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Freeman's California
John Freeman
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Freeman's California
John Freeman
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About This Book
The sixth volume in the series that has been hailed by NPR, O Magazine a nd Vogue, Freeman's: California features stunning new work from a broad selection of writers, revealing everything that is important and fascinating about America's most populous state.In Freeman's: California, Lauren Markham describes how four generations of her family have lived in and tried to manipulate the water in one of the driest parts of the state and how water and land means everything. Rabih Alameddine recounts becoming a bartender in the mid-1980s as his friends began to die of AIDS. Rachel Kushner reminisces on all the amazing cars she's owned and their peculiar, vivid personalities. Natalie Diaz narrates the process of making her body into a professional basketball player, and how that assembly stalled some of the internal vulnerabilities she'd felt as a gay native woman growing up in California. And Elaine Castillo visits her brother in prison.Amid the raging the forest fires plaguing California, William T. Vollmann drives to the Carr fire and sees how fire has become the new state of normality for California. And Jaime Cortez riffs on pulling over at a rest-stop and smelling the fires of Paradise burning.Meanwhile home is in transition as Karen Tei Yamashita recalls a Japanese-American who goes to Japan after the dropping of the bomb, writing back and forth. Reyna Grande explores how her mother fell out of society and became a woman who collects recycling, while she and her siblings have become model immigrants.Also featuring a haunting ghost story from Oscar Villalon, bold new fiction from Tommy Orange, and stunning poems from Mai Der Vang, Juan Felipe Herrera, Maggie Millner and more, Freeman's: California assembles a diverse list of brilliant writers.
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Literatur AllgemeinUltimate California Highway 1 Road Trip
CATHERINE BARNETT
Yes, perhaps like yours now my father is old.
He looks at me through agatey eyes
with a laymanās dread, I cut his meat for him,
play some early Stones and ask him to read Frost
because I donāt want him to pour another Tanqueray.
Back out of all this now too much for us,
back when he could repair anything,
it was as if heād made us solely so we could stand there
and hold the screws and listen to the Accutron
humming on his wrist.
We marveled that the watch didnāt tick, you could see
clear through to its insides, it would work, he told us,
in any gravitational field, and we could see it glow
even as we sped down Highway 1 at night when the cliffs
dropped all no-man-fathomed to the Pacific and we begged him
slow down but the radio played on
āTime, time, time is on my side, yes it isā
and he sped up, said he was following the taillights
just ahead of us and that when they started to fall
heād know it was a good idea to turn the other way.
Ā
TOMMY ORANGE is the author of the New York Times bestselling There There (Alfred A. Knopf), winner of the 2018 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction, and longlisted for the 2018 National Book Award for Fiction, the Aspen Words Literary Prize, and the 2019 Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. It was deemed a Top Five Fiction Book of the Year by the New York Times, won the John Leonard Award for Best First Book, and was nominated for the NCIBA Golden Poppy in Fiction in 2018.
Copperopolis
TOMMY ORANGE
On my days off, I walk the narrow blacktop roads of an area called Diamond Twenty in the small town of Copperopolis. Weāre in the foothills of the Sierras now, just barely still in what can be considered Northern California. The sunās right above me, pressing on the back of my neck. I reach back and cover itākeep my hand there. Itās the middle of the day, in the middle of summer, which out here means itās hot as hell. Iām just coming back from one. A hell. Or Iām still in one and Iāve gotten so used to it I started calling it something else. No, this isnāt hell, itās just fucking hot.
The heat here is dry and mean and everywhere. It crushes, seeps, floats up in waves like smoke from the pavementāgets into the brain. Slows thinking. I pass under the shade of an oak and look down at my shadow, which is joined by the shadow of a tree, so mangled by or mingled with branch shadows it becomes a new thing, a shadowed object like and not like me or the tree, the blending of images only possible where light canāt be.
The shine of gold in the tall dead grass makes me think of the people who came to these hills for gold. The rush to get it. And then thinking of that time, thinking of those miners, makes me think of Indiansāwho would have been here and been seen as: in the way. Iām thinking of Native people here because I am one, not full-blood but enough. We Natives are always looking for our presence in the absences. I look up on my phone whether there were ever Native Americans in Copperopolis. Thereās a small entry on an abandoned website about signs of human settlement dating ten thousand years back. Human remnants, it says. This makes me think of remains and how we use that word to describe people who havenāt remained at all but left what time didnāt get at all the way. I look up as if to get out of the gloom of that thought and see turkey vultures circling what must be something dead or dying nearby. I think about how things must stink worse in the heat. Thereās a big field of tall dead grass the vultures are circling above. The stalks of yellow move a little from a hot wind that, instead of cooling me, just reminds me of how hot the heat is. I find that I am swaying a little like the grass. I look down and watch my mangled shadow sway.
My four-year-old son Alex isnāt old enough to know to be afraid of me the way the rest of my family is afraid of me. He still runs up to me when I come home and I bend down and he holds my big head in his arms. Heās just learned to say I love you. He knows what it means to say it and uses it sparingly so that it keeps its meaning. As for my ever-understanding wife, Anne, we havenāt talked about what happened very much because when weāve tried, something between us opens up too wide for us to know how to speak across it. My mother- and father-in-law, and my sister-in-law and her two girls, they either talk about me like Iām not there, or they donāt talk about me at all. Never mind talk to me. Iām a haunt theyāre afraid to be afraid of in front ofābecause of what it might do to me. I donāt blame them. I wouldnāt wanna talk to me either.
Iād tried for a voluntary exit before my time had come with a razor. Voluntary exit is too clinical or noble-sounding a euphemism here of course. Before my time had come isnāt right either. Time and its length, the one weāre given, is an elusive thing. There are exits everywhere for those of us whoāactively or notālook for them. A train or approaching bus, twenty-two too many drinks, a sharp object. Anywhere. Much less common are entrances. Ways in. Like the day we had our son, there in the hospital on my knees holding the bedrail and listening to the machines and my wifeās breathing; there was paper constantly being printed out that showed the contractions, their size and length, like we were measuring earthquakes. There was something that made sense to me about how acute the pain seemed to be for my wife. Why that was part of birth. Like a blow to the body from within. A magical wound from which a human boy came out. Things were good for the first several years of his life. Everything he did was a miracle. Sure he was incapable. A mouth. But I didnāt know what love was before he came. Not that kind of love anyway.
Before Copperopolis, those first few years after he was born, I was still telling people I was a poet. And then to the expected follow-up question, No, but what do you do for a living, Iād say: videographer, which wasnāt a lie, but it wasnāt exactly true eitherāI hardly made a living at it. Iād been ready to sign a significant contract with a Native nonprofit to produce promotional videos for their website. Then that job, and a psychotherapist position my wife had lined up at the same organization, fell through at the last minuteāafter a sudden tribal leadership change.
When we moved in with my wifeās family in Copperopolis Iād just been released from the hospital after going at my left wrist with a razor in the bathroom I was supposed to be cleaning in order to move out of our house in Oakland. Iād thought about suicide plenty before trying itāas it goes. It was the razorās angle in the bathroom, that little blade on the sink, square and flat against it like a self-destruct button Iād just then realized I could press. So I pressed it in deep then across. A dark purple circle appeared in the middle of my vision as I went to the ground. Later that spot would return, only white and not dark purpleāthe bright white of stars away from cities in a new moon sky, or like the sun looks with your eyes closed after having stared at it too long. When I was on the way to the hospital, I felt untouched by the dark purple spot, and yet maybe about to enter it at the same time. Levitating above its graspāits gravity.
When my wife found me on the bathroom floor she told her mom, who was there to help us clean and move out, to take our son for a walk in his stroller. It was time for his nap anyway. The ambulance ride seemed buoyant to the point of pleasant before I passed out from losing too much blood. I donāt remember any of what happened in the hospital. When I came to my wife was rolling me out to the parking lot in a wheelchair. I felt refreshed, born again, as if into a new life.
I got a job as a sandwich artist at the local Subway. Itās the first time Iām being paid and acknowledged as an artist. The Subway is in a sort of shopping complex designed to look like an old-fashioned town like maybe from the fifties. Except everything looks brand new. Thereās a giant clock tower in the center of the town square everyone calls new old town.
Iāve recently taken to sucking on pennies and contemplating bank robbery. The pennies because there was an especially shiny one brand new out of a roll I broke to make smaller change for an impatient man with a sandwich Iād just made in his hand, lightly slapping the sandwich against his palm like a copās baton, like if I didnāt hurry heād hit me with it. As he left I popped the penny in my mouth and sucked on it. It didnāt taste like I thought it would. It tasted good to me. Thoughts of robbing the local bank came to me after I made a cash drop for the first time the other day and noticed there was no bulletproof glass between the customer and the teller. I didnāt know they still had banks like that. Robbing a bank didnāt seem crazy when I thought about it. It seemed reasonable. I need to provide for my family more than I need the discounted sandwiches and day-old cookies I get to take home for free. My son loves the cookies and says it wrong like the Cookie Monster says his own name wrong on Sesame Street. Cooky.
In the new life everything seems allowable. The star-white hole is there every time I close my eyes. Iāve started to think of it as a cell. Iāve been thinking if I could split the cell something important might happen. I close my eyes more now, fascinated by the details I can sometimes make out inside the hole. It sort of shimmers at its edges. Or the edges blur if I stare too long like itās reacting to my staring at it. My co-worker Sam caught me with my eyes closed and accused me of sleeping on the job.
āLate night?ā he said, smiling and lifting his eyebrows like people do to suggest you got into trouble or something.
āNo, I wasāā I started. He was laughing. āI get headaches and it helps when I clench my eyes shut.ā
āOh,ā he said, his smile gone. He went to the back to make more bread.
Iād requested for my green name tag to say Thomas, which is my author name, Thomas Blaine, but my manager told me theyāSubwayāliked to use shorter names on name tags. So it says Tom on my name tag. I didnāt know if this was to save money on letters or because shorter names indicate a casual kind of friendliness and familiarity.
Do I take putting sandwiches together as seriously as I do my poems? The scaffolding is similar. You begin the build in order to begin to build the order. What kind of bread? Toasted? No two sandwich orders are the same. Variance is the constant. Of course poems arenāt asked for or ordered. And how do you build a life? My life had felt like it was building to something that came apart, which Iām now attempting to rebuild behind sneeze-guard glass.
Iām lying in bed awake because I canāt sleep. Itās too hot. Thereās no AC here. It doesnāt cool down at night at this point in the summer. Iām with my wife and son. We just have a sheet over us. I think theyāre asleep but then hear them both shift in bed in a way that feels to me like theyāre awake. I donāt know though and donāt want to wake them if theyāre asleep. They might be awake thinking the same of me.
āTom?ā my wife says. She can always tell when Iām awake.
āYou canāt sleep either,ā I whisper.
āItās that damn fly,ā she says, with real, actual hatred in her voice. I havenāt noticed the fly.
āMe too mama,ā our son says. So heās been awake too. All of us lying here in silence. Something about it is so sweet and sad at the same time. I start crying without meaning to.
āWhat happened to Dada?ā our son asks his mom.
āI donāt know, maybe he really loves flies,ā Anne jokes, and this makes the boy laugh harder than Iād have expected. We all laugh and Anne gets up and turns on the light, carefully stepping around the room listening and looking for where the fly might land. I wipe my tears and sit up, looking for the fly too.
āThere!ā the boy shouts and points to the mirror, where half a dozen flies are squashed from earlier in the day. My wife is an excellent fly hunter. You have to be still then swiftāwithout hesitation. She gets the thing and it doesnāt squish but gets knocked against the glass then falls to the ground. She steps on it and I see the boy in my periphery look to me for a reaction to the death of the fly.
āItās okay Dada,ā he says. āFlies donāt live long anyway.ā
I smile at him in a way that tells him Iām not sad about the fly. It goes silent after that. Something about not living long anyway. Something about it being okay to die because of a shorter life makes me and his mom remember.
I look up on the internet how to rob a bank without a gun. I watch a YouTube clip about a guy who robbed twenty banks by just writing a note, and learn that bank policy requires that they give over the money, be compliant, no questions asked even if no gun is present. I write several drafts of the kind of note I might write. This is a bank robbery. Put ten thousand dollars in the bag and no one gets hurt. I analyze the note. Wonder at its faults. I want it to be plain and clear what is happening and how much money I need. But this: no one gets hurt. Thereās something beautiful about the idea of no one getting hurt. Also delusional. I want to strike that part of the robbery note and save it for a future poem called āNo One Gets Hurt.ā
This is a bank robbery. Put ten thousand dollars in the bag and no one gets hurt or else. I canāt help but question this: or else. A threat as vague as it is trite. And this else, else isnāt specific enough, else can be so much else. Do I need to declare this a robbery? I research more about bank policies, about gun-less robberies. There is a strict adherence to nonviolence being the most important possible outcome even if no gun is present. Sometimes customers donāt even know what is happening while a robbery is happening. Bank policy and training ensures th...