Travels with Charley in Search of America (21 page)

And isn’t this the typical complaint? I have never resisted change, even when it has been called progress, and yet I felt resentment toward the strangers swamping what I thought of as my country with noise and clutter and the inevitable rings of junk. And of course these new people will resent the newer people. I remember how when I was a child we responded to the natural dislike of the stranger. We who were born here and our parents also felt a strange superiority over newcomers, barbarians,
forestieri,
and they, the foreigners, resented us and even made a rude poem about us:

And we were an outrage to the Spanish-Mexicans and they in their turn on the Indians. Could that be why the sequoias make folks nervous? Those natives were grown trees when a political execution took place on Golgotha. They were well toward middle age when Caesar destroyed the Roman republic in the process of saving it. To the sequoias everyone is a stranger, a barbarian.

Sometimes the view of change is distorted by a change in oneself. The room which seemed so large is shrunk, the mountain has become a hill. But this is no illusion in this case. I remember Salinas, the town of my birth, when it proudly announced four thousand citizens. Now it is eighty thousand and leaping pell mell on in a mathematical progression—a hundred thousand in three years and perhaps two hundred thousand in ten, with no end in sight. Even those people who joy in numbers and are impressed with bigness are beginning to worry, gradually becoming aware that there must be a saturation point and the progress may be a progression toward strangulation. And no solution has been found. You can’t forbid people to be born—at least not yet.

I spoke earlier of the emergence of the trailer home, the mobile unit, and of certain advantages to their owners. I had thought there were many of them in the East and the Middle West, but California spawns them like herrings. The trailer courts are everywhere, lapping up the sides of hills, spilling into river beds. And they bring with them a new problem. These people partake of all the local facilities, the hospitals, the schools, police protection, welfare programs, and so far they do not pay taxes. Local facilities are supported by real-estate taxes, from which the mobile home is immune. It is true that the state imposes a license fee, but that fee does not come to the counties or the towns except for road maintenance and extension. Thus the owners of immovable property find themselves supporting swarms of guests, and they are getting pretty angry about it. But our tax laws and the way we think about them were long developing. The mind shies away from a head tax, a facility tax. The concept of real property is deeply implanted in us as the source and symbol of wealth. And now a vast number of people have found a way to bypass it. This might be applauded, since we generally admire those who can escape taxes, were it not that the burden of this freedom falls with increasing weight on others. It is obvious that within a very short time a whole new method of taxation will have to be devised, else the burden on real estate will be so great that no one will be able to afford it; far from being a source of profit, ownership will be a penalty, and this will be the apex of a pyramid of paradoxes. We have in the past been forced into reluctant change by weather, calamity, and plague. Now the pressure comes from our biologic success as a species. We have overcome all enemies but ourselves.

When I was a child growing up in Salinas we called San Francisco “the City.” Of course it was the only city we knew, but I still think of it as the City, and so does everyone else who has ever associated with it. A strange and exclusive word is “city.” Besides San Francisco, only small sections of London and Rome stay in the mind as the City. New Yorkers say they are going to town. Paris has no title but Paris. Mexico City is the Capital.

Once I knew the City very well, spent my attic days there, while others were being a lost generation in Paris. I fledged in San Francisco, climbed its hills, slept in its parks, worked on its docks, marched and shouted in its revolts. In a way I felt I owned the City as much as it owned me.

San Francisco put on a show for me. I saw her across the bay, from the great road that bypasses Sausalito and enters the Golden Gate Bridge. The afternoon sun painted her white and gold—rising on her hills like a noble city in a happy dream. A city on hills has it over flat-land places. New York makes its own hills with craning buildings, but this gold and white acropolis rising wave on wave against the blue of the Pacific sky was a stunning thing, a painted thing like a picture of a medieval Italian city which can never have existed. I stopped in a parking place to look at her and the necklace bridge over the entrance from the sea that led to her. Over the green higher hills to the south, the evening fog rolled like herds of sheep coming to cote in the golden city. I’ve never seen her more lovely. When I was a child and we were going to the City, I couldn’t sleep for several nights before, out of bursting excitement. She leaves a mark.

Then I crossed the great arch hung from filaments and I was in the city I knew so well.

It remained the City I remembered, so confident of its greatness that it can afford to be kind. It had been kind to me in the days of my poverty and it did not resent my temporary solvency. I might have stayed indefinitely, but I had to go to Monterey to send off my absentee ballot.

In my young days in Monterey County, a hundred miles south of San Francisco, everyone was a Republican. My family was Republican. I might still be one if I had stayed there. President Harding stirred me toward the Democratic party and President Hoover cemented me there. If I indulge in personal political history, it is because I think my experience may not be unique.

I arrived in Monterey and the fight began. My sisters are still Republicans. Civil war is supposed to be the bitterest of wars, and surely family politics are the most vehement and venomous. I can discuss politics coldly and analytically with strangers. That was not possible with my sisters. We ended each session panting and spent with rage. On no point was there any compromise. No quarter was asked or given.

Each evening we promised, “Let’s just be friendly and loving. No politics tonight.” And ten minutes later we would be screaming at each other. “John Kennedy was a so-and-so—”

“Well, if that’s your attitude, how can you reconcile Dick Nixon?”

“Now let’s be calm. We’re reasonable people. Let’s explore this.”

“I have explored it. How about the scotch whisky?”

“Oh, if you take that line, how about the grocery in Santa Ana? How about Checkers, my beauty?”

“Father would turn in his grave if he heard you.”

“No, don’t bring him in, because he would be a Democrat today.”

“Listen to you. Bobby Kennedy is out buying sacks full of votes.”

“You mean no Republican ever bought a vote? Don’t make me laugh.”

It was bitter and it was endless. We dug up obsolete convention weapons and insults to hurl back and forth.

“You talk like a Communist.”

“Well, you sound suspiciously like Genghis Khan.”

It was awful. A stranger hearing us would have called the police to prevent bloodshed. And I don’t think we were the only ones. I believe this was going on all over the country in private. It must have been only publicly that the nation was tongue-tied.

The main purpose of this homecoming seemed to be fighting over politics, but in between I visited old places. There was a touching reunion in Johnny Garcia’s bar in Monterey, with tears and embraces, speeches and endearments in the
poco
Spanish of my youth. There were Jolón Indians I remembered as shirttail
chamacos.
The years rolled away. We danced formally, hands locked behind us. And we sang the southern county anthem, “There wass a jung guy from Jolón— got seek from leeving halone. He wan to Keeng Ceety to gat sometheeng pretty—
Puta chingada cabrón.
” I hadn’t heard it in years. It was old home week. The years crawled back in their holes. It was the Monterey where they used to put a wild bull and a grizzly bear in the ring together, a place of sweet and sentimental violence, and a wise innocence as yet unknown and therefore undirtied by undiapered minds.

We sat at the bar, and Johnny Garcia regarded us with his tear-blown Gallego eyes. His shirt was open and a gold medal on a chain hung at his throat. He leaned close over the bar and said to the nearest man, “Look at it! Juanito here gave it to me years ago, brought it from Mexico—la Morena, La Virgincita de Guadeloupe, and look!” He turned the gold oval. “My name and his.”

I said, “Scratched with a pin.”

“I have never taken it off,” said Johnny.

A big dark
paisano
I didn’t know stood on the rail and leaned over the bar.
“Favor?”
he asked, and without looking Johnny extended the medal. The man kissed it, said
“Gracias,”
and went quickly out through the swinging doors.

Johnny’s chest swelled with emotion and his eyes were wet. “Juanito,” he said. “Come home! Come back to your friends. We love you. We need you. This is your seat,
compadre,
do not leave it vacant.”

I must admit I felt the old surge of love and oratory and I haven’t a drop of Galician blood.
“Cuñado mio,”
I said sadly, “I live in New York now.”

“I don’t like New York,” Johnny said.

“You’ve never been there.”

“I know. That’s why I don’t like it. You have to come back. You belong here.”

I drank deeply, and darned if I didn’t find myself making a speech. The old words unused for so long came rattling back to me. “Let your heart have ears, my uncle, my friend. We are not baby skunks, you and I. Time has settled some of our problems.”

“Silence,” he said. “I will not hear it. It is not true. You still love wine, you still love girls. What has changed? I know you.
No me cagas, niño.
”

“
Te cago nunca.
There was a great man named Thomas Wolfe and he wrote a book called
You Can’t Go Home Again.
And that is true.”

“Liar,” said Johnny. “This is your cradle, your home.” Suddenly he hit the bar with the oaken indoor ball bat he used in arguments to keep the peace. “In the fullness of time—maybe a hundred years—this should be your grave.” The bat fell from his hand and he wept at the prospect of my future demise. I puddled up at the prospect myself.

I gazed at my empty glass. “These Gallegos have no manners.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Johnny said. “Oh, forgive me!” and he filled us up.

The line-up at the bar was silent now, dark faces with a courteous lack of expression.

“To your home-coming,
compadre,
” Johnny said. “John the Baptist, get the hell out of those potato chips.”

“Conejo de mi Alma,”
I said. “Rabbit of my soul, hear me out.”

The big dark one came in from the street, leaned over the bar and kissed Johnny’s medal, and went out again.

I said irritably, “There was a time when a man could be listened to. Must I buy a ticket? Must I make a reservation to tell a story?”

Johnny turned to the silent bar. “Silence!” he said fiercely, and took up his indoor ball bat.

“I will now tell you true things, brother-in-law. Step into the street—strangers, foreigners, thousands of them. Look to the hills, a pigeon loft. Today I walked the length of Alvarado Street and back by the Calle Principál and I saw nothing but strangers. This afternoon I got lost in Peter’s Gate. I went to the Field of Love back of Joe Duckworth’s house by the Ball Park. It’s a used-car lot. My nerves are jangled by traffic lights. Even the police are strangers, foreigners. I went to the Carmel Valley where once we could shoot a thirty-thirty in any direction. Now you couldn’t shoot a marble knuckles down without wounding a foreigner. And Johnny, I don’t mind people, you know that. But these are rich people. They plant geraniums in big pots. Swimming pools where frogs and crayfish used to wait for us. No, my goatly friend. If this were my home, would I get lost in it? If this were my home could I walk the streets and hear no blessing?”

Johnny was slumped casually over the bar. “But here, Juanito, it’s the same. We don’t let them in.”

I looked down the line of faces. “Yes, here it is better. But can I live on a bar stool? Let us not fool ourselves. What we knew is dead, and maybe the greatest part of what we were is dead. What’s out there is new and perhaps good, but it’s nothing we know.”

Johnny held his temples between his cupped hands and his eyes were bloodshot.

“Where are the great ones? Tell me, where’s Willie Trip?”

“Dead,” Johnny said hollowly.

“Where is Pilon, Johnny, Pom Pom, Miz Gragg, Stevie Field?”

“Dead, dead, dead,” he echoed.

“Ed Ricketts, Whitey’s Number One and Two, where’s Sonny Boy, Ankle Varney, Jesús María Corcoran, Joe Portagee, Shorty Lee, Flora Wood, and that girl who kept spiders in her hat?”

“Dead—all dead,” Johnny moaned.

“It’s like we was in a bucket of ghosts,” said Johnny.

“No. They’re not true ghosts. We’re the ghosts.”

The big dark one came in and Johnny held out his medal for kissing without being asked.

Johnny turned and walked with widespread legs back to the bar mirror. He studied his face for a moment, picked up a bottle, took out the cork, smelled it, tasted it. Then he looked at his fingernails. There was a stir of restlessness along the bar, shoulders hunched, legs were uncrossed.

There’s going to be trouble, I said to myself.

Johnny came back and delicately set the bottle on the bar between us. His eyes were wide and dreamy.

Johnny shook his head. “I guess you don’t like us any more. I guess maybe you’re too good for us.” His fingertips played slow chords on an invisible keyboard on the bar.