Nine Lives Last Forever (12 page)

“Your cat’s wet,” Miranda muttered crossly, agitatedly brushing her fingers together as she looked up at me.

“I had to give her a bath,” I explained meekly.

Miranda gave me a harsh, skeptical look. “I’ve never understood why you’re always washing your cats. Surely that’s not healthy for them?”

I shrugged my shoulders. It was the best response I could come up with. There was no point trying to explain to Miranda that both cats had covered themselves in a spicy goop while chasing mustached frogs through the upstairs kitchen.

Miranda leaned toward me, scrunching her eyes together as she stared at the shiny green cover of one of the Mark Twain anthologies laying on the counter in front of me. I’d brought them downstairs for further comparison.

Miranda’s pouty plum lips pursed together. “I’m here about the Vigilance Committee.”

I was momentarily thrown by this unexpected statement of purpose. Miranda was an unlikely candidate for my first official antique-purchasing customer.

“Vigilance Committee?” I asked, recovering my voice as I swung into sales pitch mode. “From the 1850s? Those items are over here.”

Miranda glowered at me as I slipped uneasily around the cashier counter. She appeared oddly irritated at my response. I paced into the showroom toward a glass-topped display case, glancing nervously over my shoulder at her sharp, withering stare.

“Oscar collected several items from both the first and second Vigilance Committees,” I said, my back now to Miranda. Brow furrowed, I tried to coax the historical details from the recesses of my memory.

In fortune-crazed, Gold Rush-era San Francisco, law and order had quickly fallen by the wayside. The city’s sudden population surge overwhelmed the meager social services of the previously isolated outpost. Before long, San Francisco descended into a state of lawlessness, her streets ruled by ruthless gangs and thugs.

The city was particularly dangerous for the newly arrived and uninitiated. Any drink purchased at one of the Barbary Coast taverns along Pacific and Jackson streets was likely to be spiked with a cocktail of drugs that would knock the drinker unconscious for several hours.

If he were lucky, the victim would wake up facedown in a gutter, stripped of all of his valuables, perhaps even his clothes. In the worst-case scenario, he would wake up on the floor of a ship, bound for the port city of Shanghai on the eastern edge of China, to the sound of a whip being swung by the captain he’d been indentured to during his period of incapacitation.

Such individual crimes were the least of the city’s problems. Drunken gangs routinely went on late-night rampages, raping and pillaging their way through the tent communities on the outskirts of town. Arson-set fires regularly swept through the rows of San Francisco’s tightly packed and hastily constructed buildings. Many citizens believed that the city’s beleaguered law enforcement entities were either inept or complicit in the mayhem.

In 1851, fed up with the rampant crime and overt corruption that seemed to have taken over the city, a group of local citizens decided to take matters into their own hands. Led by Mormon businessman Samuel Brannan, they formed a group called the Vigilance Committee. Armed with rifles, they marched through town, rounding up alleged criminals. The suspects were subjected to a brief trial and, if found guilty, immediately hanged in a public square. After three months of work, the Committee succeeded in terrorizing the city’s most blatant criminals into hiding, and it disbanded. A second, similarly short-lived, Vigilance Committee was formed in 1856.

All of these events were well-known among local historians, as the vigilantes had left behind a sizeable collection of memorabilia.

I reached the display case holding the items Oscar had collected from the Vigilance Committees or “VCs” as they were informally called in the antique trade. On a tray beneath a protective glass covering lay several silver and bronze medallions. I ran my thumbs along the edge of the display lid and pressed in a recessed latch to raise the glass. I scooped up a couple of the metal medallions from the tray and carried them back to the front of the store where Miranda still stood, the lines of her face hardening with displeasure.

“Here are some of the items from the VC collection,” I offered tentatively, my hand outstretched. “The members of the Committees made these to commemorate their participation.”

Miranda glared at me, her heavily mascaraed eyes fuming. I dropped the medallions on the cashier counter next to the green-covered Mark Twain books. The metal coins clattered against one another in an otherwise stony silence.

“I’m not talking about the Gold Rush-era VCs,” she spit out, never once glancing at the coins.

“I’m sorry,” my voice muffled diffidently. “I don’t think I—”

“There was another group,” she prompted brusquely. “One that came together in much more recent times.”

Miranda studied my baffled expression as if she were expecting a light to go on inside my head. For some reason, she thought her clarification would elicit a response of recognition.

“I’m not sure . . . I just don’t know what you’re getting at,” I replied meekly after a long moment of uncomfortable silence.

Miranda’s plum-painted lips breathed out a whoosh of pent-up frustration.

I was completely unprepared for her testy explanation.

“The VC group from the late 1970s,” she hissed as she shoved her heavily painted face toward my puzzled one. “The one Oscar helped form.”

“OSCAR?” I SAID
, sputtering with surprise. “
My
Uncle Oscar . . . formed a Vigilance Committee?”

Miranda slid the long curve of her fingernail under one of the medallions and flicked it up into her hand.

“Yes,
your
Uncle Oscar,” she replied, her voice sniping bitterly. “As if you didn’t know.”

The sculpted surface of the medallion lay flat on Miranda’s palm, fenced in by the spiked barrier of her upturned fingers. Her purple-coated eyelids sank to half-mast as she stared down at the coin.

I shook my head. Despite the tension, I had to stifle a laugh. “I have a hard time imagining Oscar running around town rounding up criminals.”

“Don’t be silly. It wasn’t that kind of a group,” Miranda said condescendingly. “It was a political organization—of sorts.”

Miranda turned away from me and paced into the showroom. From the sharp thunking of her shoes against the floorboards, she was clearly annoyed at my lack of knowledge on this subject.

“Seriously, Miranda,” I said apologetically. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Miranda sighed loudly, clearly unconvinced. “Let me see if I can refresh your recollection.”

She spun around to face me. Her posture stiffened as if she were preparing to enter a courtroom. I could tell that I was about to be put on trial, but I didn’t as yet know the charges.

“Since its founding, San Francisco has attracted people from across America and around the world,” Miranda began, her voice resonating in the showroom. “Today, you can find representatives of almost every ethnicity or nationality imaginable here. Chinese, Japanese, Mexican, Italian, Irish, French, Indian, Vietnamese, Thai, Korean”—Miranda fluttered her dark plum nails in the air—“and countless others.” She brought her manicured hand back to her hip. “But the city is far from a melting pot. As wave after wave of immigrants moved in, they tended to locate themselves with others of their own ethnic background, sometimes by choice, sometimes by necessity, and, unfortunately, sometimes under duress or legal restriction.

“This led to the creation of distinct, inward-looking neighborhoods, isolated communities that could range from a single block to several streets, but each one with its own cultural identity. The divisions are less marked now than they were earlier in the 1900s, but San Francisco is still heavily balkanized.”

I nodded silently in agreement as I slid around the corner of the cashier counter and eased back onto the stool.

“All of this plays out in city politics. San Francisco is governed jointly by both a Mayor and a Board of Supervisors. In many respects, the Board is as powerful if not more so than the Mayor.”

Miranda circled the Gold Rush-era dental recliner positioned at the back of the room near the stairs. She ran the edge of her nail along the top of its worn leather cushion.

“Historically, the seats for the Board of Supervisors were selected in at-large elections. A candidate needed a great deal of money, organization, and clout in order to garner enough votes from across the city to win a seat. No one neighborhood or ethnic group had enough voting power on its own to elect a Supervisor.”

Miranda raised the purple prong of her nail to emphasize her point.

“While this system was meant to elect candidates with broad, citywide appeal, traditionally, there was little cooperation or interaction between the more disparate neighborhoods. Repeatedly throughout San Francisco’s history, powerful business interests have taken advantage of this political vacuum. Critics of the at-large election system often cite the city’s pro-growth, big-business policies of the 1960s as evidence of this structural flaw in San Francisco’s government.”

Miranda left the recliner and strolled toward the glass-covered display case. Her footsteps were starting to sound slightly less irritated as she focused her attention on the story instead of me.

“During that time frame, many members of the Board of Supervisors were supported—that is to say, their campaigns funded—by a group of businessmen who wanted to develop San Francisco into more of a tourist destination. They had plans to build convention centers, hotels, and other infrastructure that would earn a much higher rate of return on investment than, say, affordable family housing. Some began to complain that the Supervisors were more beholden to the moneyed interests that funded their campaigns than the varied and diverse neighborhoods of their constituents.”

Miranda paused in front of the display case and scanned the remaining Vigilance Committee artifacts, comparing them to the medallion she still carried in her palm.

“As more and more of these projects were implemented, higher rents began to push out the city’s blue-collar industrial employers. They were gradually replaced by legal and financial institutions, who hired more higher educated, service-oriented employees like lawyers, accountants, and stockbrokers.

“The labor unions, the unemployed workers, and the neighborhoods where their working-class families lived—they finally started to push back. They took the fight to City Hall. They began to protest the easing of zoning restrictions, the granting of licenses for new office buildings, and the revisions to the housing codes, but with at-large elections for both the Mayor and each of the eleven Supervisor seats, the real estate and big-business interests were still easily winning the battle.”

Miranda raised the glass-covered lid and dropped her medallion inside. Her voice grew quieter, more introspective, as her narrative switched from an abstract history lesson to a reflection of her own personal knowledge.

“Oscar was”—she cleared her throat—“well positioned to observe all of this.”

Miranda noticed my puzzled expression and clarified. “He used to work at City Hall.”

I couldn’t really picture Oscar sitting behind a desk, wearing a suit and tie, but Miranda didn’t elaborate on the nature of his City Hall employment, and I was afraid to interrupt her to ask. She brushed a stray strand of hair away from her face and continued.

“He and a couple of his colleagues began discussing ways to combat the business interests who were setting the agenda in the city’s government. They didn’t want to draw attention to themselves, so they kept their activities secret. Oscar came up with their code name, the Vigilance Committee.” Miranda smiled wryly. “He thought it made a humorous play on history.”

Miranda cleared her throat, resuming her serious demeanor. “They first targeted their efforts at a grassroots campaign that was working to support a referendum to change the way the Board of Supervisors were elected—from the old at-large seating system to a new regime that allocated seats on a district-by-district basis. Oscar’s VC secretly funneled money into the effort that helped publicize the initiative.”

Miranda arched one of her perfectly plucked eyebrows. “There were a lot of surprised faces in the city’s political circles when that referendum passed. While some of the political heavy hitters survived the next election and the switch to district seating, several new Supervisors managed to win positions on the Board. Many of these freshmen Supervisors were critical of the previous administration’s big-business, pro-growth agenda.

“One of the most vocal in that group of new Supervisors was Harvey Milk, who was elected from the district that included the Castro. While he was primarily concerned with gay rights issues, his populist, progressive stance struck a chord with a wide cross section of San Francisco voters, particularly those that felt they had been shut out by the big-business interests. Milk garnered support from both the Irish working-class unions and the traditionally underrepresented Chinese community—groups that previously wouldn’t have been caught dead in the same room together, much less one that was headlined by an openly gay man like Harvey.”

Miranda began walking back toward the front of the room. I felt myself shrink behind the counter as she approached.

“A general alignment of interests framed the battle lines in City Hall. On one side were Milk and four other progressive Supervisors; they were supported by the recently elected populist Mayor George Moscone. The opposing side comprised the President of the Board and the five remaining Supervisors.”

Miranda was now standing across the counter from me. Her piercing gaze fixed on my feeble one.