The Gold Coast

11

In his dream Jim walks over a hillside covered with ruins. Below the hill spreads a black lake. The ruins are nothing but low stone walls, and the land is empty. Jim wanders among the walls searching for something, but as always he can’t quite remember what it is he seeks. He comes across a piece of violet glass from a stained-glass window, but he knows that isn’t what he is after. Something like a ghost bulges out of the top of the hill to tell him everything—

He wakes in his little apartment in Foothill, the sun beaming through the window. He groans, rolls onto the floor. Hangover here. What were they lidding last night? Groggily he looks around. His room is a mess, bedding and clothing scattered everywhere, as if a rainbow collapsed and landed in his bedroom.

Three walls of the room are covered with big Thomas Brothers maps of Orange County: one from the 1930s (faint tracing of roads), one from 1990 (north half of county gridded with interlocking towns, southern half, the hills and the Irvine and O’Neill ranches, still almost empty), one the very latest edition (the whole county gridded and overgridded). Kind of like keeping X-rays of a cancer on your walls, Jim has thought more than once. Surrealty tumor.

Stagger to the bathroom. Standing at the toilet he stares at a badly framed print of an old orange crate label. The bathroom walls are covered by these:

Three friars, taste-testing oranges by the white mission.

Behind them green groves, and blue snow-topped mountains in the distance.

Portola, standing with Spanish flag unfurled, silent, on a peak in Placentia.

Two peacocks in front of a Disneyland castle: “California Dream.”

Little bungalow in the neat green rows of a grove in bloom.

Beautiful Mexican woman, holding a basket of oranges.

Behind her green groves, and blue mountains in the distance.

You have never lived here.

The labels, from the first half of the twentieth century, are the work of printer Max Schmidt and artists Archie Vazques and Othello Michetti, among others. The intensely rich, exotic colors are the result of a process called zincography. Taken together, Jim believes, these labels make up Orange County’s first and only utopia, a collective vision of Mediterranean warmth and ease astonishing in its art deco vividness. Ah, what a life! Jim tries to imagine the effect on the poor farmers of the Midwest, coming in to the general store from the isolated wheat farm, the Depression, the subzero temperatures, the dustbowls—and there among the necessary goods in their drab boxes and tins, these fantasies in stunning orange, cobalt, green, white! No wonder OC is so crowded. These labels must have given those farmers a powerful urge to Go West. And in those days they really could move to the land pictured on the boxes (sort of). For Jim it’s out of reach. He lives here, but is infinitely further away.

The utopias of the past are always a little sad. Jim steps into pants, pulls on a shirt, pads through his ap and looks out the front door.

Sunny day. Overhead looms the freeway, with its supporting pylons coming down in backyards or on streetcorners. Kind of a big concrete thing, squatting up there in the sky, crossing it side to side. The Foothill Freeway, in fact, extended into southern OC around the turn of the century. The land it needed to cross was by then completely covered by suburbia, and homeowners objected strenuously to having their houses bought up and torn down. The solution? Make the new freeway a viaduct, part of the elevated autopian network being built over the most congested parts of the Newport and Santa Ana freeways. Values for the homes below the flying concrete would plummet, of course, but they would still be there, right?

Now it’s a perfect place for white-collar poor folk like Jim to live, in apartmentalized old suburban homes. The cars above aren’t even that loud anymore. And the shade of the freeway can be pretty welcome on those hot summer days, as the real estate agents are quick to remind you.

Jim goes back inside, feeling blah. Hung over, confused. While he eats his cereal and milk he thinks about Arthur Bastanchury. Good old Basque name, from shepherds who came to OC when James Irvine used his land to raise sheep. Arthur still looks a little Basque: dark complexion, light eyes, square jaw. And they have a good long tradition of active resistance back home in Spain. Not to mention terrorism. Jim doesn’t want to have anything to do with terrorism. But if there’s something else that can be done—some other way… He sighs, eats his cereal, stares at his living room. His living room stares back at him.

Books everywhere. The OC historians, Friis, Meadows, Starr et al.

Volumes of poetry. Novels. Stacks and stacks, anything anywhere.

In the corner under the window, the Zen center: mat, incense, candle.

CD disks all over an old console, on a bookcase of bricks and boards.

The desk is buried in paper. The couch is tattered, bamboo and vinyl.

Paper everywhere. Newspapers, mail, scraps.

A poem is a grocery list.

We eat our culture every day.

How does it taste to you?

Oops! Someone’s forgotten to do the dishes.

No one minds a little dust, either.

“We believe that the truly staggering amounts of money and human effort (which is what money stands for, remember) that are being invested in armaments represent the greatest danger of our time,” Arthur said to Jim later on the night of their poster blitz. “Nothing that we’ve tried in the legal channels of American politics has ever slowed the military-industrial complex down. They’re the biggest power in the country, and nothing can stop them. We wanted to stay nonviolent, but it was clear we had to act, to go outside politics. The technology was available to attack the products without attacking the producers, and we decided to use it.”

“How can you be sure you won’t hurt anybody?” Jim asked uneasily. “I mean, it always starts this way, right? You don’t want to be violent, but then you get frustrated, maybe careless, and pretty soon you fall over the line into terrorism. I don’t want to have anything to do with that.”

“There’s a big difference between terrorism and sabotage,” Arthur said sharply. “We use methods that harm plastics, programs, and various composite construction materials, without endangering people. Then we select what we think are the most destabilizing weapons programs, and by God we take it to them. Maybe later I can go into more detail. But we’re patient, you see. We aren’t going to start escalating just because we don’t get results right away. It might take twenty years, forty years, and we know that. And we are absolutely committed to making sure people aren’t physically hurt. It’s vital to us, you see. If we don’t hold to that we become just another part of the war machine, a stimulus to the security police industry or whatever.”

Jim nodded, interested. It made sense.

Now, eating his breakfast, he is less certain about it all. On the poster-blitz night he told Arthur he was interested in helping, and Arthur said he would get back to him. That was what, a week ago? Two weeks? Hard to say. Would Arthur bring the matter up again? Jim doesn’t know, but he isn’t easy about it.

Upset, he decides to meditate. He sits in his Zen corner and lights a stick of incense. Preparation for zazen; empty the mind. No thoughts, just openness. Watch sunlight pierce the sweet rising smoke.

The no-thoughts part is hard, damned hard. Concentrate on breathing. In, out, in, out, in, out, yeah there he was doing it! Oops. Spoiled it. Start over. Must have gotten off five or ten seconds, though. Pretty good. Shh! Try again. In, out, in, out, in, out, wonder who the Dodgers are playing today oops, in, out, in, out, pretty smoke curl shh!, in, what’s that out there? Ah, hell. Don’t think, don’t think, okay I’m not thinking, I’m not thinking, I’m not thinking, hey look at that I’m not thinking!… Oh. Well. In? Out?

It’s useless. Jim McPherson must be the most wired Zen Buddhist in history. How can he actually stop thinking? Impossible. It doesn’t even happen in his sleep!

Well, he did it for about fifteen seconds there. Better than some mornings. He gets up, feeling depressed. Mornings are typically low for him, must be low blood sugar or the lack of the various drugs that are usually in him. But this one’s a special bummer. He’s pretty confused, pretty depressed.

Might as well go with the flow of it. Jim puts on his “Super-tragic Symphony,” a concoction of his own made up of the four saddest movements of symphonic music that he knows of. He’s recorded them in the sequence he thinks most effective. First comes the funeral march from Beethoven’s Third Symphony, grand and stirring in its resistance to fate, full of active grief as an opening movement should be. Second movement is the second movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, the stately solemn tune that Bruno Walter discovered could be made into a dirge, if you ignored Beethoven’s instruction to play it allegretto and went to adagio. Heavy, solemn, moody, rhythmic.

The third movement is the third movement from Brahms’s Third Symphony, sweet and melancholy, the essence of October, all the sadness of all the autumns of all time wrapped up in a tuneful tristesse that owes its melodic structure to the previous movement from Beethoven’s Seventh. Jim likes this fact, which he discovered on his own; it makes it look like the “Supertragic Symphony” was meant to be.

Then the finale is the last movement of Tchaikovsky’s Pathetique, no fooling around here, all the stops pulled, time to just bawl your guts out! Despair, sorrow, grief, all of czarist Russia’s racking misery, Tchaikovsky’s personal troubles, all condensed into one final awful moan. The ultimate bummer.

What a symphony! Of course there’s a problem with the shifting key signatures, but Jim doesn’t give a damn about key signatures. Ignore them and he can gather up all of his downer feelings and sing them out, conduct them too, wandering around the ap trying feebly to clean up a bit, collapsing in chairs, crawling blackly over the floors as he waves an imaginary baton, getting lower and lower. Man, he’s low. He’s so low he’s getting high off it! And when it’s all over he feels drained. Catharsis has taken place. Everything’s a lot better.

He even feels in the mood to write a poem. Jim is a poet, he is a poet, he is he is he is.

He finds it hard going, however, because the piles of poetry collections on his bookcases and around his junk-jammed desk contain so many masterpieces that he can’t stand it. Every tap at the old computer keyboard is mocked by the volumes behind and around him, Shakespeare, Shelley, Stevens, Snyder, shit! It’s impossible to write any more poetry in this day and age. The best poets of his time make Jim laugh with scorn, though he imitates them slavishly in his own attempts. Postmodernism, moldering in its second half century—what does it amount to but squirming? You have to do something new, but there’s nothing new left to do. Serious trouble, that. Jim solves the problem by writing postmodern poems that he hopes to make post-postmodern by scrambling with some random program. The problem with this solution is that postmodern poetry already reads as if the lines have been scrambled by a random program, so the effects of Jim’s ultraradical experimentation are difficult to notice.

But it’s time to try again. A half hour’s staring at the blank screen, a half hour’s typing. He reads the result.

Rent an apartment.

There are orange trees growing under the floor.

Two rooms and a bath, windows, a door.

The freeway is your roof. What shade.

The motorized landscape: autopia, the best ride.

Magnetism is invisible, but we believe in it anyway.

Step up the pylon ladder in the evening sun.

Lie on the tracks to catch a tan.

They truck the sand in for all our beaches.

Do you know how to swim? No. Just rest.

Eat an orange, up there. Read a book.

Commuters running over you take a brief look.

Okay, now run this through a randomizer, the lucky one that seems to have such a good eye for rhythm. Result?

The freeway is your roof. What shade.

Eat an orange, up there. Read a book.

The motorized landscape: autopia, the best ride.

Rent an apartment.

Lie on the tracks to catch a tan.

Two rooms and a bath, windows, a door.

Magnetism is invisible, but we believe in it anyway.

They truck the sand in for all our beaches.

Commuters running over you take a brief look.

Do you know how to swim? No. Just rest.

There are orange trees growing under the floor.

Step up the pylon ladder in the evening sun.

There, pretty neat, eh? Jim reads the new version aloud. Well… He tries another variation and suddenly all three versions look stupid. He just can’t get past the notion that if you can let your computer scramble the lines of a poem, and in doing so come up with a poem that’s better, or at least just as good, then there must be a certain deficiency in the poem. In, for instance, its sequentiality. He thinks of Shakespeare’s sonnets, Shelley’s “Julian and Maddalo.” Is he really performing the same activity they did? “Rent an apartment”?

Ach. It’s a ridiculous effort. The truth is, Arthur was right. He doesn’t have any work that means anything to him. And in fact he’s almost late for this meaningless work, the one that brings in the money. That isn’t good. He throws on shoes, brushes his teeth and hair, runs out to his car and hits the program for the First American Title Insurance and Real Estate Company, on East Fifth Street in Santa Ana. Oldest title company in Orange County, still going strong, and when Jim arrives at his desk there and boots up he finds that there’s the usual immense amount of work waiting to be typed in and processed. Transfers, notices, assessments, the barrage of legal screenwork needed to make sales, move land in and out of escrow. Jim is the lowliest sort of clerk, a part-time typist, really. The three-hour shift is exhausting, even though he does the work on automatic pilot, and spends his time thinking about the recent conversation with Arthur. Everyone’s typing away at their screens, absorbed in the worlds of their tasks, oblivious to the office and the people working around them. Jim doesn’t even recognize anyone; there are so many people on the short shifts, and Jim has so few hours, that few of his colleagues ever become familiar. And none of them are here today.

It gets so depressing that he goes in to visit Humphrey, who is sort of his boss, in that Humphrey makes use of the services of Jim’s pool. Humphrey is the rising young star of the real estate division, which Jim finds disgusting. But they’re friends, so what can he say?

“Hi, Hump. How’s it going.”

“Real good, Jim! How about you?”

“Okay. What’s got you so happy?”

“Well, you know how I managed to grab one of the last pieces of Cleveland when the government sold it.”

“Yeah, I know.” This, to Jim, is one of the great disasters of the last twenty years: the federal government’s decision, under immense pressure from the southern California real estate lobby and the OC Board of Supervisors, to break up the Cleveland National Forest, on the border of Orange and Riverside counties, and sell it for private development. A good way to help pay the interest on the gargantuan national debt, and there wasn’t really any forest out there anyway, just dirt hills surrounded by a bunch of communities that desperately needed the land, right? Right. And so, with the encouragement of a real estate developer become Secretary of the Interior, Congress passed a law, unnoticed in a larger package, and the last empty land in OC was divided into five hundred lots and sold at public auction. For a whole lot of money. A good move, politically. Popular all over the state.

“Well,” Humphrey says, “it looks like the financing package is coming together for the office tower we want to build there. Ambank is showing serious interest, and that will seal things if they go for it.”

“But Humphrey!” Jim protests. “The occupancy rate out in Santiago office buildings is only about thirty percent! You tried to get people to commit to this complex and you couldn’t find anybody!”

“True, but I got a lot of written assurances that people would consider moving in if the building were there, especially when we promised them free rent for five years. The notes have convinced most of the finance packagers that it’s viable.”

“But it isn’t! You know that it isn’t! You’ll build another forty-story tower out there, and it’ll stand there empty!”

“Nah.” Humphrey shakes his head. “Once it’s there it’ll fill up. It’ll just take a while. The thing is, Jim, if you get the land and the money together at the same time, it’s time to build! Occupancy will take care of itself. The thing is, we need the final go-ahead from Ambank, and they’re so damn slow that we might lose the commitment of the other financiers before they get around to approving it.”

“If you build and no one occupies the space then Ambank is going to end up holding the bills! I can see why they might hesitate!”

But Humphrey doesn’t want to think about that, and he’s got a meeting with the company president in a half hour, so he shoos Jim out of his office.

Jim goes back to his console, picks up the phone, and calls Arthur. “Listen, I’m really interested in what we talked about the other night. I want—”

“Let’s not talk about it now,” Arthur says quickly. “Next time I see you. Best to talk in person, you know. But that’s good. That’s real good.”

Back to work, fuming at Humphrey, at his job, at the greedy and stupid government, from the local board of supervisors up to Congress and this foul administration. Shift over, three more hours sacrificed to the great money god. He’s on the wheel of economic birth and death, and running like a rat in it. He shuts down and prepares to leave. Scheduled for dinner at the folks’ tonight—

Oh shit! He’s forgotten to visit Uncle Tom! That won’t go over at all with Mom. God. What a day this is turning out to be. What time is it, four? And they have afternoon visiting hours. Mom’s sure to ask. There’s no good way out of it. The best course is to track down there real quick and drop in on Tom real briefly before going up for dinner. Oh, man.