← Read Part 1
← Read Part 2
← Read Part 3
The wedding party was assembled, the band was ready, the preacher—Father Camozzi—set down his beer, and the ceremony began, Mary with Lura and Tura at her side, Pop with Louie the bartender as his best man and Joe Fernandez, Pop’s boss at Joe’s Tire Service, as Pop’s other man. When Father Camozzi opened his Book of Common Prayer, Lura and Tura, at the same time, turned and flashed their boobs at the crowd, and we all cheered, and Pop and Mary looked less nervous. Hey, tits count, even if they’re attached to pigs. Don’t try denying it.
Pop tugged at his coat and tie and even though I’d only once before seen him duded up like that he somehow seemed natural that way, seemed as though in another life he could have been some fancy real-estate guy or a salesman, someone who didn’t come home from work and wash his hands and forearms and neck with Ajax, someone who got to talk on the phone and have expensive sandwiches and beers with people and call it work.
My mother had somehow managed to sidle up next to me and Rhonda, and she leaned against my arm as if she was somehow attached to me, as if I were her date.
“T-Bird,” she said. “You need a bath.”
“I work at the dumps,” I said. “I stink.”
“Dead?” she said.
Father Camozzi was getting on with it.
“Dead,” she said, and she kept on saying it, dead, dead, dead, dead. Dead, dead.
“Dead end road for Clyde,” I said. “Kent, Mexicans.”
I told her. I told her about it while Pop was standing there straight backed and proper and proud and finally with a woman who would stay with him and sometimes even be nice to him, who would make him some goddamn coffee in the morning and crack a can of chili for him and have it hot in the pot after work, crackers and cheese shredded on the side, his beer fresh out of the fridge.
I started with Clyde. I told her Clyde died after getting drunk one night with me and trying to drive back to Pop’s place, wrapped his car around the barrier at the end of my dead end street. No one reported that kind of shit in my neighborhood, because that means the cops will have to talk to you and you’ll have to scour your place for stuff they’ll bust you for, which might be anything depending on how dark your skin is or how long you keep your hair. So Clyde sat mangled in his car until noon the next day—about eight hours—with a steering wheel carving semi-circles in his throat and belly. Died on the stretcher.
The way Kent died? Mommy, here’s how. He walked out of a 7-11 and saw a low rider, and the car was stuffed with the same Mexicans that had cut off Clyde’s ear and beat the living shit out of him for fucking their sister, and when Kent saw the car he said, “Mexicans.” And they jumped out of the car, and wham! they’d knocked him to the ground and they were stomping his chest and neck with those Mexican shoes of theirs, the ones with the heels. A little shit, after Kent was down and after I had a knife to my gut, wrapped Kent’s chest with a chain and then it took three of them to drag Kent to the trailer hitch welded to the ass-end of the Chevy Impala low-rider. Then they got in the car and backed up, and I don’t know if they ran over him or not, because I didn’t hear him scream and because one of those fucks had sliced my arm across the vein—that’s the scar I have, see it?—and they drove off, drove with those little 78-series low-rider tires and ass-end of the car dragging even lower from the weight of Kent being towed behind across the asphalt.
I tied-off my arm with my tee-shirt, and it was dark and foggy and the streetlights made nimbi like schmaltzy angel halos and I wear glasses, you know, and my glasses were misted and wet and fogged but I could see the taillights red and fuzzed and I could hear Kent being carved and sliced by the asphalt rough. I got up and I ran, and I ran and I saw the asphalt ahead shine with the bloodslick of Kent life reflected in the taillight haze and candleflame from Catholic ceremony and dread in bayframe windows. I kept running, my own arm leaking, and then I saw ahead a lump dark and heavy and when I came to it the lump was Kent’s leg, jeans shorn, legbone gray and sticking out of the pantleg like a plastic piece of plumbing, drooling with red gobs of curd. I nudged it with my foot, Mom, and it rolled over, and then I think I might have howled, but I’m not sure, because howling is not a thing one can be certain one has done, not if it is a proper howl. Have you howled? If you have, you’re not sure, not absolutely certain that you have. You haven’t howled if you’re sure you have.
And I kept on after them. I don’t know why, since Kent was either dead or going to die, and since if I caught them they’d kill me to, as is their custom.
I found more body parts, but the more body parts I found, the less I was able to distinguish them. The more body parts I found, the more they started to look like car parts soaked red in transmission fluid, springs, wires, gobs of grease, rubber hoses.
When I found Kent, what I saw was not something I can describe.
We buried him with a closed coffin funeral.
Telling my mother about Kent and Clyde, I knew what was going to happen. She was going to flip out and make a scene. Years before, when she was married to some other dude—an airline pilot who made a shitpile of money and had a health care plan—my mother cooked up a great scam with a shrink. That didn’t surprise me. Rich assholes all go see shrinks so they can blame their shitbaggery on someone else, anyone else, anyone other than themselves. Poor people don’t see shrinks. Poor people get a fucking job. Not the rich. My daddy spanked me too much, and so I’m a fatass pedophile adulterer. My mommy never let me play with the other girls, and so I beat my husband with a frying pan and fuck his friends silly whenever I can. Shrinks.
My mother called me when she and her shrink cooked up her excuse for bitchery. “T-Bird!” she said. “T-Bird, there’s a reason I was a bad mother and used to beat you boys. It’s because it wasn’t really me doing those awful things!”
“Yes,” I said.
“It wasn’t really me! It was the bad alters! I have M.P.D. That stands for Multiple Personality Disorder. My bad personalities were the ones doing the bad things, not my core personality. I have 95 personalities in all!”
Most of my mother’s gang, her alters, were bitches.
I’d seen plenty of the alters. Sometimes they called me at night when my mother had slipped away and she was on the freeway being driven around by a bad alter, or even a child alter who was afraid of driving. Other times they called me and cuss me out.
So I knew that my mother was going to flip out, lose it for everyone at Pop’s wedding to see so that they’d pay attention to her and not to Pop, upstage the wedding and draw a crowd of sympathetic onlookers to console her and tell her everything was all right.
Father Camozzi was about to wrap it up and pronounce Pop and Mary man and wife. They put the rings on each other. Pop had gotten one of his old wedding rings shined up special for the new marriage, and he got Mary a ring from Franco Borges, who specialized in rings, watches, and stereos. Her ring had a diamond on it the size of a doorknob, and it only cost three hundred bucks. Borges told Pop she could wear it anywhere our side of East 14thStreet. They kissed, and Pop grabbed Mary’s ass and lifted her wedding skirt. Mary grabbed Pop’s cock. We all cheered and clapped and laughed, and then the band played the recessional march and Lura and Tura lifted their tube tops and wagged their titties like water balloons and Pop and Mary walked through the crowd, Pop’s hand on her ass still and Mary tugging away. We threw rice at them. Pop was really happy. It was one of the most beautiful things I’ve seen in this life.
The band kicked it into gear and played a disco song, one of the old black dudes trying to make his voice sound fag. People started dancing. Kids threw footballs and frisbees. Kegs bubbled and slobbered on the grass. Rhonda stuck her tongue in my ear. I got a hardon.
My mother leaned against me and pressed a fake tit against my chest. It felt like the float in a toilet’s water tank. She said, “Bad. Bad. Bad bad,” and Gail had a look on his face like he’d eaten something nasty and was about to fart. Lura or Tura was standing next to Carl and banging her tits against his chest, and her husband, Leroy, eyed Carl pretty good. Granddad Murphy’s wife stood up and danced like she used to be a stripper a million years ago when she wasn’t fat and old and blind.
Pop walked up to the band. They cut the disco crap mid-riff. The amps buzzed and we were quiet. Pop took his horn from its case. It shone through its soot tarnish. His hands were inked with grease even though he’d probably scrubbed them raw with an SOS pad. He took the mike and said, “This song is dedicated to my bitch!” and the band kicked in and it was a slow blues, sleazy and sexy and washed with all the sadness and joy and asskick hosewhipped gruel of our place, of our Oakland, of the docks and piers and factories and of the railroad tracks and the slaughterhouse fume and the Hershey acrid stink that somehow became chocolate, of the General Mills plant that made you yaak your throat into your hands when you walked past, of all the Chinese and Negroes and Japanese internment survivors and of the Okies like us who came to C.A. desperate for a vine to bite and a piece of dirt that would give grain, and the beat of the music and the walk of the bass and the slow and sparse chords of the Hammond organ slipped into the air like the slimy ooze of late night tenth time in the day fucking, no shower, no KY needed for this shit. Man, those boys set the down like there was only in the universe the song they were playing, the great and almighty song of fuck and fuck and more fuck more.
And Pop brought his horn, the old family trumpet that had been the trumpet of his father before him and that someday when I could again play and when Pop deemed me worthy of the horn’s ancestry would be mine, brought his horn to his lips cracked with ten worlds of radiator fanned wind and creased with valleys of oil and grease that would never wear away, brought that horn up and pressed his lips to the mouthpiece and with the bellows of his chest, with the force of all his anguish and love and lust and will to endure, the force of all that constituted what he was and the force of what he would be and have been, the force of a man who should not be standing surefooted and planted but who should instead have been piledriven into the asphalt earth like the ruins of a splendid society the likes of which man would better off if without unawares be—with force and yet restraint, the restraint of a million years of doing the shit work for brutes bigger or smarter or less compassionate and therefore more powerful, the restraint of the man at work upon whom his family depends for sustenance, for bread and water and fire and skins, the humility and seething rageboil of a man for whom a ten-state murder spree is never more than an insult away, never more than a single instance of despair from becoming a plan, a vocation, a mission, a relief and justification for a life of endless and constant pain and silence and sucking it the fuck up. To be an American, to be an American and a man, an American a man and a working man, is to be a sultan of restraint, gorgeous enslaved and eager quims wagging in front of your face and you with no hint of hardon. If there weren’t laws and we weren’t so shitscared of them, each of us each day would kill, and not just kill with discretion, but with sure and steady and satisfied impunity. Find me an American man who claims he does not want to kill at least once in a day each day of his life, and you’ve found one lying son of a bitch, one you’d better watch out for, because he just might want to kill you. Trust me. I never lie.
And even though I shivered watching Pop swell with being and have been and will be more I wanted to see Pop other than he was. I wanted to see Pop wear a black suit and cummerbund and his greased hair knotted and black and I wanted to hear Pop the tire-man play his trumpet. I wanted to see Pop’s finger-stumps dance the pads of his trumpet and I wanted to hear Pop play the jazz that I now toothless could not play.
I had some questions I wanted to ask Pop.
I wanted to ask Pop why he quit playing his music though Pop had made excuses, blaming the bitch, the whore, the cunt, the cooze, my mother, the cause of all that was shit in not only his life but in the lives of all men, my mother the ruin of Oakland, the downfall of the unions, the reason the gooks kicked our asses in both Korea and Nam, the reason the blacks overran the nice neighborhoods of old, the reason car parts were going over to the metric system and hardworking American mechanics were having to retool their socket sets, my mother the slut behind the conspiracy to destroy the non-homo white male and replace him with a pantie-weary army of three-piece Florsheim-wearing faggots—that’s why Pop couldn’t play the goddamn trumpet anymore, for if he did, the divorce gods would descend and strip him of all he had left, his trailer, his tools, and his new bitch.
I knew all this already though, knew it by heart and by cadence, and I wanted to ask Pop if though he no longer played he still heard music in the world, if there was music in the clack of jackhammer, the hydraulic moan of dynahoe, the whine of Bobcat and the arc-sound wrecking ball swing, if now that he spent more time breaking down truck tires than he did putting them back together, destroying instead of creating, felt in his hands the hammer instead of the trumpet, felt his viscera vibrate with the rhythms of air-compressor instead of with string-bass and piano and his own fingers caressing the pads of the trumpet, if now that he beat things level with earth instead of ascending with the muses and angels he had achieved some hidden sinister goal, some act of revenge against himself, his family, his people, and his mysterious nameless gods. I wanted to ask Pop if the music of his past, the music of his blood, the notes of mothers’ and fathers’ voices before him haunted him in his dreams. I wanted to ask Pop if he was like an old piano whose keys had not been touched in a generation, the marrow in the bone white and black keys dried and drained for lack of touch, for lack of flesh on bone. Pop, is the music in your marrow gone?
When I was a boy I used to listen to Pop play the trumpet at the Baptist church with the old jazzmen, white-haired men with workblacked faces wearing shipyard blues and machinist coveralls, their names stitched to their workclothes in red, their horncases beaten like toolboxes. I used to listen to Pop and I’d sit on the pews and look at the cross in the shadows of the after hours and the church smelled of cigars and gin and menthol cigarettes, the pastor at the piano singing his chords as he played them, his voice many voices stacked upon each other as if Babel instead of being a cacophony of noise were instead language turned chorale and that chorale turned jazz-mass by the magical solo fugue of the pastor, his voice booming like a section of perfectly harmonized trombones. The drummers in this church and with my father not drummers but instead musicians who understood that the drum no more carries the beat than does the bass or the horns or the piano but is itself an instrument of music and each drumstick against calfskin or sheepskin contains within the stroke and impact the possibility of not merely a single percussive punctuation but the certainty of all notes playing at the same time, and each tom-tom and floor-tom and bass-drum and cymbal and high-hat contains in itself the expanse and range of the sounds of nature, the drum not something beaten, but something played, music lifting rather than being hammered out. The trumpets and trombones, shimmering ores mined from the cauldron heart of earth and forged and wrought into brass and silver extensions of veins and arteries lungs and I would squint so bright were the starfires that shot from the horns twisting in the candleflames and pit-lights, these horns borne in the fires of earth and even when pianissimo seemingly crouched and waiting to attack with the ferocity of beasts untamed and primordial with lust and passion and the sex of the earth’s ongoing creation, these primal heralds were troubadours of war, goat-hooved satyrs of cities ancient and rising phoenixed into the dark and darkening skies of jazz. The upright and its womanly shape, the players never sitting but standing and not just standing but entwined with the wood and gut-string and pressed into the instrument like lovers into loved, always restrained, eternal foreplay, fingering the strings now in gentle strokes and now plucking as if to punish, and the sound of the bass itself a molten wash of sound never wholly silent but only dampened, a wash of red liquid metal rolling slowly through the church, the liquid metal the beams and girders and iron rails and braided cables not yet forged but soon to be. But none of these instruments, none of the sounds made by the transformation of nature into the appendages of man struck me as did the sound of my own father’s horn, and I could tell the sound of Pop’s trumpet amid a line of fifteen. I could tell the sound of Pop’s lips on the mouthpiece, the old silver Conn held together by Pop’s father’s own handicraft with soldering iron and file, its sound when Pop played cascading over the other players like a room of strings downbeating at the opening of a Mahler symphony, which I the child did not realize until the first time I heard Mahler, many years later when I was in college and trying to impress a girl and took her, therefore, to the symphony, where, when the downbeat of Mahler's Resurrection Symphony stroked I said, “Pop,” and I wept, the girl at my side dumbfounded and saying, “Yes, it’s beautiful,” and I with my face in my hands saying softly and again, “You don’t understand, you can’t understand.” This sound which issued forth from my father’s trumpet was the wind pirouetting through the tulles, the sound of a storm-gale blowing over the open pipes of a playground jungle-gym, the howl of a chimney in a hurricane. Pop seemed to me then not my father alone nor the son of man but a being wholly inhuman, wholly at one with the elements from which the trumpet was made and which combined to bring the trumpet vibrating into life. And I (I remembered being too young to walk on my own, unable to speak the voices within myself) sitting in the pew and understanding that I was in a holy place.
Pop, Pop—why did you give up? I wanted to know. I wanted to know if the lack of courage is something you began on your own or if it was something passed on through okie shit blood, a trait sent down through the ages from the times when our people were beaten prostrate and humbled hopeless, our courage a vice and death-sentence, if the lack of courage was your personal and generational invention or if it was my destiny, a destiny I would have been better off not attempting to elude, a heritage I should have understood and therefore embraced and welcomed and coddled like a retard kid, mine.
And Pop blew, and no telling whether or not the band knew the tune but no doubt they knew the song, negroes they, they knew the song because they’d sung it and they were singing it and they’d never in America cease to sing that fucker. They knew Pop’s song, because Pop was nigger as nigger they, and so was I, nigger me, and as long as we pissed and shat in the same plastic construction site outhouses we’d always be niggers together, our shit mingling in the bowels of every urban shithole in the world. Those black boys played a chord that so made Pop’s opening breath resound that there wasn’t a person on the GE lawn that didn’t know in their heart, in their gonads, that this note, this note that was a song, was something from Bud, from Pop, the father of us all and all us but me, a song that we not only knew but that we all knew was a song that told our story, our stories individual and collective, the stories of our fucks and not-fucks, the stories of our divorces and our children, the ones we could never again see and the ones we never again wanted to see, the ones we’d raised and the ones we’d not gotten to raise, the ones we’d rather have seen drowned in the San Leandro creek—the water that separates the negroes from the not-negroes in Oakland—and the ones we’d kill the bitches to be able to raise the right way, the Oakland way, the way of Don’t you fuck and If you think shit well don’t, don’t, watch the fuck out Oakland motherfuck watch your ass bitch out right. Bud’s song, my father’s song, the song of Pop, had begun and all of us felt pride and guilt at the same time, at same time felt guilt and pride and fuck you and up your ass bitch I’ll kill you and I’ll fuck you forever, and that’s the way good music works. Try me otherwise.
And he blew. Every note he’d ever played came back to me, the times he’d stood before the tropical fish tanks in the living room of our shotgun shack on 62ndAvenue in Oakland, the fish themselves dancing no shit dancing to the sound of his trumpet, bobbing and swaying to the gentle and hatred echo of the bruits that issued from the metal of the family horn—I remember this with clarity that is bestowed only upon the cursed and the blessed—the fish somehow part of a universal dance that as a child only I understood, and only I will ever understand, for I am a child, and always will be always.
Pop blew and his horn shone with the warmth of Pop’s blood, with the heat and procreative urge and urge that creates more than life, that creates the music which itself creates life. Pop stood in an attitude of dignity and propriety that bespake something beyond the gas station and the trailer in which he lived, which went beyond the dumps and the tracks and the warehouses and the junkyard dogs but which at the same time encompassed, and more: which embraced them all, which extrapolated upon the fullness and spectrum of life, which ranged between dock and soiree, between cheap beer and fancy Champagne, between worn out blowjob whore and gorgeous bimbo divorce queen, between us and them, and with Pop playing there really didn’t seem to be much difference between us and them at all. With Pop playing, blowing his cracked-lip air-tone soul into and through and out of the horn of our family, it seemed and most likely was true that in this life of ours the only common denominator is song. Pop’s tone was so pale, so incandescent and yet ethereal, that he seemed to be playing ever more silently the more forceful he blew, as if the interposition of his being into the world was not an intrusion, not an interjection, but was instead being absorbed, embodied. Pop moved toward silence. Which made sense, which could only be, for when man made music to praise gods now dead and some recently forgotten he was attempting to silence the noise he had made, the noise which had chased the gods into circles more silent because only in silence can the whispers of the gods be recognized, so subtle are they and so still.
A man with a yellow beard walked onto the GE lawn, his beard yellow he toothless, his mouth sucked in and lipless. His mouth moved as if he would talk but did not.
A dog somewhere bleated.
The yellow-bearded man pulled out his pud and began pissing, and above the music and the wedding assembly he said, “It will get colder.”
He laughed and the flesh of his face bubbled obscene with unneeded skin and the man began chanting.
The half has never yet been told, Of love so full and free, The half has never yet been told, The blood, it cleanseth me. Yet been told, of love so full and free, Yet been told, the blood it cleanseth me.
And I knew that the old man yellow bearded and toothless and pissing strove for silence with his song. I knew that this man sang because he heard still the noise that although imperceptible to me rattled the frozen bones of the old man, and the old man therefore knew more the music of the gods than ever would I. This man sang because he heard the muted howl of citizens dazed with dread at hearing not the noise of that which surrounds but the noise which they themselves create, their breaths and snorts and the rattle and gargle of their throats and the timpanic throb of clockwork pulse beats.
This man sang because without song he was not yet alone.
The silence for which we sang.
My task as a musician, I thought. My task as a man of music is to cancel out the noise of man. To disappear the noise man creates with noise more beautiful, with noise counter balanced against all noise manufactured which is by definition ugly though the noise I make is too manufactured but the noise I make is not noise. The noise I make is music. And the noise I make which is music is not false music but instead is true music and there is indeed a difference.
And Pop played, and the oldsters of the band backed him as if Pop were Miles Davis or Chet Baker or Clifford Brown, Pop sailing through the chords as if those chords were the echoes of all he’d never tell any of us, the reverberations of howls and pleas made in the small hours to men and women at bars and clubs none of us, the workers, the cement masons and asphalt layers and rip-rappers and hod carriers and dump truck drivers of Oakland would ever know, so much different was Pop, at this moment, Pop in his suit and the family trumpet to his lips and his tone slowly turning from shimmer to lip-shot hiss, so much not like us for the first time ever was Pop. I felt like I knew everything about him, every nuance and every ache and every woman he’d ever loved, and yet at the same time I felt as if I’d never known a thing about him, never known him to speak a sentence that was honest and true. And I thought, Words don’t even approximate truth. The only truths in life are love and stupor and music.
The wind shifted directions and blew the rind-stink of the dumps our way.
Rhonda leaned into me and pressed her face against my chest. My mother whispered and shook and said, “Bad, bad, bad, bad.” Lura and Tura flanked Carl like fleabag dogs rubbing themselves against a cyclone fence, Carl beer in one hand flask in the other. Leroy eyed Carl with intent.
When the song ended, no one clapped, no one cheered. Everyone drank, tipped their beers and their flasks and their screw-cap half-pints and drank, a communion holy and reverent and solemn.
Then Pop leaned toward the mike, and he said, “For my bitch!” and we yelled, all of us somehow yelling the same note, the same pitch, as if we all understood something that surely we did not. And Pop bowed and walked toward Mary and Mary mashed herself against him and they kissed. If I’d have been the kind of guy who cried, I might have. But I’m not that kind of guy.
Pop and Mary peeled off on the lawn, Mary’s blouse unbuttoned and Pop without his shirt, hairy barrel chest soaked in beer and glistening. Oil stains greased his forearms and back where he’d missed when he washed up before the wedding. One of Mary’s tits plopped out of her black bra, and she didn’t mind but Pop reached over and stuffed that puppy back in gently as if he were being careful with an expensive inner tube he’d just patched. Granddad Murphy and his fat blind wife did some kind of Irish jig I didn’t know and had never before seen or imagined, rickety and beautiful and you could hear Granddad Murphy’s bones clacking like bad lifters.
My mother’s husband walked through the throng and the Concrete Wall Sawing guys dumped beer on him, but my mother’s husband just smiled while they poured and the more they poured the more cool my mother’s husband looked. You didn’t know what to make of this guy, the way he seemed immune to everything, the way he seemed like the kind of dude who could, if he wanted to, take anyone out, but who was either too nice or too badass to do it, and the not knowing which he was—nice guy or killer—that’s what made you creepy all over. Everyone was getting pretty loaded. Chuck Santos, one of the Markstein guys puked florescent yellow in the back of his truck and then he stood up tall and beat his chest, a beer in each hand, and then he chugged them. He could really drink, Chuck Santos. Soaked and smiling creepy with straight white teeth my mother’s husband walked up to Pop.
Carl pulled himself loose from the twins and said, “Business?”
I nodded. “Business,” I said.
I stood up, my mother still saying, “Bad bad,” and hanging onto my arm like a drunk waitress. Rhonda pulled my mother off me and broke her beer bottle against the rim of a Yandell 18-wheeler and handed me the jagged neck. She smiled at me and then she slipped her arms over my shoulders and around my neck and kissed me, tongue. I got a hardon. I pulled her close to let her know. She pushed against it. I squeezed the bottleneck in my hand. I was ready to rumble.
Leroy grabbed Carl’s arm. “What you been doing looking at my woman?”
Carl laughed.
“You been looking at my woman,” Leroy said, and Carl looked Leroy straight. Some more of Mary’s relatives started toward Carl, seven or eight men with crooked teeth and ugly wives, and they swayed and their eyes spun with booze. Father Camozzi set his Book of Common Prayer and his Bible down on the fender of one of the Yandell trucks and rolled up his sleeves and started toward Pop and Mary and my mother and her new husband. Father Camozzi was an expert at weddings. I’d played my trumpet at Mexican weddings that broke out in gang wars and one time I saw Father Camozzi crack six guys’ heads open with the billy-club he kept under his habit. By the time Father C was done with those guys, everyone stopped fighting and went back to drinking like the family they had become and would remain.
Father C reached his arm beneath the robe and pulled out the billy-club, and man we all made way and made way and made fucking way. But Mary’s clan didn’t. They were probably from some part of town that didn’t have priests or they’d have known to back the fuck off.
Leroy slapped his woman, Lura or Tura, and he said, “Put your fucking tits away, pig,” and Carl said, “Oink,” and Leroy said, “You calling my woman a pig?”
My mother walked through the crowd toward her husband and toward Pop, and the guys whistled and hooted and my mother swung it up, giving leg and showing the personality I always saw whenever there were men around, and Franco Melendrez swung his arm around my mother’s waist and she leaned on in and grabbed his cock through his Ben Davises and Melendrez put his hands to her shoulders and tugged her dress down so only her fake tits held up dress up. Her husband was almost to Pop, and Mary saw him coming and threw a beer bottle at him. Leroy spat at Carl, and Rhonda looked at me—and it seemed like everything was beginning to happen all around her and she was touched by none of it, as if in this shit of a world, this stinking hellhole that was Oakland, nothing could touch her, nothing could affect her, nothing could make her a part of it or make her any less beautiful, any less a chick for whom a man would die andwork the worst job in the world forever if only he knew she’d be at home waiting for him with a beer cracked and a roasted chicken on a plate, as if while we all fought and battled and gutted each other like shit-for-ditch fish she, Rhonda, would hover over all of us like an angel, like a warrior goddess who would choose a side and whose choice would decide all our fates—Rhonda looked at me with a sparkle and glint and crooked lip I’ll-fuck-you-love-you and never leave you look that let me know that whatever happened, no matter how bloody I got, no matter how many of her relatives kicked my ass and sliced me up, she’d bring me a beer while I soaked in Epsom salts and pretended I didn’t need to cry.
Everyone was smacking someone now and the melee swirled, arms flailing, men breaking beer bottles against their trucks and pulling the Bucks from their belts and flashing steel, Carl swinging Leroy around by the neck and Lura and Tura slapping Carl upside the head, Mary holding my mother by the hair and slapping her down to the ground, then yanking my mother’s hair again and again slapping my mother to the ground. Mary’s relatives scrambled and some of the Overhead Door guys hauled them back into the fight, and no one knew who was fighting who and Concrete Wall Sawing Bob, the biggest jackhammer operator in the East Bay, stood in the center of the mess laughing and laughing and beating his chest like a gorilla. Granddad Murphy sat down at the edge of the crowd and rested his head against a keg, his wife bouncing around in circles like she was doing some obscene fat blind Mexican hat dance.
My mother said, “Yes, yes, yes,” and someone pulled her dress down, and my mother’s husband turned to look when he heard her voice and Pop cracked him upside the head with the family trumpet and I threw up on someone.
Lura or Tura was bleeding. Carl and Concrete Wall Sawing Bob were laughing together, clubbing anyone who came within fist. Granddad Murphy’s wife was a slut with no one to fuck. Granddad Murphy was dead.
I cut my way through the crowd and checked Pop mid-swing as he was about to crack one of his new relatives. Mary danced and swung a beer bottle around her head like a lasso. She looked really happy, Mary.
I pulled Pop toward me and I kissed him on the forehead.
“You gone fag?” he said.
“I love you,” I said. I might have been a little tipsy.
“Yeah,” he said. “Just don’t go faggot on me.”
“Go,” I said, and I put my arm around his shoulder and walked him toward his new wife and took her in the other arm, she swinging a beer bottle still and I walked them toward their honeymoon rig, Pop’s shiny Ford Fairlane, sparkling and beautiful, an ice chest full of beer in the back seat and a Raiders bobbing-head doll in the back window, Ben Davidson. I opened the door for him. His new wife got in on the passenger side, and she could now, because Pop had finally fixed the door, taking off the greased rope that used to hold the door shut and bolting on a new doorhandle. The Fairlane looked like a car anyone would want. I hoped he’d leave it to me in his will.
“You’re not my son,” Pop said, “but you’re a good son.”
“And you’re not my father,” I said, “but you’re a son of a bitch.”
And Pop smiled.
The fight was getting pretty bad. Granddad Murphy’s wife had nudged him and he’d tipped over and she tried to get him back into a sitting position but he tipped over again and I couldn’t hear her but I saw her calling his name, at first softly and with love and then frantic with despair mixed with terror. If her eyes hadn’t been milked with rheum they would have been wild. Lots of other people were down, even some of the kids. Someone had tied tin cans to the bumper of the Fairlane and they clanged and sparked as Pop drove off.
I weaved my way through the fight to Rhonda, who stood untouched and smiling at me. She took my hand. I caught Father Camozzi’s eye and waved at him and he came toward us and I turned to Rhonda and I said, “Marry me.”
Rhonda smiled and she took my hand.
Father Camozzi clubbed someone and stepped over a wrangling pair of newly pronounced in-laws. “Marry me,” I said, and I don’t know what I said next, but what I should have said, and what I tell people I said, is this: Rhonda, marry me. Marry me now, here, here amongst and before my people, your people, these asshole warriors of shame and courage and despair and endurance, endurance, Rhonda, the thing we do, endure. Marry me now, here and in their sight with or without their approval or even knowledge, Rhonda, now and here and know this, Rhonda, that though I am of them and though Oakland will never leave me, my blood and flesh spilled into countless construction sites and playgrounds, blood mixed with concrete and mortar and asphalt and skin now powder inspired by all my fellow citizens, though the smell of the dumps at which I live will never leave my memory if perhaps my pores, though, Rhonda, my scars roadmap the courses of both adversaries and friends and chart the hanging rebar and wire and cable of sewer and basement and jail-cell window-wire (yes, Rhonda, I’ve been there and seen men weep and soil themselves in abject fear and I was repulsed, not by my own act or my possible fate but by their cowardice and lack of understanding that all can be taken away any instant but their souls, which remain, which, intact, continue in sewer and dump and jail-cell), Rhonda, though I am of them and of this place and will never leave either, would not abandon either even were I able, I am not like them. I’m not like them, Rhonda. Rhonda, I’m not like them. I’m not. Marry me. I’m not like them. Really, I’m not.
