an oxygen tank rigged to your asshole so you can get air to your brain directly because you drive a fancy Winnebago, well, yep, you can park where you want, wherever the hell.

  You drive a dump?

  Fuck you.

  You drive a scab dump?

  Well, fuck you more.

  So I left my stationwagon just outside the dumps next to the slaughterhouse, and nights I slept in the truck at the dumps.

  When I got the job driving scow for Vieira, my first thought was that I could just park my rig at the Mohawk station where Pop worked. Pop was in the lube bays smooching with his fiancée, Mary. She was kind of plumpy, but she had fat titties and wore little skirts and low-cut shirts and heels that made her lopsided ass look porkable. When she laughed, pigeons flew off telephone wires in clouds and cats screeched. But she had one of those blowjob mouths, and Pop bragged about it to everyone who came into the Mohawk station. “You check the mouth on my little bitch?” he’d say, and he’d wink and grab his nuts and everyone would nod and smile.

  Mary was fooling around on Pop, and everyone knew it, even Pop. When I caught her in my car screwing the bums who were living in it, even though I didn’t have the heart to tell him at first, I eventually did.

  “Pop,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Nothing to be sorry about.”

  “Did you hear what I said?”

  “Do I look fucking deaf?”

  “Well?” I said.

  “If they fuck around and they come home,” Pop said, “it’s different than if they fuck around and don’t.”

  Some of the guys in the neighborhood who’d boinked her told Pop. Mike, who worked mornings at the Mohawk, once even caught her playing naughty with one of the waitresses who worked at Dick’s, and he told Pop about it, and Pop said, “She’s always back by morning. Where’s your bitch right now?”

  And she was always home by morning—at least we could say that for her. If she was screwing around on Pop, he figured it was the best he could do, and he was probably right. Mary was loyal to Pop—if someone ever messed with him at the restaurant where she worked, she’d run around the bar and smash a bottle on the dude’s head. She loved Pop, and Pop knew it and he was relieved. She was fooling around on him, but that meant he’d be able to get guilt-free nookie on the side, too. Pop had given up on fidelity long ago, having lost two cheating whore wives already.

  Mary had three kids, all from different fathers. I’d not yet met the oldest one, a girl named Rhonda, but Mary’s two little kids were playing in the old truck tire casings, crawling through tunnels and splashing each other with the slime-green greased water. They giggled and played war with the old flaps and tubes, swinging them and smacking each other’s faces. Me and my now dead brothers, Clyde and Kent, we used to play in those tires—many of them probably the same ones—and we laughed and screamed and pulled ourselves through them, through the mantled rain-water inside the casings, and we piled them high into towers down which we climbed and in the bottoms of which we made forts, hideouts, shelter
s where we were protected from Oakland, California, from the Mexicans and the blacks and the Filipino gangs that wanted to skewer us with their switchblades and bludgeon us with brick and club and bone. We built magnificent castles of 10.00X20s, tires from the big rigs, castles that would take more than a quaker to bring down. Summers we patched the blown out inner-tubes of the trucks and made rafts out of them and launched them at the ends of the Oakland docks and floated out into the San Francisco bay, floated into the muck and slime and rainbow-slicks of diesel and gasoline and we bobbed and floated until the coast guard skinheads arrested us and made Pop come fetch us at the Treasure Island detention center. Winters, Pop loaded us into the back of a service truck and we headed to the Sierra Nevadas, and when we got to snow, in Placerville or Auburn or sometimes all the way up to Deer Valley or Donner Pass, where the Donner Party ate each other in proper California fashion—when we got to snow, Pop unloaded us and started up the compressor and aired up inner-tubes and we bobsledded down the mountain slopes, riding backward down the hills, watching the mountaintops and trees recede and laughing with fear knowing we might end up bonked against a tree or a granite boulder and we didn’t give one fuck.

  And now, now Pop’s new kids, Mary’s kids—our replacements—mine and Kent’s and Clyde’s—were playing in those same tires, slapping each other with those same inner-tubes and flaps, dusted with the same soot—and watching them made me think of how great a father Pop had been, letting us play with tires instead of sending us off to some kind of tennis racquet or soccer ball or summer camp pussyville.

  “Just because the last two didn’t work out doesn’t mean that this one won’t,” Pop said.

  “That last one was a pig,” I said. “No class. What kind of woman won’t even do the dishes? What kind of woman is that?”

  “We don’t need to go into that right now,” Pop said. “I’m ready to start a new family, and this one’s got three kids.” He smiled with a kind of glee I hadn’t seen on him since I was in elementary school. It was a smile that didn’t have any pain, that didn’t hurt his face. And then his smile went away, and he said, “It’s going to be tight in the Airstream.”

  “If I can just park the scow here,” I said. “I’m not asking to come back and live in the trailer. And maybe sleep in my car on the lot?”

  Pop said, “No.” He said, “No you won’t. It’s time to shape this ship up, and it wouldn’t look right, my own son, a grown man, sleeping in his car right outside. What kind of goddamn example would that set for the kids?”

  Pop looked at me.

  I didn’t grudge Pop. My scow stank pretty bad, even when I’d dumped my load. No amount of chemicals or steam cleaning or sandblasting could have gotten the stink out of the steel. Who’d waste their time cleaning a dump truck anyway? It’d be like scrubbing your hands during the day when you clean toilets for a living.

  “No sleeping on the lot,” Pop said. “Mary’s got kids, and they don’t need to know anything more about the way things work than they have to. I’ve learned some things. I taught you and your brothers too much.”

  “I’ll be gone before anyone gets up in the morning,” I said. “Route starts at four.”

  “No,” Pop said. “No sleeping on the lot.”

  “It was always dandy when I lived with you and you had a date,” I said. “T-Bird, sleep in your car tonight, trailer’s going to be crowded.”

  “Who pays the note on that trailer,” Pop said.

  He looked at me hard.

  “I’m really happy for you, Pop,” I said. “She’s a really good woman, that Mary.”

  “Don’t you give me any of that she’s a good woman that Mary shit,” Pop said. “You’re still not parking that garbage truck on the lot. It stinks like shit.”

  “It’s a garbage truck,” I said. “It stinks. That’s why god invented it.”

  “He invented it to stink like shit somewhere goddamn else,” Pop said.

  You’d think the dumps would be the rottenest place on the planet, but get this: the whole bay is ringed with dumps, or what used to be dumps anyway. Berkeley, Oakland, San Leandro, Hayward, Fremont, San Jose, then up the other side of the bay through all those snotty towns all the way to San Francisco—what’s their bayshore? Dumps. Fancy marinas and parks and mini-cities of condos and hilly golf courses and lagoon systems set up like imitation Venices, Mexican gondoliers poling along through the muck and couples smooching as they pass arroyo-side banks of restaurants that sell shitbred mussels and clams and oysters dredged from the water that cuts through what used to be dumps. Dumps are some prime real estate.

  I had one of the best views in the Bay Area from my dumps at the end of Davis Street on the Oakland/San Leandro border. Man, I could see everything at night, all the way to Berkeley to the north, its football stadium and towers, down to dirty San Jose and its rows of warning lights marking the low-water mud, the San Mateo Bridge lit by some sadistic architect with fluorescent lights strung together to hypnotize drivers into late night blear and wreckage, across to San Francisco, which used to be a place where people lived and worked but was becoming a place where rich people just bought things and drank coffee instead of whiskey.

  San Francisco, shit. One time I walked for nearly an hour downtown looking for a bar, and the only places that served hooch were hotels where beers cost an hour’s pay and where you couldn’t smoke a cigarette, where doormen gave you the eye if your clothes weren’t as fancy as their gold-button dry-clean uniforms. All the crappy hotels I’d worked on restoring in the Tenderloin District when I was in construction, dives with hoboes sleeping in the basements in beds of used condoms and Army surplus blankets and rusty needles, now those shitholes, those shitholes were trendy condos filled with businessmen who had shiny shoes and used umbrellas when it rained. Even the bums had gotten fancy. I saw a dude there tap dancing for quarters and he had a stereo better than any I’d ever owned. I saw one drinking Jack Daniels, juice I could never afford. A black dude wearing a jockstrap and some kind of tribal headdress did an epileptic nigger-jig at the Powell Street cablecar turnabout, his ass wagging and jiggling and cymbals tied to his knees a-banging together, and hundreds of people, I mean hundreds, were throwing wadded-up dollars at him.

  I accidentally went into what I thought was a bar one time and instead it was a poetry reading, and everyone was dressed in black and had short hair and drank water or wine, and the fucks turned and looked at me like I was the freak. A skinny chick with black-rimmed glasses stood on a platform reading from her poetry, and it was some shit about her period. I remember some of it. It went like this:

  I am woman.

  I am all strength.

  I like to fuck.

  I bleed! I bleed!

  And then she hiked up her black sack dress almost to her twat and there it was, dried up crusty blood on her cottage cheese thighs. It might have been ketchup or food coloring, but it looked enough like the real shebang to me, and next thing you know she’s weeping, standing up there crying about her period, and these dorks clapped when she was done, all hunched over on stage and wiping her eyes, clapped like she was the living shit itself. In the San Francisco I knew, someone would have told the bitch to get a tampon and go back to Berkeley and hug a fucking tree. Then some huge dude, huge and burly and wearing a Harley jacket and beer belly tight and solid, this big dude got up there and read a love poem dedicated to his boyfriend. Well, that was about all I could take of that shit. Fags are fine as long as they don’t fag it up in your face. I got right on out of there.

  I could see it all from the dumps. I could see the whole Bay Area because I always parked my rig on the highest hill of the day.

  I wasn’t the only one who lived at the dumps. There were all kinds of people there—hoboes that had been run out of Berkeley and San Francisco for the election season, Mexican apepenadores making their living collecting up the best o
f the garbage to sell at Oakland’s flea markets, lunatics who’d found a place that understood them, criminals who’d nowhere else to hide. At night their fires oranged the sides of the hills, reflecting off bent up chrome and crumpled cellophane. The kids played and threw things at each other. Sometimes the smell of burnt meat cut through the sour and sulfur.

  Even though there were plenty of people living at the dumps, Jones was the only stable resident. He lived in a little camping trailer parked in the best spot, away from the garbage and down by the clean-fill—no shit or food or rotting cats and dogs, just dirt and demo-rubble from streets and buildings and cracked concrete pipelines and twisted up rebar—right on the edge of the bay and on a rise so he had a view of both San Francisco and the Oakland and Berkeley hills. Man, he had everything you could imagine, ran it all with a gas powered generator that chugged like a chainsaw through the night. He’d strung lights from metal poles around the perimeter of his space, and he’d rigged up an electric stove and a meat freezer. He had television sets galore, all turned on and tuned to different stations but none of them with the volume up—just silent movies and newscasts and sports games flickering blue and gray in the night—and he had stereos, dozens of them, and they always clicked on when the sun went down and the scows stopped dumping their loads and the radios blasted the classical music station. When a mass would come on he’d turn up the volume so loud the garbage mountains shook like Jell-O.

  The first day I worked spilling loads, Jones came to my truck and jumped on the running board. He was a little old dude. He wore a bow-tie and white shirt beneath his orange vest.

  “Jones,” he said, and he reached his hand through the window to shake. His hand was scaled and flaked and red with scars. He smiled and some of his teeth were missing, but not in an ugly way. “New on the job, these are the rules. This is my dump, and here I make the decisions. You don’t follow my instructions, you don’t spill here. Hills rise where I make them rise, and valleys cut where I make them cut. If there’s a butte or a ridge, a cave or a crater, it’s because that’s the way I want it. You make your spill where I tell you to make your spill. Understand so far, mate?”

 

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