UNITED STATES—The heartless abandonment of the banana towns by Allied Fruit reminded me so much of Taft—that’s where I first saw it. The exodus of the company execs for Santa Barbara, far more comfortable than that of an inferno in the Mojave. There was the Jameson Estate on the hill behind the town. The Jamesons were an old oil family. The roomy sleeping porches, roomy living room redwood-stained wood, a big picture window over-looking Taft and Ford City.
It would’ve been nice, just it was all alone, trashed and abandoned, and the Jameson family left a long time ago, and there was no electricity. And there were Edison Dictaphone cylinders, and boxes of receipts from 1927 filled out in exquisite penmanship and you know these people must have been big shots. The view from the hill was beautiful in a way you didn’t expect it to be, arid and the muted palette of the desert paintbrush.
With the succeeding trips to Taft over the years the roaring house went to pot, each trip it was more violated, windows shattered, graffitied, razor-sharp shards of glass (don’t let the dogs walk there), torched by spray paint, speckled by empty condom packets. Dozens upon dozens of empty beer bottles and pints of empty whisky and Vodka. Concentrated smell of dried urine. Somebody had dumped a refrigerator here. Kids came here to get high.
Munition casings. They came here to shoot. You know they were good kids and the will to destroy is as powerful as that to create. And that there’s always a tug of war between the two. And when he doesn’t quite fill the shoes of what we set out to create, there’s the urge to crumple, tear, crush impulsively to reach that state of roaring puberty. And it looks like the Barbarians have marched in here and out of here, and that long ago humanity has been evicted, and civilization dies a long time ago.
That is what it felt to be at the Jameson place the last time and be impaled by the intimations of a long-ago planet that pressed the red button and obliterated what life there was. And you have left truckloads of beercans and bottles, and where did everybody go now. It’s a dry and lonely place. And it betokened the day when all the national, international chain of café’s would be something else altogether.
Alas, a transnational corporation is the progeny of a peculiar time and a peculiar place. Zeitgeist, like you named your third child. In Taft, he saw how the Coca-Cola plant got it’s license revoked, when it was one of the longest in operation in the West. The family fought it and they fought in. And they lost. Taft became more of a colony, dependent on a bottling plant in Santa Barbara.
When Miller received his second honorary doctorate from the University of El Salvador, he remembered:
“When I see how much Coca-Cola people drink here. I think Atlanta must be the capital of the Caribbean. Taft taught me also to love the heat.”
And because of all the unrest stirred up in the isthmus of Panama, you could have somebody still come up north from Honduras because it seems like there was nothing there. Like Ell realized when she got here that they were poor but rich in other ways. There was plenty of country and fields to run through. There were guayaba and peach trees to climb and grab fruits from. Iguanas were there for the eggs and delicious meat and avocados for the picking. And mangos. Riches in what is materially manifest, how can we be so blinded by the gleam of dollars, when it is all there for the picking, si senor.
Before she came here she honestly believed that her parents had a swimming pool in their backyard and cherry trees. That was because a lot of family who goes north and leaves Central America, they paint a prettier picture by omission, because they want to feel within themselves that the journey here and the sacrifices to get here were worth it. So Ella joined that in San Jose, California. Everything was paved over, nothing soft and dirt to run across and play.
No cornfields and fruit trees, hardly any fruits because it was expensive and a lot of fast food. That yes. Cement and cars everywhere, no apples. All the space got crowded into a crammed one-bedroom apartment with family on the coach, the bedroom, sharing the floor, and the ubiquitous smell of Ariel laundry detergent.
Ella had a cousin in Taft, it saved her life. Her cousin said, “Come to Taft. You’ll like it here. I won’t let you down. And don’t listen to a word of what other people, outsiders, say about Taft—they don’t know.
And Graydon was in the cemetery in Taft, he was looking for the remains of his family, long gone, he only found his cousin. The rest of them, it turned out had gone their separate ways. Uncle John to Bakersfield, LauRene to Boise where she died, while eking out the last days under care of her older son. She vamoosed so fast after her husband died—it made your head spin. Graydon, who had yet to hit it big, had no chance to bid on the Aunt and Uncle’s house he loved so much.
But John had bequeathed some words he prized more than any inheritance. Uncle John said just casual like, “You’re gonna hit it big one day.”
It would always hurt a little that none of them were here to see it. And it really hurt that his cousin had left before anyone else, so they had no time to share the forerunners of success, like when his first poem was published in the Paris Review. This life so sweet deep a draught of wine, raise the cup and your beloved spirit they’ll be there in that spirit, alright. Who knows?
Maybe they were there in the cemetery when he bumped into Ella, and something started it all over again, the heart thumping.
To be continued…
