Blue Sky Dream (25 page)

I was out of my depth, I saw. My father had obviously thought about such things a lot more than the rest of us, and he, for one, had decided that it was better to name his complicity than to deny it. Everyone else in the car just seemed to want the conversation over with.

“I’ll tell you one thing, though,” my father said as we rolled
on toward Silicon Valley, home. “I haven’t noticed our bills getting any smaller lately. I’m going to keep cashing those checks.”

I
suppose I wanted to believe that the father’s complicity need not be visited upon the son, that my aerospace upbringing was largely immaterial to who I was and who I could be and that I was free, therefore, to make a life cleanly separate from Ronald Reagan’s designs. I suppose, too, at some level, I believed in the expiation of Original Sin through good works. Frankly, I am not sure how I explained it to myself back then, when I was twenty-two and deciding I should become a missionary of sorts to black children in a ghetto. When Ronald Reagan was first elected I was one year out of college, unemployed, and facing a move back into the family tract house. The world seemed not to care a whit that I had a bachelor’s degree in English from small, Jesuit-run Santa Clara University. The world knew nothing of the self-regard I’d accumulated as a student, an insouciant, even lazy, student much of the time. That self-regard, I knew deep inside, was in too small reserve to withstand the move home (the oldest son back in his bedroom at the end of the hall at an age when his father was flying fighter jets off the deck of an aircraft carrier).

I found my escape into my mother’s institution, into the Catholic Church. I signed up for a year of work with the Jesuit Volunteer Corps, an organization modeled on the ideals of Dorothy Day’s Catholic Workers: activism for the oppressed joined to an inner life of serious prayer. The inner life of serious prayer held no interest for me, since I no longer practiced Catholicism and preferred to call myself, having read a few books by Existentialists, one of those. But the work with the oppressed appealed to me strongly. The oppressed, at the time, were Ronald Reagan’s oppressed, and I found something exhilarating about the uncomplicated badness of Reagan, his toadying to crass wealth, his affable bullying of the weak, his easily caught lies. Rarely does a
president of the United States afford a young man such opportunity to burn the flame of outrage so hot and clean. Besides, I felt teaching black children in the ghetto might add texture to my suburban character. And so I went to live on the edge of Hunters Point in San Francisco with six other Jesuit Volunteers in a drafty old pile of a house that nevertheless provided me a home warming to my self-regard.

We were three ghetto teachers, two prisoner rights lawyers, a campus organizer, and an office worker for the pro-Sandinista Institute for Food and Development Policy. We were all white and middle class and in our twenties, all of us given shelter, simple meals, and fifty dollars a month by the Catholic Church in exchange for our good works. Other Jesuit Volunteers across the country were doing similar good works in those awkward months between college and career, teaching on Indian reservations and tutoring Haitian immigrants and running workshops for the mentally handicapped. We were unquestionably for the poor, and so whenever we assembled for one of our religious retreats or blowout parties, it was understood that all of us were against Reagan.

Unfortunately, as a ghetto teacher I proved to be no Sidney Poitier. The kids ran roughshod over my friendly teaching style, called me “Mister Pointynose,” accurately sensing that I was not in this thing for the long haul. When I took some of my students roller skating, I led them down a too steep path and one boy broke his arm. When I took some of them to a Giants baseball game, I slathered myself with sunscreen and never bothered to think that black children sunburned, too. When they woke up the next morning whimpering in pain and their mothers asked why, the children answered that Mr. Beers did not share his lotion. The principal fielded irate calls all that day.

Still, whenever I’d ride the commuter train south, whenever I’d arrive for a Sunday dinner, my mother and father and siblings were eager to hear my stories of simple living and ghetto teaching. In honor of the occasion my father often would barbecue a “tri-tip,” a steak recipe he’d discovered in Lompoc on his Lockheed business trips. The salt-encrusted beef would come off the
grill oozing black-red juices and there would be Napa Valley cabernet and many delicious dishes made by my mother who had trained herself to be a nutrition-conscious gourmet cook. Inevitably talk would come around to Ronald Reagan and our heads would shake at his latest outrage. My father would apply his readings about general semantics to the “pap” spoken by the president’s officials. My girlfriend, Deirdre, and I, enamored with leftist insurgencies in Central America, would chip in our well-footnoted critiques. My mother would nod her amens. She was then a close reader of the magazine of the Maryknolls, missionaries whose involvement with movements of the poor often made them targets of death squads. The magazine on the living room coffee table was full of brown faces, the same brown faces that had once stared piteously from Catholic Charities envelopes at Sunday Mass. Now, though, the brown faces were said by
Maryknoll
magazine to be not pitiful but brave and determined, struggling to create a farmer’s cooperative or a union drive in defiance of one of Ronald Reagan’s dictator friends. The Maryknollers had helped my mother become comfortable with words like “liberation” and even “revolution” whenever other Catholic words, words of religious faith, were joined to them. And so, at dinner, as the second helping of tri-tip was served, it was possible for me to imagine that my father, mother, Deirdre, and I were all speaking the same language.

There were times, as a new bottle of cabernet was retrieved and uncorked and poured, when I heard all of us speaking a language as radical as anything said at the Jesuit Volunteer house in Hunters Point. Indeed, one evening my mother and father decided to pack their big kettle of a grill into the back of their car and drive north, arriving at Hunters Point with two tri-tips in the cooler. That night my father barbecued his steaks for my radical Catholic friends, and even the vegetarians took some bites as we all shared laughs at the expense of Ronald Reagan.

A
fter a year, having flunked at ghetto teaching, I left the Jesuit Volunteer Corps to be clean of Ronald Reagan in what I hoped would be a more a dashing role: as a muckraking journalist.

In need of a first break, I made my way to the jungle regions of Chiapas, Mexico, where tens of thousands of refugees from Guatemala were gathering. Most of them were Maya Indians who had seen their villages destroyed by government soldiers carrying out, with the blessings of Ronald Reagan, a “scorched earth” policy against supposed guerrilla sympathizers. The escapees were stumbling into Mexico’s remote borderlands, creating a crisis for the Mexican government. I learned of one desperate encampment just across the Usumacinta River from Guatemala, a mere dot in the rain forest reachable only by plane and closed to all reporters by fiat of the Mexican government. Conditions were terrible there, the Catholic aid workers told me, and someone should expose this. I bribed a pilot to fly me into the camp along with another man who would interpret for me. After three hours of picture snapping and interviewing, we stood on the runway waiting for the pilot to return for us as he had promised he would. He never showed. As a result I had much more time, days, to speak with the Maya, to listen to them tell me in their singsong voices of the tragedy they had experienced. I wrote their stories in my spiralbound notebooks and photographed their expressions of contained grief as they told of seeing husbands and fathers rounded into churches and shot, sons and daughters hung by their wrists and bayonetted, babies burned alive in lime kilns. I ran my viewfinder over their hands and eyes and lips, waiting for their pain to best announce itself to film. I jotted stars next to the most compelling phrases.

In seeking this pleading poetry for my notebook, I was pulling them away from their labors of survival, the lashing together of hundreds of huts from jungle thatch, the setting up of schools in four Indian languages, the organizing of a democratic system for sharing what little food there was. They were giving me their waning energy because I had come on an airplane with recording devices and a white face that other white faces might pay attention to, and this filled me with an incongruous joy, a sense of perfection of purpose. After acquiring more than enough stories for my needs, however, I began to feel vaguely ashamed to ask for more, to want to just leave the camp as the Maya knew I soon would (and they could not). The chance came after three days when another Cessna landed to collect mahogany logs. I paid the pilot fifty dollars to fly us out with the precious lumber.

At home, as the brown faces came up in the photographic developing solution in my darkroom, I heard, for a short while, their singsong voices pleading again. Then a different voice told me I should hurry for fear that someone might scoop me, and the last twenty pictures were necessarily a whirl of production. The May 8, 1983, edition of the
San Francisco Examiner
carried my report on the front page, jumping to three more pages inside with thirteen photographs accompanying. This was an excellent “clip” (as freelancers call their product) and it proved the break I had hoped it would be, landing me further assignments on a variety of topics.

Freelance muckraking did not begin to pay my rent, however, so I spent much of my time on assignments of a different kind. A silver-haired public relations man named John hired me on contract to compose brochure copy and advertisements for his client Transamerica Delaval, a manufacturer in Oakland, California, that sold diesel generators to the military and the nuclear power industry. I enjoyed visiting Transamerica Delaval’s foundry, the largest west of the Mississippi. I would put on a hard hat and watch the men, many of them black and layered over with blacker soot, as they fed blast furnaces and
pulled levers that sent cascades of molten, glowing metal pouring down from mammoth buckets. It was like visiting a working museum of fading “industry,” and when the air grew too thick and hot in the dark cage of a factory, I would stroll over to the offices of the suit and tie men in order to discuss my work, the latest promotional copy I was writing for management. They liked me to write in a tone of gruff confidence, even though Transamerica Delaval was going broke, the foundry laying off more and more workers, everyone hanging on to the hope that Ronald Reagan might yet save their futures by coming through with the five-hundred ship Navy he had vowed as part of his mighty arms buildup.

After an Oakland visit I would return to John’s office in pretty Portola Valley, a place of golden hills and country estates, a place where venture capitalists tended to live. John, a Republican who considered
Businessweek
the ideal filter on events, was kind enough to give me, free of rent, a corner of his office where, for forty dollars an hour, I sang the glories of diesel generators and, also for John, the glories of printing factories and of oil pipeline compressor valves and of a hand-held computer that let you calculate your tennis shot percentages. Often, over lunch, John and I would argue about Ronald Reagan. Then, if the work was light and the day was warm, we would take to the tennis court behind the office, our games almost always close. We became good friends. On weekends John sometimes invited Deirdre and me for sails on the boat he kept in Sausalito. We’d cross the Bay and tie up at the dock of Greens, a Zen Buddhist-run restaurant with polished redwood burls for tables and grand windows framing the marina and the Golden Gate Bridge. The vegetarian breakfasts, expensively nouvelle, attracted a clientele who were clearly doing well for themselves in the early 1980s, people free to make whatever they wished of a bright, crisp weekend day in San Francisco, people who were beginning to be called “yuppies.” Sitting in Greens with John’s boat bobbing in view, I thought of myself as an indifferent dabbler in their world, my soft sweater tied around my neck like a disguise, my self-awareness separating me cleanly
enough from the yuppies who must have thought I was one of them.

A year after my visit to Chiapas, I returned to write a second (and as it turned out, final) newspaper piece about the plight of Maya refugees. Then Deirdre and I traveled on to the Caribbean island of Barbados, where she had a grant to study sweatshop conditions in the region. As if to help along my journalism career, Ronald Reagan ordered an invasion of the next island over, Grenada, but my reporting of the aftermath was uninspired and I found few homes for my pieces. Living with Deirdre on Barbados and then the nearby island of St. Lucia, I seemed to invite puzzlement and mistrust from my black and East Indian neighbors, the same cautious curiosity shown me by the ghetto children I had once asked to call me “teacher.” I wanted to write movingly about their folkways and tropical wisdom, but willing myself into their lives was not going to be enough, clearly, to allow a communing of spirit. Not if I could not eat blood pudding and pig organs with them on New Year’s Day. Not if I could not cheer on a cockfight or ease through an afternoon of joking and musing in the rum shack at the end of the road. Not if I could not make their children laugh and want to be in my company. My stiff attempts at all these things were usually seen for the calculated efforts they were. Perhaps I was CIA, rumor had it in the little village where Deirdre and I rented the best house and my electric typewriter filled the air with gunshot
rat-a-tatting.
Perhaps I was a cult missionary or some odd version of a rich tourist, since I did not seem to work for a living. In truth, I was hopelessly the American child of aerospace, just beginning to glean the limits to suburban-bred hubris. But how to explain that to the man across the way who slaughtered his favorite fighting cock to impress me and then, in vain, searched my face for authentic pleasure as I chewed on the stringy drumstick he had ordered his wife to cook?