Welcome to Oakland Read online

  Welcome to Oakland

  a novel

  by

  Eric Miles Williamson

  Copyright

  Welcome to Oakland Copyright © 2009

  by Eric Miles Williamson

  Published by Raw Dog Screaming Press

  First Edition

  Cover photography: James F. Nelson

  Cover design: Kevin Prufer

  Book design: Jennifer Barnes

  Portions of this book have appeared in the following journals:

  Arroyo; Boulevard; The Chattahoochee Review; Rosebud; The Texas Review

  Thanks to the Christopher Isherwood Foundation

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2009922633

  www.rawdogscreaming.com

  Dedication

  In Memoriam P.J. Rondinone

  Nobody dast blame this man.

  —Arthur Miller

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Also by Eric Miles Williamson

  Welcome to Oakland

  About the Author

  Also by Eric Miles Williamson

  Novels

  East Bay Grease

  Two-Up

  Nonfiction / Criticism

  Oakland, Jack London, and Me

  Welcome to Oakland

  I’m always happiest when I live in a dump, and I’ve lived in some serious shitholes.

  I’ve lived in people’s backyard sheds that stank of fertilizer and gas-powered lawnmowers, in the storage rooms of the construction companies and snorted diesel fumes all night, in garage apartments that haven’t been converted into apartments, concrete floors and rickety wooden work benches against the walls, the stink of cat piss and dead possum. When I’ve found a place for my car where I don’t get hassled by the cops or the neighbors or the business owners or the nightwatchmen, I’ve crashed in the back of my stationwagon.

  Right now, I am one happy motherfucker.

  I’m living in a garage, detached, single-car, in the middle of bumfuck Missouri. Warrensburg. Costs me $200 a month. The floor is concrete, stained with oil because the previous tenants have been Chevys and Fords. It’s summer, a hundred and five degrees, and if I turn on a light at nighttime the bugs stream through the holes in the walls and ceiling like some shit from a horror movie. Mornings I drink my coffee from a cup with a lid because if I don’t I end up swallowing spiders and roaches and gnats and flies that swim in my cup. I wake with bugs in my mouth, in my ears. Until I started wearing sweatpants with elastic bands around the waist and ankles, they’d crawl right up my asshole.

  For a shower there’s a hose been run in from outside hanging from a hook on the ceiling, drain’s a hole in the floor, and when water’s not going down the hole, bugs crawl up it. These are some weird-ass bugs, too. I don’t know what the fuck they are. Missouri designer bugs, is what. Winters I kick the snow off my shoes when I walk in and it stays there, doesn’t melt, and I have to sweep it out. When I shower, the water turns the floor into a fucking ice-skating rink.

  I’m sure as shit not living here for some romantic writerly reason, slumming with the people so I’ll have something to write about, being some heartfeeling tourist in the intestines of the world. Dig: I’m not one of those trust fund art-fags who thinks it’s fun to hang out with “the people,” who does his sympathetic pity-essay for NPR on the weekend, cataloging the denizens of the student ghetto he lives in so as to preach art-Christianity to the other condescending snobs who listen to that crap, pretending that they care and understand, making like they do anything but sneer at the pregnant drug addict teenage whore who’s weeping for the peppy yet understanding and compassionate interviewer. I’m not one of those wine-drinking sushi-eating faggots who takes up causes he’s never had anything to do with (men who call themselves feminists! Good God!), who thinks it’s groovy to wear work boots that have never stepped in concrete or hot asphalt, who buys faded and ripped up jeans, who drinks Bud because it’s cool and not because it’s the best they can afford. I’m not like those guys you see at the coffee shops pretending they have something to write in their notebooks, dressed in black like that makes them cool instead of dressed in black Ben Davis work duds so the grease don’t show.

  This book is not about my overcoming of adversity or about my struggle against my environment, because I like my environment and always have, excepting the time I got uppity and married into the suburbs. It’s about people who work for a living, who not only get dirty but who never get clean, who wash their hands with Gunk and solvent and bleach and Lava soap, who scrub their skin with chemicals and the skin dries out and goes shiny as buffed leather, and when the skin finally peels like a molting snakeskin beneath is still grease and oil and permanent filth that goes down to the bone. They’re characters—to you—but to me they’re my people, the ones I grew up with, my father who beat truck tires with a sledge hammer until he worked himself to death, my brother who was killed by a gang on the Mexican streets of Oakland, my other brother dead wrapped around a lightpost in a night-drunk carheap, the men I worked with on construction sites and dozens of them now dead in needless and stupid accidents not of their making, the Hell’s Angels who reared me and who threw me a party in Oakland at Dick’s Restaurant and Cocktail Lounge after I wrote down the first part of this story, posting a guard at the door to keep out the non-smokers, at the party telling me the gory stuff I’d not remembered or not known or neglected to commit to the page for fear they would not be flattered, when in fact they would have.

  Living in a trailer when I was growing up—a nineteen-footer—next to the Mohawk gas station where Pop worked, and then later living in the black ghettos of Oakland and having my white ass whomped at least once a month, and then being homeless while I had a job driving a dump truck because I couldn’t afford the deposit and first-and-last-month’s rent on an apartment, I got stupid and decided I wanted the good life, the suburb life, that I wanted to live where people mowed their lawns and washed their cars and drank water that didn’t have flakes of rust settling to the bottom of the glass.

  I wanted a family that wasn’t fucked up like mine, a family in which the grandfather hadn’t boned his daughter, in which the kids knew who their parents were, a family that didn’t have to live in a trailer or move every year because they got evicted, a family that didn’t have to wait reunions until people got out of jail or rehab. I wanted kids who didn’t have to deal with over a dozen step-parents and countless ex-step siblings. I wanted to marry a woman who didn’t have some other man’s jism drooling down her jowls when I got home from busting my ass all day at work, a woman not like my mother who jumped the fence like a bitch-cat in heat every time there was a male neighbor under thirty in a two-mile radius, whose kids wouldn’t walk in on her humping five or six dudes at a shot.

  I wanted a good wife who smiled at me when I walked in the door at day’s end and took my suit-jacket and handed me a glass of iced tea and asked me how my day was, and I’d say, “Just fine! Let’s see if your parents want to have dinner with us,” and she’d say, “I’ve already invited them, and they’ll be here any minute!” and we’d both grin like idiots and look around our house at the clean, light-colored furniture and white shag carpet that had never been soiled by oil or grease or diesel or transmission fluid or the blood of family, friends, or enemies. I wanted it all: the house, the car, the kids, the in-laws, the retirement fund, the lawnmower, the washer and dryer and electric goddamn can opener.

  I got married. I cleaned up and went white-collar, wore t-shirts with collars and pussy b
rown shoes with tassels like I was some fairy, gained fifty pounds and became a fatass like my new neighbors. Bitch went vegetarian on me after we were married half a year. Organic tomatoes. Shampoo, not tested on animals. Tofu hotdogs, for fuck’s sake. What the fuck are those?

  I’d had girlfriends from the suburbs before, and I didn’t mind the way they covered up their vegetarian spice-stink with organic perfume and herbal deodorant. I slipped them the dick when they came slumming in my hood, cruised on over to Oakland’s nasty to piss off their pasty parents, brought them home after their curfews to fancy houses with mowed lawns and garaged cars with barking curs that had more expensive haircuts than anyone in my family has ever had, ever. I’ve seen those freaked out porch lights come on and the mommies and daddies come to the door and scope my stationwagon and me, and I’ve seen the terror in their eyes when they’ve seen my “Yep, I screwed your little bitch” smile.

  “She’s spawned with the scum, Sir, Ma’am.”

  They made me want to puke, the pleat-slacked tassle-shoed satin-sheet penny-loafer alligator-shirt clean-shaven Gold’s Gym American Express SUV blowjob at the strip-joint Starbuck’s BMW crystal rocks glasses gas fireplace bottled water wine with a cork Heineken hot tub mowed lawn entertainment center waterbed fancy cracker twenty-dollar haircut mall-shopping black sock clipped fingernail nosehair-trimmed contact lens wearing mail-order catalog easy-listening ski slope Hawaii Holiday Inn flower garden brand name grocery fresh veggie only pussies, and their bitches squatted like fat bitch turkeys in their McMansions, inbred retarded poodles yapping and pissing on the Italian marble tiles. Those suburban runny little shits are insured against everything—fire, flood, earthquakes, bodily injury, bad husbands and wives, ingrate spawn. No amount of insurance, though, can take away their fears. Where I come from we don’t need insurance because we’re already at the bottom. Sue me? Right. What you going to take, my eight-track collection of Creedence and Santana and Tower of Power? Fuck you. Back home, we’re not afraid of shit except not having enough loot to hold court on Friday night at Dick’s Restaurant and Cocktail Lounge, ten whiskeys and gallons of beer and plastic baskets of fried zucchini and pretzels.

  But they only made me want to puke because I knew they were so far out of reach, so way out there that I’d never be allowed into anything more than an occasional pair of non-skid-marked not-bought-at-Sears fancy silk lace-trimmed panties. I wanted an address, a phone number, a normal life that didn’t surprise me at all. I wanted a television I watched night after night, a bed, and curtains. I wanted to be happy, like they were. Like they are.

  Now I’m really fucking happy. I’m happy because the stink of my dump has replaced the stink of the suburbs I attained. Now I am wise. I’d rather smell like ghetto shit or country death-rot fertilizer and rotting deer carcass than suburban potpourri.

  I am not a milkman, a postal worker, a cab driver, a ditchdigger. I’ve delivered newspapers, I’ve poured concrete, I’ve scrubbed the coffee stains from bosses’ mahogany desks, from plush white carpet, I’ve had my skin burned off by hot tar and asphalt, I’ve manufactured healthfood, I’ve built freeway overpasses, I’ve mixed drinks at lonesome bars and at bars where I had to wear their starched uni-colored uniform. I was a caretaker in Marin County watching over private tennis courts, protecting nylon nets from theft in the night. I have trowelled the concrete slabs your glass and steel building rests upon.

  I’ve done the shit work, the work the fat-faced red-neck whiskey-gutted blue-collar grunt has done. I’ve watched seven men die on construction sites, seen men flopping on the ground like fish in the dirt, their pants fouled, seen men with their skulls split and splattered like hammer-beaten watermelons, seen the way the corpses’ eyes clouded and ceased to see. I’ve passed out from exhaustion before lunchtime. But I’m not a postal worker, I’m not a milkman, and as poor as I might be, as little money I might have to spend on VCR’s and wristwatch-televisions and ice-making refrigerators, I still haven’t become a bucket-headed middle-class television-stupored mat of toilet blood. The “I” of this story, this thing, is the most important character. That’s me, T-Bird Murphy.

  I called a chick poet—one of those baggy pants silver jewelry no makeup bumpersticker healthfood hairy-armpit types—and I read her what I’ve just written, and she got pissy and said, “People don’t want to know the truth. That’s why they read fiction. You’re just telling the truth, and the people who read books are the very ‘art fags’ you’re railing against.”

  The art fags didn’t like my last book and they’re going to like this one even less. I showed some of this book to my agent, and he fired me. He said, “I can’t help feeling like one of the people that T-Bird would like to see dead.” He was right. Art fag.

  Big fuck. I’m not writing for art fags.

  I write for the not yet born and the dead.

  I don’t write for you.

  Or for the gang of housewives who invited me to a bar to talk to me the last time I wrote a book.

  “How much of this really happened?” one asked.

  “The editors made me cut the bad parts,” I said. “It was much worse than I was allowed to write about.”

  That got them gooey. They bought me more drinks, which suited me fine, because I was broke. Then the good looking one, a woman maybe 35 years old, the most promising writer in the writer’s group they all agreed and dressed in appropriate low-cut black, started telling about her new Winnebago that was being paid for with her ex-husband’s child support money since she’d “married up” and gotten herself a plastic surgeon who specialized in fake titties for hags and strippers. Her ex, she chortled, was now mopping floors at the bar across town, paying sixty percent of his take-home pay in child support.

  I knew him. I’d heard his story. I’d been to his trailer. I’d puked in his toilet. He was a good man. He gave me another beer. He told me the route to drive home so no cops would catch me. I’ve driven drunk exactly seven or eight thousand times. I’ve never been caught. I’m not stupid, after all.

  She wasn’t an art fag.

  She was an art cunt. Art Cunts wear fancier clothes, and they’re not drunk before they start drinking for the day. Art Cunts know who their parents are—or so they think. Art Cunts have for their dowries houses—wired with cable and automatic garage door openers and garbage disposals and ice-making frost-free refrigerators and Mexicans to mow the lawn neat as a carpet, underground sprinklers and grounded plug outlets—and they come equipped with cars and washing machines and promises that you don’t have to worry about your retirement fund. Spend it now! My Art Cunt inheritance will take care of our Art Cunt retirement! We won’t have to worry about a thing, honey bunches. Honey bunches. Honey fucking bunches.

  Are you an Art Cunt?

  By the way, the occasional “you” in this book isn’t a stylistic tic. It’s an implication, a chastisement, an insult. It’s not addressed to some universal “You,” no. It’s addressed to you personally. Take it to heart, motherfucker or motherfuckerette. I don’t want to hear about your pain. Fuck you. I’ve howled and cried until my eyes bled from salt. I got no sympathy for you. I eat my own shit every day.

  Eat yours.

  You might think it tastes better than mine, but I bet it don’t. Sushi shitbag.

  You want sympathy? Talk to your psychiatrist, your counselor, your guru, your swami, your fortune teller. Talk to your goddamn mommy. Talk to that wife or husband or yours who pretends they love you and who loathes the way you smell, the stink of your age. If I ever meet you, I’ll probably not like you. I’ll probably do my damnedest to make sure you don’t like me. I sure as shit ain’t going to comfort you, give you a story larded and stuffed with redemption and hope.

  I’d kick you in the cunt, except it’d mess up my shine.

  I’ve looked out of my window at night and seen the smog, I’ve breathed the same crud in the air that
you have, I’ve walked out my door at three in the morning and smelled the stench of the great American armpit. I know it’s there, and I don’t claim to embrace it. I condemn it. And I condemn you.

  Back in Oakland, in the neighborhood, I was one of the folk. I could walk down 98th Avenue and every other warehouse or shop was run by someone I’d known since I was a kid pumping their gas, back when I lived in the trailer next to the Mohawk with Pop. I’d been in their houses during holidays, and I’d sweated it out with their kids in school trying to learn how to read and shit like that. No matter what I did, no matter how many times I showed up to work hungover or stupid, no matter what kind of screwups I did on the job that cost the big man money, the foremen and managers were my compadres, and the job stayed or I got fired with the best refs you’ve ever seen ever. And the next boss understood the code and hired me and I got checks long enough until I could line up another job soldering or welding or laying brick or asphalt, busting tires or running fence or lumping crates at the docks, jackhammering or guniting or riprapping or pouring mud or sheetrocking or doing something really nasty. Those cool old dudes took us on knowing all along that they’d eventually have to fire us and send us to the next guy down the street, and that when they did, we’d get our shit together for six months or so, do a good job for long enough to make us worth the checks until we started on the skid.

  Some advice for you: if you want to get a job, don’t wear new workboots when you meet the boss. Your boots need to be old and sucked dry by concrete, spotted with roofing tar, the laces tied back together where they’ve broken. You want your shirt to be torn and dirty, and you want the back pockets of your Ben Davises to have holes from carrying margin-trowels and pliers. You got to look strong, but you need to look tired too, like this is your first day off in a long time, like you’ve worked every damned day of your life until yesterday, like you woke up at four in the morning not because the alarm was set, but because you’ve been trained by years of busting your ass.