Girl of My Dreams

by Peter Davis

  The train jolted as though it might have run over a small animal. I pulled myself up from the dream within my dream. The man next to me was still upright, his eyes now shut as if someone had put pennies on them. He bounced stiffly at the jolt yet his eyes did not open. When I looked at him his lips curled into an admonitory smile. Did he see me through his lids, was he dreaming himself?

  We were lumbering into San Francisco.

  It was after dawn. I was not aware of sunlight. Clack-clack, clack-clack, outside the train the figures were dim, bustling. The faces inside the car arose. The train had stopped. I hurried to my compartment for my suitcase, and when I returned to the coach the souls were moving in the aisle. I stood behind the card players, still in their derbies, looking like four bowling balls in a row. Behind me the sad-eyed mother carried her baby, and the others appeared to have no luggage, only their underslung dismal air. I walked out of the train, out of the station, into the wall of fog.

  16

  Festival of Resistance

  You don’t know what it is to be killed until you are brutally, abruptly, surprisingly killed—by someone you thought friendly, a comrade—and after that you will know, it hardly needs declaring, nothing at all. You will presently be extinct. Your knowledge shrinks as you watch your life shrink, watch the knife with the blade eight, ten inches long, make its unstoppable way toward you. Ashes to ashes and nothing to nothing.

  The knife was at my arm, held by the enemy I’d thought a friend. Why my arm? He only wants to scare me, I was thinking hopefully as I tried to retreat. At the same time I could see the knife headed north toward my neck.

  As a child I saw chickens killed that would flap around after their heads were neatly hatcheted off. One managed a circuit of my grandfather’s barn, 360 degrees, coming neatly, amazingly to rest at his feet while he still held the gleaming though stained instrument of its beheading. He laughed. “Will you look at that, Owen? The creature doesn’t know it’s dead.” It was doubtful I’d make it around the barn.

  I held the knife back, that is I held the wrist holding the knife, trying to push it away, but this bulging arm against my own, though twice the age of my arm, was pure brawn, muscled and sinewed and bicepped from thousands of jobs of dockwork, from its hefting and hauling, probably from numberless fights in waterfront bars, until my arm was no match for it despite the doubling, trebling, of my strength through fear.

  But was it only fear, fear and desperation, I was feeling? Was there not also the sense that at last, like San Francisco itself, this was something real? And was there not the further sense that my enemy, who had earlier been chummy if not my chum, was in some schoolish way making a mistake that, if only one of our teachers were present, she would have quickly rectified? “No, Steve” (which name I’ll temporarily donate to this stevedore), “Owen is your friend, or at least ally, and you remember we had ‘ally’ in vocabulary last week and it meant someone on your side who is joined with you in a common purpose, so please, Steven, let Owen go, and Owen, you let Steve loose too or I’ll have to keep you both in detention after class and send you to the vice principal who is not stingy with his ruler. No fighting on the playground. Now, Steve, right now!”

  But there was no time, no playground to be rescued from by the benevolent teacher, because time was about to stop, four, three, two, and I could hear my breaths as I wondered, since they were surely to be my last, if I had ever heard my own breaths before. How did they smell. The trivia of the condemned facing his executioner.

  Mossy had said he thought people would like to see a disaster worse than the Depression. New techniques in miniature and special effects would let him show, convincingly, an earthquake as it destroyed block after block of the great metropolis. “Tell me,” he had said, “exactly what people were doing before the quake struck, what their brothers and mothers-in-law were doing, the way the woman next door was pulverized. Give me details, what happened every second of the quake. How did they survive? Even better, how did those who died die? And then the fire. The fire that follows will be the gravy on the roast beef.”

  Now I was the beef about to be carved, the disaster worse than the Depression. Except no one would ever know. Mossy would miss the picture I didn’t bring back more than he would me, and Curtt Weigerer would wonder where the rest of his thousand dollars was.

  When I arrived in the city, San Francisco not only felt bracing but was also visible to me. I saw through the fog to a place I could understand, or thought I could. Pure and knowable, apparent and transparent—this was the steep-hilled, sea-girt city I entered. One knew where one stood in San Francisco even when the place swam in fog. In Los Angeles, some of the poor and the working class were religious or political freaks, enthusiastically in favor of beating up a labor organizer; some of the rich, on the other hand, were Communists. They may have been the most casual, careless Communists, with butlers, pools, Japanese yard men, may have been cheerfully, hypocritically unaware of the disconnect between their behavior and their ideology, yet they colored themselves Red and called for the abolition of private property, called for the overthrow of the existing structures of state and capital. In San Francisco the poor, the workers, a slice of intelligentsia were where Reds were found if Reds there were at all, and the rich gazed out of the windows of their clubs with horror at any sign of unions. What a relief!

  The papers had done interviews on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the quake in 1931, and that’s where I started. At the doughty Call-Bulletin I bumped into a half sober reporter his colleagues called Roughride Reynolds because he’d actually been with Teddy Roosevelt more or less charging up San Juan Hill in the Spanish American War. Ruddy, big-bellied, laughing in every sentence as he swilled his beer. He told me the whole charge was a sham, that the troops had simply walked up an undefended rise and that he, Reynolds, had staged the photograph that ultimately put the first Roosevelt in the White House. After the war he’d come west and landed on the old Evening Bulletin, covering the earthquake when it struck. “Ought-six,” he said, “not one of us thought we’d get out alive. First the quake scared us half to death, then the fire ate up the city.”

  I read a few interviews Roughride had done with earthquake survivors for the 1931 series, but he’d lost their addresses. “Fact is, Sonny,” he said to me, “I made up a lot of this, haw haw. Go down into the Tenderloin, or Fisherman’s Wharf, old-timers will talk to you. Making a picture, eh? Better have a gentleman of the Fourth Estate in it. Haw.”

  At Hearst’s Examiner, I saw a newsman named Hoover Townsend, a ramrod in pinstripes and a vest. It was hard to imagine him as anything but a banker. I asked what drew him into this line of work. “Someone has to uphold community standards,” he said. His only interviews were with Nob Hill crusties who had their servants tell them what damage the quake and fire were doing.

  Better luck at the Chronicle, where a reporter named Jack Quin sent me to his cousin Mike who had not only done interviews but also published a pamphlet on the earthquake, A Celestial Joke, a bitter screed on the class distinctions present even in a natural disaster. “Oh sure,” Quin told me, shooing his unruly red hair off his freckled Irish face, “everyone pulls together, everyone’s in the same boat, the quake reduces everyone to the same level of horror—for all of an hour, two at most. After that the swells take over. ‘Dora, would you make certain there’s marmalade for the mister’s toast, Bannister will bring round the brougham so Lavinia and myself can survey the destruction downtown. Marquez, do give last night’s leftovers to the Ladies Aid but be back to have supper on the table by eight. We’ll be wanting the lamb shank this evening.’” Poor Jim Bicker—Mossy was right—would have loved this guy.

  Mike Quin slipped his voice back out of his impression of a prissy Nob Hill bluenose. “Christ on a crutch but I’d like to have seen some of them go without their damn lamb shank for one bloody evening!”

  I told him I wanted to meet waterfront people who had been around since the turn of the century—g
amblers, lowlifes, barkeeps, prostitutes. “You’re the boss,” he said, and sent me off to what was left of the old Barbary Coast. Waterfront dives were new to me, but it wasn’t hard to get people talking. “What were you doing at the time of the earthquake?” I’d ask, buying someone a beer or a shot. “About what I’m doing now,” they’d all start, and then the tales would pour.

  The Barbary Coast had mostly been destroyed in the earthquake and fire, but the grizzled barflies rebuilt the taverns, opium dens, gambling houses, flophouses, and whorehouses for me as if they were all still around the corner. As I listened I saw the henchmen at the studio as neighborhood enforcers with Mossy as their double-breasted head gangster. Pammy would be a singer in a posh gaming house Mossy had in a shakedown vise until the detectives Nils Maynard and Yeatsman foiled him and his crooked cohorts. I myself was the enterprising reporter who exposed the whole scheme.

  A one-legged bartender told me he saw three men trapped on the roof of a burning building. “Must have been two thousand people down in the street, stopping to watch as they ran from the flames a block away. A company of soldiers were trying to keep order. The three men on the roof were screaming for help as the fire climbed closer and the roof began to cave in. The Army captain ordered his sharpshooters to aim at the men on the roof so they wouldn’t burn. Boom. Boom. Boom. The soldiers shot the three men to kingdom come but at least they weren’t roasted alive.”

  An old lady with dyed blonde hair rasped that she’d been a madam and her establishment escaped the flames. “No ya wasn’t no madam, Minnie,” one of the workmen brayed at her, “Ya was a workin’ girl in the old Ruby House, ya know ya was.” The woman joined the laughter and went on. “Ordered all my girls,” she said, “to give it away to any cop or fireman. Saving the city, they were, deserved a little relaxation.”

  (Pretty quickly it was obvious that oral history is, in practice if not by definition, nostalgic calisthenics, subject to contamination from what happened later as well as the usual discrepancies imposed by nostalgia itself.)

  After the first day Mike Quin met me for a drink, excited about what he claimed was a far better story than the earthquake. “It’s happening today right under your nose,” he said. I said I didn’t know what he was talking about. “Nevermind, Skinny, make your goddamn moving picture.”

  The next morning I went on hearing about such things as the stampede of cows up Market Street bellowing and wild with fright. “The street opened up in the aftershock,” an elderly man in Union Square told me as I tried to visualize how special effects would handle this, “and swallowed all the cattle into its chasm, all but a baby calf who wandered over to me as I crouched by a swaying building that somehow didn’t fall. It was ridiculous but I started petting the calf. A Catholic priest came by and said we had to get the ferry to Oakland, and he led us down to the ferry, the calf following me like I was its mother. Ten thousand people were trying to catch that ferry, and we waited five hours.

  “People huddled together here in Union Square,” the old man went on, “as the fire lit up the night sky. One group was praying loud when a crazy man came by and screamed the Lord had sent this to them so they shouldn’t pray to him any more. A great roar shook everyone, and it was an eight-story building collapsing like a crushed biscuit. I was walking behind a fellow swinging his lunch pail as he tried to report for work. A cornice from a bank broke off and flattened him. The Army dynamited buildings to deprive the fire of nourishment, whole blocks of buildings. Wagons with horses still harnessed, drivers in their buckboards lay dead in the streets.”

  “The unbelievable worst I saw,” a bartender told me on my third day, “was I came on a man trapped in the burning wreckage of a grocery store. Meat was cooking around him, chops and steaks from the butcher’s counter barbecuing. The man lay silent, pinned under two huge wooden beams. A rookie cop ran up and got a bunch of us to try to move the beams. We couldn’t budge them. The man didn’t begin to scream until one of the beams was on fire at his legs. He begged the young cop to shoot him. The cop kept pulling on him while the man pleaded to be shot. No one could move the poor fellow. Finally the policeman asked the man his name and address. The man shouted it out. ‘Phineas Mulford!’ he yelled, a name I’ll take to my own grave. The rookie took the address, and he crossed himself before he shot the man square in the head. But he couldn’t stand what he did, and he ran around the corner and shot himself.”

  A woman at Fisherman’s Wharf was the first person who let me know what Mike Quin was referring to when he said something else was happening in San Francisco. “What’s going on right now, Sonny, in this year of Our Lord 1934, is going to make or break this city. Never you mind God’s little hiccup back in Oh Six.” She pointed to a group of men marching picket across the street. They shouted and held signs.

  Squat, indefatigable Mike Quin was on me every evening after I finished my day’s quotient of survivors. Wanting to know what I’d done, nudging me to do something else while I shut him up with earthquake lore. I was buying the drinks; he probably figured let the skinny make his own mistakes. I might have seen an item in the morning paper, but I was so intent on finding the story Mossy wanted, figuring out his movie, that the occasion in San Francisco, heating up in front of my eyes, had eluded me.

  The morning after I saw the marching pickets I let Quin take me down to the Matson docks. The SS Lurline was parked there, sleek, shining, a Thoroughbred of the sea. I looked at the Lurline, luxury on the waves, wishing I were on it. I saw Pammy’s eyebrows, each really the watercolor of an eyebrow, and imagined how she’d look on the deck at sunset. I didn’t hear Quin. “Paralyze the docks with their strike,” Quin was telling me, probably for the third time. “The Lurline doesn’t look as though she’ll ever sail to Honolulu again, does she? Not a soul aboard. Then they’ll paralyze the city itself, maybe the whole coast. You hear me, Skinny?” He called me that, I knew, not because I was particularly thin but as a way of whittling me down to the size of an apprentice.

  Quin would get a kick out of writing my little obit after the stevedore finished me off with six or seven thrusts of his blade. Skinny got in over his head. A featherweight going in against that big lunk Primo Carnera. Who’s to blame, the featherweight for being brazen or the Dago for doing what comes naturally? “Ya wanna see us working for pennies like Coolie labor, dontcha?” the huge stevedore yelled at me. “No, no,” I gasped as I ducked away, “I don’t, I don’t.” He dealt me a clean slice in my leg as I kangaroo hopped away from him. “Lay off, ya big Kraut,” another stevedore yelled, “He’s like the rest of us only been to school.” But this guy ran off, and my tormentor wasn’t buying. “He’s nothin’ but a Hearstie is what he is,” he sputtered. He had me against a storefront, and he smelled blood. Facing death, I understood for a tenth of a second how he was right in a way. I might as well work for Hearst since I was a voyeur here, hoping to profit in my own way from the striking longshoremen’s grief and pain.

  After we left the Matson docks Quin had taken me around the Embarcadero to the dockworkers’ headquarters a few blocks from where the foundation was being laid for the bridge to Oakland. Alleys and small streets chopped into the Embarcadero all along the waterfront. This was where the Barbary Coast had once darkened and enlivened the neighborhood before the earthquake and fire destroyed much of it.

  Quin was introducing me to the city he had a lover’s quarrel with. “Six hundred thousand of us here, Skinny,” he said, “fifty percent white collar, fifty percent laborers. Blessed with harbors and panoramas. From the heights you look out over blue waters to the rolling Marin hills and the mountain peaks beyond. At night the cities across the Bay—Oakland, Berkeley, Alameda—sparkle with a million lights, and if a moon makes its appearance the waters present a level meadow of silver. A young Italian, big, broad-shouldered, graceful, echoes the elegance of the city. Center fielder for the Seals, boy from Fisherman’s Wharf swings his bat like an eagle spreading its wings.

  “Through the heart
of San Francisco cleaves the wide Market Street,” Quin said, “backbone of the city. The groove down the center of Market holds the cable for cable cars and we call it the slot. If you’re north of the slot, you’re prosperous, at least a merchant. South of the slot you’re a laborer, you’re in the Irish stronghold, you’re a Catholic. If you have a little store you’re paying protection to the Muldoon brothers, as sorry an excuse for Irishmen as ever disgraced the shamrock. The Muldoons run half the cops and three quarters of the whorehouses of which there are well over a hundred. More tentacles than an octopus, more poisonous than a nest of rattlesnakes.

  “The residential sections reach out from Market Street over all the hills of the city—here are the Italians, over there the Chinese, down there the Negroes, up there the swells, each district as sharply defined and controlled as an autonomous republic. But the key to everything in San Francisco is the little knot of shipowners and dock owners, often the same people of course.”

  “Why is one small group,” I asked, “the key to so much else?”

  Quin patrolled his subject like a cop on the beat he knew better than anyone else. Which didn’t prevent him from additional roles as a teacher and a preacher. “Because, Skinny,” he said, “cargo is the word that drives this town. Before we’re anything we’re a seaport. Most of us, one way or another, get our income from the transactions that surround the movement of cargoes. Insurance companies, banks, real estate brokers, wholesale firms, shops, hospitals, schools, restaurants, theaters, hotels—all exist for the service or entertainment of a community devoted to the constant flow of boxes, barrels, bales, the tonnage that feeds or clothes or houses distant populations and brings back raw materials and cash. Yet the men who lay hands on this cargo and keep the living pulse of the community beating basically derive no share in its returns. And the seamen who bring in the cargo, whose hazardous work is the cornerstone of the city’s prosperity, are looked down on as one of the lowest forms of existence. The straw bosses do the hiring, and they belong to the owners. A longshoreman gets up before dawn, trudges dock to dock. Often he finds no job at all and when he does he has to pay a piece to the straw bosses, which keeps the longshoremen in competition with each other and drives wages down. Company unions, sure, but no organization workers can call their own. Corruption rules the system, and the owners, who seldom even lay eyes on the cargo, much less lift it, rule the corruption. That’s our city, and that’s what the strike is about.”