Jones might have been the immediate master of the dump, but even he had to own up. He had bosses, and they were assholes, white-shirts with pocket-protectors and the whole nine yards—beepers, calculators, company cars. They’d be out there on the dumps every few weeks with their blueprints, checking up on the progress of the dumps.
“That’s not where the hill goes,” one told Jones. He spread out the blues on the hood of his fancy Chrysler, and he squinted and he pointed with his pink finger at the prints and then pointed at Jones’ hill. “That hill should be fifty yards or so to the south.”
“That’s my business,” Jones said. “When I’m done, every hill will be where it should be.”
“It better be,” the architect said.
Jones smiled. “You think I don’t know what I’m doing? I been doing this longer than you’ve been alive, young man.”
“The hills will be where they should be?”
“That is my job,” Jones said.
The architect said, “Right,” and he pointed at Jones’ junk sculpture. “Then what the hell is that monstrosity?”
“That,” Jones said. “That is integral to your blueprints, young man. It is what is beneath the lines on the paper. It is what holds your plan together, what brings not only structural integrity to the whole but that which codifies the individual units, which sanctions the enterprise.”
“Of course,” said the architect.
“Making a dump is not something to be done haphazardly,” Jones said. “Combustibles—and you don’t know what those are, do you? Compounds what will eventually combust, not just immediately explosive and flammable, must be buried deep enough to not ignite the entire mound and create an infinitely burning heap. Tires, for instance, when they reach a critical mass of weight and therefore gravitational pressure, will spontaneously combust and cannot be extinguished with chemical or compound. Households contain a different variety, and must be treated accordingly. The hills shift, are mutable during the creation of the eventual landscape, and it is my profession, profession, young sir, my chosen and studied vocation to properly situate, mold and manipulate the excess of humanity into the bounty of man’s future.”
“We’ll be back regularly,” the architect said. His two colleagues turned to walk back to the company Chrysler. It was white, the Chrysler. The whitewalls were dusty. “You are expendable. East Bay Municipal Utility District will hear of this.”
Jones smiled. “Oh yes,” he said. “I am expendable to East Bay MUD. But it is not only I who is expendable. Man has come and man will go, but his garbage, his garbage will endure.”
Jones tore off his orange safety vest and threw it to the ground. He stretched his arms out wide and scanned the dumps with his eyes.
The architect rolled his eyes, and I didn’t blame him. Jones was about to say some of his weird shit and get all philosophized about garbage.
And Jones knew we weren’t listening, knew the architect couldn’t take much more and only wanted to get back into his car and blast right on out of there, and Jones he played it up, standing there like he was going to go off on a tirade and leaning toward the white-shirt with promise, with threat of words, and I backed off behind Jones and lit a cigarette and the architect walked backwards toward his car as if he had something to do, somewhere to go, as if he were listening to Jones, hanging on every psycho word, truly heeding.
Jones didn’t say anything. He just leaned and leaned, promising to say something but not saying anything, chasing the shitbag away with not-word, scooting him right on out of there with threat.
When they’d left Jones looked at me and did not smile.
“What?” I said.
Jones shook his head in disgust.
Music was playing on a boom box. Mexican tunes, Tito Puente. On top of one of the mounds danced a little girl. She wore a lacy dress and she danced, and she danced like both a little girl and like a woman, her face lush with sex and body lithe with pureness. Her hips swiveled figure-eights to bongos banging off-beats in merengue and her fathers and forefathers would have been both ashamed and proud and heavy with anger and pride and shame and they would have been happy. She danced and the clouds and fog of the bay sky moved in some kind of strange and slow off-beat knowing and approval. The trumpets brassed the beat of her slender hips, and Jones and me, we watched.
Rich fuckers. It sometimes seemed kind of funny to me, hauling their trash to the dumps, just a mile down the road, sometimes seemed funny and sad that it felt like their trash wasn’t really going away at all, that it was just being shifted around, and that soon the trash would creep back to their homes, would slither beneath the ground and overflow from the landfill hills and crud their lives. And while the trash boomeranged back to them, rich people would live in condos on top of the landfill heaps and get nice views of the city, and they’d play golf on landfill courses and they’d go jogging in their faggy running suits in the mornings on trails that wended their way along the hills and gullies that Jones was raising and carving.
When I first started driving dump for Vieira, the most cool thing was getting to see just what kinds of things people actually had in their trash. I’d linger over a dumpster or a can and go through it, finding silverware, faded wedding pictures, boxes of letters and journals people had kept for years and years, sex accessories and bails of porno magazines, china and crystal and things you’d think no one would ever throw away. One time I found an entire box full of military medals and awards, and even the poor sonbitch’s air force wings, tossed out no doubt by ingrate kids or some wrinkled and bitter old hag wifey glad to finally be rid of her hubby. But after a while witnessing the remnants of other people’s pain and anguish and despair and hate got to me, and I stopped sifting through their trash. The only things I liked about driving the scow were the mindlessness of it—the thinking and zoning time I got by doing a job any retard could do—and when I got to sub someone else’s route and did a rich neighborhood.
The rich neighborhoods in the East Bay, in Oakland and Berkeley and San Leandro, are all in the hills. That way they can see the niggers and the white trash like me coming when we get uppity and pick us off with their rifles. They live in the hills and sit up there with their binoculars fearing the day when we all get together and instead of killing each other charge up the hills and burn them down and give them what they deserve. So far we’re stupid, though, and when we have riots we steal from and kill each other. Some day, though—some goddamn day there’s going to be a really good riot, a class war instead of a race war, and we’re going to take them out, the fuckers. We’re going to burn their homes and burn their banks and burn their fancy cars and even through they’ll just get insurance to pay for it at least they’ll know that just because they have cops and alarm systems and motion-detector spotlights and Dobermans and bullshit laws, even though they actually are protected from just about everything including death—they just sit by the freeways waiting for one of us to die so they can buy our spare parts and Mickey Mantle them into their fat carcasses—even though there’s not much we can actually do to them, at least they’ll know that they’re not invulnerable, that they’re mortal. Like us.
Well, driving dump in their neighborhoods is a joy. You always get an extra early start when you’re hauling for the rich so you can wake them up. Our jobs start at six—we have to be there to serve them when they get to work at nine—and so when you haul in their neighborhoods you crash the cans and clunk the iron scoop over and over on the rig and you accidentally honk the horn as often as possible. You drop the scoop hard, let the fucker free-fall against the truck. You rev the engine. You skid to stops whenever you can. But waking them up isn’t the best part. What’s best is leaving them some ooze. When you do your route, you make sure to always have the nose of the scow facing uphill. That way the sludge and slime and swill runs out the back of the truck and down the street, or, if you’ve ang
led the rig just right, into their driveways and yards. You leave them some of their own. The smell of the swill is worse than the smell of the actual garbage for some reason. And it sticks. It don’t go away. It’s our gift to them of their gift to us.
One night I decided to go out on the town instead of hanging with Jones. I took the hike toward the slaughterhouse just off Dolittle to fetch my stationwagon and ramble around town a bit, catch a shower at a college locker room and maybe go find a bar and get some nookie.
The slaughterhouse was a great place to leave a car, or anything else, because it smelled so bad no one would go near it unless they worked there chopping up pigs and cows. The smell was shit, clean and pure. Shit and rotten eggs. There were some houses close, sure, but they were houses for people who didn’t have the guts to just do the right thing and live in their cars, houses for people who thought that just because they lived in a house instead of an apartment they were some big goddamn middle class deal—uptown—homeowners, Jack, and landed like blue-blood Lake Merritt very big deals. Poor sons of bitches mowed their foxtail lawns and larded latex over the peeling lead paint every spring. They’d be out there Sundays waxing the oxidized paint of their rusted jalopies, Armor-Alling the cracked vinyl of their dashboards, sending their ratty children to the market for celebratory brewskies after duct-taping a cracked window that buzzed and rattled and kept everyone awake at night when the train rolled past.
If you live in your car, it’s because you’re hoping you’ll end up better off someday. You’re knowing you’ll be better off some day, since after car living, you get the welfare and a place with all the good things, digs that don’t rock when you walk down the hallway because the floor ain’t set on wheels, the plumbing is connected to pipes and not a garden hose, the sewer isn’t a bucket you carry but a pipe down which you flush.
But dig: if you own a shack next to the slaughterhouse, if you’re paying the note on it and you’ve got the payment schedule scotch-taped to your refrigerator and you’re counting down until you finally own the dump—it’s over. Everything else surrounding the slaughterhouse was abandoned. Construction companies, the old shooting range, the truckstop and Fernandez Salami and Chin Ho’s Laundry and Break Fast Bakerie. No one could stand the stink after the slaughterhouse came in.
When I turned the corner and saw my stationwagon I felt good, felt like everything was right in my cosmos.
My car—I bought it when I was fourteen years old. A ’67 Dodge Polara stationwagon, navy surplus. Some old dude pulled into the lot of the Mohawk station and the wagon was flaming from under the hood, fire licking through the grille like snake tongues, black smoke curling around the wheel-wells.
“Fifty bucks,” the oldster told Pop.
Pop laughed. “It’ll take more than that to fix this one,” Pop said. “It’s a goner.”
The oldster said, “To take it. Fifty.”
Pop looked at me. “Two months of morning shift, it’s yours. I sleep in, you open.”
Took me three years to get it running and bondoed into shape. Tranny, cam, carb, seats, bumpers, rings, valves, alternator and generator, battery, radiator wroughted-out, master cylinder, shoes. I spent weekends in the junkyards that rim the bay cruising for parts, chrome mouldings and armrests, taillights and u-joints. A steering wheel. Lug nuts. When I brought interior parts back home to the Mohawk station—armrests and floor pedals and seats and parts for the dashboard, I took them pronto to the solvent bin and used a wire brush to carve off the matted hair and black-cake blood. Sometimes I found chips of skull, little flakes like broken seashells. Fixing up that car of mine was like redeeming the world, making it right and good and complete. There is something very sad about a car that isn’t being fixed up, that’s just sitting on someone’s lawn or parked on some station lot and rusting and sagging and rubber hoses and bushings drying out and chassis turning to dust. Old crumbling cars are sadder than toothless adult-diaper oldsters because medicine and operations and love can’t fix someone that’s croaking. People can’t be fixed back up, and most of them shouldn’t. Cars can, and most of them should.
My stationwagon looked like hell—red and gray pancakes of primer, four different hubcaps, the whitewalls all different sizes. But it was a car no one fucked with. When I hit the blinker and started into another lane on the Nimitz Freeway, I never looked to see if I was cutting someone off. And I liked seeing fancy dudes in their Camaros and Firebirds and 280Zs and Monte Carlos making way and making way and making fucking way.
That car was tough. One time after a gig in San Jose when I was playing merengue and salsa with Los Asesinos a low rider tried to shimmy his 1939 Ford coupe around my car in the parking lot, got the cars somehow wedged together so that there was no way to move either without scratching or denting them up. He got out of his customed-up diamond-tucked sled and started screaming at me in Mexican, and a crowd gathered. People cracked beers and sat on the hoods of cars to watch. I wasn’t too worried about getting sliced up—hell, I was with the band, and that counts big.
“No mi problema,” I said. “You’re the one who wedged the cars. I’m not moving mine.”
“You move that shitheap,” he said. “Gringo.”
“Nope,” I said. “Muchacho.”
He made toward me, and the band members circled round. Nacho, the bandleader, told me to just move my car. “You have witnesses,” he said. “The accident will be his fault.”
So I got in my car, dropped it into drive, and instead of trying to ease my car away from the coupe, I punched the pedal. My rear bumper grabbed the fender of the coupe and tore it off. The fender lay on the ground like half a doughnut.
I took a look at the damage to my car: sprung bumper, about six inches out of whack.
The low rider dude was kneeling next to his severed fender.
I pulled my wallet. “Let’s exchange insurance info,” I said.
He shook his head. His cheeks were wet and shined taillight red.
“You don’t have insurance?” I said.
“You owe me money,” he said. He was shaking. He picked up the shorn fender and slung it over his shoulder like it was a fainted woman. “Lots of fucking money.”
“We need to call the police,” I said. “We need a police report about this. It’s illegal to drive without insurance, isn’t it?”
“Fuck you,” he explained.
He opened his trunk and stowed the fender.
“Adios,” Nacho said.
The trunk wouldn’t shut. The low rider drove off, the trunk bouncing and clanging against the fender.
The next morning at the Mohawk I told Pop the story of the low rider and his fender. I showed Pop my sprung bumper.
“We’ll fix that right up,” he said. “Nudge the nose against Doral’s building. Keep the car running. Set the emergency brake, leave the car in gear, and keep your foot on the brake. Hard.”
When I had the car against the cinderblock wall, Pop lit a cigar and started up one of the tow trucks. The truck had a wide flat bumper made for pushing broken down vehicles off the road. He pulled in about 20 yards behind my car. I saw him sitting in the cab, smoking his Roi-Tan, smiling. I heard him rev the motor.
Pop yelled, “Hold on,” and then I saw him coming and I braced myself.
The truck smashed against my car so hard I thought I was going to mess up my face on the windshield. Then Pop backed up again and revved the motor and made a second charge at my car.
We got out to look at the work. We were making progress.
Seeing my car in the nightlights of the slaughterhouse parking lot made me feel damn good. I wasn’t going to be living in the cab of a dump truck for long, and I knew it, and soon, amigo, I’d be back in my car and soon after that I’d have a place to park it in front of and a refrigerator that wasn’t built into the wall with food in it that I didn’t have to eat th
at very day.
The windows of my car were fogged. The car was rocking.
It was rocking and when I got close enough I could hear pigsqueals and grunts and I saw a greased foot pressed against the back window.
One of the doors squeaked open and then slammed and a shirtless black dude walked away from my car and toward the slaughterhouse.
I’d brought my flashlight from the scow in case I needed to do some work under the hood to get the wagon started, and I always carried my Buck, and I crouched down low and scrambled to the side of the car and squatted next to the rear tire and I took a deep breath to get ready. I think I smiled. Then I stood and pulled the doorhandle and clicked on the flashlight and readied my blade not for cut but for plunge.
“Aw fuck,” I said. “Aw,” I said. “Fuck.”
What I saw? I saw asses—three or four of them—naked black asses pointed my way and pumping and a-rocking and under them was a fat chick rolling around in the back of my stationwagon in a pile of fast-food wrappers and weird junk—broken trophies and golf balls and picture frames and antique liquor bottles, pints mostly.
“Hey man,” one said. “What the fuck.”
“Fucking fuck, fuck,” said another.
“Aw fuck,” I said.
“Get the fuck,” one of them said.
I lowered my flashlight and turned to walk away and I thought about slamming the door shut but I didn’t.
I heard one of them getting out of the car and I turned back and shined the flashlight at him. He was pulling up his pants—blue doctor’s scrubs.
“Turn that light off,” he said. “Hurts the eyes.”
I didn’t, and I shined the light at his eyes for spite. He walked toward me.
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