Vineland (9 page)

Frenesi let him rave on. Her childhood and adolescence had been full enough of taps on the phone, cars across the street, name-calling and fights in school. Not exactly a red-diaper baby, she'd grown up more on the fringes of the political struggle in Hollywood back in the fifties, but the first rule was still that you didn't talk about anybody else, especially not about their allegiances. Her mother then had worked as a script reader and her father, Hub Gates, as a gaffer, always under dreamlike turns of blacklist, graylist, secrets kept and betrayed, grown-ups acting like the worst kind of kids, kids acting like they knew what was going on. As house receptionist, Frenesi'd had to learn to keep straight a whole list of fake names, and who used which to whom. Whatever it was, she hated and feared it, one set of grown-ups bitterly against another, words and names she didn't understand, though she knew when Sasha was between jobs or when Hub was fired off a picture, the two of them looking at each other a lot but not talking that much—a good time, Frenesi learned, to keep out of the way.

Frenesi the baby had come along a little after World War II ended, her name celebrating the record by Artie Shaw that was all over the jukeboxes and airwaves in the last days of the war, when Hub and Sasha were falling in love. Frenesi had a version of how they'd met, an upsweep come partly unpinned, a jaunty angle of sailor hat over eyebrow, jitterbug music, a crowded endless dance floor, palm trees, sunsets, warships in the Bay, smoke in the air, everybody smoking, chewing gum, drinking coffee, some all at the same time. A common awareness, as Frenesi imagined it, no matter whose eyes should meet, of being young and alive in perilous times, and together for a night.

“Oh, Frenesi,” her mother would sigh when presented with this costume drama, “if you'd been there, you'd chirp a different tune. Try being a woman who also happens to be political, in the middle of a global war sometime. Especially with all those revved-up gentlemen around. I was one confused cookie.”

She'd come down by old 101 from the redwoods to the City, a teenage beauty with the same blue eyes and wolf-whistle legs her daughter would have, out on her own early because of too many mouths to feed at home. Her father, Jess Traverse, trying to organize loggers in Vineland, Humboldt, and Del Norte, had suffered an accident arranged by one Crocker “Bud” Scantling for the Employers' Association, in plain sight of enough people who'd get the message, at a local ball game, where he was playing center field. The tree, one of a stand of old redwoods just beyond the fence, had been cut in advance almost all the way through. Nobody in the stands heard saw strokes, wedges being knocked loose . . . nobody could believe, when it began to register, the slow creaking detachment from the lives around it as the tree began its descent. Voices found at last only reached Jess in time for him to dive out of the way, to save his life but not his mobility, as the redwood fell across his legs, crushing them, driving half of him into the earth. There was then guilt money from the Association—cash in a market bag, left in the car—a small pension, a few insurance checks, but not enough to keep three kids on. They had a local attorney for the damned, sure no George Vandeveer, working on the case, but not hard enough or near enough to Scantling to matter.

Sasha's mother, Eula, was a Becker, from Beaverhead County, Montana, who'd been bounced as a baby upon the knees of family friends known to have shot at as well as personally dropped company finks, styled “inspectors,” down mine shafts so deep you might as well say they ran all the way to Hell. Meeting Jess had been blind fate, she wasn't even supposed to be in town that night, ran into some girlfriends who talked her into going down to the IWW hall in Vineland, where they knew some fellows, and the minute Eula walked in, there he was, and as she found out not long after, the real Eula Becker too. “Jess introduced me to my conscience,” she liked to say in later years. “He was the gatekeeper to the rest of my life.” Wobblies, sneered at by the property owners of Vineland, and even some renters, as I-Won't-Works, were not known as nest builders or great marriage material, but Eula, meeting herself, discovered what she really wanted—the road, his road, his bindlestiff life, his dangerous indenture to an idea, a dream of One Big Union, what Joe Hill was calling “the commonwealth of toil that is to be.” Soon she was with him in somber mill towns among logged-off slopes, speaking on the corners of mud streets lined with unpainted shacks and charred redwood snags, no green anywhere, addressing strangers as “class brother,” “class sister,” getting arrested at free-speech fights, making love in the creekside alders at the May Day picnic, getting used to an idea of “together” that included at least one of them being in jail in any given year. She would remember the first time she was shot at, by Pinkertons in a camp up along the Mad River, more clearly than the birth of her first child, who was Sasha. With Jess's crippling, she arrived at last at the condition of cold, perfected fury she had been growing into, as she now understood, all these years. “Wish I could just pick up my bindle and come along with you,” she told Sasha when she left, “there's nothing much for us in this town anymore. All we can do about it now is just stay. Just piss on through. Be here to remind everybody—any time they see a Traverse, or a Becker for that matter, they'll remember that one tree, and who did it, and why. Hell of a lot better 'n a statue in the park.”

Sasha left for the City, got work, began sending back what she could. She found a rip-roaring union town, still riding the waves of euphoria from the General Strike of '34. She hung around with stevedores and winch drivers who'd been there to roll ball bearings under the hooves of the policemen's horses. By the time the war came along she'd worked in stores, offices, shipyards, and airplane plants, had soon learned of the effort to organize farm workers in the valleys of California, known as the Inland March, and gone out there for a while to help, living on ditch-banks with Mexican and Filipino immigrants and refugees from the dust bowl, standing midwatch guard against vigilante squads and hired goons from the Associated Farmers, getting herself shot at more than once, writing home about it. “Something, isn't it?” Eula wrote back. Growing up, Frenesi heard stories of those prewar times, the strike at the Stockton cannery, strikes over Ventura sugar beets, Venice lettuce, San Joaquin cotton . . . of the anticonscription movement in Berkeley, where, as Sasha was careful to remind her, demonstrations had been going on before Mario Savio was born, not only in Sproul Plaza but against Sproul himself. Somewhere Sasha had also found time to work for Tom Mooney's release, fight the infamous antipicket ordinance, Proposition One, and campaign for Culbert Olson in '38.

“The war changed everything. The deal was, no strikes for the duration. Lot of us thought it was some last desperate capitalist maneuver, a way to get the Nation mobilized under a Leader, no different than Hitler or Stalin. But at the same time, so many of us really loved FDR. I got so distracted I quit working for a while even though there were these incredible jobs everywhere, just 'cause I had to try to think it through. You can imagine how much help I got.”

“What about other women?” Frenesi wondered.

“My, what you'd call, sisters in the struggle, ooh no, no, my poor deluded pumpkin, forget that. They were all preoccupied. Having affairs while the husbands were overseas, trying to handle the kids
and
the mother-in-law, working or just playing too hard to want to talk any politics. No time either for night school, fellow students, teachers sorta thing. So finally when here came your father, in his government-issue uniform, not a tailor-made stitch on him, pant cuffs so high you could see his socks with the extra packs of smokes tucked into 'em—”

“Platters spinning, mellow reed sections,” Frenesi would speculate, “I love it! Tell me more!”

“Oh, the joints were jumping those nights. Uniforms all over the place. Wild and rowdy like the Clark Gable movie. Bars that would stay open all day and night, trumpet and saxophone music blasting at you out of doorways, big crowds at the hotel ballrooms . . . Anson Weeks and his Orchestra at the Top of the Mark . . . all over downtown, these rivers of uniforms and short dresses. I was living on fried donuts and coffee with no cream, finally had to go out looking for work again.”

And was soon adopted, in a way that may've been sexually, though not otherwise, innocent, by a small band with a steady engagement in the Tenderloin. Every night sailors and soldiers came crowding in to dance with San Francisco girls till the windows got light, to the music of Eddie Enrico and his Hong Kong Hotshots. “That's right, I was the girl vocalist, always could carry a tune, sang the babies to sleep at home and they never complained, 'course when I sang the ‘Star-Spangled Banner' at the playoffs my junior year, our chorus teacher, Mrs. Cappy, came over shaking her head real slow—‘Sasha Traverse, you're no Kate Smith!'—but it didn't bother me, I wanted to be Billie Holiday. Not a burning ambition, more of a pleasant daydream. And then out of nowhere this professional, Eddie himself, telling me I
could
sing . . . nope, he wasn't trying to get me into bed, too much trouble already with ex-wives and road girlfriends suddenly showing up in town, etcetera. I trusted his opinion, he'd labored for years in all the big bands—he was back east playing congas with Ramón Raquello the night they interrupted ‘La Cumparsita' with the news from Mars. Finally, just about the time the City was starting to boogiewoogie, he got together this band of his own. If he thought I could sing, well, I could. I did. Who'd be listening that close? These folks wanted a good time.”

Turned out that as long as she kept her hair washed and stayed on pitch, she was just another instrument, and it could've been just about anybody, happened to be Sasha, high-heeling in to the Full Moon Club that morning looking for a waitress job she'd heard about at another little nightspot the day before. That was her life then, hitting all the nightspots, only it was during the day. The Full Moon wasn't much of a place, but she'd already seen worse. She found the owner working on some plumbing behind the bar, and soon he had her passing him wrenches. One of the Hong Kong Hotshots came groping in, looking for his wallet. Sasha noticed he wasn't Chinese, but neither was anybody else in the band, Chinese references in those days being code for opium products, and the Hotshot personnel coming from Army bands, like the 298th, stationed in the area, or civilians too young or too old to be in the service, so that the little ork combined youthful high spirits, the experience of age, and that cynical professionalism Army bands are widely known for.

“Pardon me,” the wallet seeker addressed Sasha, “are you here about the canary gig?”

The what? she wondered, but said, “Sure, what do I look like, the plumber?”

The owner angled his head up between some pipes. “You sing? why'dn't you say so?” The musician, who was Eddie Enrico himself, sat down at the piano, and there Sasha was all of a sudden singing “I'll Remember April,” in G. Why'd she pick that? it changed key a hundred times. But this band must have been desperate for a warbler, because Eddie didn't try to make her fuck up, helping her along instead, telegraphing all the chord changes, keeping her gently steered in case she lost track of the melody. When they finished—together—the owner gave her the 0–0. “You got anything a little more, ah, fashionable to wear?”

“Sure. I just wear this when I go looking for waitress jobs. Which would you prefer, my gold lamé or the mink strapless?”

“OK, OK, only thinkin' of the boys in uniform.” So was Sasha, though Eddie and she were already four very fast bars into “Them There Eyes.” She unbuttoned a button on her dress, took off her hat and draped her hair like Veronica Lake over one of them there eyes, and once more they got through together with nothing much going wrong. “I'll ask my wife,” the owner said, “maybe she can find somethin' snazzy.”

She sang at the Full Moon for the duration. Sometimes the boys and girls, instead of dancing, all came pressing close around the bandstand, and stood there, holding each other, swaying in time to the music. As if they were really listening. At first it made her nervous—why wouldn't they dance? whose idea was this rapt silent swaying?—but then she found it was helping her hear her way around the music. The last spring and summer of the war, San Francisco really began to whoop and holler, as troops came redeploying through town on the way to the Pacific, including Electrician's Mate Third Class Hubbell Gates, who was assigned to a long-hull Sumner-class destroyer brand-new out of the yards, which then steamed across the ocean to Okinawa just in time to get hit, in its first fifteen minutes of action, by a kamikaze, and had to put back into Pearl for refitting. By the time she was ready again, the war was about over, and Hub more than eager for some romance in his life.

“He listened to me,” Sasha declared, “that was the amazing fact. He let me do my thinking out loud, first man ever did
that.
” After a while her thoughts started falling into place. The injustices she had seen in the streets and fields, so many, too many times gone unanswered—she began to see them more directly, not as world history or anything too theoretical, but as humans, usually male, living here on the planet, often well within reach, committing these crimes, major and petty, one by one against other living humans. Maybe we all had to submit to History, she figured, maybe not—but refusing to take shit from some named and specified source—well, it might be a different story.

“She thought I was listening,” Hub liked to put in at this point, “hell, I would have listened to her read the collected works of—what's his name? Trotsky! Sure, just to have some time with your mother. She thought I was some great political mind, and all's I was thinkin' was the usual sailor-on-liberty thoughts.”