Big Dreams (43 page)

Ice-cream bars landed on the table, thrown from cardboard boxes. One of the bartenders took the floor and rapped on a glass with a spoon. After thanking Kovacevich for the feed, he cleared his throat and told a joke.

“What’s the difference between herpes and AIDS?” he asked. He paused for a minute to let us ruminate. “Herpes is a love story, but AIDS is a fairy tale!”

The laughter was uproarious. At our table, only Ezikian seemed to be cringing a bit.

Another man stepped up to tell some jokes. He was a semi-pro, the sort of lounge act that you might find yourself confronted with in Sparks, Nevada, after you’d lost all your money in Reno, had drunk too much, and had locked yourself out of your motel room.

“Hey, how about the size of those steaks?” he said with a wink. “Even in my fantasies, the meat isn’t
that
big!”

He hitched up his slacks and told another joke in the form of an exchange on “Jeopardy,” the TV quiz show, that cast Batman and Robin as a homosexual couple.

I felt myself awash in casual cruelty, recalling the sickly sensation of being in a high-school locker room and joining in on some mindless macho posing. With a sinking heart, I understood that the distance between the Slavonian Hall and Ward 5A at San Francisco General was so imponderable at the moment that only a stoop laborer might know how to calculate it.

O
N MY LAST MORNING IN WASCO
, Jim Crettol materialized at the machine shop looking as if he’d passed the early hours rolling in a field and trying to harvest dehydrator onions with his teeth, but he’d just been crawling in the dirt for a tightly focused tour of two test-plot plantings of sugar beets.

With a pest-control adviser from a chemical company, he had examined the effects of a new treatment that was supposed to increase the amount of sugar in a beet by a half percent. That didn’t sound like much, but if you had a hundred acres in beets, as the Crettols did, the gain could amount to two or three thousand dollars a year.

Around Wasco, farmers referred to pest-control advisers as snake-oil men. The PCAs walked a fine line between science and selling, but Jim felt that the reliable ones afforded him some useful information at times. Besides, a test didn’t cost him anything.

He took me with him on the rest of his morning rounds, driving first to Nikkel Ironworks in Shafter to see about a new cotton planter that he and Louie were buying. Lloyd Prather, the manager at Nikkel, was a lean stick of hickory. He was stewing about a shortage of bearings from Japan.

“No bearings, and you’re in a big world of hurt,” Prather said, putting it succinctly.

Farmers are loath to discuss money, but I gathered that the cotton planter would cost about $25,000. Nikkel would build it from scratch and paint it International Red.

Jim and Louie didn’t mind the price, but Art Crettol was up in arms about it—a customary response among the Crettol elders, Jim said, when the younger generation usurped the power. Art’s father, Victor, had howled in pain when Art had insisted on shelling out seven thousand dollars for a new cotton picker in 1949.

In Wasco, Jim bought a tri-tip roast and asked me to a barbecue at his house that night.

On the drive back to the farm, he was acting hyper and said that he’d always been like that, loaded with more energy than he
knew what to do with. It had kept him from staying in college, down in Bakersfield. The pace of education had seemed so slow to him that he literally couldn’t sit still and had to drop out. The army had drafted him right away and sent him to helicopter school at Fort Rucker, Alabama, in 1968.

Rural Alabama was no dreamland, even for a farmer. Jim was certain that he’d soon be flying over the jungles of Vietnam, but he got lucky and was assigned to a base in Korea instead, where the army put him in charge of the motor pool, which was like tossing Brer Rabbit into the briar patch.

Korea made Jim grateful for what he had at home. The resourcefulness of Korean peasants astonished him. They scavenged the military dumps and made use of almost everything that the army threw away. They built houses from cardboard and aluminum cans, lashing the cans together three-deep with wire and stuffing the cracks with insulation against freezing winter temperatures. To amuse himself, Jim became a test-drive ace. He tested every vehicle in the motor pool, whether or not it needed testing, pushing the pedals to the floor.

After his discharge, he had started working on the farm full time, gradually assuming his father’s duties. It was really all he wanted to do.

“Farmers like to farm,” he said cheerfully.

I could hear the satisfaction in his voice, a peace that comes from doing what you want to do. Jim didn’t feel that he was missing anything—no sirens were whistling in his ear. When he had some free time, he played golf or listened to music or took in a Dodger game in L.A. He had a brand-new IBM computer and a subscription to
InfoWorld
.

Behold the modern California farmer, I thought, not without envy. There was a satisfaction in making things grow. There was a sweetness to the mockingbird’s song. For all its contrariness, I liked this heat-seared, light-blinded country of the San Joaquin. It didn’t
need to go searching for a narrative. It still knew what it was about.

Even a farmer who was phasing himself out, such as Art Crettol, seemed reasonably content with his lot. We stopped at Art’s house to bring him some groceries. Tall palm trees lined his block, and he had a cool blue swimming pool in the backyard.

Art had recently remarried and wore a gold chain around his neck, just like Louie did. He knew his local history well and could remember when you had to carry a sidearm at the desert place to nail all the rattlesnakes in the sagebrush.

Art irrigated a couple of almond orchards for the boys and growled at them if he caught them doing something wrong, but that was the scope of his involvement. They still consulted him before making a major decision, but the torch had been passed. Why slave in the fields when you could take your new bride on a cruise to Panama?

In the end, Art said, farming was no picnic. He guessed that about half the farmers around Wasco and Shafter ran good, clean operations and were solvent. Others were getting by on a wing-and-a-prayer, while still others were failing because they were overextended or bad gamblers or just plain stupid.

J
IM CRETTOL LIVED IN A RANCH HOUSE
on a lightly traveled road, with no neighbors nearby. Dogs poured out the front door, six or seven of them, licking and sniffing at me in greeting.

Barbara Crettol was in the kitchen preparing Rock Cornish game hens from a recipe in the
Los Angeles Times
. She was a pretty, cultured woman, who had been teaching ballet since she was fourteen and still taught a class in Wasco. She and Jim had married young. That was still the way in California farm country.

Their daughter, Suzanne, had finished her first year at Shafter High. She was a volleyball star and let me thumb through her yearbook and look at the pictures. I read the semisecret scribblings and the vaguely articulated dreams until B.J. dragged me down the hall
to his room and showed me the pellet rifle that he used for plugging crows.

“They’re
sooo
tough,” he said. “The BBs bounce off ’em.”

He had rock tapes scattered around a boombox—Metallica, Guns N’ Roses, and Run D.M.C. There was a photo of the Alpine Okies’ dragster on his wall and also a poster of a hard-nippled Budweiser girl in a state of perpetual arousal. A big desk took up most of the floor space, though, as if to remind him that he’d never be entirely free from his studies.

Louie came at dusk with his wife and two kids. The brothers socialized often. They were different as men and yet remained closely knit in the blood. We ate at a table on the patio—two tables, actually, one for the adults and one for the children. Like an early marriage or the unbroken link among generations, this, too, seemed like another country thing preserved.

The Crettols served fine food and vintage wines. For dessert, we had vanilla ice cream and homemade apricot cobbler. Crickets chirruped under the gathering stars, and the night was huge and sweeping. I was aware of how softly everybody was talking and took comfort and solace from the mesh of voices. At that moment, it seemed that there was nothing more to life—nothing to be pursued, all cruelty erased.

When it was time to go, I walked down a driveway where candles were glowing inside paper sacks. The kids had insisted on putting them out, and their parents had indulged them. The candles gave my leave-taking a festive edge.

In the dark, I imagined the sleeping cotton fields and heard the sound of water trickling in irrigation ditches. I wondered how long the farm landscape would last in this part of California and how long it would offer such nourishment to those who tended it. In Suzanne’s yearbook, a question had been put to the graduating seniors, and their answer had surprised me.

“Are you afraid of the future?” they were asked, and almost half the students had answered, “Yes.”

O
N HIGHWAY 99
the next morning, Dwight Yoakam came over my car radio singing his country hit, “Streets of Bakersfield,” an old Buck Owens tune that told of a well-meaning youth who stumbles into town, gets into a fight for which he’s not to blame, and lands himself in jail. Yoakam might be a slinky-hipped Hollywood cowboy in dry-cleaned jeans, but he’d still put his finger on a pulse. The song’s refrain was an echo and a reminder:
“You don’t know me, but you don’t like me.”

Buck Owens was a Bakersfield boy by birth and knew what he was talking about. He and Merle Haggard, who grew up in nearby Oildale, an even raunchier place, had both been married to the same woman, although at different times. They were all divorced now, but the woman kept a job playing backup in Merle’s band. She was a survivor.

That was a Bakersfield story, all right. The city was legendary for its toughness, and you had to be able to swallow your disappointment if you hoped to stay afloat. The central metaphors were all stolen from the oil business, where you set your sights on a target, took one good shot at drilling, and learned not to piss and moan if the bit just swirled in sand and water.

Bakersfield had no tolerance for crybabies. It ate nails for breakfast and might even have hung a few kittens from trees. I’d heard a rumor once that whenever a new franchise opened in town, the home office dispatched its top supervisors to oversee the operation, because you only got one chance to please your customers. Feed them an off-color french fry or a warm soft drink, and you were finished. They’d never forgive you, and they’d never come back.

The Baker in Bakersfield was Colonel Thomas Baker. He brought his family from Visalia to an abandoned cabin of logs and thatched tule reeds in the swampy sloughs around Kern River in 1863. The colonel reclaimed some land and planted ten acres to alfalfa—Baker’s field. In that time before dams and irrigation, the river could be wild and ferocious, and it still recaptured some of its former glory each spring as it dropped steeply out of the Sierra Nevada.

Merle Haggard had paid it a wary tribute in his beautiful ballad, “Kern River”:

The Sierra Nevada lay to the east of Bakersfield, but I couldn’t even see the foothills. The entire range was camouflaged in a dense, stinging smog. The southern tip of the San Joaquin was unimaginably hot and dry, the bottom of a cauldron I’d been sinking into inch by inch. Foul air from all over the state got trapped in the tail end of the valley and sat there growing more and more fetid, like dirty socks left under a bed.

At my motel, the air conditioners droned incessantly and dripped machine sweat down the stucco walls. They seemed to be the only forces working against inertia, little athletes of the ozone pushing the envelope of their Freon and their coils.

Slow-stepping maids trudged across a courtyard to feed their wages into a soda machine, trying to quench an unquenchable thirst. The man in the next room was a horrible white from avoiding the sun and could be glimpsed seated in his skivvies before a TV, not a sight for the faint of heart. He resembled a grub rousted from under a rock.

You don’t know me, but you don’t like me
—maybe it was the nearness of Los Angeles, 109 miles away, or the talk of twisted relationships, but I felt that I was moving toward an archetype of California that any American would recognize.