First Citizen

by Thomas T. Thomas

  He just shook his head. “Disable, if you must and have no other choices, no other skills. But to disable is not to destroy. You think only in terms of winning and losing. You say, ‘My win is your loss.’ I would rather have you seek a third way, that both can win. Or else both lose something.”

  “Perhaps,” I said, “you’ve been too long on this mountain. The world out there is full of people who don’t give up until either they’re dead or you are.”

  Matsu’s face never lost its smile. “Do you think the world was any different before I came up here? If the people around you cannot learn, if they understand the Tao so poorly that they break their heads against it, then you must teach them, if only to save your own life. There is always a way. Even the rocks learn from the water.”

  “If the water has enough time.”

  “Time is an illusion of the body, as the katas have taught you. There is always a way around time.”

  “But …” I was running out of arguments. I was a rock standing dumb against the flow of his simple optimism.

  “To be human is to be apart from the natural world,” he said. “The rock wears away in the water or tumbles along the streambed because it can do nothing else. The vine reaches toward the sunlight and withers in the frost because it can do nothing else. The owl pounces and the mouse squeals because they can do nothing else. But the human has a mind that can see alternatives, a will that can choose something else. There is always a way. You only have to find it.” He paused. Time stopped. His eyes were looking right at me for once, not past me. But he gave the impression of seeing not me but someone else, far away, in memory. “And if there is not a way,” he said slowly, as if reciting a lesson he’d learned fifty years ago. “If you lack the skill to find alternatives, or your—opponent—cares so much about killing you that none will satisfy him, then you can submit to the natural world and die. As the mouse to the owl. The world will not end. The Tao continues.”

  My head went down in submission. “Thank you, Sensei. I understand that now.”

  Right then, I was lying, a little. I still thought, deep down, that you had to fight enemies and find justice, that winning was better than either losing or patching up a compromise. Since then, his words have proven to be wiser than I could have guessed. And I’m not talking about just a fistfight. …

  The cycle of days at Hakusan went around, more months of training and learning and living. Then one morning after the class had formed up on Hajime, the Master called out, in English: “Student Corbin!” I knew what to expect, as he had done this several times since I had come to Hakusan. Still, it was a shock that it was happening to me. I walked forward and faced him at attention, biting my lower lip.

  “You have learned as much as you can hold at this time,” he said. “I advance you one degree in rank and send you back to the world.” Sensei Matsu gave me a quick grin and then turned a sober face to the class. It took ten minutes for me to gather my few possessions from the cottage I had rebuilt and start walking down the trail. The cadence call of the morning class was soon lost on the wind breathing through the pines behind me. By noon I was back in civilization.

  And did I ever learn the thirteenth kata—which was the whole reason I came to Japan? Yes, a student named Kudasaru taught it to me one afternoon. It has only eight moves, and in half an hour I could perform them perfectly.

  Chapter 9

  Billy Birdsong: Easy Money

  Stuffing a cork up the backside of the Feds had always seemed like a good idea to me. I mean, who had been my biggest source of aggravation right from the start? The Feds.

  The Bureau of Indian Affairs had put my people on a piece of land even the coyotes avoided. The Drug Enforcement Agency had tried to queer the pitch on selling that twelve pounds of coke I had lucked into. The Internal Revenue Service was always hassling about my profits from running the kiddie tricks. The Department of Defense had sent me to Nicco—and jammed my system full of poison when they dusted Managua. The Central Intelligence Agency had probably been behind the kidnapping in Arabia. If anybody was going to clap and cheer when those debt and tax laws finally passed, it was me.

  For a time, it looked like the worst depression anybody would ever see. All the money dried up one morning. The stock market and real estate went bad overnight. Everybody I knew lost his job. But the funny thing was, some things did not change. In San Francisco, anyway, the Safeway stores still had food on the shelves, more of it than before, I think. Pacific Gas & Electric still gave you light when you flipped the switch. Hetch-Hetchy water was still coming out of the tap. The cable cars still rolled; the streets got cleaned. And the main cop was still around the corner in his squad car, dammit.

  For a while, Bank of America was issuing paper scrip backed by its own assets, whatever they were—mostly loans the bank would never collect. On the street, we said “backed by its ass.” But people took it.

  After about six months, MasterCard and Visa got together and fixed a rate of exchange, the New Dollar, at about thirteen cents on the old on. Everyone grumbled and a few of the larger cities tried to issue their own bills. Except they turned into colored paper when you got past the city limits—no good for a national economy. So, in a few weeks, American Express, Diners Club, and most of the banks went along with the McVisa Plan and the currency stabilized as much as it ever does.

  And about that time I got steady work in the pollution control field.

  Happened this way. The Twenty-ninth Amendment had turned the Environmental Protection Agency into a kind of advisory council to big business. A million pages of regulation got squeezed down into The Little Green Book, which everybody thought the big boys would ignore while they stuffed asbestos and other crud into their landfills, poured raw sewage into the Bay, and blew smoke where they felt like it. Except the people still wanted these messes cleaned up. So the EPA hired guys like me.

  I bought a bond for a million new dollars and filed it with the Agency. They, in turn, gave me half of Santa Clara County, the heart of Silicon Valley, for inspection and enforcement. Which means that I looked into all the citizens’ complaints; sampled air, water, and garbage trucks; and “counseled with” the businesses and private individuals who broke the Green Standards in my jurisdiction. Otherwise, I lost my bond and went on my ear.

  Who watched the watchdog—that is, me? Everybody. Neighborhood associations, consumer groups, county health agents, Naderites, you name it. They all had their sampling gear plugged in right alongside mine. Three unresolved complaints in a quarter and I would be out—with the bonding agency looking for a piece of my skin.

  Right away things got very hostile. I had a fistful of complaints about an etching lab called P&L Partners that was shown to be dumping one-tenth-molar solutions of hydrofluoric acid into the sewer system. That is the kind of acid that scratches glass, really bad stuff. So I went and “counseled with” them.

  The guard at the gate paused over his racing form to send me to Reception. The dish at that desk stopped chewing her gum long enough to sign me in and point me toward the office of the Environmental Director. The secretary there put down her coffee, the phone, and a paperback novel and pushed open his inner door. And from inside came a yell: “You got a warrant?”

  “No, sir. But we have had several complaints about—”

  “I don’t do business with you jokers unless you get a Federal warrant. And that’s with the whole specification: the dates, the times, the names, and the complete chemical analysis for each alleged infraction. You got me, Chief?”

  “Maybe we can short-cut some of that paperwork with a simple—”

  “No way, Chief. You just go the whole nine yards with me and then we’ll be in a position to talk.”

  “But you see—”

  “Am-scray, Redskin. You got no business here.”

  What could I do but leave? I put my head down, apologized for bothering him, and walked out.

  And came back that night—you have to work fast to make an im
pression on these people—with a crew from the midnight paving company. We opened the sewer line two feet south of the P&L fence and pumped in nine cubic yards of fast-setting concrete.

  They must have had concrete slopping out of the toilet bowls. It closed them down for a week while they laid a new sewer line. This one went the other way, across the parking lot, back under the building, and into the creek under a culvert right on the edge of their property. Inside of another week, P&L was pumping acid again. So we went back one foggy dawn, down into the creek, and pumped that line, too.

  This time, the Environmental Director came to me at my hole-in-the-wall office in back of a petshop on First Street in San Jose. He threatened me with a suit for breaking and entering, trespass, and vandalism. I introduced him to Elmo Garcia, who dealt Doberman in pups and who, in turn, introduced him to his breeding stock.

  After two more of these counseling sessions and about six weeks’ worth of downtime, the director’s boss got the message that it was cheaper to put in concentrators and filters than to rebuild the sewer system twice a month.

  The P&L people were tough, but they never heard about suffering in silence. They complained plenty and to anybody who would listen, especially to their trade association, the Chamber of Commerce, the Better Business Bureau, and the Rotarians over lunch. Word, as they say, got around, and soon I had the cleanest jurisdiction in Northern California.

  Now you are probably wondering how I made money on a deal like that. After all, I had to put up the bond, appear before the Environmental Protection Agency to answer complaints, pay for the sampling and testing, and arrange for enforcement. So who was paying me?

  When I applied to the Agency for relief, the few remaining bureaucrats in the local office, the lucky survivors of waves of fiscal decimation, grinned at me without any sympathy at all. They surely had no money to pay for enforcement; that was why they had been taken out of the business in the first place, to be replaced by rude amateurs like Billy Birdsong. Let it go to hell, they said behind their smiles. Then the people will wake up to what they have lost. Amendments can be repealed. The budgets will come back. Washington will rise again. As for my problem, the bureaucrats trusted to my “ingenuity and spirit of enterprise.” They were disappointment number one for me.

  Well, when I had first gone into the pollution business, it seemed that the State, county, or municipal governments—any one or all in a row—would gladly pay for a cleaner environment. Now I discovered they had no budget for it. And so long as my bond was on the line with the Agency, why should they? The local administrations were growing fat and strong by choosing carefully among the pieces of the Federal mantle they would or would not pick up after the Twenty-ninth Amendment. Disappointment number two.

  Up until the P&L affair, I had half-thought that the polluters themselves would pay for my “consulting.” But a few subtle approaches—and the unsubtle responses—convinced me they would only cough up to be left alone. Not to have their sewers broken in the name of clean water. Disappointment number three.

  Cash flow—the incoming side—was becoming my biggest problem. I was seriously thinking about abandoning that million-new-dollar bond and going back into the kiddie trade when Jay Corbin came back out of the mountains.

  He telexed me from Japan using the old address and blindly trusting that someone would forward the message. He also expected me to meet him at the airport. Probably carry his bags, too. After brooding about it, I decided to meet him anyway. What else did I have going that day?

  Corbin was the same man, but different. I could see that even as he walked up the jetway. Browner, quieter, with eyes that were older and saw more. He was more like an Indian, a tribal elder perhaps, than the brash kid who had shot up a pink helicopter in the desert. Corbin looked like a wise old man—until he smiled and showed teeth. Then he looked like a hungry jaguar. And he carried his own bag.

  “What have you been doing with yourself, Billy?” he asked as we settled into my car.

  “This and that. Losing money, mostly.”

  “What, at the beginning of a great flood tide like this?” He was smiling, teasing me. “I thought there’d be opportunities coming out of this fiscal thing that ‘any sucker could fell into.’ ”

  Suddenly, I remembered that line of bullshit I had once handed him when he was down on his luck. Yeah, me.

  “Sucker is right,” I said and proceeded to tell him all about the pollution control business. Corbin heard me through. He was staring out the windshield, down the road, with his lips all puckered up. When I ran out of words, he did not leap right in with a lot of great ideas and free advice. Just held his stare.

  After a while he said, “Seems like there should be money somewhere in that mix … somewhere … Have to think about it.”

  Then we talked about Japanese culture, the U.S. economy, or what was left of it, and things generally. That night he stayed in my apartment, which was on the edges of the San Jose barrio, and slept on the couch. Corbin was stone broke and alone. Which took me some getting used to, because he still spoke and acted like a Harvard Law grad and senior partner in an East Coast firm. He could never wash cars or cadge drinks with a manner like that; so the world had to find him something decent to do and ripe to live on. It found him me.

  Jay spent five days lying on the couch, mooching in the refrigerator, drinking with my friends, and listening to their songs. I still called him “Jay,” but among my friends he introduced himself as “Gran,” or “Granny.” That was short for his first name, Granville, which I had never known.

  Sometimes, he did karate exercises in my living room. The quick jabs he would make with his hands at the door frames, and those fantastic spinning kicks with bare feet that ended up half an inch from the chandelier, looked like they would turn the place into kindling and broken glass. But he never touched a thing.

  Most of the time, however, Corbin sat and stared out the window. Or went down to the library and took out books that he just flipped through and put aside. I thought he was in some kind of a funk. I should have known he was thinking hard. Finally, on the fifth day, as we sat down to my special California ranch breakfast with chili-salsa eggs, he quietly observed, “You know, garbage is a really undervalued resource.”

  “Hunh?” I put down my fork. “Something wrong with my food—?”

  “No, no. I mean garbage, trash, wastes, what comes out of the dumpsters, pollution, your current problem.”

  “What about—garbage?”

  “Looked at the right way, it’s valuable. I mean, our thinking is shaped by our definitions, right?”

  “Ahhh-ummm.” That was Corbin’s way: leap out onto the loose, leafy end of the limb and work his way back to what he was really talking about.

  “Right, definitions,” he plowed on. “And we have always defined garbage as something to be thrown away. Prehistoric peoples had their middens and shell mounds; we have the town dump. Everyone knows that colorful characters can find useful and interesting things in the dump, at the wrecker’s yard, in garbage. But there’s a stink such things have that goes beyond the nose. It says, somebody didn’t want this, it has no value.”

  “So, perfesser?”

  “So, if you redefine garbage, it works out to be the most valuable product in the natural world.”

  “What product?”

  “Mineral ore! You look at the big open-pit copper mines that people were digging in Utah, Montana, and Arizona early in the nineteen-oughts, teens, and twenties. Were they pulling nuggets of solid metal out of the ground? They were not. The ore at Ajo, Arizona, was something like one-half percent copper. They’d raise a ton of dirt to get maybe ten pounds of metal—and that was after a lot of chemical processing. And how much copper is there in your average pile of city garbage?”

  “How should I know?”

  “Two to four percent. Forty to eighty pounds per ton.”

  “Of pure copper?”

  “Well, some of it, the wire in motor windings
and electrical parts. More of it’s in alloys like brass and bronze. And that’s just one metal. There’s steel and tin, about eight to twelve percent, mostly from thrown-away food cans. Aluminum, twelve to fifteen percent, from beer cans, pie plates, and packaging. There’s glass from bottles and jars. All of these products are in an already energized state—”

  “What does that mean?”

  “These things are refined from their basic ingredients with energy. Huge amounts of electrical energy to smelt aluminum, which is why so many Third World countries that build hydroelectric projects put in an aluminum smelter, even if they have no bauxite. Aluminum is exportable electricity. Look at how many smelters grew up around the Bonneville projects in the Pacific Northwest.

  “Steel and glass are also made with energy—that is, heat. The cost of the iron ore or silica is incidental to the energy inputs to the process. And all these products are just lying there in your garbage, waiting for someone to pull them out, process, and sell them.”

  “My garbage?”

  “You’ve got the territory and—oh, boy! In Silicon Valley, you’re getting gold salts, specialized acids, rare earths, and other unique chemicals, probably in attractively large concentrations. Billy, you’re a rich man.”

  “Okay, garbage has percentages of metal in it. And glass. But most of it is still trash.” I was grumpy because my specialty eggs were getting cold on his plate.

  “Definitions again, Billy. Most of it is still paper and plastics, vegetable fiber, and animal fats. Garbage to you, but wood pulp, oil products, and organic chemical feedstocks to an industrialist, or anyone who has studied our scarce natural resources.

  “At the very least, you can pelletize this stuff after you take the metal and glass out. The cellulose and fibers, helped along by the fats and plastics, burn with about the same Btu rating as bituminous coal. And just about as cleanly—which is to say, not all that clean, but scrubbers and filters will take care of the smoke. Of course, pellets are just the quick buck. Long term, you will want to fractionate that material into wood and oil precursors, backtracking your enterprise into their natural resource markets.”