“Well, come on,” Eileen said impatiently, tugging him by the hand toward the car.
“Huh?” Bobby muttered in a daze.
“We’re on Mulholland Drive, we’re supposed to have the Mulholland experience!”
“What . . . ?”
“We’re supposed to screw in the car, of course!”
“In there?” Bobby muttered, looking at the cramped interior of the two-seater. “I don’t think we can really—”
“Of course we can!” Eileen insisted. “People have been doing it up here for at least a hundred years!”
As it turned out, she was right. It was uncomfortable, and difficult, and quick, but he managed to get it up, and get it in, and get her off, and he even managed to come himself. Nevertheless, it was an anticlimax.
“Well, now you’ve had the Mulholland experience,” Eileen said afterward. “Something else, isn’t it?”
In a way that Bobby doubted she could ever understand, she was right.
Saturday, Bobby talked Eileen into taking him to a ball game; they were leaving on Monday for Berkeley, and it was going to be the only chance he would have to see Dodger Stadium.
It was another endless crawl through traffic down to Venice to the ball park built out on pilings and completely surrounded by ocean under a clear azure sky, but, to Bobby, at least, it was worth it. It was one of only three parks left in the majors where the game was played on natural grass, and the Dodgers beat the Mets 8 to 6 in a wild slugfest that ended dramatically with a bases-loaded triple in the bottom of the ninth by Hiro Yamagawa, who last year had become the first .400 hitter in the majors in decades.
The crowd was something else too. In the prime lower-deck seats behind the plate that Bobby had sprung for, remembering Duke, there were well-dressed Anglos, stunning starlets, and actual TV stars, or so Eileen said excitedly as she pointed them out. Out in the bleachers, which were done up as a hillside park without seats, Chicanos and blacks, who seemed to have their own self-segregated sections, whooped and hollered with every hit. A whole section of upper-deck grandstand was filled with military personnel in uniform, who got in for half price. Another part of the upper deck was an organized cheering section, where thousands of people held up cards forming pictures—the Dodgers emblem, company logos, the American flag, even a stylized wing-flapping American eagle—on cues from the P.A. announcer.
There were vendors selling curried popcorn, burritos, beer, sushi, and steamed hot dogs, and all in all, it was the perfect American experience, the essence somehow, of LA.
Some guy she had gone to high school with had invited Eileen to a beach party out near Malibu on Sunday, and early that afternoon, they fought the freeway traffic for an hour and a half, managed to find a parking space, stripped down to the bathing suits they wore under their clothing in the car, and made their way down the jam-packed sand to where a big red helium balloon floating high above the acres of bare flesh marked the scene of the party.
“Now remember, Bobby, not a word about Paris or Europe,” she warned him. “I went to Beverly Hills High with most of these doofs, they’re all a bunch of gringo jingos, and I don’t want you to end up starting a fistfight.”
About twenty people were sitting on beach towels around a metal beer keg, sunning themselves, drinking, making out, eating take-out junk food, while awful martial-sounding max-metal music muttered unheard at medium volume from a portable chip deck.
A big blond surfer type with the ridiculous name of Tab greeted Eileen with a hug and a goose, got them beers, and he and Eileen introduced Bobby around while Bobby stuck to his well-rehearsed road story about returning to Berkeley from a visit back home to his folks in Akron.
And thus began a long lazy sunny afternoon that quite fulfilled Bobby’s image of the archetypal Southern California beach party. He swam. He made a fool of himself trying to ride a motorized surfboard, falling off over and over again, until he had finally swallowed enough of the Pacific to give it up. He necked with Eileen. He played a spaced-out slow-motion netless version of impromptu volleyball with a big balloon filled with a mixture of air and helium.
And, like everyone else, he drank. By the time the sun started crawling down the perfect California sky toward the mirror of the Pacific, everyone was pretty well blotted, a few people had actually puked, no one was inclined toward further athletics, and the drunken bullshit began.
There was a lot of techtalk that bored Bobby speechless, as well as a good deal of pissing and moaning about teachers he didn’t know. There was also a good deal of obscene banter about who was and was not fucking whom, about which he couldn’t care less. It was all a lot of blather by people he didn’t know or care about, and for the most part he just lay there on a beach towel next to Eileen, drinking whatever was passed to him, and zoning out into the deepening blue of the Malibu sky.
“. . . hear Billy’s goin’ in with the 82nd . . .”
“. . . get his dumb ass shot off!”
“Naw, my dad says the beaners’ll go without firing a shot. . . .”
“Bullshit! Gonna be a duster. . . .”
“My ass!”
“My dad says they’re gonna give Baja veterans forty acres, he’s pissed at me for not joining up.”
“Are you for real? The Big Boys got title on everything worth anything down there already!”
“Gonna be a duster!”
“Bullshit! Beaners can’t last a week, and they know it.”
“It’s a Commie gov, ain’t it?”
“So fucking what?”
“So they gotta be figuring the Rooshians—”
“Rooshians won’t do dick, buncha pussies. Didn’t save the Cubans’ asses, did they? Didn’t lift a missile! Too busy corning the Peens!”
“We’re the ones that just corned the Peens!”
“Haw! Haw! Haw!”
“I still say gonna be a duster, war’ll last at least six weeks!”
“Crappo!”
“Economics.”
“What the fuck you know about economics, Butch?”
“My dad works for Zynodyne, he says the fix is already in. They won’t let the beaners go without a fight.”
“They?”
“Defense industry, asshole. Resupply contracts are already out. Biggo buckso. They’re planning on using up a hundred bills’ worth of ordnance on the beaners, min. Lots of overtime already, and they’re looking to hire.”
“Yeah? Short term?”
“Week to week. Hundred an hour, usual double time, triple for weekends. . . .”
“Hey, not a bad deal. . . .”
Bobby’s appalled attention was slowly captured by this drift in the conversation. He had certainly heard enough of this cynical imperialist merde from Dick Sparrow and elsewhere, but to hear it coming out of the mouths of mecs his own age whom he had swum with, played volleyball with, drunk with, was somehow much, much worse.
“Think your dad could do me something?”
“Maybe. . . .”
“Hey, Eddie, your dad works for Collins, don’t he? They hiring short-termers too?”
“Could find out. . . .”
“You guys can’t really be serious!” Bobby finally blurted.
Butch, a big burly guy with short black hair, gave him an open friendly smile. “ ’Course I’m serious,” he said pleasantly enough. “You want, I suppose I could put in a word for you too. . . .”
“La merde!” Bobby snapped without thinking. Eileen, lying beside him, punched him in the small of the back.
“What?”
“You can’t really be serious about going to work in munitions plants!”
“Bobby!” Eileen hissed in his ear.
“Why the fuck not? Hey, hundred an hour, that’s biggo buckso!”
“Making weapons to kill people who just want to be left alone!”
“Left alone! Hey, they ain’t leaving the Americans who bought land in Baja fair and square alone, now are they?”
“It’s their co
untry, isn’t it?”
“Bullshit! Everybody knows Mexico ripped off Baja during the Civil War, what’s his face, Pancho Villa and his frito banditos! We got a right to take back what was ours, like it says inna Monroe Doctrine.”
“Is that supposed to be some kind of joke?”
“What are you supposed to be, some kind of Communist?”
“Hey, Eileen, your boyfriend some kind of Berkeley Red?”
“Beaner-lover!”
There was a long moment of silence. People who had been lolling back and not paying much attention suddenly had their eyes on him. Oh shit, Bobby thought.
“Bobby’s just a little blotted, that’s all,” Eileen said. “You’re drunk, aren’t you, Bobby?”
Bobby sat up, a little woozily. He tried a little smile and a shrug. “I’m not the only one,” he said lightly.
“What do you mean by that?” Eddie said belligerently, his blue eyes more than a little bloodshot.
“Nothing,” Bobby said. “Forget it.”
But somehow things had already gone over the edge. Bobby found himself in the center of a whirlpool of hostile vibes.
“You some kind of Communist?”
“Fuckin’ KGB’s all over Berkeley, my dad says!”
“I’m no Communist!” Bobby insisted nervously.
“Then why you defending the fucking beaners?”
“Just people, is all. . . ,” Bobby said lamely.
“They ain’t people, they’re beaners!”
“Bet the little doof’s a Peen-lover too! What about it, Bobby-boy, the fuckin’ Peens that stole half our fuckin’ country and sold it to the fuckin’ Rooshians, they just people too?”
“They ain’t people, they’re Peens!”
“Nuke ’em till they glow blue!”
“Let ’em eat anti-protons!”
“Let ’em eat frijoles, haw, haw, haw!”
Bobby felt the blood pounding behind his eardrums. His hands, unbidden, balled into fists. The angry pop-eyed faces in the mob outside the American Embassy in Paris swam through his memory, became the faces of these young Americans glaring at him under the open Southern California sky.
AMER-I-CAN, AS-SAS-SAN! AMER-I-CAN, AS-SAS-SAN!
The echo of the chant mocked him twice over. What was the difference between those jingos and these? Except that these assholes were starting to convince him that what he had thought was a lie might be the truth.
Eileen grabbed his hand, and he let his fist unwind into it. But a big part of him, the better part of him, could not let this merde go unanswered. He owed it to his parents, he owed it to himself, and somehow he owed it to America too.
“How can you believe this shit?” he shouted, bolting to his feet. “Don’t you see that you’re talking just like the gringo jingo bastards they say we are? Americans can’t be like this! You just can’t be!”
“What the fuck kind of American are you, you Peen-loving Commie!”
“Fuckin’ Berkeley Red!”
And all at once, everyone was on their feet shouting drunkenly, and Bobby found himself surrounded by what was about to turn into another mob, or, somehow, the same mob.
“Boys!” Eileen moaned patronizingly. “Stop this juvenile horseshit! You’re all blotted out of your minds! You’re too drunk to have a fistfight! You’d just end up puking all over each other!”
Some of the other girls laughed and poked at some of the guys with mock punches, and the moment of physical tension receded a tad.
“Come on, Bobby,” Eileen said, tugging him by the hand. “We’ve got to go now!”
Reeling, realizing how drunk he really was, and how close he had come to getting the crap beaten out of him, Bobby let her lead him away toward the car. Over his shoulder, he saw that her old high school friends had collapsed back onto their beach blankets and were already passing bottles, swilling more beer, and laughing among themselves.
“I told you what a bunch of gringo jingo doofs they all were! You could’ve gotten yourself killed!”
“What’s happened to America?” Bobby sighed maudlinly.
Eileen shrugged. “You’ve met Daddy, haven’t you?” she said.
Bobby managed a wan little laugh. Eileen pecked him on the cheek. “Come on, Bobby, snap out of it,” she said gently. “I’ll show you something better to remember la-la land by.”
“And so we bid a fond farewell to scenic Los Angeles,” Eileen said. “What a zoo! Still, it’s beautiful from up here, isn’t it, where you can pretend you don’t know what’s really going on. . . .”
Bobby had to admit that it was.
They had driven up the Pacific Coast Highway, then taken a long winding canyon road up into the sere brown hills beside the sea, way up to a shelf of land high atop the ridgeline. They had parked the car and walked out to the lip of a cliff, where they now stood, looking out over the Pacific and the beach and the city curving south around the wide bay.
By now, the sun, orange and umber under the purpling sky, was bisected by the mirror of a sea reflecting the blazing perfection of an archetypal Southern California sunset, rosy and violet through the smog.
The lights of the Los Angeles Basin were coming on, glowing up at them through the brown layer of the smog deck, a magnificent electronic enormity foaming up against the Santa Monica Mountains like a great luminescent breaker, sweeping away around the majestic curve of the bay toward San Diego, toward the Mexican border, toward things that seemed quite unreal from this lordly mountaintop vantage.
Bobby knew that the crazed city below was writhing in a superheated torment, that something had gone very wrong down there, that dark deeds were veiled behind the cloak of lights. Yet, like America, it was beautiful still.
As the sun was swallowed up by the ocean, and a tide of darkness slowly rolled across the surface of the sea toward the shore, the vast scintillant city, by some trick of the mind’s eye, seemed to be rising triumphant out of the natural landscape to challenge the washed-out stars—like America itself, beautiful, prideful, a light that not so long ago had been the shining hope of the world.
Or was Los Angeles, like America, slowly sinking back into the primeval darkness, doomed to subside like legendary Atlantis into the oblivion of the sea?
In that moment, as Bobby stood there at the edge of the continent, at the last frontier of the dream, the issue, like the vista, still seemed ambiguous, still seemed in doubt.
* * *
A DELIBERATE INSULT TO MEXICAN SOVEREIGNTY
No Mexican government can seriously consider the American offer to cancel our external debt in exchange for the cession of Baja California. Those who warn that this outrageous proposal is only a thinly veiled ultimatum are, of course, entirely right. But to suggest that the Republic of Mexico has no alternative but to accept the inevitable is treason, pure and simple. The Yankee aggressors may have the planes and the ships and the overwhelming military superiority, and they may indeed be able to work their will against us.
One hundred million Mexicans may be robbed of our land, as we were in 1845, but let it never be said that we were robbed of our honor. We must stand firm against all odds. We must fight to the death for every centimeter of our sacred national soil.
—Noticias de Mexico
* * *
XV
The drive up to the San Francisco Bay area was a big disappointment. Eileen wouldn’t take the Pacific Coast Highway or even 101. “It’d take twice as long that way,” she told Bobby, “and you can’t do any of the driving.” So there was no scenic seacoast road, no Big Sur, no Monterey, no Carmel.
Instead, Eileen took Interstate 5 through the San Joaquin Valley, an arrow-straight freeway through what she told him was the most productive farmland in the world.
Productive it might be, but scenic it wasn’t as they drove for about three hours up the long flat valley floor, past endless fields of crops broiling under a pitiless sun, moistened by huge sprinkler systems, harvested by spidery-looking machinery, watched
over by little observation blimps. It was more of a gigantic food factory than Bobby’s romantic concept of farmland, or worse still, like some kind of military operation against nature itself.
The landscape finally began to change as they climbed out of the valley up into the low rolling hills to the north and west, where it was cooler, moister, and greener, but the improvement didn’t last for long, as the traffic thickened, and big factories sprang up beside the road—mostly defense plants, Eileen told him—and then the usual sprawl of tract houses, shopping malls, fuel stations, car lots, fast-food joints, and billboards that seemed to be characteristic of the approach to California cities.
But then they crossed another range of hills, and quite suddenly they were crawling straight north on a clogged freeway with a stupendous view that quite took Bobby’s breath away.
To the west, beyond a coastal sprawl of industrial crudland, San Francisco Bay was an immense sweep of blue water sheened golden toward its western reaches by the palpable rays of the late afternoon sun. White sails dotted the bay like a fleecing of scattered clouds, and the wakes of boats sliced the azure surface like the contrails of high-flying jets. Far to the northwest, Bobby could just make out the Golden Gate Bridge, ghostly within a bank of fog that was rolling through it and around it like an immense slow-motion breaker, pouring up the hills of San Francisco overlooking the narrow mouth of the broad bay, and wrapping the outlines of the buildings in the crystal mist of legend.
“Now that’s what I call the real California!” Bobby declared.
“You can’t mean Oakland!” Eileen said. “Ugh!”
Between the elevated freeway and the blue waters of the bay, enrobed in brown photochemical smog, was a truly repellent other vista that Bobby hadn’t deigned to notice.
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