We had taken the wrong road and it was my fault.
Here there were no vineyards, no smell of grapes in the air,
no winding country roads reminiscent of postcards of French
wineries and the French countryside—just a hot day and
us driving along the rim of a small valley filled with orange
and grapefruit trees. I knew the vineyards, wherever they were,
were turning green. And I knew they would have been beautiful
to see and smell as their leaves gave off such an odor that
only grapevines could give when budding. We had wanted to go
there to see that it wasn’t like the thin red look of
winter with vines naked to the Tule fog. But such thoughts suddenly
mattered less and less. In the distance now the trees were strangely
full and starry, and we soon forgot that we had ever wanted
to see the vineyards. “We made it across America months
ago and we’re still not dead,” Tommy laughed. She
had meant to say “…and I’m still not dead”
but didn’t and continued to laugh as she thought of a
cigarette smoking hot and dry between her curious lips. I could
see the fingers of her left hand fumble as if she fingered a
Camel Light. She always wanted one when she felt this way. She
made the same motion with her fingers late at night as she held
a whiskey sour in the Alley Cat Alley bars and leaned toward
smoke that drifted her way. She just never admitted it. She
could smell smoke a dozen miles away. It didn’t matter
whether crops were burning, or a kid on some punk street had
lit up; she wanted that fire burning smoke into her lungs. It
just wasn’t like her to admit how bad she wanted one.
Instead, she would say, “I don’t smoke. I just love
the smell of it. But if I did, it would have to be a Camel Light.”
Maybe she did smoke. Maybe I just never knew because I never
caught her with that little glow in front of her lips in a dark
room. She continued to laugh about not having died. She threw
her head back and roared and then just as quick, looked at me
and snickered, making her dimples show deep and lovely. That
smile reminded me that she was the one who had been driving
us further into citrus-covered farmland. I just gave wrong directions.
Of course no one had died. No one was even about to die. Tommy
only kidded because she was happy to get away from downtown
Bakersfield. It showed on her face, the way the fragrance from
citrus hills could make her smile and look around wide-eyed
at the waxy-leafed trees; it was the way wonder marked a young
child bent on discovering that you can escape and make it to
the next moment. I knew for a fact she had always been like
that. When she was young, she was the kid who always just got
missed by a car flying out of control down a hill. Even more
than that—she was the kid who could grab on to that car
and fly right down the hill with it. She wiped such fears away
with the same sweep of her pretty hands as she did the hair
from her face as she drove. Tommy was in motion. She grabbed
the wheel just then as if we both were about to fly down that
hill. This is how she released her own fragrance; and here she
would release it. Now she could relax, let go of herself, even
though she always looked so at ease, though lately, something
had built within her. It was as if you could see her about to
say, “Here it comes, get the hell out of my way! I’m
letting this shit go!” I know what created that momentum.
It was that fragrance which moved within her like music—like
the alternative music movement that was growing in the city—those
tunes we’d been listening to in the seedy downtown dives;
it was something different for my little rural town. And that
wasn’t all that filled her: it was the little bouts of
drinking in those dives along with the music and people, and
us having to steal food in the afternoons to survive in this
little town where we live. She needed to get away from it, to
let go. And we did.
“It’s really ok that we’re not where we want
to be,” she continued as we descended into the valley
laughing, she steering the car madly down the freeway and myself
nodding approval. Turning off the highway onto a narrow road,
we suddenly found ourselves shooting up into the hills over
the struggling Kern River. In front of us stood immense groves—so
many rows of trees full of fruit that the day was like a strange
green night of twinkling orange stars.
“Who owns all this?” Tommy yelled, trying to overcome
the engine's loud rumbling and the wind roaring at us through
the car windows.
A citrus goddess? I thought. The golden tanned sun? She was
it, and I didn’t answer. The way Tommy looked just then
she could have owned everything from beyond Fresno’s rolling
farmland to the bottom of the Grapevine itself—the steep
central California gateway to Los Angeles. Tall, Tommy was nearly
six feet, and it showed in the car, with her head near the roof
and hair down her back tossing crazily in the wind. She sauntered
into bars—they were hers. Pedro and everyone else knew
it. Into the rural outskirts of Bakersfield—hers. Down
Bakersfield’s Westside streets—hers; and hers when
men honked and stopped in the morning light to talk to her as
she sometimes pulled my two boys along in a red wagon. Tommy
sat next to me: delicate, deliberate in her joyous moment; her
dimples smiled around rosy lips; dark desert-tanned skin and
big green eyes, her eyes that melt you with life and love for
each wild moment of adventurous existence. This was going to
be a wild car ride. You just knew it by Tommy. Her honey-brown
hair like wheat wrapped her golden neck and flowed madly and
made me want to lean over and put my face in it. And that fire
in her big green eyes: deliberate adventure as she wiped dirt
from her blushing cheeks; this was the grime that the dirty
car had streaked upon the two of us. This was my dividing line.
She’d done it. The East and West of my mind had come together
with her and the citrus scent, and us getting lost—Tommy
and adventure just then.
Her hands were delicate yet hardened from years of trail-riding
in Ohio. She held the wheel firmly in her left while the other
reached over and caressed me the same way the mighty Kern sweetly
laps its rivers into the banks of our dry valley. The Kern,
having cut so sharply through canyons, squirms into irrigation
waterways, some of it toward the citrus outskirts here. And
Tommy’s hands were so full of life just then, like the
same irrigated water gone into ripened flesh: river water-filled
and sweet; as Tommy’s lips were just as full; and her
breasts as lovely as every star in the canopies around us; full
above her hips I’ve touched; citrus skin waxy soft morning
flesh leading into our starry afternoons. Who needs vineyards?
This was Tommy next to me leading the car into her adventurous
canopy, exploding into rows of orange dotted citrus fire. She
wasn’t even from here. But her smile shone from the earth
that happy madness of adventurous longing for each moment. Come
to think of it, I wasn’t really a native either, no one
really was a native around here, but she had taken me onto the
freeway, into her home.
With the windows down, we hung our arms and heads out—even
my white foot flopped on the side mirror while we screamed at
the top of our lungs, “We’re going somewhere, we’re
out of the city! Goodbye, Bakersfield! Goodbye Bako! Next time
we’re going to the coast!”
There around us the orange groves stood like great leafy citrus
hills, innumerable trees with waxy leaves like water glistening
in the sunlight. Yes, somewhere back on the city’s edge
we had taken a wrong turn. But Tommy didn't care. She loved
the smell of the citrus and breathed deep of the oranges that
hung all around us as the car zoomed. She smiled, “You
smell that?”
I did. But it didn't affect me in the same way. Tommy looked
like she could smell every orange in every full leafy tree at
once. Her hair kept dancing across her tanned neck as the sudden
citrus scent made her more alive. I looked out the car window
to the groves of citrus that hung so fat and full of winter
grown life.
“We've got to stop.” She said. “Let's walk
around, baby. Would you like that? We could head up one of these
roads. Just us. We can get lost and…”
“Yes girl, I'm right with you. Let's go.”
“Why don't we ever get out of the city like we did last
summer?”
“We don't have any money.”
“Who needs money? This is heaven.”
Earlier, while I poured gas into the car Tommy ran out of the
gas station with a twenty ounce bottle of Coke—a smile
plastered across her tanned face—drops of sweat glistening
in the golden day and milky stars and planets in her big green
eyes. It was February 1997 and sure, we were risking just about
everything to take her huge half-dead car on a ride to the outskirts
of Bakersfield. We had both thought it would be worth it to
backpack and fly through the foothills of endless vineyards
in her crazy broken-down car. And what mouth-watering thoughts
we’d had that there might be green and golden clusters
of grapes—not quite ripe of course, but hanging like slow-forming
drops of water. And this hoopty—the huge car I consider
‘dead’ partly because of how miserable-looking it
was would take us there. It really was Tommy's car and in its
strange dead way was in a state of exile like us. “Like
all the other slackers of this dead generation,” we always
said, as it fell further apart with each new day. Yet it kept
on running even after crossing America. It carried us here and
there under the weary Bakersfield moon—to Siddhartha’s
apartment, to the store for a bundle of food to be slyly tucked
away, to local roller hockey games, and even late-night getaways
where we had sex in sleepy neighborhoods. Now with our winter
giving way to springtime once again, it had carried us out of
Bakersfield into the looming foothills of the Sierras.
Now we were looking up into starry citrus canopies that stood
over the Great Central Valley on hills that the summer would
transform into golden god mounds. Today, they were Cahokia-like
green hills of paradise, grass and tree-covered, poking above
the valley and its endless squares of tilled and planted fields.
The fields went on and on like colorful patches in browns and
greens and reds under a smoggy blanket of sky interrupted only
by the perimeter of the city with its belt of dusty shacks and
mobile homes, dirt-banked canals and wide California-sad streets,
and rows of houses in the thousands. Not that Bakersfield was
all old and tattered. But the new growth was all in the west
and here we were miles away from the city’s poor and tattered
eastern edge. On days like this “Bako” hid in a
mist of smog and looked as if it had been spread across the
countryside of the wide valley, like an armload of blocks spilled
by a child stumbling in the dirt. The city existed for one reason:
to take command of the river in whose path it lay. And it was
these churning waters in turn that filled the golden citrus
flesh in the canopy of stars near us.
Tommy's eyes glistened with mysticism as she drove. We were
still planning on coming back that night for one of Siddhartha’s
get-togethers; a party of internationals and pseudo-intellectuals
near the University. She had his look in her eyes just then.
Siddhartha, the mad Indian in America, the mystical leader of
nothing. Cat-like curious Sid—the writer extraordinaire
of history and culture, of the past and present: the writer
of nothing, the writer of everything dead—of slackers
in history and history itself—and the speaker of the demons
in us all.
Sid had been drunk and envious, reminding us after our trip
last summer, “You do what I am afraid of doing, surviving,
risking it all and living the adventurous life! Goddam you crazy
idiot cross country travelers and homeless dwellers! I always
have security! Though I often live in poverty, I am never afraid
of starving. And what do you have? Nothing but a loud ugly red
car and each other!”
Tommy looked at me now and smiled and sung as she drove, “I
have you. I have you!” And that's what Sid would have
said. He loves knowing what he has.
We smiled at each other. The cat-like mystical look on her face
grew fierce and with a dancing, slightly parted curl, formed
on her wet lips as she punched that gas pedal and the hoopty
burned further into citrus hills.
We really hadn’t been out of town in a while. After our
adventure last summer we never risked taking the car out of
the city. It was our only transportation, and it was on its
last legs anyway. With no muffler and no exhaust system, it
cried and wailed in sputters of exhaustive breaths. Its cooling
system had exploded long before I’d ever been acquainted
with it. The hoopty had no tags and no insurance. It guzzled
gas the way Tommy downed Cokes and we drove it as sparingly
as possible. On the other hand, this trip was close to home.
I had no more fear of breaking down here than I had of us starving
in my own town. There was always a roof to find, intellectuals
to spout fantastical ideas to, and food to grab. It was a long
way from our four-day breakdown in the Sonora Desert that I
would later write as Tommy’s “well sung experiment.”
Somehow, late in the summer of 1996 the hoopty carried us most
of the way across America. That was when Tommy became the goddess
of the desert, when everything began to fall apart and naturally
come back together; it was when we—like that sweetly strange
and loud music from around here—began to take shape and
create something new: because now there were new forms to live
by, thoughts and ideas of poverty-stricken Bakersfield life
that seemed to be everywhere we looked. And yet it was wonderful
and transplanted all around us. It went from Tommy into the
desert like music, infectious, infecting, fragrant beyond any
desert flower that could spring to life from a late summer thundering
storm. In Santa Rosa, New Mexico she blossomed. Her citrus petals
furiously came open and spun into full view; they threw color
and fragrance into the dismal landscape. Trapped with the broken-down
hoopty, there we hawked her twenty-seven inch television that
we’d stolen from her ex-boyfriend in Ohio. We sold it
to a mechanic for parts and labor so we could get back to California
and survive school and love and life in downtown Bakersfield.
