Big Dreams (29 page)

M
ARIN COUNTY HAD ITS DARK SIDE
, too, like every other place on earth. San Quentin prison, an ugly cluster of aging buildings in the shadow of the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge, dated from 1853. Every man who was sentenced to die in California had a cell on the prison’s Death Row, because it had the only gas chamber in the state—one of the few states that still
had
a death penalty.

There were some rundown subdivisions in Marin that had gone to drugs and Heavy Metal. And in San Rafael, the county seat, you saw Hispanic men hanging around outside a Burger King and a 7-Eleven to look for day work, just as their brothers were doing across the bridge. The men lived in the Canal District nearby, a raunchy backwater, often six or eight to an apartment, and whenever they had a problem or needed advice or got into a scrap, they turned to La Familia.

La Familia was a social-services agency on an ordinary block in an ordinary neighborhood in San Rafael. Alejandro Montenegro, its executive director, was Chilean by birth, although his mother had owned a British passport. Montenegro was a reddish man—reddish hair and beard, a fair complexion. He was gracious and polite and owned a doctorate in psychology from UC Berkeley.

Montenegro had not always been a social worker. He had first used his background in psychology as an image consultant, putting pretty faces on otherwise faceless corporations. He had lived in London for a time, but he had found the English to be passionless and told me a story about a friend of his mother’s, Lord B., to prove the point.

Lord B. was the CEO at a prominent head-hunting firm. When Montenegro went to the firm for a job interview, he was dressed in his best suit and tie, every inch of fabric neatly pressed. Lord B. had glanced at him perfunctorily and had jabbed a finger at his feet.

“Those brown shoes won’t do, my boy,” Lord B. had sniffed.

La Familia was definitely part of the brown-shoe universe. It resembled every other underfunded social agency in California, furnished with the same Salvation Army furniture and equipped with the same motley collection of dime-store coffee mugs.

In his office, Montenegro said that he had no idea how many Hispanic immigrants lived in Marin, even though he’d been on the job for five months now. The estimates ran from eight to twenty thousand. The men who showed up at La Familia were in the United States illegally, almost without exception. They spoke no English and came not from Mexico but from Central America, Cuba, Peru, and Brazil. Often they were the poorest of the poor in their own countries, making them, as Montenegro noted, among the poorest people anywhere.

The men usually crossed the border alone, hoping to save enough money to later import their wives, their kids, and even their parents. There were more opportunities for work than you might think, Montenegro said. Marin was a garden spot with thousands of trees to be pruned and thousands of flowerbeds to be weeded. If a man worked ten days a month, he could make his nut and even put some cash aside by sleeping on his uncle’s floor.

Whenever work was plentiful, the men caused no trouble. It was the slow times, the dead-broke Saturday nights in an inhospitable land, that led to the loud music, the drinking, and the knife fights. In the past, agents from the Immigration and Naturalization Service had conducted wholesale sweeps through the Canal District, but they were forced to stop because they had bagged many legal Hispanics with the undocumented ones, leading to charges of racism.

Montenegro was frank about playing the race card. He glanced around at his humble office and said, “It’s the only weapon we have.”

He believed that the veneer of tolerance in Marin County was very thin. Neighbors around La Familia complained incessantly about the men lounging on the steps or leaning against a fence, but when Montenegro met with them to talk about the problem—if it
was
a
problem—they could not elaborate. The very presence of the men, it seemed, was objectionable.

The INS had recently taken a new tack in its campaign. Agents waited for somebody to be hired outside Burger King, followed him to the job site, and arrested him. Those who got caught had almost no recourse. They were proud Latinos and often refused any help, even from La Familia. Montenegro had once suggested to some of the men that they draw up a standard contract to use with their random employers, but they rejected the idea. It would be too cold and too formal, they felt.

I asked him about the future, but he wouldn’t venture a guess, except to say that the men would keep coming, regardless of the obstacles. He wished that the people in Marin were easier to deal with—he thought that they took criticism personally, while in San Francisco he had been able to hammer out agreements in the framework of a debate.

Still, he loved living where he did, in Sausalito. It reminded him of Viña del Mar, Chile.

“Same weeds, same plants, same everything,” he said, sounding just like the Sikhs in Yuba City.

For Alejandro Montenegro, there were really just two places in the world to live, Sausalito and Viña del Mar.

S
AUSALITO MEANT
little willow
in Miwok. Twenty years, twenty years, and now The Tides was gone, Sally Stanford was in her grave, and the actual published writers were nowhere to be found. The Trident was as insubstantial as a figment. The waitresses had changed back into Betty and Joan and were probably living with their stockbroker husbands and their kids in Caprice or Tiffany Ridge.

At Cafe Trieste on Bridgeway, I bought a cup of coffee and walked along the docks past sloops, yachts, and dinghies, high on the morning light. A black cat materialized and courteously refused to cross my path. Instead, she hopped up on a railing and purred for
some attention. When I reached out to pet her, she nipped at my hand and bit the flesh between thumb and index finger.

Just so, our California paradise.

F
ROM SAUSALITO
I drove through Marin City, the only black town in Marin. It had grown up around the ruins of Marinship, a Bechtel Corporation shipbuilding plant that had opened in 1942. Bechtel had resisted hiring black workers through the 1930s, and only under pressure from black leaders and the threat of legal action did it agree to take the workers on at the new shop.

The unions then screwed the workers by granting them an auxiliary status and denying them the right to vote. One black welder, Joe James of the Boilermakers’ Union, rebelled and led a strike, which resulted in firings. The struggle became a legal battle that didn’t end until 1948, when the Boilermakers were upbraided in court and ordered to integrate fully, without discrimination. The ruling made little difference by that time. The war was over, the demand for ships had slackened, and the union’s black constituency had dropped from a high of about 3,000 to just 150 members.

Ever since the first slave was dragged from the South into the foothills to dig for gold, blacks in California had been subjected to messages that were alternately hostile and conciliatory. The state had outlawed slavery in 1849, for instance, but a law on the books was only as good as the guns enforcing it, and any man who ran away from his master was likely to be apprehended and returned to him as property.

In a celebrated case of the period, Archy Lee, an eighteen-year-old slave from Mississippi, traveled to Sacramento with his master, Charles Stovall, in 1859 and soon fell under the influence of free California blacks. Lee broke for freedom himself, but he was captured easily and tossed into prison for four months while his fate was deliberated upon by the state supreme court.

Abolitionists took up Lee’s cause to no effect. The court acted
as if the state’s fugitive slave law, which had expired in 1856, was still on the books and sent Lee back to his master, showing leniency toward Stovall because he was “young and inexperienced.”

Only a few years after the Lee fiasco, however, blacks were relieved of a burdensome law that had kept them from testifying in court on an equal footing with whites, a privilege still denied to Indians and the Chinese. They seem to have done reasonably well in business, too, and documents from the time suggest that a black middle class was emerging.

Education for blacks remained a muddle. Few schools in and around San Francisco were integrated in the 1860s, and the schools that black children did attend were clearly inferior. A report to the San Francisco School Board in 1862 described one typical black schoolroom as a poorly ventilated basement of a military barracks. Whenever the troops did their exercises, upstairs ceiling plaster and water from ruptured pipes rained down on the kids below.

The city did begin to integrate its public schools in the 1870s, although not primarily for humanitarian purposes. Under a court order to provide separate-but-equal facilities for blacks, educators agreed that it would cost less to incorporate black children into the existing all-white system than it would be to repair and renovate the segregated schools. Black teachers continued to be paid at a lower rate than white teachers, though.

In general, blacks were treated badly in San Francisco in the early 1900s. They were often turned down for jobs, even as unskilled laborers, in favor of the Chinese (who were perceived to be a better value for the dollar) and the Irish. Some fortunate blacks got work with the railroads as porters and sleeping-car attendants, but most men and women had to content themselves with far more menial tasks.

Discrimination and racist union policies created the first black suburbs in the Bay Area. Anybody who got fed up with taking a back seat could ride a ferry to Oakland, where about a thousand blacks were living in relative harmony in 1900. The black population
had reached about five thousand by 1917, and boosters were so proud that they published a 140-page “Colored Directory” to their community. It pictured their houses and their churches in the best possible light. Similar suburbs were sprouting at an even quicker pace down south, even though W. E. B. DuBois put forth a caution.

“Los Angeles is not Paradise,” he said, “much as the sight of its lilies and roses might lead one at first to believe. The color line is there sharply drawn.”

The restrictive covenants that kept a black person from buying in a good San Francisco neighborhood did not exist in Oakland. They did not exist in Richmond, either, another largely black town on the bay that grew up around Henry J. Kaiser’s shipbuilding plants, much as Marin City had evolved around Marinship.

When World War II ended, many black families stayed on in Marin City, where the daunting housing projects now floated like an archipelago in a sea of utter whiteness. Richmond was also still a mostly black community that was dispersed over a tangled industrial landscape of refineries, docks, and railroad tracks. There were some fine homes on the water and in the hills, but most people lived in modest stucco and wood homes (median price, $144,300) with patchy little lawns.

I
CAME NEXT TO BERKELEY
, a nuclear-free zone, where the citizens were worried about things.

They were worried about the rain forests in the Amazon, Sendero Luminoso, South Africa, and the Norwegians who ate whales. They were worried about the depleted ozone layer and about the microwave ovens that were short-circuiting pacemakers and about the radon that might be seeping up from the earth into their homes. They were very worried about the nitrates in their bacon and about the cruel way that little calves were butchered into veal.

In Berkeley, nobody believed that Lee Harvey Oswald had shot John F. Kennedy on his own. Everybody knew that it was a plot
cooked up by the Mafia in collusion with J. Edgar Hoover, and they knew that Hoover liked boys and played the ponies and sometimes carried a pink purse. They knew of massive conspiracies that the fascist-dominated media had never divulged, plots to assassinate Mother Teresa and to make Pol Pot the potentate of Guatemala and to put little-known bacterial agents into the water supply to control people’s sex drives and make them want to live in Tiffany Ridge.

Some Californians thought that Berkeleyites worried
too
much. It was as if they’d been assigned the job of worrying for the entire state, as if all the brain-burning, soul-troubling issues had befallen them and were their responsibility, freeing every other Californian to have fun.

Berkeley was only a few miles from Richmond, but it orbited in another solar system.

Telegraph Avenue was the city’s Broadway. It ran all the way from Oakland to the UC Berkeley campus. It was a street of refractory sounds and images, where anorexic poets mingled with jugheads in flak gear who were dedicated to resuscitating the Symbionese Liberation Army. On Telegraph, the dread Cinque might yet pass muster as a philosopher, and Charles Manson could pawn himself off as a misunderstood victim of a dysfunctional family. Manson had started his own Family in Berkeley, in fact, latching onto a librarian and moving in with her.

The street had its own argot, its own codes. As I walked along it, I sensed that signals of various kinds were being semaphored over a tom-tom skin of pavement. Lying on the sidewalk or crouched by the tables of vendors selling life-giving crystals, there were ravaged speed freaks, messianic hipsters, bad dudes in hooded sweatshirts, and Deadheads in tie-dye, each of them looking for the transformative score that would make it happen for them, the big lift-off into the California ozone.

Among them moved an improbably clean-cut group of young men and women, who were purposeful where the others were lost, untarnished where they were scarred, solidly grounded where they
were all fucked up—students at the University blithely skirting the perimeters of a lost world.

A walk on Telegraph was another memory garden for me. The street was linked indelibly to certain events of the 1960s and the 1970s that had given me the sort of instruction that I had never got in school. In those early days of exploring away from San Francisco, I had crossed the bridge not only for the bookstores and the cultural institutions but also to be part of the action, the so-called revolution.

I could remember how the store owners on the strip would nail plywood panels over their windows at the slightest hint of a demonstration, and how the cops and the protestors would collide with the inevitability of two football squads marching toward a disputed fifty-yard line. I remembered, too, the smell of tear gas and the air thick with smoke, and the sight of faces and heads split and bloodied by nightsticks, innocence going down with an angelic swoon.