Russian Spring (44 page)

“What do you mean by that?” Eddie said belligerently, his blue eyes more than a little bloodshot.

“Nothing,” Bobby said. “Forget it.”

But somehow things had already gone over the edge. Bobby found himself in the center of a whirlpool of hostile vibes.

“You some kind of
Communist?
”

“Fuckin’
KGB
’s all over Berkeley, my dad says!”

“I’m no Communist!” Bobby insisted nervously.

“Then why you defending the fucking beaners?”

“Just people, is all. . . ,” Bobby said lamely.

“They ain’t
people
, they’re
beaners!
”

“Bet the little doof’s a Peen-lover too! What about it,
Bobby-boy
, the fuckin’ Peens that stole half our fuckin’ country and sold it to the fuckin’
Rooshians
, they just
people
too?”

“They ain’t
people
, they’re
Peens!
”

“Nuke ’em till they glow blue!”

“Let ’em eat anti-protons!”

“Let ’em eat
frijoles
, haw, haw, haw!”

Bobby felt the blood pounding behind his eardrums. His hands, unbidden, balled into fists. The angry pop-eyed faces in the mob outside the American Embassy in Paris swam through his memory, became the faces of these young Americans glaring at him under the open Southern California sky.

AMER-I-
CAN
, AS-SAS-
SAN!
AMER-I-
CAN
, AS-SAS-
SAN!

The echo of the chant mocked him twice over. What was the difference between
those
jingos and
these
? Except that
these
assholes were starting to convince him that what he had thought was a lie might be the truth.

Eileen grabbed his hand, and he let his fist unwind into it. But a big part of him, the
better
part of him, could not let this merde go unanswered. He owed it to his parents, he owed it to himself, and somehow he owed it to America too.

“How can you believe this shit?” he shouted, bolting to his feet. “Don’t you see that you’re talking just like the gringo jingo bastards they say we are? Americans
can’t
be like this! You just can’t be!”

“What the fuck kind of American are you, you Peen-loving Commie!”

“Fuckin’ Berkeley Red!”

And all at once, everyone was on their feet shouting drunkenly, and Bobby found himself surrounded by what was about to turn into another mob, or, somehow, the
same
mob.

“Boys!”
Eileen moaned patronizingly. “Stop this juvenile horseshit! You’re all
blotted
out of your minds! You’re too
drunk
to have a fistfight! You’d just end up
puking
all over each other!”

Some of the other girls laughed and poked at some of the guys with mock punches, and the moment of physical tension receded a tad.

“Come
on
, Bobby,” Eileen said, tugging him by the hand. “We’ve got to
go
now!”

Reeling, realizing how drunk he really was, and how close he had come to getting the crap beaten out of him, Bobby let her lead him away toward the car. Over his shoulder, he saw that her old high school friends had collapsed back onto their beach blankets and were already passing bottles, swilling more beer, and laughing among themselves.

“I
told
you what a bunch of gringo jingo doofs they all were! You could’ve gotten yourself
killed!
”

“What’s
happened
to America?” Bobby sighed maudlinly.

Eileen shrugged. “You’ve met
Daddy
, haven’t you?” she said.

Bobby managed a wan little laugh. Eileen pecked him on the cheek. “Come on, Bobby, snap out of it,” she said gently. “I’ll show you something better to remember la-la land by.”

“And so we bid a fond farewell to scenic Los Angeles,” Eileen said. “What a
zoo!
Still, it’s beautiful from up here, isn’t it, where you can pretend you don’t know what’s really going on. . . .”

Bobby had to admit that it was.

They had driven up the Pacific Coast Highway, then taken a long winding canyon road up into the sere brown hills beside the sea, way up to a shelf of land high atop the ridgeline. They had parked the car and walked out to the lip of a cliff, where they now stood, looking out over the Pacific and the beach and the city curving south around the wide bay.

By now, the sun, orange and umber under the purpling sky, was bisected by the mirror of a sea reflecting the blazing perfection of an archetypal Southern California sunset, rosy and violet through the smog.

The lights of the Los Angeles Basin were coming on, glowing up at them through the brown layer of the smog deck, a magnificent electronic enormity foaming up against the Santa Monica Mountains like a great luminescent breaker, sweeping away around the majestic curve of the bay toward San Diego, toward the Mexican border, toward things that seemed quite unreal from this lordly mountaintop vantage.

Bobby knew that the crazed city below was writhing in a superheated torment, that something had gone very wrong down there, that dark deeds were veiled behind the cloak of lights. Yet, like America, it was beautiful still.

As the sun was swallowed up by the ocean, and a tide of darkness slowly rolled across the surface of the sea toward the shore, the vast scintillant city, by some trick of the mind’s eye, seemed to be rising triumphant out of the natural landscape to challenge the washed-out stars—like America itself, beautiful, prideful, a light that not so long ago had been the shining hope of the world.

Or was Los Angeles, like America, slowly sinking back into the primeval darkness, doomed to subside like legendary Atlantis into the oblivion of the sea?

In that moment, as Bobby stood there at the edge of the continent, at the last frontier of the dream, the issue, like the vista, still seemed ambiguous, still seemed in doubt.

A DELIBERATE INSULT TO
MEXICAN SOVEREIGNTY

No Mexican government can seriously consider the American offer to cancel our external debt in exchange for the cession of Baja California. Those who warn that this outrageous proposal is only a thinly veiled ultimatum are, of course, entirely right. But to suggest that the Republic of Mexico has no alternative but to accept the inevitable is treason, pure and simple. The Yankee aggressors may have the planes and the ships and the overwhelming military superiority, and they may indeed be able to work their will against us.

One hundred million Mexicans may be robbed of our land, as we were in 1845, but let it never be said that we were robbed of our honor. We must stand firm against all odds. We must fight to the death for every centimeter of our sacred national soil.

—
Noticias de Mexico

XV

The drive up to the San Francisco Bay area was a big disappointment. Eileen wouldn’t take the Pacific Coast Highway or even 101. “It’d take
twice
as long that way,” she told Bobby, “and you can’t do any of the driving.” So there was no scenic seacoast road, no Big Sur, no Monterey, no Carmel.

Instead, Eileen took Interstate 5 through the San Joaquin Valley, an arrow-straight freeway through what she told him was the most productive farmland in the world.

Productive it might be, but scenic it wasn’t as they drove for about three hours up the long flat valley floor, past endless fields of crops broiling under a pitiless sun, moistened by huge sprinkler systems, harvested by spidery-looking machinery, watched over by little observation blimps. It was more of a gigantic food factory than Bobby’s
romantic concept of farmland, or worse still, like some kind of military operation against nature itself.

The landscape finally began to change as they climbed out of the valley up into the low rolling hills to the north and west, where it was cooler, moister, and greener, but the improvement didn’t last for long, as the traffic thickened, and big factories sprang up beside the road—mostly defense plants, Eileen told him—and then the usual sprawl of tract houses, shopping malls, fuel stations, car lots, fast-food joints, and billboards that seemed to be characteristic of the approach to California cities.

But then they crossed another range of hills, and quite suddenly they were crawling straight north on a clogged freeway with a stupendous view that quite took Bobby’s breath away.

To the west, beyond a coastal sprawl of industrial crudland, San Francisco Bay was an immense sweep of blue water sheened golden toward its western reaches by the palpable rays of the late afternoon sun. White sails dotted the bay like a fleecing of scattered clouds, and the wakes of boats sliced the azure surface like the contrails of high-flying jets. Far to the northwest, Bobby could just make out the Golden Gate Bridge, ghostly within a bank of fog that was rolling through it and around it like an immense slow-motion breaker, pouring up the hills of San Francisco overlooking the narrow mouth of the broad bay, and wrapping the outlines of the buildings in the crystal mist of legend.

“Now
that’s
what I call the
real
California!” Bobby declared.

“You can’t mean
Oakland!
” Eileen said. “Ugh!”

Between the elevated freeway and the blue waters of the bay, enrobed in brown photochemical smog, was a truly repellent other vista that Bobby hadn’t deigned to notice.

Piers, dry docks, and fuel tanks spread out from the shore, connected by mazeworks of gangways, railheads, and girder bridges, and overarched by cranes, power lines, and elevated conveyers. Inland of the docks were warehouses, big sheet-steel sheds, scruffy buildings, and big open lots surrounded by high razor-wire-topped fencing. Trucks and workers and forklifts were scurrying busily everywhere.

Tied up at the piers or enfolded by dry-dock scaffolding were the objects of all this intense activity. A big aircraft carrier with huge cranes loading helicopter gunships, jump-jets, Ospreys, and hovercraft onto its flight deck. Four destroyers. A heavy cruiser. Three big troop-carrying hovercraft being loaded with gunbuggies and hovertanks and artillery pieces. Assorted tankers and freighters with numbers painted on their battleship-gray superstructures, all taking on cargo. And waiting in the parking lots, more tanks, trucks, gunbuggies, mobile
rocket launchers, gunships, and assorted major military hardware.

“Here too?” Bobby moaned.

“Better
believe
it!” Eileen told him. “Without the Navy Yard, Oakland would be even more of a basket case than it already is. But don’t worry, no one ever
goes
there. Berkeley is another
world
.”

The freeway finally ascended into the hills, where the trees and shrubbery masked what lay to the south and west from view, and when they came down into Berkeley itself, it did indeed seem like another and far more appetizing world.

They descended out of the hills along a tree-shrouded avenue lined with private homes and low apartment complexes, past a little square with a cluster of restaurants and shops that reminded Bobby of Paris. They drove down a main street, with a big university campus on one side, and bookstores, chain restaurants, video shops, chip-rentals, supermarkets, and Laundromats on the other, then turned left onto another main drag, but of quite a different character.

“Voilà, Telegraph Avenue!” Eileen proclaimed. “The center of the universe!”

Telegraph Avenue was relatively narrow, and the traffic crawled along it at a slow walk, giving Bobby plenty of time to soak up the ambiance and marvel.

Small shops lined both sides of the street—bookstores, computer equipment shops, clothing stores, chip-boutiques, weird little craft shops selling leather goods, jewelry, bric-a-brac. There were junk shops purveying old furniture and household goods. There were tiny little restaurants, bars, sidewalk cafés, a film theater, a little playhouse, porn shops, liquor stores. Music played from cafés and clubs and portable chip-decks.

And the street was jammed with boulevardiers, almost all of them in their teens and twenties. The majority of them looked like the kids Bobby had grown used to seeing in the rest of the States; mecs in jeans, T-shirts, walking shorts, short-sleeved sport shirts, clean-shaven, with short, neatly groomed hair, girls in more tightly tailored versions of the same gear, or wearing halters, short skirts, spandex stretch pants in bright primary colors.

But a third or a quarter of the strollers on Telegraph Avenue looked like nothing Bobby had ever seen.

Mecs in asymmetrically cut jeans, one leg long, the other short, embroidered, studded, painted in crazy random rainbow patterns. They wore flowing medieval-looking blousons, big floppy leather cowboy hats, Arab kaffiyehs dyed in neon colors. Black leather jackets open over bare chests. Wide belts with gigantic carved wooden buckles. Silk sashes. Shaved heads tattooed or painted in complex designs.
Brilliantly dyed hair done up in spikes and crests. Long unkempt flowing locks that went down to their
asses
. Oh yes, the circus was in town!

And the
girls
were something else again! The same profusion of wild hairdos. Tinted plastic blouses and halters that seemed transparent. Skintight T-shirts with naked breasts painted on them. Short asymmetric skirts and high patent-leather boots in many colors that seemed to go all the way up to their crotches. Long flowing skirts painted with landscapes and spacescapes and abstract patterns. Girls who seemed entirely nude inside wrap-around capes patterned like oriental rugs. Girls in brief Japanese happi coats festooned with flashing electronic jewelry. Girls who had it and flaunted it, yes indeed!

If Telegraph Avenue reminded Bobby of anything, it was the streets of St.-Germain, up around the Sorbonne and down in the crowded maze of little streets off the Place St.-Michel, but amplified, augmented, magnified, and somehow gloriously Americanized.

He found himself falling instantly in love. With who, or with what, he didn’t know, but he felt the spirit of the street calling to him, beckoning him, giving him the eye, like the most beautiful girl he had ever seen smiling at him, crooking her finger, seductively inviting him to come and lose himself in the carnival of her eyes.