Flash. Jim Miller
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out to be true. I followed up that story with a piece about Salvadoran death squads chasing down and murdering leftist refugees in Los Angeles. One of my sources got killed before the article went to press. It was one of those epiphanic moments in my life when I realized that anything, no matter how menacing, was possible.
So I was completely immersed in my life as an underpaid jack-of-all-trades, if you’ll pardon the pun, for the LA Scene, not paying much heed to the future. When I wasn’t crashing at Trisha’s house in the Hills, she was staying with me at my studio in Venice. We took walks by the canals to feed the ducks and bemoaned each time a McMansion took the place of a cottage. We strolled down the boardwalk on lazy afternoons watching the fire jugglers, listening to pitches from religious cranks, and stopping to be serenaded by troubadours on roller skates. We’d buy books in Small World, and read over beers until sunset. The only bad thing that went down during that period happened back at Trisha’s place, when a friend of the Ghoul’s OD’d in the bathtub during one of the gatherings in what was an endless stream of house parties. There were tons of people there, and when Zane discovered the body he cleared the house, screaming at everyone to “get the fuck out” and insisting that the Ghoul and his buddies drag the guy’s body out of the house. I almost got in a fight trying to persuade them to call an ambulance. Trisha packed up her stuff that night and moved in with me. Within a month she was pregnant.
To be honest I was surprised she wanted to keep the baby. I had told her that it was her body and I’d be there either way. She thought about it and decided to have the kid. “Because I love you,” she said. As you might expect, I was scared shitless at the prospect, but soldiered on. Trisha quit her job, and we moved to the Valley to be near my mom’s house, as Trisha’s family was not too keen on the idea of her having a kid “out of wedlock.” I was surprised people still talked that way. In my eyes, Trisha just got more and more beautiful when she was pregnant. She let her hair, naturally black, grow out, and she was radiant. I would write up my pieces and go get her snacks when she needed them. I was with her in the hospital and got up at night to feed little Henry (named after Henry Miller and the “Hank” character in the Bukowski stories).
During this period, there was never any discussion of Trisha being unhappy. Quite the contrary—I remember getting up to feed Hank (Trisha pumped breast milk in bottles so I could do some late night duty), and I walked with him cradled in my arms out onto the steps in front of our place. Despite myself, I got lost in the wonder of my baby boy. The fragility, the improbability of life. I could smell the hops cooking across the way and it was deep and sweet in the hot summer air. At that moment I swore that I’d try to be there for him for the rest of my life. Trisha came out and kissed me on the cheek and we looked at the moon. I’d never felt more love or more peace than in the ocean of it that subsumed me at that moment.
The next night, I drove over the hill to cover the Jane’s show at the Howl. I wandered around the gorgeous hotel lobby, went into a room taken over by dozens of huge screens featuring a Burroughs-like cut-up of random black and white stills, some of iconic images like Robert Frank, others looked like family photos, then some blurry color footage from a handheld camera. It lost my attention and I went over to the bar and bought a vodka soda. In the next room, some guy dressed up like Jesus, with a big cross strapped to his back, was crawling around on all fours begging for a gin and tonic. This got old fast so I walked back out to the top of the big staircase in the lobby. It was an elegant setting, a fitting backdrop for Mae West in her prime. By now it was littered with tall, sexy girls, posing by the railing, practicing various stages of ennui. A few looked high on H. They were the kind of women who never gave me the time of day and I was out of the game now anyway.
Jane’s Addiction played in another big room that looked as if it had once been the hotel’s chapel. The crowd was jammed in tight, flesh against flesh. You could feel the rush of anticipation surge through the room when the band came on stage. They opened with a hard driving version of “Pigs in Zen” and Perry Farrell was in top form, prancing around the stage theatrically and leaping in the air. Everybody went nuts for “Jane Says,” but I preferred their cover of the Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil” and the way Farrell’s voice poured out longing when they closed with “I Would For You.” It made me think of Trisha, and I just wanted to get home. I walked out past the lounging and posing and desiring crowd to my beat-up Mustang. I popped in a Los Lobos tape and glanced up at the downtown skyline as “One Time One Night” came on, and I rolled onto the freeway to head back to the Valley. When I got home, I found the note in our empty apartment. It was a warm summer night and the thick smell of hops and hamburgers made me want to throw up.
2
I showed up at The New Sun early in the AM to call my contacts. Neville was already there, working on a review of a string quartet that’d opened a new classical music festival in La Jolla. His politics were very left, but he had a Ph.D. in the Humanities and was extremely well-versed in the arts, opera, and classical music. This was a huge boon for our anemic advertising budget, since we had the best coverage in town and that gave us some cultured readership, which appealed to a handful of advertisers for galleries, wine shops, record stores, travel agents, etc. So the wine and cheese crowd and “adult industry” (porn is the evil twin of every good muckraking weekly) kept Neville’s trust fund from being pillaged. Neville ignored my warm greeting, so I left him to his work and poured myself a cup of his coffee before hitting the phone. I had to leave a message for the Marine, but got a hold of Ricardo Flores right away. Ricardo was the spokesman for a coalition of labor and human rights groups. Las Madres Unidas, the women from the neighborhood downhill from the maquiladora, was part of Justicia para Trabajadores, the larger group that he helped run. Ricardo would meet me just over the border at 4:00 if I could make it. I could. It was still early so, with no word yet from the Marine, I decided to go back to the library to finish looking over the I.W.W. file I had been pulled away from yesterday evening. I had Bobby Flash on my mind despite my other obligations. Neville ignored me when I waved to him on the way out.
Back at the archives, I asked the librarian, the same pudgy guy, for a file on the free-speech fight and he brought it over to me glumly. Mostly, it was a fairly haphazard selection of newspaper clippings from 1911 and 1912. I read a pair of dueling rants: The Union editorialized in favor of the vigilante attacks on the Wobblies and their supporters, while The San Diego Sun attacked the owner and editor of the Union, John D. Spreckels. One of the attacks was entitled, “Put This in Your Pipe and Smoke it Mr. Anti-Labor Man.” In it, the writer decried the way Spreckels sought to run San Diego like General Otis of the LA Times had run Los Angeles—as a petty dictator. More to the point, The Sun argued, it was clear that Spreckels was most upset about being taxed for “occupying the streets with his railways.” I took a few notes and remembered having read that one of the key things that preceded the free speech fight was the effort of the tiny San Diego I.W.W. Local 13, which had only fifty members, to organize the Mexican workers on Spreckels’ street car lines.
Unlike the local AFL unions who wouldn’t even try to organize Mexicans, blacks, or Chinese workers, the Wobblies welcomed everyone—even unskilled migrant workers. The Wobblies were the only American union to oppose exclusion laws and organize Asians and other workers like the Jews, Catholics, and recent immigrants frequently ignored by the American Federation of Labor. The Industrial Workers of the World was born out of the fires of Colorado mining wars, and the Wobblies thought of themselves as revolutionaries. They rejected contracts, believed in direct action, were suspicious of political organizations, and mixed anarchism, syndicalism, Marxism, and an inverted form of Social Darwinism freely as their rough and ready membership thought of theoretical distinctions as useless nitpicking. (Having covered my share of endless leftist political gatherings, a hostility to useless nitpicking was a sentiment I could get behind.) Believing in “One Big Union of All the Workers,” they thought that their form of organizing would eventually lead to a huge general strike in which the workers would take control of the means of production and end the rule of the bosses. They were forming the structure of a new society in the shell of the old. Unrealistic, as it turned out, but a good thought. In San Diego, by hitting Spreckels’s streetcar franchise they went straight after the interests of the richest man in town and scared the shit out of the powers that be. I liked that.
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