Darling (15 page)

Chavez visited Synanon, the drug-rehabilitation commune headed by Charles Dederich, shortly before some Synanon members were implicated in a series of sexual scandals and criminal assaults. Chavez borrowed from Synanon a version of a disciplinary practice called the Game, whereby UFW staff members were obliged to stand in the middle of a circle of peers and submit to fierce criticism. Someone sympathetic to Chavez might argue that the Game was an inversion of an ancient monastic discipline meant to teach humility. Someone less sympathetic might
conclude that Chavez was turning into a petty tyrant. I think both estimations are true.

From his reading, Chavez would have known that Saint Francis of Assisi desired to imitate the life of Jesus. The followers of Francis desired to imitate the life of Francis. Within ten years of undertaking his mendicant life, Francis had more than one thousand followers. Francis realized he could not administer a growing religious order by personal example. He relinquished the administration of the Franciscans to men who had some talent for organization. Cesar Chavez never gave up his position as head of the UFW.

In 1977 Chavez traveled to Manila as a guest of President Ferdinand Marcos. He ended up praising the old dictator. There were darker problems within the UFW. There were rumors that some within the inner circle were responsible for a car crash that left Cleofas Guzman, an apostate union member, with permanent brain damage.

Chavez spent his last years protesting the use of pesticides in the fields. In April of 1993 he died.

The year after his death, Chavez was awarded the National Medal of Freedom by President Bill Clinton. In 2002 the U.S. Postal Service unveiled a thirty-seven-cent stamp bearing the image of Cesar Chavez. Politicians throughout the West and the Southwest attached Chavez's name to parks and schools and streets and civic buildings of every sort. And there began an effort of mixed success to declare March 31, his birthday, a legal holiday. During the presidential campaign of 2012, President Barack Obama designated the home and burial place of Cesar Chavez in Keene, California, a national monument within the National Park System.

The American hero was also a Mexican saint. In 1997 American painter Robert Lentz, a Franciscan brother, painted an icon,
César Chávez de California
. Chavez is depicted with a golden halo. He holds in his hand a scrolled broadsheet of the U.S. Constitution. He wears a pink sweatshirt bearing the UFW insignia.

That same year, executives at the advertising agency TBWA\Chiat\Day came up with a campaign for Apple computers that featured images of some famous dead—John Lennon, Albert Einstein, Frank Sinatra—alongside a grammar-crunching motto:
Think different
.

I remember sitting in bad traffic on the San Diego freeway one day and looking up to see a photograph of Cesar Chavez on a billboard. His eyes were downcast. He balanced a rake and a shovel on his right shoulder. In the upper-left-hand corner of the billboard was the corporate logo of a bitten apple.

Disappointment

Though California has not inspired the finest American novelists, John Steinbeck's
The Grapes of Wrath
remains one of America's great novels. The native son imagined California from the outside, as a foreigner might; imagined wanting California desperately; imagined California as a remedy for the trial of the nation.

Otherwise, I might think of John Milton when I think of California and the writer's task. Milton devised that, after the Fall, the temperature in San Diego would remain at seventy-five degrees, but Adam and Eve's relationship to a perfect winter day would be changed to one of goose bumps.

The traditional task of the writer in California has been to write about what it means to be human in a place advertised as paradise. Not the Buckeye or the Empire, not the Can-Do or the Show-Me, California is the Post-Lapsarian state. Disappointment has long been the theme of California.

For example, my own:

I cannot afford to live here. I mean I do live here. I rent two large rooms. My light comes from the south. But if I had to move, I could not afford to live here anymore.

In San Francisco, small Victorians, small rooms, steep stairs, are selling for three or four million and are repainted to resemble
Bavarian cuckoo clocks—browns and creams and the mute greens tending to blue. That is my mood. If I owned one of the Victorians, I would, no doubt, choose another comparison. It is like living on a street of cuckoo clocks—and all the cuckoos are on cell phones—I won't say striking thirteen; nevertheless, a version of postmodernity I had not anticipated. Only well-to-do futurists and stuffed T-shirts can afford to live in this nineteenth-century neighborhood.

My complaint with my city is that I am old.

The sidewalks in my neighborhood are uncannily empty save for Mexican laborers and Mexican nannies and Mexican caregivers, and women wearing baseball hats who walk with the exaggerated vigor of a wounded pride (as do I). The streets are in disrepair; the city has no money; really, the streets have never been worse.

Can you imagine Adam and Eve grousing about run-down Eden?

California has been the occasion for disappointment since the 1850s, since men wrote home from the gold fields, from Auburn, from Tulare or Sonora, from tree stumps and tent hotels.

I have no doubt I will prevail here, but you may not think my thicker skin is the proper reformation of an Ohio son. The men here are rough; they grunt and growl and guard their plates with their arms. Now I reach past my neighbor, and grunt, too, and shove, too, and I would cuss just for the pleasure of saying something out loud. I don't believe I have said more than ten words since I came to this place. I realize any oath I might devise would pale next to the colorful flannel they run up here. . . .

And yet the streets are clogged with pickups and delivery vans, cable vans, and the vans of construction workers—certain evidence of prosperity. Crews of men, recently from old countries,
work to reconstruct the houses of futurists—houses that were reconstructed not two years ago. One cannot drive down any street without having to go around the pickups and the vans, without muttering under one's breath at the temporary No Parking signs that paper every street, because everyone knows the only reason for the No Parking permits is to enable construction workers to drive to work.

Men from every corner of the world converged on the gold fields in the 1850s, prompting Karl Marx to proclaim the creation of a global society in California, a society unprecedented in the world up to that time. The gold parliament was an achievement of necessity as much as of greed.

Kevin Starr, the preeminent historian of California from the 1850s to the end of the twentieth century, has described California as a chronology of proper names: Stanford. Atherton. Giannini. Disney.

Disappointment came with arrival. Letters went out to the world, diaries, newspaper reports, warnings, laments, together with personal effects—eyeglasses, pen nibs, broken-backed bibles, Spanish Julia's beads—wrapped in soiled canvas. The stolen claim. Or the fortune squandered. (
Lottie, dear, I have wasted our dream . . .
) The trusting disposition. The false friend. The fog-shrouded wharf. The Spaniard Marquis, etcetera. The ring, the brooch, the opium den, etcetera.

Narratives of disappointment flowed eastward, like an auguring smoke, or bumped back over rutted trails, as coffins bump on buckboards, to meet the stories of the desolations of the prairie life, rolled over those, flowed back to the Atlantic shore, where the raw line separating the North and South was beginning to fester.

Nineteenth-century California rewarded only a few of its brotherhood, but it rewarded them as deliriously as an ancient king in an ancient myth would reward. The dream of a lucky chance encouraged a mass migration, toward “
el norte,
” or “gold mountain,” or from across the plains of America.

For, as much as California's story was a story of proper names or of luck or election, California was also a story of mass—migrations, unmarked graves, missing persons, accidents. By the time he reaches the 1990s in his great work, Kevin Starr seems to sense an influential shift: The list of singular makers of California gives way to forces of unmaking—to gangs, earthquakes, riots, floods, ballot propositions, stalled traffic.

•   •   •

Disappointment is a fine literary theme—“universal”—as the young high school English teacher, himself disappointed, was fond to say, and it wears like leather.

Disappointment continued to be mined in California's literature throughout the twentieth century. Joan Didion gave us domestic broken-dreamers, not so much driven as driving. In the great Didion essays of the sixties, the mother abandons her daughter on the median of the San Bernardino freeway; dirty dishes pile up in the sink; the hot wind blows from the desert.

The Marxist historian Mike Davis gave us the California Club version of the broken dream—evidence on paper that a deal was cut. The water, the electricity, the coastline—everything can be bought or sold in the Promised Land, and has been.

California's most influential prose has turned out to be that of mystery writers, more in line with John Milton, who regard Eden as only an occasion for temptation and fall. For example, the eighteen-year-old cheerleader from Sioux City returns her
engagement ring, a poor-grade sapphire she got from a boy named Herbert (not after the president); cashes in her scholarship to the Teachers College; buys a ticket to L.A., enjoins herself to become the new, the next—
Whaddaya think?
—Jean Harlow. (Ty Burr in
Gods Like Us
remembers so many young women came to California, dreaming of stardom, that Hollywood denominated them as “extra girls.”) But the cheerleader ends up a manicurist in Van Nuys; she ends up the blue, blond Jane Doe of the Month in the Hollywood morgue. It requires a private investigator who is broke, dyspeptic, alcoholic, but also something of a Puritan, to want to incriminate California. The golden.

When she retired from the movies in 1933, Clara Bow told reporters: “It wasn't ever like I thought it was going to be. It was always a disappointment.”

California's greatest disappointment essay is F. Scott Fitzgerald's
The Crack-Up
—an incautious memoir, meticulous, snide.

What an unenviable prospect, though, to be forced to listen to the same lament—the Hollywood screenwriter's lament—at one o'clock in the morning in the Polo Lounge. I once suffered a very long evening thus, listening to a young man complain, in breath that smelled of boiled eggs for lunch, about the difficulty of being a “serious” writer in a town that idolized Spielberg. It was Spielberg that year; I imagine it still is Spielberg.

Francis Scott Fitzgerald at one o'clock in the morning:

I saw that the novel, which at my maturity was the strongest and supplest medium for conveying thought and emotion from one human being to another, was becoming subordinated to a mechanical and communal art that, whether in the hands of Hollywood merchants or Russian idealists, was capable of reflecting only the tritest thought, the most obvious emotion.

Many decades after Fitzgerald cracked up, I saw with my own eyes a still orbiting fragment of his legend. I saw Sheilah Graham, a tarnished blonde in a black cocktail dress; she floated from table to table at Mr. Chow's restaurant, myopic, bending at the waist to kiss the air behind the ears of revelers. As a public sinner, she was something of a disappointment.

What Fitzgerald was too aureate to imagine was that unfastidious merchants of Hollywood—the ham-fisted, the thick-fingered, the steak-minded—nevertheless could pay somebody (scale) to develop the screenwriter's complaint into a script, into a picture about a pretty-boy screenwriter who ends up floating facedown in a swimming pool on Sunset Boulevard.

•   •   •

The question is: Does California have anything left to say to America, or to the world, or even to itself, beyond disappointment?

True, a vast literature is forming upon the Dewey-decimal Coast. Vietnamese-Californian, Japanese-Californian, Pakistani-Californian, Hispanics, all sorts, including my own. The question many people legitimately ask about this literature is whether our voices describe more than a hyphenated state.

My first literary recognition of California came from reading William Saroyan because Saroyan described the world I recognized. It was as simple as that. Armenian Fresno was related to my Sacramento. It was as simple as that—the extreme Valley heat (outlanders swore they never could stand it; or the flatness, either; or the alfalfa green); also the taste of water from a garden hose—the realization that California, that any life, that my life, therefore, was potentially the stuff of literature.

Here is the quote from Saroyan that I typed and pasted on the inside of my bedroom door, a manifesto:

Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep, really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive, with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell, and when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.

That was Saroyan's “advice to a young writer.” I took the advice at a time when I had no expectation of being a writer or any desire or sense of obligation. It comes to me only now, as I type this, that Saroyan's advice has nothing to do with writing; it is advice for any mortal, sentient being.

It would be another two decades before I came upon the words that made me think I had a story to tell—the opening words of Maxine Hong Kingston's
The Woman Warrior:

“You must not tell anyone,” my mother said, “what I am about to tell you.”

The immigrant mother's prohibition to her daughter reminded me of my own mother's warning about spreading “family secrets.” In the face of California's fame for blatancy—in the face of pervasive light, ingenuousness, glass-and-aluminum housing, bikinis, billboards—Mrs. Hong recommended concealment. Her shrine is a published book.

About this time, Aram Saroyan, William Saroyan's son, published a bitter memoir of his father's last years.

William Saroyan was not on any syllabus I ever saw at Stanford or Berkeley, nor, incidentally, was Steinbeck. Stanford, Berkeley—these were schools established in the nineteenth century by professors from the Ivy League who had come west, like Peace
Corps volunteers, to evangelize California for the Atlantic Enlightenment. So perhaps it was not surprising that, even in the 1960s and '70s, very little attention was paid to California in any university course, despite the fact that California was in those years at the center of the national imagination. The only California novel assigned in any course I took, either in college or in graduate school, was Nathanael West's
The Day of the Locust,
probably because it fulfilled some East Coast expectation that California would come to doom.

And speaking of doom, the editor from
Time
magazine wanted an essay on California because it was a season (this was fifteen years ago) when the national newsweeklies were hitting the stands with titles like “Is the Golden State Tarnished?”

The
Time
editor wanted 750 words' worth of tarnish: “It would be nice if you could give us a Joan Didion essay.”

“What do you mean?” I said.

“You know,” she said. “Sardonic.”

I unfold and refold that fraying
Time
story whenever I go to lunch with a California writer, handy to pull out if the conversation turns to New York. When the conversation inevitably turns to New York.

Anyway, California is getting too old to play the unhappy child or even the sardonic—too rich, too glued, too Angelica Huston walking substantially down some steps into the garden—to play the exuberant, the naïf. And California has grown children of her own. Two of the most interesting cities in North America are California daughters: Las Vegas, the open-throttled city, mimics California's youth, when land was cheap and cities were built in opposition to nature. Tijuana wants so little; she terrifies us for needing so much.