Welcome to Oakland by Williamson Eric Miles

Author:Williamson, Eric Miles
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Raw Dog Screaming Press
Published: 2013-11-03T16:00:00+00:00

Duke’d cauterized my gums and he’d mostly fixed my trumpet, but without teeth I wasn’t going to be much of a trumpet player anymore, which was just as well. I was never going to be anything more than a schmuck playing bars, and I’d seen some old schmucks at bars and they were so pathetic you either wanted to smack them or bury your face in your hands and cry like a bitch. Being an old musician is one thing. Being a lousy old musician is another.

I did tons of jobs after that. Went back to gunite for a while and worked on the California Aqueduct and the Delta Mendota Canal out in the Central Valley, got to work a long ditch job at McClellan’s Air Force Base, too, and didn’t have to pay for a campground because I had family in Sacramento and I stayed with them. But I saw a couple more guys die, and I’d already seen too many men die doing gunite, and so I decided adios, compadres. Gunite is a good job, but too many people die doing it. Riprapped, worked as a hod-carrier, soldered electronic components for a hippie who made negative ion generators in his spare bedroom, lumped at the docks. I worked as a janitor, worked the line at Anchor Hocking, canned veggies at the Huntz plant, served some time at Golden Grain. I worked security at an amusement park, protecting kids from perverts and cuffing the little shits when they stole something. Did freelance work rehabbing old houses for seedy landlords who didn’t really want the houses fixed right, just wanted them to look nifty for suckers. I didn’t get fired often, but I never really liked any of those gigs. I lost my hotel room because I couldn’t seem to make rent regularly, which was fine because I just pitched my tent at the campgrounds in the area, Redwood Park, Lake Chabot, sometimes even Half Moon Bay on the coast. There are lots of worse places to live than in a Northern California campground.

Then I finally got a good job, and when I landed it, I knew things were going to start going my way.

At least the smell died down at night.

Seagulls clacked along fat and happy, and rats played in puddles. Across the bay San Francisco glittered beneath a smear of fog and the water rolled slow like tar, garbage and dead fowl adrift and caught in sludged foam you could tell was green even though at night it looked black. Thousands of hot methane gasjets hissed sulphurous and steady, millions of tons of refrigerators and diapers and water heaters, mattresses, boxsprings, deodorant cans and twisted swing sets and empty bottles of malt liquor compressing into fuel enough to power Oakland for the rest of time, and from the garbage dump mountains the shit-fume exhaled up into the world again, spouting up like geysers through dime-sized earth-assholes. Cold nights the methane geysers steamed, and at each plume a seagull

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