Freeman's California E-Book

John Freeman

• Herausgeber: Grove Press UK
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 428

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

The sixth volume in the series that has been hailed by NPR, O Magazine and Vogue, Freeman's: California features stunning new work from a broad selection of writers, revealing everything that is important and fascinating about America's most populous state. In Freeman's: California, Lauren Markham describes how four generations of her family have lived in and tried to manipulate the water in one of the driest parts of the state and how water and land means everything. Rabih Alameddine recounts becoming a bartender in the mid-1980s as his friends began to die of AIDS. Rachel Kushner reminisces on all the amazing cars she's owned and their peculiar, vivid personalities. Natalie Diaz narrates the process of making her body into a professional basketball player, and how that assembly stalled some of the internal vulnerabilities she'd felt as a gay native woman growing up in California. And Elaine Castillo visits her brother in prison. Amid the raging the forest fires plaguing California, William T. Vollmann drives to the Carr fire and sees how fire has become the new state of normality for California. And Jaime Cortez riffs on pulling over at a rest-stop and smelling the fires of Paradise burning. Meanwhile home is in transition as Karen Tei Yamashita recalls a Japanese-American who goes to Japan after the dropping of the bomb, writing back and forth. Reyna Grande explores how her mother fell out of society and became a woman who collects recycling, while she and her siblings have become model immigrants. Also featuring a haunting ghost story from Oscar Villalon, bold new fiction from Tommy Orange, and stunning poems from Mai Der Vang, Juan Felipe Herrera, Maggie Millner and more, Freeman's: California assembles a diverse list of brilliant writers.

Leseprobe

Previous Issues

Freeman’s: Arrival

Freeman’s: Family

Freeman’s: Home

Freeman’s: The Future of New Writing

Freeman’s: Power

Freeman’s California

Est. 2015

Edited by

John Freeman

First published in the United States of America in 2019 by Grove Atlantic

First published in Great Britain in 2019 by Grove Press UK, an imprint of Grove Atlantic

Copyright © 2019 by John Freeman

Assistant Editor: Dhyana Taylor

Managing Editor: Julia Berner-Tobin

Copy Editor: Kirsten Giebutowski

All pieces not included in the list below are copyright © 2019 by the author of the piece. Permission to use any individual piece must be obtained from its author.

The moral right of the authors contained herein to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of the book.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright-holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

Grove Press UK

Ormond House

26–27 Boswell Street

London

WC1N 3JZ

www.groveatlantic.com

Trade paperback ISBN 978 1 61185 473 2 Ebook ISBN 978 1 61185 906 5

Printed in Great Britain

Contents

Cover

Previous Issues

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction

John Freeman

Seven Shorts

Jaime Cortez

Oscar Villalon

Xuan Juliana Wang

Matt Sumell

Jennifer Egan

Yiyun Li

Anthony Marra

How to Bartend

Rabih Alameddine

The End of the Pride Parade

D. A. Powell

Omaki-san

Karen Tei Yamashita

Prayer to the Redwood

Mai Der Vang

The Fires

William T. Vollmann

Facts from the Story []’ll Never Tell You

Elaine Castillo

A Portrait of the Artist as a Latchkey Child

Héctor Tobar

The California Pageant

Lauren Markham

At the Shore

Frank Bidart

Susto

Manuel Muñoz

California Brown

Juan Felipe Herrera

Eleven Short Histories of the Bison in Golden Gate Park

Heather Smith

Paramount

Robin Coste Lewis

Gone in Sixty Sentences

Rachel Kushner

My Mother’s California

Reyna Grande

Ultimate California Highway 1 Road Trip

Catherine Barnett

Copperopolis

Tommy Orange

High Windows

Geoff Dyer

Monterey

Maggie Millner

The O Ring

Shobha Rao

Bodies Built for Game

Natalie Diaz

Columbine

Javier Zamora

Take It

Namwali Serpell

Contributor Notes

About the Editor

Back Cover

Introduction

JOHN FREEMAN

He didn’t tell us where we were going.

This was not unusual. My father loved pointless drives. He’d hustle us into the car and then we’d tool across town. No destination. Sometimes these drives went on for fifteen minutes.

Sometimes several hours.

We’d meander home from church the long way, stopping at open houses. Are we going to live here? No, let’s just look, he’d reply.

Do I need to say all the homes we ogled were much bigger than ours?

And so I grew up in the multiverse. Have you heard of this term? The theory that reality is simply a series of stacked versions of itself.

This idea—that something else was always simultaneously happening elsewhere—called to my father, and so that Christmas night in 1985 my mother, my brothers, and I—there are three of us—knew we could have been going anywhere.

We passed the malls, then the turnoff to the adjacent suburbs. Then it seemed clear we were going to downtown Sacramento.

Our hearts sank.

My father ran a family service agency in the city that provided health and human services. They did things the government gave up on. Meals on Wheels programs, counseled people getting on or off welfare.

The office was a big old home with sticky floors and it smelled of Tab cola. Most of the time he stashed us in a room with no toys and we were told to wait.

The whole place had the low, quiet ache of disappointment.

And looking back I suppose it should have … that’s what the agency dealt in, how to cope with disappointment.

It was dark now and we had sailed right past his work; none of the streets were looking familiar. My mother was talking quietly to my father as they drove.

Where are we?

We’re here. Come on, help me with this.

My father opened the back of our banana-colored station wagon and yanked out several wrapped presents.

Come on guys.

We followed him and my mother to the door. All of us had paper routes, and though we lacked any kind of social IQ, we were experts in front doors.

This was the kind of metal that would bang if you tried to one-hop the paper to the porch and hit the door by accident.

My dad rapped it loudly. RAP RAP RAP. A light turned on. The metal door opened and a woman appeared. She was dressed for work in the kind of outfit Lucy wore in I Love Lucy. She looked confused but friendly.

Hi we’re your neighbors from United Way, and we just wanted to say Merry Christmas.

By this point, my brothers and I were holding the presents.

We still didn’t know what we were doing there, but the woman behind the door, she had figured out why. Her eyes softened, and then she put on the face you make when you have another face you need to cover up.

Oh you are so kind. Thank you …!

A child our age appeared behind the woman.

This is my daughter …

There we stood on the other side of the door. Two families. Ours, the five of us, and theirs, the two of them.

That’s when the girl our age burst into tears and ran back into the house.

We have been talking a lot in recent years about privilege. White privilege, male privilege, straight privilege. I know I have benefited from all these things, but when I have to identify a period where I understood—before I could articulate—what any of these things meant, I think of that night.

We use a horrible phrase to describe such incidents: teachable moments. But who are they teaching? And what? At age eleven the lesson, for me, was too complex. What was supposed to be an objective demonstration in generosity—giving is good—turned into a tutorial in the invisibility of power. That it takes power to give, and power to create moments for learning, rather than have them thrust upon you. The woman’s daughter had decoded all of it in under a second and it made her feel ashamed.

It took me years to understand that, because as a middle-class striver, I had other teachable lessons I was paying attention to—mostly in books. You read the books, you followed the plan, you took the classes, you did the right activities, you got into the schools that enlarged your life progressively, sequentially, logically, coherently.

But of course, we often learn the most from what we see. It sits inside us like a spinning top, moving of its own accord, until we grab it.

That Christmas set one such dynamo in motion.

Here is another one.

All those nights I stayed up late as a teenager, reading books, doing my homework, determined to get into college, I often shared the dining room table with my mother, who was a social worker in Sacramento, like my father—a professional listener. Most of her patients were in hospice, and this was the 1980s, so they were cancer patients, Alzheimer patients, and early AIDS patients, dying in terror. Lonely and afraid, angry, bewildered. Why has this happened to me? She once told me they said this a lot.

While I dutifully extracted the teachable lessons from the core curricula of the San Joaquin Unified School District, she wrote notes of her visits to patients in Vacaville, Sonora, Placer County.

I see her in memory’s lamp, bent over her notebook transcribing their stories, and I now know there was something holy in what she was doing. While I was racing to turn myself into an excavator for meaning, she had turned herself into an abacus for pain. Recording and measuring and holding what was often seen, but remained invisible—the stories of people who were suffering.

I tell you this now because eventually the meaning of these stories caught up with me—because life did. I did get into the good school, I did move to New York, which is where you went to work in the storytelling business. I did get a job in publishing and did turn myself into a freelance writer. I spent a decade reviewing books full-time, and became an editor of a literary magazine, and did all the things a striver in my field with a passion for literature might try to do because I genuinely loved it—I loved the possibilities of literature. What it was and what it stood for. I believed in all of it.

All these things are true.

But here’s another story from the multiverse. What if I told you that if I had to construct a reunion of this gift exchange, say, fifteen years after the fact, just two members of my family would be standing on that West Sacramento porch? My older brother would be homeless, living out of a van on a construction site in Oregon, sometimes wrestling his 120-pound malamute in the dark so she knew he was top dog; my younger brother would be under full restraint at a psychiatric ward, in the throes of a schizophrenic breakdown. My mother would already be in the steep decline of a frontal lobe dementia. And come to think of it, my father, who took care of her through this illness—the one that garbled her speech, then stumbled her legs, then sat her down, and then turned her into just her ability to smile, before clicking off the lamp behind her eyes—he wouldn’t be there on that reunion porch either. No, he’d be waiting for a social worker to come to his door to listen to him talk about his unbelievable problem.

California has for a long time been seen as the Valhalla of far-flung dreams. The far shore. It’s why my family moved back there in 1984. The place of starting over. The end of the horizon, as Joan Didion famously wrote.

California is also, however, the site of real people’s homes. Real people’s lives. Real lives begun as dreams and perhaps dribbled into boredom. Or unraveled into nightmares. Or fabulously, miraculously achieved. This schism—between what California represents in popular imagination and what it is, what it means to live there, to be from there—means Californians collide constantly with the rupture of existence.

How to dream the life we are already living.

One of the best definitions of literature I ever heard was uttered by a California writer, T. C. Boyle. Literature, he said, is how we dream in story. One of the best definitions of immigration was also told to me by a Californian—Natalie Diaz. Immigration, she said, is dreaming with the body. You imagine a better future somewhere else, because you must, and so you move—you move your body into a dream.

Literature from California is among the most alive in the world, in part because it is being driven by these questions. California has more immigrants than any other state in the U.S.—nearly a quarter of the immigrant population. Nearly a third of the state is foreign-born. In a world in the throes of a massive global migration, this makes California the most literary state of an increasingly unliterate nation.

A state built with, stolen, and powered by immigrants is an army of living untold dreams. So here are some of them, dreams lived, deferred, daydreamed, nightmare-dreamt. This special issue of Freeman’s is an attempt to celebrate these stories, these writers, and to follow the fog lamp of their imagination into the other issues California faces, which, in fact, mirror some of the most important issues of our time—from global climate change, to the radical and pernicious stockpiling of wealth in one minuscule group of individuals.

If our civilization is ever going to reckon with these realities, it is going to have to dream better in story. Californians do not, most of them, have the luxury to postpone such dreams. The state is literally on fire.

Driving down 1-280 in his opening piece, Jaime Cortez stops at a rest stop in the Central Valley and sees what he thinks is a collection of people living out of their cars. Instead he discovers it packed with escapees from the recent Paradise Fire. William T. Vollmann dons a protective mask and drives up into the foothills outside Sacramento with the photographer Greg Roden to witness the Carr Fire, and finds a world in which the supposed future of climate disaster is now. In her short story, Karen Tei Yamashita chronicles the aftermath of World War II as it plays out in the lives of a widowed Japanese woman and her Japanese-American husband’s relations.

Motion is a big part of these pieces, clocking the emotional doppler effect of migration. In Javier Zamora’s poem he remembers how hard it was to relearn beauty in a new language. Reyna Grande tells of her mother, the half of her family who didn’t become the immigrant success story, and the vertigo she experiences when she grapples with that—a feeling that turns into a ghost story in Oscar Villalon’s tale of his father being visited by a spectre on his porch growing up in Mexico.

How to live with such hauntings—there’s no other word for them. In Manuel Muñoz’s tale, a Mexican man turns up half buried in the fields, like an ostrich. None of the white people in town know who he is. Are such visions projections of guilt or something else Rabih Alameddine asks, as he recounts his brief detour as a bartender, when many of his friends were dying of AIDS, and he found in a gang of regulars an unlikely form of fellowship. In a state tilted forward into dreams of the future, the past can become kitsch, or worse, capitalist marketing material, as D. A. Powell writes in his poem about the gay pride parade. In her essay, Heather Smith wonders if the bison brought to Golden Gate Park knew this all along.

The land in California was twice stolen from the peoples who lived there. Growing up on it, Natalie Diaz learns to make her body a tool, an offensive weapon, essentially putting on hold some of the issues she would eventually have to deal with as a queer Native woman with Mexican heritage. Is there a way to stopper this process? The narrator of Tommy Orange’s story is so exhausted by the mental work of asserting his existence he falls into a thought pattern: maybe ending his life is the only legitimate route?

There’s a quiet surrealism to some of these tales. In Xuan Juliana Wang’s memoir, a simple avocado takes on magical powers when seen through the eyes of a culture that was forcibly starved. Shobha Rao’s short story revolves around a family of immigrants who turn up in California in time to watch the Space Shuttle Challenger explode. Anthony Marra notes how the Italians in San Francisco’s North Beach immortalize their journey in food that’s so tasty, when they ask if you like it, it isn’t a question.

Some of the writers here are in the process of re-narrating the stories that disguised their part in California’s history. Lauren Markham describes how four generations of her family have occupied and told the tale of their possession of a dry as hell part of the state, where water and land is everything, and most of it has been taken by white families, like hers. Frank Bidart recalls driving across the Mojave on the way to Bakersfield to visit his grandfather in an envelope of protection so great it had kept his father out of World War II. “The government didn’t draft—even / refused to enlist—rich / farmers,” he writes.

Sometimes simply acknowledging reality has a powerful effect. It has the sonic boom of truth. Yiyun Li describes the strange brittle friendliness of neighbors in Oakland who turn mean when they can’t sell you anything. Elaine Castillo goes to visit a loved one in prison and turns the essay form inside out. Héctor Tobar depicts the inner life of a latchkey boy whose mother has to leave him home all day, proving the immortal stories of James Joyce could have just as easily taken root in the dry southern part of California.

Piece by piece, these writers reassert what is possible to see clearly when you press down on language with enough care and force. Matt Sumell describes his relationship with the man who sleeps in a cardboard box outside his window in L.A. in a way that pays equal attention to the man as it does Sumell’s proximity to his circumstances. Mai Der Vang honors the beauty of the state’s most iconic tree—the redwood—in a poem so tightly wound it feels like seeing one for the first time. In his latest poem, former California and U.S. poet laureate Juan Felipe Herrera shows how everyday laborers turned fantastic with a change of clothes in his part of the state, some years ago.

Is it any wonder, given these juxtapositions, that California is a state full of dream machines—from the internet to drugs to cars. Rachel Kushner describes all the fabulous vehicles she’s owned and the peculiar world in which cars are more vivid than people. Geoff Dyer describes why it’s no longer fun to get high in California. In Namwali Serpell’s story, a homeless teenager gets invited to a free-love party in the Berkeley hills, powered by drugs and a fantasy of benevolent togetherness.

Even as a fourteen-year-old, Jennifer Egan knew this world—this hippy world—was powered by significant oversights, and danger. Just as Catherine Barnett was aware that driving home with her father when he was drunk wasn’t safe, and Maggie Millner worried there were parts of Monterey that might blow her illusions away if she stayed too long. This layering—of dreams with dreams within nightmares—is one of the ways California writing distinguishes itself. It takes looking back, sometimes, as Robin Coste Lewis does in her poem about going to the movies with her family, to see its lack of perfection is what makes it paradise.

As I write this, I am getting on a plane to go home to California to celebrate my father’s eightieth birthday in Los Angeles. The number eighty, once so ancient sounding, now hardly feels miraculous, the closer we get to it. His father lived to be ninety-seven, so there is that, too, but packing for the trip I couldn’t help but think of my father’s father, who died much younger, penniless, and of the generations before, like my great-great-great grandfather, who came to Grass Valley in the late 1800s, also broke, married to his brother’s widow, as one did more often then. The journey from Canada must have been difficult and long; there were no trains upon which one could travel it. So it would have been completed by foot and by horse. We have almost no records of him, until one day he emerges in county records, renting a storefront to a baker.

Later this week as I meet my father and hug him, a part of his body will call back from that storefront, a very long time ago. I wish my mother could be there, but she will be only in the stories we tell. My brothers will be there, my older brother, no longer in his van, and my younger one, resettled in Texas and very much well. Deadpanning his acute observations of the absurdities of our lives. How the earth falls through space. I am already thinking of the multiverse questions I want to ask my father, his life a record of events created by choices or events even he couldn’t imagine had quantum implications. Each day a new stack of realities. As our literature can be, as it ought to be, as California literature is in its finest moments. Hold it close and you will hear it singing of its incredible journeys, of what it dreams possible.

Seven Shorts

FIRE NOTES: NOVEMBER 2018

My evening commute takes me north on Highway 280 towards San Francisco. One hundred and fifty miles to the east, Paradise is burning at the heart of the largest wildfires in California’s long and storied history of fires. The thick smoke, which blankets the entire region for hundreds of miles, contains the particulate remains of Paradise. It occurs to me that in unison, millions of us are inhaling the sofas and ottomans of Paradise, the cars and gas stations of it, the trees and lawns, the clothes and detergent, the wedding pictures and divorce papers, the cadavers. This thought comforts and discomforts me as I drive through the evening traffic.

I need to use the bathroom, so I pull over at the Crystal Springs Highway Rest Area. The rest stop used to be notoriously cruisy, drawing gay and temporarily gay men from around the region with the promise of nocturnal sex in the bathroom stalls, in the cars, or on the trail that winds up the scrubby adjacent hillside. Increased surveillance of the rest stop, and finally a mini police station planted near the bathrooms, put an end to the nightlife.

The now-chaste rest stop is packed. Its parking lot is sizeable, with room for thirty or forty cars, but every parking spot is occupied. I find a patch of roadside and improvise one. I walk to the bathroom, and there is not one person in there.

Hmmm …

The whole rest stop is jammed full of cars, but no one is using the bathrooms. “But it’s a rest stop,” I think. “It’s all about bathrooms, isn’t it?” Evidently not. On my way out, I see through the open door that no one seems to be using the women’s bathroom either.

I walk back to my car slowly, and I notice now that one car after another is packed to bursting with stuff. There are pickups with their beds stacked high with blankets, bicycles, boxes, and chairs, Beverly Hillbillies–style.

My nosiness is piqued. I slow my walk to a near shuffle and assess each car. I see a woman in an old Civic bundled up in the fully reclined passenger seat. She is turning about in her blankets, trying to find a comfortable position to settle in for the night. She sees me looking fixedly, and I feel a small wave of shame rise and break in my chest. I have been busted being morbidly nosey. I witnessed this act of settling in, this act that is normally so intimate, to be seen only by the eyes of your kin or your lover.

Next door, in a little red pickup with a rusted hood and bumper, I see someone’s hands adjusting a metallic folding windshield sun screen for privacy. The overhead LED lights shine through the windshield, reflecting off the silver screen, and the hands seem those of a deft puppeteer in a sad, surreal cabaret.

I see a bearded man with a steaming paper cup of something sitting on his car hood and chatting with a second man in the passenger seat of the neighboring car. I eavesdrop. Their chatter is a bit of nothing about the brisk weather, the smoke. Backlit by lights from the rest stop map kiosk, their words exit their warm bodies and become delicate vapor genies that dissipate into the darkness.

Shit. I finally understand. The parking lot is either a longtime encampment for car-dwelling folk, or an ad hoc way station for refugees from the epic fires engulfing Paradise and the neighboring areas of Butte County.

Or both.

I stand there for a moment, and take in a big breath of smoke-tinged air, and I am stunned by how deeply dystopian this scene is. The dirty twilight air. The car people battered by inequity and priced out of proper shelter. The people who gazed into the burning eye of climate change and fled for their lives.

We did not ask for this, but we chose this. Through our action and inaction, we chose those fires, that smoke, and this displacement. We are all paying for it, though these people are paying more dearly than the rest of us. Of course I am complicit in this, just like everyone else. Of course I can do better. Of course. Of course.

I feel a dull, leaden weight on my shoulders. I turn my face towards the hillside. The gate to the uphill trail is locked for the night, but I mentally vault over it and take the short hike up to the vista point, where a hulking statue of the eighteenth-century Franciscan monk Junipero Serra awaits. Serra is bowed down on one knee, but the statue of the colonial missionary is still of heroic scale, perhaps twenty or more feet in height. His right arm is raised. His forefinger is pointed towards a polluted sunset of such lurid and awful beauty that gazing upon it gives me the dread of a marooned astronaut, emerging from his smoking capsule and pondering the heavy descent of the first, unknowable night.

—Jaime Cortez

GHOST STORY NO. 2

The dead come to you, but not to everyone. I have yet to see them—those who were here but left us, never to return. Yet there they are, at the end of a hall terminating at the closed door of a bathroom, or standing outside a living room window, looking down upon you as you watch cartoons on TV. Night or day, it doesn’t matter. They try to announce themselves, waiting for you to see them.

This happened to my father when he was very young. He would’ve been in his early teens. He was on the small, covered patio in front of my grandmother’s house. It was late. It was dark. My grandmother may or may not have given me the specifics on what my father was doing on the patio (these things are impossible to recall perfectly), but let’s say he was in a rocking chair. Or he may have been sleeping out there, lying atop a couple of thick blankets, folded double for a cushion against the tile floor. But there he was, in the evening, nothing but quiet around him, the stars all easily visible as they are in that part of Mexico in that time some sixty or so years ago. Then my grandmother heard a crash (a rocking chair bowled over? A shoulder slammed into the closed front door before a hand could turn the knob all the way?), and then she saw her son in the sala, babbling and crying, his face drained of color.

I spent nights—scores of them—on that same patio. I was just a boy. Eleven, twelve, then thirteen, then once more when I was in high school, and not again till I was a junior in college, and nevermore since. (At first, the circumstances of work and life kept me from returning; then the evil of the drug war, which envenomed my father’s hometown, extended that absence and does so to this day.) Stretches of summer were spent penduluming on a rocking chair, reading a novel, a Robert Ludlum or a Stephen King, doing “nothing.” Between the time my father had to leave home, barely out of his teens, and when his sons roamed around his mother’s house, bored and homesick, the view from that roofed patio had changed little if at all. Set into the foot of a hill, my grandmother’s house slightly rises above a rocky dirt road. Below that road is an asphalt one leading, eventually, to the town’s main plaza, and in between them is a steep wedge of tangled and desiccated greenery. Look into the horizon and there are rows after rows of flat rooftops, and mint and rose and lavender facades receding all the way to another set of hills in the distance, a gleaming reservoir smeared across its base. When the deep darkness falls, the tops of the streetlamps—ten-foot-tall, creosote-coated logs rigged with powerful light bulbs and metal shades—mark the distance like glowing buoys. But way back then, those streetlamps might not have been there, especially not the one some yards to the left of the patio that allowed us to make out each other’s faces and bodies as we stretched out on thick cobijas, trying to fall asleep on hot nights, desperate for the air to finally cool. The darkness would have been near perfect. Yet my father could make out his grandfather. He could see him as if illuminated. And he could somehow hear him. And my great-grandfather spoke to him urgently, with terrible news, and that’s what my father was trying to heave out, beyond “I have seen my grandfather!” He was trying to convey to his mother a message freighted with the authority of the dead returned among the living. Is it any wonder he was overwhelmed? To cry and to lose language is the purest response to witnessing a breach between the mortal and the immortal. It is awful. It is awesome. It is the stuff of myth.

Parents tell their children complicating facts in dribs and drabs, if at all. Sometimes, they do so judiciously, meaning they’re ready for the ensuing questions a disquieting bit of family history will stir. More often, they do so unthinkingly, meaning they hope the child will not think too hard about the peculiar revelation, maybe just offer a “really?” and leave it at that. The hope is the child won’t exacerbate a father’s recklessness: thinking aloud. Once we were driving in northern San Diego County (I think we were on the 5 or the 76), about twenty miles from home. My dad gestured to the landscape beyond the driver’s window and said something like, your grandfather nearly died around here. He’d been hit by a car. Or was he thrown from one? I don’t remember clearly. But that it was a car-related accident I do recall. I had tried writing about it when I was in college—a fiction redolent with descriptions of an unnamed character lying by the side of the road, legs ruined, the sun burning his face, his eyes closed and teary as car after car zooms past him, their black-and-yellow license plates rattling in their wash. My father’s father could pass for Anglo, meaning he looked plenty American, and would cross the border as often as he pleased, working in the States, making his nut and bringing it back home, sometimes promptly blowing it. He came home once with a brand-new pickup, a treasure that made his oldest kids beam. It augured better things to come; no more wanting, a lot less suffering. Days later he lost it in a coin toss. Flipped a thick peso, and it came up wrong. Handed over the keys and that was that.

My grandfather woke up in a hospital in Oceanside. This would have been in the fifties. I can’t help but think that his being tall and fair-skinned, with light-colored hair and eyes, may have had something to do with his being plucked from the road and placed in a bed. (Because being Mexican in San Diego has never been an easy thing. In 1983 Tom Metzger founded the White Aryan Resistance in Fallbrook in northern San Diego County. And the first successful school desegregation case in U.S. history—in 1931, Roberto Alvarez vs. the Board of Trustees of the Lemon Grove School District—ruled that Mexican kids in San Diego didn’t have to keep going to separate schools; tellingly, it’s a proud civic moment you might never hear about there.) My father tells me my grandfather was in the hospital for a while. Tells me one day my grandmother received a postcard from the hospital letting her know her husband was recuperating there, a way, I presume, of telling the family not to worry that they hadn’t heard from him for so long. I strongly suspect my grandfather never kept his wife and children in the loop about anything, so his long silence wouldn’t have meant much. Still, the postcard came as a relief. For now they knew my grandfather was out of danger. They had been anxious about his well-being since the night my great-grandfather appeared on the patio with the news that his son—my grandfather—was dying.

What a strange world. You’re in a beat-up white van with your son, still a child but barely, driving by the place where your father was laid up so many years ago. And now you live near there, getting up at 4 a.m. to push a broom. Dinner for your family is sometimes eggs, or two frozen pizzas for ninety-nine cents a box. What do you have to show for your life? You’re raising your kids in government housing. There are things you see in the neighborhood that you can’t do anything about. You might as well be a ghost. But yet, the dead have come to you. And they do not come to everybody.

—Oscar Villalon

EVERY AVOCADO

I saw my first avocado when I was five years old, in the winter of 1990. My mom smuggled it back in her suitcase after her first trip to America. Its name, I was told, was butter fruit. Since this is the stuff of memory, I remember the room was very dark, almost as if our only sources of light were candles and the moon. The avocado emerged from her suitcase and my family gathered around it, passing it from hand to hand. Nobody had ever seen such a thing before. Then I believe my dad sliced it with his pocketknife, and my mom broke it in half and cut each half into slices the width of my thumb. We ate it like a watermelon, with the dark skin still attached. Since it wasn’t ripe, I remember distinctly that it had a rubbery texture and tasted like a pencil eraser. The flavor of that first avocado stayed with me for days afterward.

After our family immigrated to California I stayed away from avocados. It wasn’t until my parents purchased their first house, and we met our neighbors, that I was reunited with this strange fruit. With great pride, the neighbors showed us their avocado tree, recalling a recent burglary where thieves jumped into their yard and harvested every single avocado of the season. That’s how I discovered these things were precious. They gifted us with two avocados and told my parents to prepare them for me at home with spoonfuls of sugar or soy sauce.

But our new home wasn’t ready for us to live in yet. Ours was still the infamous abandoned house on the street, the only one we could afford. All the mirrors were smashed. The toilets had been ripped from the ground, shattered. One day as my parents were working on the house, this same neighbor knocked on our door and gave my dad an avocado sapling, sprouted from their tree. “You won’t be able to get any fruit from it for many years. The tree will grow and grow but the fruit will not be edible. It will be ready, well, about the time your daughter’s married,” he said. I remember it well because he said it in front of me.

In middle school I learned about guacamole. What is this? What do you do with it? The first bite and it blew wind through my hair. My mom and dad both loved it. They called guacamole, avocado. And avocados, guacamoles. By the time my lau lau and lau ye came to live with us, my grandmother had no teeth left in her mouth. I served her avocados mashed up with big spoonfuls of sugar mixed in. She said, “Ah, this is good, this is good” while staring straight ahead at the Peking opera at full volume on satellite television.

In college I meet some Chileans who became dear to me. Their mothers traveled from their land of sunshine to stay with us, and prepared grilled meats that were always accompanied with avocado and tomato salad. I was in awe of these mothers, who behaved like no mothers I’d ever seen before. I loved the way they laughed freely in colorful dresses, how flowers blossomed from their hands as they spoke, and how they hugged and kissed all of us. I learned the Chilean way of dressing the avocados—creamy mayo, lemons, and garlic—and I took that recipe with me all the way back to China, where I moved after graduating from college.

In Beijing it was no longer so unusual to eat avocados. But they were rare and expensive. At Western restaurants, waitresses made guacamole tableside with half an avocado and enormous theatricality while my friends and I watched. In those years, I craved avocados more than ever; I wanted to eat them all the time. Their name was now oily pear or alligator pear and I loved asking for them, letting the strange words lope around my mouth. At the party of an American expat, the host had bought more than a dozen avocados and I was in charge of making the guacamole. The Chinese guests watched me with fascination. They examined the avocados, gently pressing with their fingertips. Many of them were rotten. They were from Mexico. Almost from home.

The avocado tree in my parents’ backyard was growing fruit by then. Not a lot. Not enough. Each year my dad waited for more. Perhaps it was because I was still not married.

In my nai nai’s house in south China, she planted an avocado with a seed we smuggled in our care package. Ten years later it has been growing and growing but never bore any fruit until last year. Then, during monsoon season, all the tiny avocados fell off the branches in the rain. My aunt showed them to me through the camera on her computer screen. Each and every single one. She held them in her palms like the eggs of a mystical bird.

I don’t know when I started to associate avocados with wealth and perfection. Each time I cut into one, I make a little wish, that this one will be immaculate as the morning sun. My nai nai never neglects to water her avocado trees. My parents split up but my dad kept the house with our original sapling, even after he married again and a new daughter and mother-in-law moved in. When I bring my lau lau and lau ye avocados to eat at their nursing home, my grandmother still says, “Ahh, this is good, this is good.” I spoon the softened sweet pulp into their open mouths, even on days when they don’t recognize me.

When my boyfriend and I visited my family together for the first time, I knew he was the man I was going to marry because I could picture moving back to California with him. At the time I tried to entice him with avocados. Look at them, I said, holding out to him the objects of desire. Here in California they are plentiful and perfect. They are creamier here than anywhere else on earth.

I made something with avocados at every meal, fanning out slices on white porcelain plates to show off their svelte necks, their full bellies. Each time the avocados held up their end of the bargain: they were divine. As I set them down in front of him I hoped he would fall deeper in love with the sunshine that made them grow, with the air that smelled like the sea, with those strange fruits, with me.

—Xuan Juliana Wang

BOXES

To be clear it’s not literally a coffin, but it is literally coffin-shaped, as in hexagonal, as opposed to the cushier rectangle of a casket. Mike’s is built of broke-open Intercept Free Nitrile Glove boxes, the logos along their lengths lending this the look of a corporate sponsored funeral, only Mike’s not dead, which I can tell because he pops his hand through and waves hello in the half-second lag between the headlight switch and my halogens fading out. He rarely if ever gophers his head up anymore—I’m guessing because by now he recognizes the particular whine of an old Jeep transmission and because I’m the only asshole who overnight parks there—but occasionally, after the thunk and click of my driver’s side door, he’ll ask how I’m doing. I don’t ask how he’s doing because I know how he’s doing. He’s doing homeless in Los Angeles for five years. He’s doing sleeping in a box. Instead I ask if he needs anything—a blanket, food, money. There’s always a pause before he tells me he’s fine. I ask if he’s sure and he assures me he’s sure, and then me and this packaged voice in the dark wish each other goodnight.

This is the unglamorous side of Hollywood, the only side of Hollywood for me. Maybe I’m biased. Maybe just poor. I’ve lived here a decade, in an exposed brick studio between an elementary school and a fire station and directly above a horn shop, as in musical horns, with a problematic pocket pit bull with a cleft-face—Tink has teeth in her nose which connects to her mouth, kind of like a sea lamprey—who the day after I signed the adoption papers decided to become vocal, so now she barks at every recess announcement and wee-yoo and lonely flute through the floor, and at the voices of people smoking or arguing or shooting up or grunting out a shit in the alley below the window by my bed, which happens more than you might think, because it’s Hollywood, and because the L.A. homeless population has surged from roughly 32,000 to roughlier 57,000 in just the last six years, and the city’s attempts to deal with it have led to roving encampments and outbreaks of hepatitis and typhus and topless guys and one bucket bongo busker who accused Tink of being a water buffalo before assaulting the entire Blackwood Coffee Bar. Not the people, the furniture. The walls. The Us Weeklys.

Apparently, some of the Skid Rowers pushed out of a gentrifying downtown went westward, to Echo Park and to Culver City and to the lot my low beams light up every night along with the abandoned building behind it, its busted-up numbers first and its glass entryway leading to an off-white partition and a bathroom door the color of Chef Boyardee spaghetti sauce second. The floor inside is polished concrete, bare but for a crumpled strip of turf putting green the former tenants left behind with a tipped over wire wastebasket and two golf balls adjacent as testicles. Third or eighth, depending what you count, is a reflective Unauthorized Vehicles Will Be yabba blabba sign mounted halfway up the exterior wall that catches half-a-headlight and half-zings it back at me, its shine voltaic and scattershot, illuminating, just a little, Mike’s setup.

It’s not until six-thirty the next morning that I actually see him through the window nearest my table, where I sit with a cup of Kroger coffee and every few sips tell Tink to shush the fuck up and stop staring at me, Daddy’s busy watching this bro blink at the front end of my car for like the last ten minutes. Eventually Mike pulls his winter cap off and runs a comb through his hair ten times, puts his hat back on and pulls it low, like right over his eyebrows low, like even his forehead is cold low, then folds and slides his blanket into a black backpack and gets weird with the zippers. He’s very particular about those. I’ve seen him lean to look at them from different angles, then hold the bag up in front of his face and rotate it, making sure they’re zipped to where he wants them zipped—up top and centered—and when he’s satisfied he places the bag behind him against the wall. He puts his right shoe on before his left, methodically folds and stacks his boxes, then tucks them out of the way between a concrete safety bollard and the adjacent fence. Dude is diagnosably neat. Even if I don’t see him I can tell if he’s been there by how clean that corner of the lot is.

On the mornings Tink barks enough and stares enough to guilt me enough to get me outside early enough, we catch Mike midroutine or en route to the bus stop. Up close and in the low light of predawn or just-dawn, when the diesel diffused sun hasn’t burned through yet, he looks a bit like the actor Michael Shannon, or like Michael Shannon’s second cousin from Burbank, maybe, or maybe it’s better to say what the two really share is that unsettling alchemy of vulnerable and terrifying. His eyes are LSD spooky—wide-set, wide-open, uneasy. Most of the time you can see the whites all the way around his irises. People are scared of him, but to me he seems more imposed on than imposing. Intelligence can do that. Trauma. Mental illness. Maybe they’re the same thing. Maybe they’re all folded into each other. Maybe that’s what bad luck is.

While it’s a bit too on the nose I can’t help but think of Shannon’s turn in Take Shelter, both for the physical likeness and because he depicts a man struggling with hallucinations and voices in his head, voices he’s not sure he can trust. The fact that Mike sleeps on the street is reason enough to wonder, as even the most conservative estimates put serious mental illness among the homeless somewhere between twenty and twenty-five percent. That number goes way up in “unsheltered individuals.” Then there’s the zipper thing, the obsessive neatness, the fact that he once turned down my offer to buy him breakfast because he needed to brush his teeth. Mostly, though, it’s not his answers that worry me but the pauses before them. His responses to even the most basic questions are sometimes so considered I wonder what the argument in his head is.

A few weeks ago we had a cold snap and—in the middle of telling Tink that my putting forks in a drawer not only shouldn’t concern her, it’s also none of her fucking business—I glanced up to see Mike dracula his way to seated and blow breath into his hands, so I poured a second cup of shitty coffee because, I figured, even if he doesn’t like it he can at least hold it. I don’t know what he thought of the weak and creamerless but he for sure appreciated Tink handstand-style pissing on my car—it’s like a parkour trick she does—and it was the first time I saw Mike smile in the year or so he’s been sleeping there. The second came a minute later when she jumped in his box and sat next to him. He scratched her head and asked how old she was, and I told him I wasn’t sure, that someone found her wandering the streets of Vegas half-starved with a prolapsed vagina, cystic nipples, ear and eye and respiratory infections, mange, the cleft face, and necrotic box-cutter-cropped forever open ears—but based on her teeth I’m guessing around four. He nodded and looked at her, and she looked at him, and I sipped my coffee and learned he splits his days between the So-Cal Storage off Franklin and the library on Ivar, has a brother he doesn’t talk to because he doesn’t want to be a burden to him anymore, is fascinated by Charles Manson and the Straight Satans, and that I was right about the voices.

“What do they say?”

The pause was a good four Mississippis.

“I’ve heard like uh, like, like, ‘He doesn’t like you,’” he said. “‘She’s mine,’ stuff like that. Just like personal … just … ‘What are you looking at? What the fuck did you just say?’ It’s like a … it’s like a fight that never ends.”

“Huh,” I said, surprised and disappointed that his crazy is as boring and antagonistic as mine, just louder. I guess everything is when your walls are made of paper. “The voice in my head doesn’t sound all that different.”

And while I haven’t always ignored it, I can usually tell what’s in my head and what’s outside of it, which voice in the dark is imagined and which is real, but why I’m in here and he’s out there, I’m not sure I can tell. Why my box is bigger than his.

—Matt Sumell

FLOWER CHILDREN

After a day of walking barefoot in San Francisco, the soles of my feet looked like shoes. It was a city, after all, even in the late 1970s; the streets were made of concrete. It’s hard for me to believe, looking back, that I really went barefoot as a teenager—Would my fastidious mother have allowed it, or did I do it without her knowing? Would I have been permitted on city busses, my chief mode of transport? The biggest question, of course, is why I would want to go barefoot at all. But I think I know: Feeling the city’s texture against my skin was a way of owning it.

To be a teenager in San Francisco in the 1970s was to be plagued by a sense of catastrophic failure in timing. The ringing aftermath of the summers of love still tingled through the city. At times it was possible for my high school friends and me to forget we’d missed that golden age: listening to drumming in Golden Gate Park, for example, surrounded by the reek of pot (much of it generated by ourselves). That smell was as much a part of San Francisco’s atmosphere as the cold white fog that gushed over the hilltops at the end of each day.

In truth, the 1960s had barely passed. But in the mind of a fourteen-year-old, ten years was forever. The city abounded with suggestive artifacts: the old guy selling psychedelic concert posters in North Beach; the Magic Eye occult shop on Broadway, where a wild-haired lady hocked bright, mysterious powders and books on witchcraft. And there were plenty of diehards, now a decade older, sometimes derelict. They loitered in places like Union Square, where they bought and sold hard drugs and searched the shrubbery for smokable cigarette butts. Often they were barefoot, too. To me, they were refugees from a reality so piercing it had maimed them. Their company brought me nearer an intensity I craved, though I never would have had the courage to seek them out by myself. I was a follower, tagging along with bolder kids whose rebellion was more overt than mine.

I felt closest to the 1960s when I lay on the fuzzy white rug in my best friend’s apartment, smoking pot (or sometimes tripping), listening to Pink Floyd and Patti Smith while a foggy breeze poured in through the window. Outside, San Francisco shimmered and hummed. Who knew what decade it was?

Looking back, I wonder whether that hum I detected was the roar of technology pullulating just to the south. I had never heard of Silicon Valley. Our family trips always took us north of San Francisco, to Mendocino, perched alongside a tempestuous patch of Pacific and populated by hippies who showed Chaplin films in a café on Saturday nights and made sculptures out of driftwood. Inland, there were dense redwood forests. Through their towering silence we paddled in a rented canoe—my mother, stepfather, little brother, and I—on a river so cold that it stopped your breath if you dared to jump in.