Welcome to Oakland

by Williamson, Eric Miles

  And Pop played, and the oldsters of the band backed him as if Pop were Miles Davis or Chet Baker or Clifford Brown, Pop sailing through the chords as if those chords were the echoes of all he’d never tell any of us, the reverberations of howls and pleas made in the small hours to men and women at bars and clubs none of us, the workers, the cement masons and asphalt layers and riprappers and hod carriers and dump truck drivers of Oakland would ever know, so much different was Pop, at this moment, Pop in his suit and the family trumpet to his lips and his tone slowly turning from shimmer to lip-shot hiss, so much not like us for the first time ever was Pop. I felt like I knew everything about him, every nuance and every ache and every woman he’d ever loved, and yet at the same time I felt as if I’d never known a thing about him, never known him to speak a sentence that was honest and true. And I thought, Words don’t even approximate truth. The only truths in life are love and stupor and music.

  Rhonda leaned into me and pressed her face against my chest. My mother whispered and shook and said, “Bad, bad, bad, bad.” Lura and Tura flanked Blewer like fleabag dogs rubbing themselves against a cyclone fence, Blewer beer in one hand flask in the other. Leroy eyed Blewer with hate.

  When the song ended, no one clapped, no one cheered. Everyone drank, tipped their beers and their flasks and their screw-cap half-pints and drank, a communion holy and reverent and solemn.

  Then Pop leaned toward the mike, and he said, “For my bitch!” and we yelled, and Pop bowed and walked toward Mary and Mary mashed herself against him and they kissed. If I’d have been the kind of guy who cried, I might have. But I’m not that kind of guy.

  Pop and Mary peeled off on the lawn, Mary’s blouse unbuttoned and Pop without his shirt, hairy barrel chest soaked in beer and glistening. Oil stains greased his forearms and back where he’d missed when he washed up before the wedding. One of Mary’s tits plopped out of her black bra, and she didn’t mind but Pop reached over and stuffed that puppy back in gently as if he were being careful with an expensive inner-tube he’d just patched. Grandpop Murphy and his fat blind wife did some kind of Irish jig I didn’t know and had never before seen or imagined, rickety and beautiful and you could hear Grandpop Murphy’s bones clacking like bad lifters.

  My mother’s husband walked through the throng and the Concrete Wall Sawing guys dumped beer on him, but my mother’s husband just smiled while they poured and the more they poured the more cool my mother’s husband looked. You didn’t know what to make of this guy, the way he seemed immune to everything, the way he seemed like the kind of dude who could, if he wanted to, take anyone out, but who was either too nice or too badass to do it, and the not knowing which he was—nice guy or killer—that’s what made you creepy all over. Everyone was getting pretty loaded. Chuck Santos, one of the Markstein guys, puked florescent yellow in the back of his truck and then he stood up tall and beat his chest, a beer in each hand, and then he chugged them. He could really drink, Chuck Santos.

  Soaked and smiling creepy with straight white teeth my mother’s husband walked up to Pop.

  Blewer pulled himself loose from the twins and said, “Business?”

  I nodded. “Business,” I said.

  I stood up, my mother still saying, “Bad bad,” and hanging onto my arm like a drunk waitress. Rhonda pulled my mother off me and broke her beer bottle against the rim of a Yandell 18-wheeler and handed me the jagged neck. She smiled at me and then she slipped her arms over my shoulders and around my neck and kissed me, tongue. I got a hardon. I pulled her close to let her know. She pushed against it. I squeezed the bottleneck in my hand. I was ready to rumble.

  Leroy grabbed Blewer’s arm. “What you been doing looking at my woman?”

  Blewer laughed.

  “You been looking at my woman,” Leroy said, and Blewer looked Leroy straight. Some more of Mary’s relatives started toward Blewer, seven or eight men with crooked teeth and ugly wives, and they swayed and their eyes spun with booze. Father Camozzi set his Book of Common Prayer and his Bible down on the fender of one of the Yandell trucks and rolled up his sleeves and started toward Pop and Mary and my mother and her new husband. Father Camozzi was an expert at weddings. I’d played my trumpet at Mexican weddings that broke out in gang wars and one time I saw Father Camozzi crack six guys’ heads open with the billy-club he kept under his habit. By the time Father C was done with those guys, everyone stopped fighting and went back to drinking like the family they had become and would remain.

  Father C reached his arm beneath the robe and pulled out the billy-club, and man we all made way and made way and made fucking way. But Mary’s clan didn’t. They were probably from some part of town that didn’t have priests or they’d have known to back the fuck off.

  Leroy slapped his woman, Lura or Tura, and he said, “Put your fucking tits away, pig,” and Blewer said, “Oink,” and Leroy said, “You calling my woman a pig?”

  My mother walked through the crowd toward her husband and toward Pop, and the guys whistled and hooted and my mother swung it up, giving leg and showing the personality I always saw whenever there were men around, and Franco Melendrez swung his arm around my mother’s waist and she leaned on in and grabbed his cock through his Ben Davises and Melendrez put his hands to her shoulders and tugged her dress down so only her fake tits held up her dress. Her husband was almost to Pop, and Mary saw him coming and threw a beer bottle at him. Leroy spat at Blewer, and Rhonda looked at me—and it seemed like everything was beginning to happen all around her and she was touched by none of it, as if in this shit of a world, this stinking hellhole that was Oakland, nothing could touch her, nothing could affect her, nothing could make her a part of it or make her any less beautiful, any less a chick for whom a man would die and work the worst job in the world forever if only he knew she’d be at home waiting for him with a beer cracked and a roasted chicken on a plate, as if while we all fought and battled and gutted each other like shit-for-ditch fish she, Rhonda, would hover over all of us like an angel, like a warrior goddess who would choose a side and whose choice would decide all our fates—Rhonda looked at me with a sparkle and glint and crooked lip I’ll-fuck-you-love-you-and-never-leave-you look that let me know that whatever happened, no matter how bloody I got, no matter how many of her relatives kicked my ass and sliced me up, she’d bring me a beer while I soaked in Epsom salts and pretended I didn’t need to cry.

  Everyone was smacking someone now and the melee swirled, arms flailing, men breaking beer bottles against their trucks and pulling the Bucks from their belts and flashing steel, Blewer swinging Leroy around by the neck and Lura and Tura slapping Blewer upside the head, Mary holding my mother by the hair and slapping her down to the ground, then yanking my mother’s hair again and again slapping my mother to the ground. Mary’s relatives scrambled and some of the Overhead Door guys hauled them back into the fight, and no one knew who was fighting who and Concrete Wall Sawing Bob, the biggest jackhammer operator in the East Bay, stood in the center of the mess laughing and laughing and beating his chest like a gorilla. Grandpop Murphy sat down at the edge of the crowd and rested his head against a keg, his wife bouncing around in circles like she was doing some obscene fat blind Mexican hat dance.

  My mother said, “Yes, yes, yes,” and someone pulled her dress down, and my mother’s husband turned to look when he heard her voice and Pop cracked him upside the head with the family trumpet and I threw up on someone.

  Lura or Tura was bleeding. Blewer and Concrete Wall Sawing Bob were laughing together, clubbing anyone who came within fist. Grandpop Murphy’s wife was a slut with no one to fuck. Grandpop Murphy was dead.

  I cut my way through the crowd and checked Pop mid-swing as he was about to crack one of his new relatives. Mary danced and swung a beer bottle around her head like a lasso. She looked really happy, Mary.

  I pulled Pop toward me and I kissed him on the forehead.

  “You
gone fag?” he said.

  “I love you,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Just don’t go faggot on me.”

  “Go,” I said, and I put my arm around his shoulder and walked him toward his new wife and took her in the other arm, she swinging a beer bottle still and I walked them toward their honeymoon rig, a fancy ’58 Caddy someone had set up for the occasion, baby blue and sparkling and beautiful, an ice chest full of beer in the back seat and a Raiders bobbing-head doll in the back window, Ben Davidson. I opened the door for him. His new wife got in on the passenger side.

  “You’re not my son,” Pop said, “but you’re a good son.”

  “And you’re not my father,” I said, “but you’re a son of a bitch.” And Pop smiled.

  The fight was getting pretty bad. Grandpop Murphy’s wife had nudged Grandpop Murphy and he’d tipped over and she tried to get him back into a sitting position but he tipped over again and I couldn’t hear her but I saw her calling his name, at first softly and with love and then frantic with despair mixed with terror. If her eyes hadn’t been milked with rheum they would have been wild. Lots of other people were down, even some of the kids. Someone had tied tin cans to the bumper of the Caddy and they clanged and sparked as Pop drove off.

  I weaved my way through the fight to Rhonda, who stood untouched and smiling at me. She took my hand. I caught Father Camozzi’s eye and waved at him and he came toward us and I turned to Rhonda and I said, “Marry me.”

  Rhonda smiled and she took my hand.

  Father Camozzi clubbed someone and stepped over a wrangling pair of newly pronounced in-laws. “Marry me,” I said, and I don’t know what I said next, but what I should have said, and what I tell people I said, is this: Rhonda, marry me. Marry me now, here, here amongst and before my people, your people, these asshole warriors of shame and courage and despair and endurance—endurance, Rhonda, the thing we do, endure. Marry me now, here and in their sight and with or without their approval or even knowledge, Rhonda, now and here and know this, Rhonda, that though I am of them and though Oakland will never leave me, my blood and flesh spilled into countless construction sites and playgrounds, blood mixed with concrete and mortar and asphalt and skin now powder inhaled by all my fellow Oaklanders, though the smell of the dumps at which I live will never leave my memory if perhaps my pores, though, Rhonda, my scars roadmap the courses of both adversaries and friends and chart the hanging rebar and wire and cable of sewer and basement and jail-cell window-wire (yes, Rhonda, I’ve been there and seen men weep and soil themselves in abject fear and I was repulsed, not by my own act or my possible fate but by their cowardice and lack of understanding that all can be taken away any instant but their souls, which remain, which, intact, continue in sewer and dump and jail-cell), Rhonda, though I am of them and of this place and will never leave either, would not abandon either even were I able, I am not like them. I’m not like them, Rhonda. Rhonda, I’m not like them. I’m not. Marry me. I’m not like them. Really, I’m not.

  About the Author

  Eric Miles Williamson’s first novel, East Bay Grease, was a PEN Hemingway finalist and listed by both the San Francisco Chronicle and the Los Angeles Times as one of the best books of 1999. His second novel, Two-Up, was listed by the Kansas City Star and the San Jose Mercury News as one of the Best Books of Fiction published in 2006. The Atlantic Monthly said his 2007 book of criticism, Oakland, Jack London, and Me, is “one of the least politically correct texts of our time.” He is an editor of American Book Review, Boulevard, and The Texas Review. Winner of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Christopher Isherwood Foundation, after many years as a laborer Williamson went to college and now works at the University of Texas, Pan American. He lives with his wife, Judy, and their sons, Guthrie and Turner.

  photo by Jean-Luc Bertini