Authors: Bill Barich
“Half the time, things get boiled down to their lowest common denominator,” he told me on the afternoon that we met, while standing in line at a sandwich shop.
In the evening, over a beer, Adam gave me his view of politics in California. The state was so big, he said, that a politician needed to be a personality in order to survive. Issues counted, but only a handful, like water, were pertinent everywhere. The north and south were really two different countries. At the capitol, you still heard jokes about drawing a dividing line at the Tehachapi Mountains, a plan first concocted during the Civil War.
Adam saw four major constituencies at the nucleus of the political scene—the San Francisco Bay Area, including Oakland and Berkeley; metropolitan Los Angeles; the southern sunbelt that revolved around Orange and San Diego counties; and the Central Valley. Mrs. Albaugh was correct, I saw, in saying that the Far North played a minimal part in the affairs of the state.
The most populous area was the southern sunbelt, where almost half of all Californians lived. They tended to be conservative and middle-class. San Francisco stood for liberalism, activism, and a flakiness that could be totally unpredictable. But in Los Angeles, you had an explosive melange of rich and poor. Voters there were often
divided by race and by class. Agriculture and the Central Valley were synonymous, although the new suburbs were altering that pattern a little, pushing it in the direction of sunbelt values.
“What do they think of Jerry Brown in Sacramento?” I asked.
“They try not to think about him,” Adam said.
Jerry Brown, our Governor Moonbeam, was the person that most Americans singled out as the symbol of a California politician. He was not very popular on Capitol Hill or among his fellow Democrats. What people disliked about him, Adam felt, was his arrogance. He wanted to play the insider’s game while appearing to be above the fray. Yet Brown was contrary enough to be intriguing. He had an honest passion for his causes and a hint of genuine idealism. The same blend of Buddhism and seminary logic that infuriated the veteran pols knocking back bourbons at Frank Fat’s held some appeal for the wide-eyed young.
In his days as governor, Brown had wrapped himself in self-denial. He had shunned limos for an old Plymouth and had slept on a mattress in a small apartment rather than in the gubernatorial mansion, cribbing his political style from his earlier life as a seminarian.
His father, Pat Brown, a former governor himself, had once sketched a fascinating psychological portrait of his son for an interviewer. He mentioned three factors that motivated Jerry—failing the bar exam on his first try, being dumped by a college girl friend, and his time in the novitiate. Jerry was essentially a loner, he said, who might never get hitched.
“It would be tough on the dame if he got married,” Pat Brown had speculated. “He certainly has no inferiority complex. If the door opens, he’ll grasp it and go through it.”
With his contradictions, Brown seemed to embody the vicissitudes of the state, but he belonged only to the north. The south had its own symbol in Ronald Reagan. Old Dutch was the Ultimate Californian—tall, tanned, handsome, and sunny, a fine swimmer and a former lifeguard, an accentuator of the positive, somebody who
ignored bad news, who was fit, narcissistic, and so unwilling to show his age that he still dyed his hair to mask the snowy white.
Reagan had Golden State charisma. He could take an assassin’s bullet, rise from his hospital bed, and soon be back chopping wood at his ranch above Santa Barbara. Like his predecessor, former U.S. senator George Murphy, the first modern California actor-politician, he had used the presidency of the Screen Actors Guild to propel himself to the top. He was a red-baiter and an arch conservative who had learned to moderate his stance in public. As governor, he had railed against wasteful spending and ranted about the lefties in Berkeley. On the environment, he sided with the miners and the lumberjacks.
“If you’ve seen one redwood,” he said once, “you’ve seen them all.”
During my time as a Californian, a ballot initiative and not a politician had affected the most change, however. On June 6, 1978, the state’s voters had passed Proposition Thirteen, a measure that amended the constitution to limit severely the amount of property taxes that local governments could collect. If you had bought a house before 1978, your tax bill was fixed at that level and could never be increased.
Cities, counties, and special districts had suffered an immediate loss of about $7 billion annually. Proposition Thirteen was so drastic that such corporate giants as Atlantic-Richfield, Bank of America, and Southern California Edison had opposed it, fearing the effects on the business economy. Some people were convinced the proposition was at the root of the bankruptcy California might be headed toward.
The closed libraries, the shuttered clinics for the mentally ill, the outdated textbooks in the public schools, even the homeless around the capitol—Proposition Thirteen was a contributary cause of them all, at least to some degree.
One afternoon as I stretched out on the capitol lawn talking with Adam, I looked around at the assembled faces of government workers, black, Asian, and Hispanic, and realized how much change was
still in store for the state when these new faces began to have an impact on the electorate.
“What’s in the political future, Adam?” I asked.
“The future?” He laughed and plucked at a blade of grass. “Arnold Schwarzenegger.”
G
OING HOME
. The Fourth of July weekend lay ahead, and I was returning to San Francisco for my break before heading south to the San Joaquin, Los Angeles, San Diego, and the Mexican border.
I took the scenic route along Highway 160. It followed the Sacramento River through the peach and pear orchards of Freeport, Clarksburg, and Hood. Set back from the floodplain were some handsome old Victorian houses that had a quality of permanence denied to the tracts that were spreading inexorably from Sacramento to Silicon Valley, linking towns and villages together into a new megalopolis whose projected population was expected to top 9 millon by 2010.
Past Courtland I went and past Locke, a Chinese hamlet of the Gold Rush that brought back memories. There, many moons ago, a friend had taught me to catch crawfish by baiting a trap with dog food. The mud bugs foolishly crawled in to dine on MPS chunks and later we dined on them, a bounty unsuspected, soaking the crawfish in milk overnight and boiling them in a big kettle with bay leaves, salt, peppercorns, and lemon slices.
Lunch at Williams’s Big Horn in Rio Vista, maybe the most curious restaurant in the state. It was part short-order grill and part Museum of Natural History. Old man Williams, long deceased, was a big-game hunter who had stalked trophy game across Africa, one step ahead of Ernest Hemingway, killing many species of animal now endangered or extinct. Their taxidermied heads and carcasses were mounted on the Big Horn’s wall, so that you sometimes locked eyes with a dik-dik or a gazelle while you were chewing on your burger—a disconcerting moment, at best.
To the east of Rio Vista stretched the cornfields of Brannan and Bouldin islands. Here the San Joaquin River merged with the Sacramento and became a single, mighty stream that gradually widened into Grizzly, San Pablo, and San Francisco bays. The open land was disappearing, swallowed by lookalike suburbs, Antioch, Pittsburgh, Concord, and Walnut Creek, and soon there was nothing at all to see but houses—big houses, small houses, crummy houses, and terrific houses, houses fully paid for and houses mortgaged to within an inch of their lives.
Houses everywhere.
M
Y OWN HOUSE
in San Francisco, a Craftsman-style bungalow built in 1913, was the first we’d ever owned. It stood on one of the steepest hills in the city. At the hilltop, there was a warning sign that showed a big semitruck going down our street at a frightening angle. Next to the truck was the word
Hill
, beneath which some wit had scribbled “No shit.”
It was the house’s precarious position that had made it cheap enough for us to buy in 1982—although, in California real estate circles, “cheap” is a relative term.
Waking early that first morning at home, unable to stop the forward motion of the road, I left my wife in bed and went out for coffee. A contingent of elderly regulars was already making the rounds. They were familiar faces to me, old-timers in Noe Valley, our neighborhood. They’d seen it go from a blue-collar district to a gentrifying enclave of younger homeowners and had survived the changeover from American cheese and salami to goat cheese and andouille sausage.
Through a Mediterranean haze, I looked downhill to the shimmery blue of San Francisco Bay. The city could be achingly beautiful on the cusp of summer, its pastel colors ideally wedded to the season.
William Brewer had mistrusted the mild weather on his initial visit to San Francisco in June of 1861. He found the climate “healthy, very healthy, lovely” but also monotonous, a drift of feathery days that undermined the work ethic and induced a soporific laziness.
To Brewer, a Yankee raised on Puritan values, San Francisco seemed to pose a moral threat. He regarded it as a dangerous place where delicious but unconscionable things might occur. From the balmy air, he took a troubling hint that the afterlife might not be any more rewarding than the life he was currently leading.
Had Brewer stayed for another month, he would have felt differently, I believed. By mid-July, winds from the northwest would be pushing the punishing heat of the Central Valley toward the coast, where the warm air would collide with ocean vapors, sucking the cool moisture from them and creating the city’s trademark fog. Summer in the city could be a mockery, really. I had once worn a pea coat to a barbecue on the Fourth of July.
The miracle mile in Noe Valley was Twenty-fourth Street, a shopping strip both utilitarian and frivolous. Most stores were not open yet, but some workers were unloading crates of organic produce from a panel truck parked by Real Foods. They were the star actors in a cosmic California vegetable pageant that played daily at trendy groceries in the city, and they had costumed themselves accordingly in earrings, shredded Levis, and pirate bandannas—an outlaw band in revolt against iceberg lettuce.
Some San Franciscans felt so virtuous in the presence of tofu, kelp, and unsprayed guavas that the ambience in Real Foods could be weirdly precious and cultlike. On occasion, I had fantasies about starting a Fake Foods nearby, where the carrots would be irradiated and the cook would spit into the soup, but much more often I quietly joined my fellow effetes in paying top dollar for tomatoes that tasted like tomatoes. In my lifetime, the genuine had become a costly item.
A young Japanese man came dancing down Twenty-fourth Street in the blossoming light. He was crew-cut and had on a bop suit with a little plastic Ornette Coleman saxophone dangling from a cord
around his neck. He was ready to break into some spacey jazz licks at any minute, courting inspiration as he passed store windows that displayed such esoterica as Iranian caviar, strings for steel guitars, and ponchos from Argentina.
The sight of him was refreshing after my journey to the hinterlands. He was part of what gave San Francisco its unique character. Whether you liked it or not, anything at all could come at you from around a corner. Many Californians didn’t like it and projected their fears onto the city. It posed a moral threat to them, as it had done to Brewer. They rejected its liberal attitude, its tolerance, its chaos, and the wild diversity of its population.
All the wishes and the emotions that were secret, hidden, repressed, or quashed in such places as Termo or Yolo or even Sacramento were freely available, even in Noe Valley. Having been away, I recognized again what an island San Francisco was, adrift in the great sea of California. Just as I had been drawn to it while I was groping toward a dimly glimpsed future, so, too, did others flock to it for refuge and companionship.
The gay teenager from Nubeiber, the Hupa devoted to
film noir
, the woman in Fort Bragg wanting to master Indonesian cookery, they cycled through our hub in a dauntless effort to become themselves. The city was willing to take in every misfit Californian, as well as misfits from elsewhere—the wounded, the defrocked, the intellectually adventurous, and the sexually prurient—and it bound them together into a community that somehow managed to work. That was its genius and its salvation.
On Twenty-fourth Street, I came to an upscale coffee store and stopped for a cappuccino. The owners had put a bench out front, where you could sit in the sunshine and let your mind wander. The bench had never been crowded, but something had happened during my absence—it had been discovered, and every seat was taken. Customers were leaning against cars, too, and colonizing the front steps of an apartment building, propping up an entire coffee-drinking scene.
What had once been singular was now plural. The experience of bench sitting as it
used
to be, before anyone knew about the bench, could not be conveyed to the new arrivals, who probably held a misguided belief that they
were
bench sitting, even though many of them were not technically
anywhere close to the bench!
As I waited in line behind a turbaned man in Birkenstocks, and smelled the rich coffee aroma, I thought to myself, Here’s the dilemma of California in embryo.
S
AN FRANCISCO WAS YERBA BUENA FIRST
, a village on the bay at Yerba Buena Cove, where wild mint, the “good herb,” could be harvested.
The village had fewer than forty residents as late as 1846, but it grew quickly after that into a densely populated city complete with a razzle-dazzle cast of international characters such as the Sydney Ducks, a ready-made criminal class exported from the penal colonies of Australia. Eventually, it would spread itself over forty-three hills and forty-four square miles to become one of the most elegantly situated cities on earth.
From its infancy, San Francisco was prone to disasters and had a tendency to burn. Arsonists weren’t capable of resisting the thrill of torching its redwood buildings. Six major fires roared through the business district between 1849 and 1851, culminating in the Great Fire of May third, whose dimensions were spectacular enough to merit a Currier & Ives lithograph that showed landmarks like the Apollo Saloon going up in flames.