Imperial (118 page)

4

Imperial Valley is more than a highly-developed farming area—it is a wonderland of factories running 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
Today Riverside is the center of the Citrus Empire.
A regular hell is L.A.
And in material advantages they are already well supplied:
four paved streets, sixteen alleyways, two rivers full of shit and a whole lot of assholes!
I can’t help believing in people.
You are going to kill yourself, señor?

PART TEN

DISSOLUTIONS

Chapter 128

PROBABLY THE WEATHER (2002-2003)

There is no ill which lasts a hundred years, nor anybody who can resist it.

—Mexican proverb

ICE COLD (2003)

Probably the weather, replied Mr. Larry Grogan, freshly elevated from Mayor of El Centro to former Mayor as he sat lean-faced and long-limbed over a desk full of papers in the back office of his pawnshop, beyond the guitars on the walls, the bicycle locks for sale, the boom boxes, the hordes of wrenches both rusty and perfectly nickeled; I saw a grinding wheel; the vending machine proclaimed its contents ICE COLD; a DeWalt drill could have been mine for half price, a saxophone for $599.95; on the outer wall of Mr. Grogan’s office hung a
CASH EXPRESS PAYDAY ADVANCE
chart which explained that to receive, for instance, a hundred dollars, the fee would be seventeen dollars and fifty cents, which was why one needed to make out one’s check to Valley Pawn for one hundred and seventeen dollars and fifty cents;
I have never been cheated out of a dollar in my life.
I also discovered an appreciation plaque from the Centinela State Prison Citizens’ Advisory Committee, another from the Lions International, one from the El Centro Police Activities League, and one from the Volunteers of America Imperial Alcohol and Drug Service Center.

Probably the weather
was his answer when I asked him why Imperial County had not lived up to dreams of her boomers and boosters forever and ever, Amen. And it might even have been the perfect answer;
²²³
for in this empire, even beehives need awnings.

“SAY KA-CHEEPO”

Probably it was the weather, to be sure, but by now the ninety-one-degree autumn afternoon had entirely departed, the sky dark violet at seven P.M. like the Martian atmosphere. When the air got as cool as this, I for one wouldn’t pawn El Centro away! A man in a wheelchair sat in front of the nightclub on Main Street; his gaze was a sentry’s; nothing got past him on that long wide flat street, because there was nothing. Probably it was the weather. At least he’d never have to worry that in his grave he’d turn ICE COLD. A coolish breeze began to breathe from the wide tan alleyways. I read the sign which said SEXY LINGERIE—WE
HAVE TOYS AND THING’S FOR WOMEN!
But for which women? I’d lost my belief in the slender cowgirl with long soft bangs who stands with her hands on her buckskin-fringed hips, grinning like the perfect stewardess; she’s on the cover of Ball Advertising’s pamphlet: “Visitors’ Recreation Guide Book to Imperial County California: 36 Pages of Information.” I think she’s supposed to be Barbara Worth. What prevented her from existing? Probably the weather. Having reached this conclusion, I then passed very slowly through one of the alleys, wondering as always what had gone wrong and fallen silent here, or was this how Imperial was supposed to be? Before the Valley of Death got settled, its sands were silent, but the silence of an uninhabited place or of potentiality differs from the silence of a corpse. I remembered an old photograph of Main Street, with the El Centro Hotel proudly front and center (where was it now?); the arches of its arcade had spelled out
STATIONERY
and CONFECTIONERY and CIGARS and DRUGS and
CAMERAS
and
CACHIPO Say Ka-Cheepo for your Stomach Liver etc.
I remembered the days when Imperial was the third-fastest-growing county in America. If only the Virgin of Guadalupe would help us all!

Or do some happy homesteads endure? Consider this: NOTICE: PARKING RESERVED FOR FARM AMERICA.

THE COURTHOUSE (2002)

Generally speaking, when one walks eastward in this part of El Centro, the businesses become bail bonds offices and pawnshops; while going westward, they tend to become title companies. So I went a block south. On State Street, the bright phony yellow welcome of the Roberta Hotel’s doorway blasted into a jet-black silhouette of the black man who was riding his bicycle round and round the parking lot.
He made a success through his own efforts.
There were several other yellow-lit parking lots whose blackness had been delimited and verified by tan buildings; there was block after block of multilayered square arches from whose ceilings more yellow lights hung down like pig-teats. The insurance company had closed for the night, but the Fraternal Order of Eagles (founded in 1907) offered a glowingly open doorway with a garbage can just inside. (The Eagles used to meet in Holtville, I recall, back when the world knew that
IMPERIAL COUNTY SHOWS RAPID INCREASE: Is Growing Rapidly Richer.
)

I heard crickets. Old people said that half a century ago they were “everywhere” in Mexicali. I never heard them in that city anymore, at least not downtown. Well, but El Centro wasn’t as busy as Mexicali nowadays. (
TAKE NOTICE.
“PALMBREAD”
Made in El Centro Sold All Over the Valley.
That message comes to you from 1912.) Sooner or later business would pick up, once Imperial County had finished building those industrial parks.
His farm has been highly improved.

Dawn was enacted by the liquid chucklings of pigeons, taking State Street by surprise, for it had not yet fully organized its shadows into razor-edged tightness as it certainly would by eight-o’-clock. Soon each pillar in each archway possessed a downward-diagonal shadow of itself. I wandered back to Main Street, turned west, and reached the courthouse
²²⁴
just as it opened.

This graceful white edifice, its staircase flanked by hedges, exemplifies bifurcation as much as anything in Imperial. On the left stand a trash can and a graciously deciduous tree; on the right, a regal palm, a mailbox, and our American flag. Straight up the middle of the stairs runs a railing, almost all the way to the place between the central pair of pillars where the double doors meet. There are, in fact, six pillars, each outermost pair clumped together, so that the portico is divided into thirds, each third adorned by a molding and a rectangular window divided in two both horizontally and vertically, the smaller pair of topmost panels then subdivided in a star-boned square of six triangles. To the left of those grand copper doors, and also to the right, there is a wide glass-paned bulletin board, and within the rightmost of these misery-windows there hang from rows of clips, sometimes with their sides curling inwards, like the wings of sleeping bats, NOTICES OF TRUSTEE’S SALE from this or that foreclosure department of Anyzone’s title or “service” company; while the leftmost pane presents corresponding notices of sale and probate. The probate doesn’t bother me; we all have to die. But what about those presumably still-living wretches who have lost their homes?

That lovely white courthouse, eternally quiet behind its hedges! Open the door, and you’ll find it filled with brownskinned people who murmur in low sad rapid voices.

EVEN MORE ICE COLD (2003)

After looking through a loupe at the ring which a lady sought to pawn, Mr. Grogan said tenderly: You see, girl, it’s very . . .—and then he took her fat wrist. Then, turning to the biggest of his clerks, he said in a firm, all-business voice:
Seventy-five dollars.

Is seventy-five dollars too much? Do you want to save? I’ll tell you how, courtesy of the following advertisement from the Pure Ice Company, one of whose three plants was in El Centro:
SAVE WITH ICE
.

Here’s another helpful hint for all you scrimpers: In El Centro, California, our Furniture Palace proclaims
1 YEAR SAME AS CASH
.

A SECOND OPINION (1936)

What caused Imperial to go wrong? Probably the weather. And here’s another explanation, courtesy of a book on citrus diseases:
A large list of special fruit rots and spots occurs . . . The last one,
dry rot,
has been found only in the Imperial Valley.

Chapter 129

FROM TEN GALS DOWN TO THREE (1914-2004)

All Riverside County “shows off ” during this one week period. Horses, cattle, dramatics and pretty girls galore in Arabian costumes.

—Shields Date Gardens, 1952

W
ell, I worked there fifty years, said Mr. Ray House, rotund and grey. Well, the first year we called it Tent City. Through the years it’s been upgraded. I worked there in the Junior Department, 4-H and so forth. And then I served nine years on the Board of Trustees of the fair, you know, the Fair Board. Then I served the rest of the time just working on the fairs. I had a Date Queen exhibit at the Fair for pretty much fifty years.

It started out, looks was very important. You got a bathing suit, and things like that. Well, that’s started to phase out. But they still use skimpy costumes and you see. It’s been Arabian costumes since 1947. Bob was the manager. Guess his daughter suggested it. They were looking for a theme to follow. They chose the Arabian theme because of the desert. Looks was very important at first, and then it phased into knowledge of the date industry being an important part. And then the communications skills come in there.

We used to take a week off from school for the Fair, but that phased out.

It was all volunteer work at first. We didn’t have sponsors before. Used to have the Christian church with all the foods. Now we have a hundred and fifteen kinds of foods, and all not local. One reason is that the kids don’t want to work as hard as their parents. They got tired. They got other interests. They got surfboards.

We did go from ten gals down to three, you know, one Date Queen and nine Princesses down to a Queen and two Princesses; and the reason for that was financial. It was countywide at first, and then it got littler and littler as far as it covered. We had a Queen of California, a Queen of the County, all that. But we always had the publicity based on the Queens. When we had ten of ’em, a Queen and nine Princesses, we could go to L.A. and get anything on TV we wanted. And locally here, when we brought the Queens down, they got a free meal every day they were here, for the ten days, to, to, go before the Lions Club.

He smiled into the past very sweetly, as if he could see all the way back to the day Miss Helen Shaw got elected Imperial County Queen
and held court on the fair grounds, awarding prize winners their trophies.
She’d commanded ten Maids of Honor. That was in 1914, at the Seventh County Fair.

They’d always wear their costumes, he said. One thing you notice, the costumes weren’t as fancy in the beginning. They weren’t as colorful; they weren’t as skimpy. Then that changed. Toward the end, they’d make communications about the date industry the centerpiece. (It was really dates and citrus and all that, but mainly dates.) I guess the last five years or maybe ten, I made a book for every Queen or Princess and gave it to ’em. And the Fair gave me no money for my book, but they paid for the expense of printing the pictures.

In 1947 there were ten gals. We had ten for years. I started with the Fair in ’51, and then it went to five, and then to three. I can’t tell you when, exactly.

But there’s some people who will never give up on the Queen.

You gotta have a Queen, agreed his friend Art La Londe.

There’s been a lot of pressure to change the emphasis from Queens to Ambassadors. They think it should not be so much emphasis on beauty, Mr. House continued, and I could tell that this made him sad.

From ten gals down to three! Isn’t that life? Across the line in Mexicali, the bank of flesh-red lights began winking at the Thirteen Negro, and I ordered a beer from Mario the waiter, after which I bought a beer for Mario, who was by no means as old as Mr. House but had known the Thirteen Negro for many eternities just the same. On the subject of royalty, he remarked that there were very few dancing-girls nowadays; even on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays you saw no more than thirty; eight or nine years ago there had been seventy-six; and when he remembered that, he got happy even in his sadness that seventy-six had gone to thirty and the Río Colorado no longer reached the sea, that he was no longer the lover of the bargirl Emily and that someday the Thirteen Negro itself would come to an end.