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PARTISAN REVIEW
quest for California remains.
Down-and-out and threatening to drown the country in its eco–
nomic collapse, what California once was for America it now wants to
become for the world - its gardens as real as its toads, its dinosaurs as
horny as imagination allows.
Work is fleeing across all borders (outside San Francisco's Maritime
Museum, an old longshoreman speaks of Harry Bridges and the ILA until
booze lays claim to visions of underwater sweatshops beneath the
Alcatraz shore), money is in short supply, the environment is choking
people to death, and even fantasy is no longer a growth industry. Movies
are now shot in South Carolina, theme parks and girlie shows pop up in
Texas, the sexual and familial peccadillos of Michael Jackson are tabloid
headlines in every supermarket in the country, and fashion in salvation
grows as boring as fashion in vice.
"Out here, anything goes," one of those Bronx refugees, a friend "in
the business," said to me a decade back. We were at breakfast in a hotel
near Universal Studios. "Maybe because out here, nothing matters." As if
on cue, a pot-bellied Telly Savalas - in open yellow polo shirt, blue
shorts, and blue pedal pushers - escorts his old Greek mother across the
marble floor, our dutiful Kojak taking Mama to breakf:lst in a California
still hawking romance.
After a superb week, Harriet and I decide to leave Yosemite for San
Francisco. On the drive north, my eyes drift from road to roadside.
Sabre slashes of graffiti on California Ninety-Nine. Only these are hu–
morous - unlike the lumpen scrawls raging against L.A. 's freeways, where
rolls of razor wire guard exit signs as vigilantly as Cerebus guards hell.
We stop for coffee at a roadside restaurant. A red-faced truck driver
yells at a tattooed blonde woman, "It's all shit!" Even for two enraged
drifters, words are dumdums of intimacy. "Garth Brooks Ain't Goin'
Down Till The Sun Comes Up!" "Helmets Kill!" California speaks.
Driving through Pixley, I read signs aloud. "Dead Pigs Don't Write
Tickets! Shoot a Pig!" Old movies taunt reality, bins of endives and cu–
cumbers rock the road in a hot bucolic breeze. Fantasies of tomatoes so
red and juicy I can taste them explode in my mouth. Tom Joad is dead,
and these scruffy motorcyclists with beards who ride single-file alongside
me are his grandchildren - dirty hair streaming in the wind like drag
queens strolling Berlin's Kufu.
Past Pixley, I maneuver to the front of the cyclists' unwavering line,
then past trucks filled with rhubarb. I pass an oil rig hauled on a flatbed,
like an Israeli tank sent down from the Golan. Then past the flashing
blue light of an oversized pre-fab, purple FUCK slashed across the side.
