Desert Boys (11 page)

That's when I asked if they'd been successful.

Under her breath, my mom cursed her brother for getting me involved. Then she said, “I want to tell you a story, too, one where he fixes one of his Volkswagens and drives to a place where he can feel at home, where he can live.”

“But?”

“For some, there is no such place. Not in this world, anyway.”

 

NOTES FOR A SPOTLIGHT ON A FUTURE PRESIDENT

THE INCIDENT

The mascot—a cartoonlike Confederate soldier known affectionately on campus as Rebby the Blue—had been defiled. Unfortunately, the African American sophomore commissioned to wear the costume at the spring pep rally didn't notice the freshly painted Hitler mustache until it was too late. Joshua Stilt fist-pumped his way onto the gymnasium floor, where he expected to be swathed in the intoxicating energy of school spirit. Instead, he was met with a wild mixture of laughter and hissing from the overwhelmingly white audience of five hundred. Afterwards, the local news sent a camera crew and a reporter to interview Joshua Stilt and the high school's white principal about what was already being described in the Antelope Valley as the third or fourth greatest controversy of the year.

“To equate a Rebel soldier with Nazis is ridiculous,” said the principal in his prerecorded interview. “Rebels fought for freedom, you see, and Hitler fought for power. Anyone who knows history understands states' rights and dictatorships are like Chinese food and cheese—totally incompatible.”

Peter Thorpe, the local reporter—having already heard the joke over Panda Express takeout at the principal's house two nights earlier—decided against challenging his old friend's logic. They had graduated as Rebels fewer than thirty years ago.

Quickly the conversation turned to identifying the culprit. For his part, Joshua Stilt—whose last name provoked jokes about his five-foot-nothing frame—became the first suspect. “If I'd wanted to make a political statement,” he told the reporter when he began to feel accused, “I'd have come up with something more intelligent.”

The story might have ended there had the local news segment not been seen by a famous film director, who happened to be this far north of Los Angeles to shoot an explosion scene in the desert. The director, a woman whose own fight for legitimacy in the male-dominated field of Hollywood action films had nurtured in her a sensitivity to the just indignations of others, sent a brief but excoriating email to the chiefs of major news organizations across California. Word spread. Soon, reporters at every major television network wanted a sit-down with Joshua Stilt. The
local
interest—who sullied Rebby the Blue?—was replaced by a
national
interest: What young black kid in twenty-first-century California would willingly don the uniform—cartoonlike or not—of a Confederate soldier?

Interview after interview produced the same response from Joshua Stilt: “I really enjoyed being the mascot, and I couldn't change what the mascot was.” But what Joshua Stilt felt he could not do, national media attention proved able to. Shortly after the story broke, petitions, rallies, and lawsuits were organized to replace Rebby the Blue with a less political mascot for Antelope Valley High. After consulting his conscience, his Bible, his school district, and an online national poll, the suddenly apologetic principal revealed the new mascot at an assembly on the football field. An actual desert tortoise had been borrowed for the event from the conservatory, and, released from its cage, began eating blades of grass that had been painted white with the high school's logo, a Stars and Bars flag that had not yet been replaced.

THE MEETING

A decade later, I planned to meet Joshua Stilt at a Mission District café in San Francisco, but saw him almost an hour early, standing at the yellow edge of the Rockridge BART platform in Oakland. The weather—warm and overcast—lent a cinematic, quiet texture to the whole scene, as if we were waiting for a steam engine and not a commuter train. For a moment I considered avoiding him until our planned meeting. Checking the overhead electronic platform scrolls, however, I saw that our train had been delayed due to a post-Occupy, largely impromptu protest a station ahead. Fearing Joshua Stilt might catch me avoiding him in that time, I went over to introduce myself.

He was donning those large white plastic headphones everyone our age seemed to be wearing in transit, and I had to reach out and touch him on the shoulder to get his attention. When he slid the headphones down around his neck, I said, “I'm Daley Kushner, the guy who's writing about you.”

He'd grown up to become a stylish, handsome young man. He'd sprouted a good eight inches not including his early-'90s-style flattop fade (an additional two inches), complete with lines shaved into the sides of his head that reminded me, for whatever reason, of the wingtips on classic American cars. He wore large-framed black glasses and, despite the warm weather, a slim-fitting suede blazer that, only when the clouds passed temporarily, proved to be navy blue. We talked about the chance of rain and the clearer skies we could already make out across the bay until our train arrived, at which point, we found two empty seats and began to talk more comfortably.

“I won't turn this on,” I said, showing him my digital recorder, “until we get to the café. Too much noise on these rails.”

“Very strange to see another AV kid outside the desert,” he said. “I guess you and I are special.”

“Ha,” I said—actually saying the word. I wondered (a) if he remembered me from high school (probably not) and (b) if I—far less stylish as an acne-scarred, uncombed, short-but-lanky white dude in a polo shirt—had made a good first impression. I resisted the urge to ask, and told him that once the recorder came on, the conversation would be about the ways he—and only he—was special. “Trust me,” I said. “My editor has no interest in getting to know me better.”

“You'll seep through anyway,” Joshua said, not unkindly. His music was still on, and I could make out the snare hits through the headphones around his neck. “As soon as you choose what to say or write,” he said, “you start seeping through. And it only gets messier the more you say.”

THE ASSIGNMENT

My class—Antelope Valley High, 2005—was the first to graduate not as Rebels, but as Desert Tortoises. Joshua's was the next. After earning his bachelor's degree in Political Science and Philosophy at Stanford, he became, at the age of twenty-three, the seventh-youngest city council member in Oakland's history. Now, at twenty-five, he was mulling his first mayoral run. It was too early in the campaign for him to be followed around by reporters, but his name had been floated as a possible candidate, and early polls were lending credence to some—if not all—of his confidence. My assignment was to:

1. Conduct, over lunch in San Francisco (where he'd scheduled a cross-Bay photo-op), an interview with Stilt.

2. Return to Stilt's Oakland apartment for a prearranged photo-shoot with his friend, a photographer named Jenna King.

3. Attend, in the evening, a “green jobs” event at which Stilt was scheduled to speak.

4. Write the spotlight, tentatively titled, “The President of the Future Presidents Club.”

The publication for which I was writing—a Los Angeles–based, century-old magazine turned website—wasn't the first to speculate on Joshua Stilt's bright future in politics, but it was the first to acquire an exclusive feature with him (citing his L.A. County birthplace). Stilt and I had never been friends, but I'd been thinking a lot lately about what motivates a person from our hometown to leave, and whether there was some essential difference between people like us and those who chose to stay. In fact, that's how I'd pitched the article in the first place—from the point of view of someone who went to high school with Joshua Stilt—but my editor advised me to keep the focus on the subject at hand. “Do whatever you need to do,” she added at the end of our conversation, “as long as you don't turn this into a story about you.”

And so I'd kept certain facts of my life—some more important than others—from Joshua Stilt. I hadn't told him, for instance, that for the previous two weeks I'd had a dull but constant headache, the result of getting so little sleep. I'd been living with my partner, Lloyd, for nearly a year in San Francisco, but a recent series of disagreements (he wanted to meet my mother) had me sleeping on the stiff corduroy couch of a friend on the south side of Berkeley.

I'd stayed up the night before searching the internet for old interview clips with Joshua Stilt regarding the Hitler-mustache controversy. Some of the footage showed panning shots of the high school during lunch, and when I started looking for myself among the crowd—going so far as to pause the video—I knew it was time to shut off the laptop and try, again, to sleep.

THE TRANSCRIPT, 1/3

JS:
You can probably tell your readers more about the Antelope Valley than I can, Daley. I'd rather talk about Oakland.

DK:
We'll get there, but I'd like your thoughts on growing up in the AV. Like, how did growing up there affect your worldview, et cetera.

JS:
On the record or off? [
Laughter
.]

DK:
Whichever, just let me know which is which.

JS:
Okay. On the record: The AV's an interesting place. Edge of the Mojave Desert, so, hot and isolated. Not a lot to do. I ended up spending a lot of time in my own head. I thought the Joshua trees were named after me, for example, and then I thought I was named after them. [
Sounds from the espresso machine.
] I couldn't face the fact that we had absolutely nothing to do with one another, other than accidentally being in the same place. Mostly I thought about leaving, and what I was going to do after I left. I wanted to live in a place where I wasn't the only one trying to change things, you know? When you're basically the only one of your kind in a town, whether it's an activist, or if it's the only black kid in class, or the only gay kid, or both, like—

DK:
James Baldwin?

JS:
I was going to say Frank Ocean—[
laughter
]—but sure. There are specific challenges for each minority—black and gay aren't the same, obviously—but the common link if you're the only one of your kind is that it's tough to get taken seriously by the majority. People hear you complain and say, “If you don't like it here, then leave.” If you don't complain, you start feeling complicit. I just had to learn to ignore everyone, even myself, wait it out, and save my energy for a more worthwhile [
inaudible
]. Turned out to be a good place for me to grow up, actually, because good politicians aren't only adept at being frustrated, but also at knowing what to do with that frustration.

DK:
I'm afraid to ask about your off-the-record response.

JS:
Off the record? It's where I'm from, but it's not what I'm about. I've been able to move, the fuck, on. [
Laughter.
]

THE PLAZA

Some notes on the city at Sixteenth and Mission: In the corner are the steps leading down to the BART platforms, to the trains, all trains this way, this way all trains. Between you and those steps lives a micro-city; women selling homemade tamales; women nursing babies; pigeons loitering near the bus stops. There are the homeless and cheery—the jokesters, the peddlers, the
I NEED MONEY FOR WEED
sign-holding, missing-tooth-grinning, dog-owning variety; and there are the homeless and despondent—asleep, you hope, bundled up on the concrete in eighty-four-degree, windblown weather, nearly indistinguishable from the trash bags tethered to their ankles with yellow, flapping drawstrings. Their pockets are full of fifteen-cent, shoeprint-stomped BART cards they've peeled from the ground in their travels through the macro-city, travels that must occur in the night, though you can't imagine them getting up off the checkered floor. Note the checkered floor. Black-and-white diamonds on the plaza, and you think: Makes sense. Chess is a game, checkers is a game, but chess and checkers have nothing on this. This—surviving a place—is
the
game. The hiss-stop, gunshot blare of a bus shakes everyone but the permanent inhabitants of the micro-city, and a heat wave from the bus's exhaust turns the whole scene into a watery mirage you can't wait to get close enough to dispel. You arrive at the steps and turn the corner, careful not to touch the handrail, and a black man in a battered three-piece suit is selling flowers on the stairwell. Just in the seven seconds it takes to cross the plaza to the steps, you've grown so used to ignoring these people that you've already made it to the bottom of the steps before realizing the person you've been walking with is still at the top, backlit by the day above him, fishing through his navy blue suede jacket for cash as the man in the suit bundles together the stems of four or five flowers with twine. The stench of urine—faintly at the back of your throat since arriving in the Mission—is faint no more. The stairwell, ground zero for the smell, is no place to linger. Your train is coming—you can hear it and feel the molecules in the air come to life, a savior—and you call out to the person at the top of the stairs: Our train is coming. The two of you jump on just before the sliding doors close, and take the two green, carpeted seats beneath the royal blue
RESERVED FOR PERSONS WITH DISABILITIES
sticker. No one will call you out on sitting here, but a small-town kid like you cares about rules. You practice your response just in case:
As soon as someone needs this seat, I'll be happy to move.
In your mind, the response comes off as less forthcoming and more self-righteous, so you practice until you achieve the desired tone. Beside you, the subject of your assignment—the future president—cradles a newspaper-wrapped cluster of yellow-and-orange violets and acacias, water seeping through last week's top stories. You live in this world, it occurs to you. You've lived in the Bay Area for years, but you never felt comfortable calling it home. For the moment, you've been considering yourself a visitor
on assignment,
and you've enjoyed the label, the justification for being here, but there is no such thing as a visitor, and you know it. Maybe there is only one city, micro or macro, and you happen to be a citizen. A woman approaches. Your heart jumps.