Big Dreams (46 page)

As I was paying my bill, Thu Le gave me a business card certifying her as a color analyst and image consultant. I must have looked puzzled, because she began to elaborate, gesturing toward some shelves behind the cash register that were stocked with cosmetics in jars and bottles. Beauti Control Cosmetic Boutique had manufactured them all, and Thu Le had attended a BCCB school to master the subtleties of their application.

Beauty had interested her even in Vietnam, she said—she was a striking woman, after all. The accent at home, however, was on a natural look. A woman attained beauty by eating well, caring about her health, and working hard. No woman would ever dream of putting on any makeup until she was married, and then she would wear only what her husband desired.

Thu Le felt that her BCCB clients in California might rebel against such a beauty regimen, especially the hard work. They had come of age in a different tradition, she told me, and had been taught to rely on cosmetics to do the job of nature.

S
OMETIMES DURING MY FINAL DAYS
around Bakersfield it seemed to me that the entire San Joaquin Valley ran on beer. As each sizzling
afternoon limped toward its conclusion, I could sense a buildup of dust on my teeth, like a strange, agricultural form of tartar, and I began to look upon the usual remedies of iced tea, ice water, and Diet Coke with disdain.

Only a daily ration of Bud or Coors or Rolling Rock would do the trick, so by five or six o’clock I’d visit a deli or a grocery store for a refill. I had learned to rank the stores according to the relative frigidity of their stock,
cold beer
being words that were much bandied about in the valley and often used with impunity.

In the San Joaquin, I drank beer at low-rent taverns and high-class bars, in Taft and in McKittrick and in Ford City, and at last I drank some beer in Buttonwillow, a prosperous town of about two thousand, where I stopped after a ride out to the Temblor Range by the San Andreas Fault. The fault had ruptured in 1952 and had dealt Bakersfield some significant abuse, but there wasn’t much to see other than dry creekbeds, salt lakes, and abandoned mines.

A solitary buttonwillow tree stood at the north end of Main Street in Buttonwillow. At that spot, in 1895, the great cattleman Henry Miller had built his headquarters, naming the post office and the railroad station after the landmark tree. Pumps and derricks had taken over from the cows, and now cotton grew thickly in the fields around town, often watched over by quietly affluent farmers of Italian descent who were capable of hiding a few thousand dollars in cash beneath a mattress.

Buttonwillow, then, on a Friday afternoon toward quitting time, with the air stinking of oil and gasoline. Ahead, I saw four or five cars parked by a storefront from which all manner of merry noises were issuing, and after a brief second of foreboding that recalled the standard hitch in consciousness preceding any cowboy’s plunge through the swinging doors, I slipped into the BS Saloon.

The BS was storming. Friday was payday, and checks were being cashed. Oily galoots drank in boisterous knots, their faces raw and beaming. At a pool table, a gigantic machinist was bashing at balls and saying that he still owed the damn IRS five grand, but who
cared, really? His daughter was his opponent. She was big, too, and she didn’t care, either. It was good not to care in Buttonwillow on a Friday afternoon.

The bartender, Betty Stiers, resembled Tuesday Weld. She was the eponymous BS and owned half the bar. There were three bars in Buttonwillow, she said, but hers was the only one that might qualify as a joint. Buttonwillow was her hometown. She had come back to it lately after a long time away working as a legal secretary in Tracy, in the Bay Area. Tracy, once a country town, was too hectic for her now. She was a country girl at heart.

“I like to look out the door at those cotton fields,” Betty said dreamily, and you knew she meant it.

In her year or so as a co-owner, she and her partner had brightened up the BS. They’d stripped the walls and had painted them. They had papered over the men’s room with a spritely print of horses galloping, but when I went in I saw that some dim-witted prankster had already marred the print by drawing an arrow to one nag and writing beneath it, “Sea-fucking-biscuit.” The future of the bar’s new finery could be predicted.

The afternoon wore on. I talked with a man who contracted to supply work crews to the oil companies. Things were tough in the fields, he said. The companies were more demanding than ever. They were outlawing beards, ordering the workers to show up in reasonably clean clothes, and forcing them to keep pace with a clock whose hands spun faster and faster. They were after soldiers, not employees.

The crews were angry and depressed, the man said. A few workers in any crew were on drugs, he guessed, regardless of any testing procedures.

Maybe we were speaking too loudly, or maybe I was asking too many questions. From a dark corner of the BS, a fellow stepped forward to confront me. Jet-black hair fell slackly to his shoulders, and he had the disagreeable odor of somebody sweating out booze from the night before. He wanted to know what the hell I was doing
in Buttonwillow. What about a business card? Didn’t I even have a business card? A real writer would have a business card.

Intimidated, I fished around in a pocket, found Thu Le’s card, and decided against trying to pass myself off as a certified color analyst from Vietnam.

“Why, you’re just a fly-by-nighter!” my accuser wailed. He pointed a finger at me, like some grand inquisitor, and wailed again. “He’s just a fly-by-nighter!”

It would be unwise, I realized, to overstay my welcome. After a round of hasty good-byes, I made for the door, half-expecting to be hit from behind with a barstool leg. But I got to the car all right, took a deep breath, and saw that the BS was a perfect bookend to Twenty-two Mile Roadhouse, one a greeting and the other a farewell. In my head, I heard dear old Baker pounding the ivories and collected myself for a trip over the mountains and into the Mojave Desert, leaving behind the farms, the heat, and the light—the
summa
of the San Joaquin.

You don’t know me, but you don’t life me
.…

T
HE MOJAVE DESERT
in August. I had done better planning in my time.

From Bakersfield, I drove east to where the San Joaquin Valley ended around Lamont and Arvin and continued on into the Tehachapis, a fault-block range that marked the southern terminus of the Sierra Nevada. Some people believed that the mountains were the true dividing line between northern and southern California. They were not as grand or as intimidating as the mountains of the Far North and were forested mainly with scrubby oaks rather than tall pines, firs, or redwoods. The hillside grasses were tinder-dry and smelled of fires waiting to burn.

At Tehachapi Pass, at an elevation of 4,604 feet, Refugio Rangel was selling some miniature windmills from his pickup truck on Highway 58. He had a broad Hispanic face and a watch cap pulled down over the tips of his ears. His windmills were arrayed on a shoulder of the road and ballasted with rocks. The blades spun madly. Tehachapi Pass was among the windiest spots in the state and gave him an ideal showcase for his wares.

“I’m here most every weekend,” Rangel told me as he hammered together a new windmill. “I come up from Arvin.”

Rangel knew the Tehachapi country well, having studied it on his hands and knees. Before retiring, he had worked for many years as a laborer laying water pipes in Tehachapi Valley, all the way to the local prison. He pointed out the prison for me, a malign shape in the middle of some apple orchards.

“I don’t expect to get rich on these,” said Rangel, grinning at the very thought. “I just do it to keep busy.”

While he kept hammering, I sat on his tailgate and took in the view. The canyons were littered with clothing that the wind had robbed from unwary tourists—hats, sweaters, scarves, and T-shirts. Big winds were common in the Tehachapis, often gusting to fifty or sixty miles an hour on the most ordinary days.

William Brewer had gone on about the winds in 1863, calling them “unruly” and saying that they blew “most fearfully.” At the same time, he was charmed by Tehachapi Valley, “a pretty basin five or six miles long, entirely surrounded by high mountains.” The pasturage was so fine that a half-dozen Methodist families from Missouri had settled there. The Piker men raised cattle. The Piker women were devout and liked to dip some snuff after their church services.

There were still some cattle in the valley, and the settlers were still arriving, too, forsaking the congested suburbs around metropolitan Los Angeles for the budding subdivisions of Tehachapi. I could see hundreds of new houses below me, their red-tile roofs often packed in so closely that they looked like the heads of matches in a matchbook. The settlers were said to be pursuing that phantom,
a simpler life
.

Tehachapi Pass had always been a major gateway to the state. Route 66 ran through it out of Arkansas and Oklahoma and had emancipated the Dust Bowl hordes—Sam Cravens off to pick zucchini with his uncle, and Woody Guthrie plucking his banjo and singing,
“If you ain’t got the do-re-mi, boy, then you can’t get into Ca-li-for-nee, boy.”
Charlie Manson might have traveled the same route on the lam from West Virginia.

In 1876, the Southern Pacific had opened the Tehachapis to rail travel by completing the staggering task of looping some tracks over the mountains. It was on an SP train from Des Moines, Iowa, that a young sportscaster at radio station WHO had made his first trip to California, ostensibly to cover the Chicago Cubs’ spring-training camp on Santa Catalina Island, off Santa Barbara.

February of 1937, the farms of Iowa gripped in a chilling freeze, and there was Ronald “Dutch” Reagan boarding a railroad car at the depot, readying himself in secret to test the waters in Hollywood and beginning the process that would transform him into the Ultimate Californian.

I
N TEHACHAPI
, some teenage girls were talking about a recent Junior Miss Pageant that had taken place at their high-school gym. They were sitting behind me in a booth at T. Juanito’s at lunch, and over nachos and sodas they were recalling the epic moments from the pageant and also relaying previously unreleased gossip about which contestants had thrown up or had gotten the giggles before the main event. They seemed to find a seed of cosmic justice in the trials of the chosen.

Beauty mattered everywhere in the world, of course, but it mattered most in southern California, building to its peak in Los Angeles and falling off by degrees from that epicenter. Every big town in the South and many big towns in the North could be counted on to select an annual Rose Bowl Queen (Pasadena) or a Garlic Queen (Gilroy). Such contests were often assumed, however naively, to be the first tentative step in the impossibly long march to movie stardom.

I was able to dig up a leftover program from the Junior Miss Pageant and learned that there had been eight finalists: Becky, Amy, Penny, Kristy, Laura, Helen, Joanna, and MaEllen. Only four of them were California blondes, but almost all of them had affected the spiral perm I’d seen so much of in Bakersfield.

The overall sponsor of the event was the Tehachapi Lions Club,
but the finalists had an individual sponsor, as well—Farmer’s Insurance, Benz Propane, Cee-Cee’s Boutique, and so on. On the back page of the program, there was a message from last year’s Tehachapi Junior Miss, Stefani Stark. She thanked God for her good luck and quoted Phil. 4:13, “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.”

While I flipped through the program, I couldn’t help remembering my own adolescence and how for a time in my early teens nothing was as vital or as potentially defeating as the image confronting me in the bathroom mirror. I felt that I’d be judged by it (and I wasn’t far wrong), so each blemish or pimple struck me as a betrayal of the flesh. How I longed to look like an actor—any actor would do! Hollywood, the home of all transcendent beauty, was more than three thousand miles away, but I knew boys and girls in high school who secretly believed that they were destined to be discovered and transported to the Coast.

Similar dreams of glory must have prompted Ronald Reagan to board that train to Los Angeles under false pretenses. Dutch had seen his twenty-sixth birthday come and go, and he was craving more from life. In his suitcase, he was carrying a brand-new suit of white linen. He put it on after checking into his hotel at Hollywood and Vine, hailed a taxi, and rode uncomfortably through a stifling winter heat wave to Republic Studios, where he dropped in on some acquaintances, the Oklahoma Outlaws.

Reagan had met the Outlaws at WHO during his broadcasting sojourn. They were filming a cheapie western with Gene Autry, but Dutch, who’d been thinking about breaking into the movies, didn’t like the look of things at Republic, or the way that he was treated. He got a better reception at Paramount and an even better one at Warner’s, where a friend even arranged for him to have a screen test before he went back to Iowa.

This friend was a singer with a big band, and she did Reagan another favor, too. He still wore glasses, but she urged him to remove them and never be seen with them in public again. He did his test
without them, and the Paramount executives received it so enthusiastically that he was awarded a seven-year contract at two hundred dollars a week, a fortune in those days. Dutch was on a roll.

No doubt Ronald Reagan would have understood the fantasies dogging those potential Junior Misses. The pageant was not supposed to be about beauty, its sponsors claimed—there were no bathing suits or cheesecake posing—and yet beauty was still the subtext. A Junior Miss could not escape from being conflated with Barbie dolls and fairy princesses and giving into a fantasy that she would one day light up the silver screen.

Our eight Junior Misses were lovely, sweet, vicious, churlish, and wholly human, a compendium of teenage desires in conflict, and after the pageant was over and the winner had been crowned, seven of them had started a slow retreat into the dimensions of an ordinary life in California, having seen the elephant.