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  I’ve never filled out a job application and I’ve gotten damned near every job I’ve tried to get. If a company wants you to fill out an application, then you tell them to shove it up their ass and move on to the next company in the phone book. If they want you to fill out an application, that means they’re so stupid that they can’t tell whether or not you’re working hard from watching you on the site. If they want you to fill out an application, then that’s just the beginning of them nitpicking you to death like a bunch of persnickety faggots. First the application, and the next thing you know you’ll have to wash your hands every time you take a leak.

  The jobs, they were just to get by, because what I really wanted to do and what I was good at doing was playing my trumpet. I was the best second-rate trumpet player in Northern California, and there wasn’t a merengue or salsa band I couldn’t cut a chair with except the good ones. I could make forty bucks a night nearly every weekend, and if I played well, which I often did, I could get wasted on whiskey sent by the customers after my solos.

  I mostly played Mexican bands, and I always felt ashamed of myself around those guys. There’s nothing I’d rather not be than an American man, a man who by world standards is a eunuch, a dickless ball-less please-fuck-me-up-the-ass slob who stands in the doorway getting slapped around by his wife when he’s late getting home because of a traffic jam or a subway stall, the bitch saying, “Who were you fucking, you bastard,” who begs his wife not to divorce him because he knows damned well he’s fucked forever and always if she does, she raping his retirement, getting his house, taking his children, and making him pay for the privilege of living beneath an underpass the rest of his numbered days while she lives into eternity, who comes home to find his woman become a Wiccan gathered with her cunt club and burning a straw effigy of Priapus in the backyard, the ladies dancing in joy at Priapus’ flaming and shrinking cock, and while the Roman boner-god burns, the American man tells his wifey that he’s proud of her for asserting her female otherness, who slaves like a pig on the assembly line or the construction site or driving a greasy semi or runs a jackhammer until his guts are Jell-O only to find himself called a White Male Oppressor and Enemy, who opens a door for a California liberated 300 pound disgusting zit-faced quarter-pounder-choked lady only to have the bitch turn to him and say, “I can open it myself, thank you, and don’t think I’m impressed by your feigned chivalry because I know all you want to do is fuck me,” who digs ditches and unplugs toilets and cleans carpets that have been shat upon by generations of feline and hound and then on the daily news finds himself deemed “advantaged,” who, truly, would be better off without his balls and even better off if his balls were being served up on a Rocky Mountain Oyster Platter, barbecue sauce slathered and cole slaw on the side, gimme a fucking beer. An American man, shit. Why do you think whenever an American man goes overseas he comes back with a foreign wife? Because women in every other county know, from experience, that no man treats a female better than a sucker of an American man, a man who does not believe his woman farts or shits or wipes her menstrual slobber with her restaurant napkin. Navy men go overseas and come back with Asian spinners.

  There’s Norman Stephanski, a buddy of mine who was in love with a short-haired Jewish runt named Lisa with big lips and a mustache. He’d have done anything for her, and he did, the sap: he went to college where she wanted to go to college, lived in the apartment she chose even though he couldn’t afford it and took out student loans to pay for it, never drank normal beers but always fancy imported shit in green bottles that she liked because it made her feel fucking special and better than the rest of us because we’d never even heard of the countries those fucking beers came from, let alone the beer brands themselves. Some African or South Pacific swill that tasted like a mowed lawn or the smoke from the Kellogg plant. Norman waited on that bitch hand and foot, put on a white shirt and tie when he met her Goldbergstein parents and they inspected his gentile ass, made the paycheck and did the laundry and dishes besides. She was a literature major, wanted to be a literary critic when she grew up. Didn’t want to be a writer, because writers are just idiot savant chumps, genetic mutants who know not what they do, emotional retards, she once said, unable to cope with the intellectual and psychological and sociological realities of life. Critics, she said, are those who lend credence to the malconceived and accidental manifestations of those whom the white male patriarchy have deemed to be artists. The insane, she said. Critics, she said, are why artists exist, and without critics, she said, there would be no art. And then she’d go off on Norman, who had dreams of becoming a writer, pseudo-psycho-analyzing him, saying that the reason it took him so long to shit when he went to the pot was that he refused to let his bad karma go, that he was a typical male living on the bile of his testosterone, when, as Norman once told me, the truth of the matter was that she watched him like a hawk all the fucking time and he never got any pussy out of that cunt and the only place he could be alone enough to jack off was in the can, and so he spent half the day there pounding his pud until he jerked it ragged.

  He said the few times she actually did let him fuck her the cunt squeaked, made a noise that sounded like one of those little toy mice you give your cat to play with, and in four years he never managed to get his dick all the way inside her, all fifteen times he double-condom boned the bitch. He’d go silly, semen making his eyes bulge and his speech go whack, staggering the dockside bars idiotized saying, “Squeak! Squeak! Squeeeeeeeeek!” and laughing like some deranged souse, Squeak! echoing off the warehouse walls. Well, three years they spent taking classes at the university she chose, and then she decided she didn’t like it anymore, wanted to go to a university more befitting of her specialness, a private university that wasn’t attended by riff-raff commoners, an East Coast, not an East Bay, private institution of higher learning that only the best people attended, and so off to Syracuse University, in upstate New York, they went.

  Two torched credit cards of moving expenses and tuition later, that is, three months later, Norman’s smelling something nasty about the bitch’s behavior. She smells like sexing and he knows it’s not his, and he breaks open the lock of her desk drawer and finds love letters, dozens of them, love letters from her Syracuse man dating back two years and begging her to move to Syracuse so they could fuck and fuck and fuck, and lovey-lovey and kissie-kissie and drink wine and eat some French-shit food Norman couldn’t pronounce, huggie-huggie, huggie-fucking-huggie. The letters made Norman want to puke. He said they stank of some faggot cologne. He read them and read them and he got drunk, not on that fancy ass nigger gook beer, no. He went out and bought himself a bag full of Colt 45s, 40’s, and he sat on the porch like an Oakland boy and watched the pale eastern sun slip away and gone into dark. And he got calm, calmer than he’d ever been, and when he was calmest, about five 40’s into the night, he stood up and pulled out his dick and pissed, pissed standing there on the porch and it was a stupendous, a purifying piss, one that nearly reached the sidewalk, and, while he was standing there pissing and his groin tingling with the relief that only a good piss can bring, Lisa Goldbergstein, his love, his woman, cruised up on her stylish mo-ped and he swung the stream of his piss toward her and doused her, saying, “Hey hey! This is not symbolic! This, bitch, is not symbolic! I’m pissing on you and you don’t need to interpret this, bitch. What does it mean? What the fuck’s it mean? It means, bitch, it means that I’m pissing on you. That’s what the fuck it means.”

  A month later Norman was on a plane to Tokyo. I’d been married and divorced by the next time I heard from him, nearly a year later. I’d partied with the angels and then had the great asshole of life pucker up, build up pressure, and unload, dousing me with the shit and digested bile of the cosmos, and I was on a drunken spree, trying to find the merest of solace in the deep dry cavern of booze soaked cunt. The mornings I woke and was not alone I rolled away from whatever stinking cooze I’d harpooned the night before, some ska
nky love-desperate big-eyed whore just low enough to want me, to trust me with the remnants of her shat-upon hopes. Alone or not, mornings I woke and wished I hadn’t. And before I began to cry I’d find some booze and swill, put a buzz on that would numb me from my own desolation. I was bad off after that wife was gone, couldn’t shake the image of her, of Rhonda sitting in the corner with her panties down around her ankles, her heroin-silked eyes dilated like black hubcaps, saying, “Fuck you! I hate you! Fuck you! I hate you! Fuck you, I hate you!” and pissing. I couldn’t close my eyes without hearing her and seeing her in a squat. And it was always a violent piss, a piss that said all she had to say about the world. She was more fucked up than me, and that was saying something, and I didn’t find out why until many years later when I discovered that before she met me the man who’d been fucking her had been her father, and her mother had found out and instead of jailing the bastard, threw Rhonda out on her own. She’d fuck any man who’d give her a place to crash for the night, and eventually she fucked me.

  It’s funny, you know: no matter how many jobs you lose, no matter how broke you are, no matter if you have a place to live or if you’re sleeping in the junkyard—no matter what there’s always a way to cop a tumbler or a 40. Women, of course, can always use their cunts to get some hooch. But men? Men don’t use their cunts. We come through for each other because we all secretly suspect that we’ll be the next one broke and without a bed. We help each other because we like to have people in our debt, owing us a bender. You need a drink? Somebody will always come through, not out of love but out of hope that when they need their bottle someone else will cough up their debt. One day when I was pretty low, scrapping for meals and living in an ISO—one of those cargo containers they use for trains, semis, and ships—they have entire unpatrolled cities of them by the Oakland docks, and those ISOs are bigger than a single-wide and more rock solid, and the census takers never come around, but if they did, the populations of the seaside and railroad cities of America would grow by ten percent—one day I came back to my rusted ISO and found a case of Glenfiddich and a note: “Fuck You! No one should die on rotgut. The Lone Ranger Rides Again! –Love and Kisses, Duke.” That case was gone in a week, and I never even got a hangover. No wonder rich fuckers drink expensive hooch. Duke’s dead now, died a month after his wife of 35 years, Myrtle, divorced him. Died of despair. She’d gotten God on Duke, and hadn’t fucked him in twenty years, and she’d finally decided that by being married to Duke she was being unfaithful to Jesus, and so she divorced Duke so she could suck the heavenly weenie without guilt. Duke was one of those men who knew everything, displacing his ridiculously constant and loyal wolfen love for his hateful wife with a voracious passion for acquiring knowledge. Myrtle’s final act of spite was having his funeral service performed in her church, Jesus Fuckyourwife Christ officiating, Jesu Cristo grinning over the dead cuckold with bleeding hands and forehead that don’t mean a fuck because he’s God and can heal those hands right on up and shoot a game of pool anytime he fucking wants. That bitch hated Duke so much she had “Amazing Grace” played on the church organ as they hauled his methane farting carcass away to the dirt.

  A year had passed since I’d heard from Tokyo Norman and when I finally did hear from him it was on Christmas when I was visiting Pop and his family at the trailer. The phone rang and all I could hear was a sloshing sound, and then Norman’s voice came on and he said, “Hey, T-Bird, you know what that was?”

  “Norman?”

  “You know what that was?”

  “Let me crack a beer,” I said. It was early, but I was already pretty soaked.

  “Phone sex,” Norman said. “That was the sound of the phone up Kimoko’s cunt. Want to hear it again?”

  “Course I do,” I said.

  For two or three hours and two six packs of Oly Norman kept it up, jamming his phone in and out of Kimoko’s cunt and then licking off the slobber and telling me his Tokyo stories, about the time he shat on some chick so drunk was he while he was fucking her and about how she got rags and cleaned him up and then fucked him again, about how he and his roommate Burlton boned some Jap girl who got drunk and thought she was a bunny-rabbit, hopping around the room and bouncing on their cocks bunny-style, she screaming ichi-mo! or something like that which means I’m cumming in Jap, about the Shinjuku district of Tokyo and how if you fuck chicks on stage at the sex shows you get to fuck them for free if you have a “Western-size” cock, drooling Jap businessmen as horny to see a big white cock as they are watching that big white cock fucking one of their women, somehow hating Yankees for torching their city to cinders and getting stiffies thinking about us enslaving and humiliating their females—like they do. Somehow people who’ve been truly fucked want to keep on being fucked and fucked and fucked, Norman on the subways surrounded every day by Jap girls jockeying for position to rub their little asses against his cock while pretending they’re not, reaching around and tightening their little fists around his cock and through his slacks and leading him off at the next subway stop like dragging a bull by its ring to the nearest “Love Hotel,” Jap no-tell-motels that don’t have rooms but instead have slots like filing cabinet drawers, fuck tubes you rent by the hour. On and on he went, and then he hung up because the phone cunt was about to cum, and I didn’t talk to Norman again for about another year, and this time I called him from a bar and this time his bitch was Taeko of the Skies, a stewardess whore, his flying prostitute, who, after describing all the noises she made when they fucked, he confessed he loved. And so while she slept there on his futon, and he described her beauty, and how she’d thank him after they fucked, and then she’d do the dishes, and then she’d leave like a puff of cool mist into the dilapidated and twisted streets of Tokyo, the subway rattling past and the sound of sad shuffling hungover feet grinding the pavement into dust. He married her. He’s still married to her. He doesn’t let her out of the house for fear she’ll become just another American cunt. It’s working. It’s been working for a dozen years. They have kids. They have a house. They can’t see their neighbors. They don’t want to. She still thanks him every time they make love. And now, heart mended, he thanks her too.

  Everywhere I looked I saw misery, destitution, hopelessness, rage, filth. Everywhere but in my soul. Somehow I hadn’t been touched, not in a way that could shake my unalterable faith and optimism. I knew somehow that humanity wasn’t as ugly as the humanity I’d seen. I knew that the festering rot and swamp of the hearts of man was not its natural condition but was born of disillusion, that the cannibal rending of man from man was a consequence, not a cause, was the desperate reaction of hearts shorn and devoured raw and still a-pumping. I’d seen the men I’d known—and sometimes the women—seen them destroyed into suicide, seen them reduced to the subhuman ugliness of Norman in Tokyo—despair turned into shitting on oneself and defiling all with whom he’d come in contact. I’d seen the sadness of Duke, on his knees every time he got drunk begging the hallucination of his wife to come home to him, to lay down with him, to love him as she had before she loved an ideal and perfect and snickering god. I’d seen my father, Pop, lose wife after wife, seen him lose his dignity and kill in rage, wanting to strike at something, at anything, to somehow heal the wounds that never heal, the cancerous sores of disappointed hope. There’s P.J., who hanged himself after his wife dumped him and took his daughter, and Mike, whose wife dumped him and took his daughter and married a doctor and so he drank himself to diabetic death on a bottle of single-malt that I bought him, Antonio, whose wife kicked him out and took the sons and by the time this book sees print he’ll be dead of drink, and on and on, so much sadness it’s almost too much to bear.

  The crowd at Dick’s has a particular interest in The Case of Blaise, because no one knows if he’s alive or dead. Blaise called himself a full-time alchemist and part-time composer. As far as I knew, he couldn’t figure an A from a G on a banjo, probably couldn’t play a goddamn throat warbl
er or a kazoo. No one ever heard him play a note, and no one ever saw a score he’d written, not until after he was taken out by a SWAT team. He told us he was a studio composer for TV commercials but wouldn’t tell us which ones, and so even though he seemed to have some cash from those alleged commercials of his, and he didn’t have to work like us, we suspicioned. He told us the jingles paid the bills while he performed alchemical experiments and composed serious music, that one day he would only experiment and create art. One of those guys who thinks art can replace work. Asshole. We loved him.

  When he met Ashleigh, he didn’t know that she’d been running all over the neighborhood telling everyone she was getting the hell out of Oakland, that she was going to get pregnant and marry a scientist, in that order. She couldn’t tell a scientist from a bartender. She had no idea that alchemy was an art long abandoned and dead, a relic like human dignity. So when Blaise moved to town—he wasn’t really one of us, but instead a Southern Californian who grew up living on a hill—and he’d been to a community college in L.A. for two years, the only guy in the neighborhood, excepting Shapiro, who’d ever set foot in a real college and not just a union hall training course or cop school or refer/a-c camp—he wasn’t prepared for Oakland, and he sure as shit wasn’t ready for Ashleigh.

  Blaise moved to Oakland because his aunt died and left him her house. On 62nd Avenue, right in the heart of niggertown, much to his surprise. He used to come up from L.A. summers when he was a kid and the neighborhood was white, and that’s what he remembered, not an ornamentally-ironed caged shack with fried chicken bones on the lawn and junkies on the run from the cops hopping his fence every night like Olympic hurdlers.