3

      The next morning I hit the New Sun office early again and started on a piece about Las Madres. It came easily. The women’s faces and stories were fresh in my mind, and I wrote with a sharp-edged anger. I had called the company office and got a generic corporate denial of any knowledge of the situation. Las Madres had found the home address and phone number of the owner, so I called his house and didn’t get any further than “How did you get this number?” They sounded worried and that made me happy. When Neville came in, I showed him what I had started and he loved it.

      “We’ll make it a cover piece once you get some pictures,” he said. I called up the freelancer and got on her calendar. The neighborhood tour wasn’t for another two weeks, however, so I had some time to kill. I noticed that the answering machine was blinking and I checked and found a message from the Marine. He could meet me tomorrow. I called to confirm and then left for the day to go to the Historical Society.

      Even during the worst bust since the Great Depression, San Diego looked like Disneyland compared to Tijuana. Everything was newer and brighter—at least it seemed that way. I had taken my car to work today so I drove across the Laurel Street bridge off 6^th into Balboa Park with the California Tower rising like Xanadu in the bright January sky. It was one of those summer-in-winter days, and the park was a gorgeous apparition in all its Spanish revival glory. I remembered reading that some of the Wobblies who’d fled the second battle of Tijuana ended up working on the construction projects for the Panama California Exposition. It was ironic that they’d escaped from a failed border revolution to help construct an Anglo fantasy of California’s Spanish golden era. It was Spreckels’s fear that the Wobblies would piss on San Diego’s party in 1915 that led to the brutal response to the free speech fighters as early as 1911. Irony heaped upon irony. I smiled at the still-beautiful flowers and fountains and Spreckels Organ Pavilion as I drove to the small lot by the archery range to park.

      Down in the basement of the Historical Society, I looked through everything I could find: postcards of dead Wobblies on the battlefield after Mosby’s forces were routed, photos of the crowds being hit by firehouses, a picture of Wobblies posing on a hijacked train in Mexico, a shot of a Wobbly holding up a copy of Industrial Worker with a story about the fight in San Diego, and several portraits of soapboxers speaking to crowds at Heller’s Corner, their arms outstretched, their fists clenched, a sea of men in battered hats below them—tired, scarred, bruised, but defiant faces. I was almost through with the binder when I came upon a striking image of a rough-looking character sitting on the steps outside the I.W.W. headquarters. He had a full beard and a big, flat, boxer’s nose. His upper lip hung over his lower lip. He was staring hard into the camera, with a “get that thing away from me” look. He had on overalls and a black felt hat. On the back of the picture someone had written, “I.W.W. Agitator” and, after that, a different hand had written “Bunco.” I asked the woman behind the counter if she knew anything about the change. She didn’t. I dug out my photocopy of the Wanted poster and reread the description of Gus Blanco or “Bunco.” It certainly could have been him with his beard grown out.

      After I was done with the photographs I looked through some old copies of the Labor Leader for news on Bobby or Blanco and struck out. The vertical files had some of the same articles I found at the library, but nothing that referred to individual Wobblies. Leaving the vertical files, I asked for the court records for 1912 and found a record of the arrest of “Buckshot Jack,” but no references to a trial or even a mugshot. Perhaps “Buckshot” never went to trial because he was taken up to run the gauntlet instead. If they had only known, he would have been shipped back to Holtville. Nothing on Blanco.

      Finally, I came across the personal papers of a labor leader who had been in the local Communist Party in the 1930s. There were lots of things, letters mostly, about the battles for control of the San Diego Labor Council, but nothing about the I.W.W. until I found some much later letters to his daughter about being interviewed by a college student about the free speech fight:

      I spoke a while last week with a young fellow studying the history of the free speech fights in the teens. He seemed very earnest and disappointed that I had been too young to have been involved in the organizing. I did tell him a few stories about sneaking out to watch the commotion on the streets and remembering the fire hoses and the horrible police swinging away at the crowds. There were stories about people being kidnapped and never being seen again. It seems like another lifetime now. The fellow’s name was Sam Jones.

      The letter moved on to other matters. Not much to work with, but I did write down Jones’s name. Maybe he had done a thesis or something. All in all it was a disappointing day. The archivist recommended I try the court records out in the Imperial Valley and then wrote down the titles of a handful of dissertations and Master’s theses on the free speech fight. He also told me to try the Library for Progressive Research in Los Angeles, and Wayne State University’s archives in Detroit. With no new leads and a stack of homework, I left for the day, not sure if my big idea would work out. Perhaps Bobby Flash was lost to history. Hell, I didn’t even know much about my own family’s distant past, no less the history of strangers. Still, I was haunted by the image of Bobby’s face, like my son’s face, receding into the past and merging in my mind’s eye.

      Out on the Prado I walked by the reflecting pool, stopped to watch the gigantic koi swimming around lazily, and took a stroll through the botanical garden before heading over to the café by the art museum for a cup of coffee. As I sat down, I remembered that I should write Hank back before too long, so I tore a piece of paper out of my notebook and did my best job of playing a father. I encouraged Hank to stay in school while acknowledging his point about how uninspiring the classes could be. I joked, selfeffacingly and with sufficient irony, about him not following my example in terms of career. I tried to assure him that what seemed like an endless time at home was really not that long. How was his mother, really? Etc. Despite having been at it for over twenty years now, some part of me still felt as if I was putting on an act as a father. Don’t get me wrong, I loved Hank fiercely, but who was I to tell anybody anything about anything? It was funny, in my role as a reporter, I could hammer away at people with no hesitation and no regrets, but as a father I felt unqualified to give the simplest advice. I was utterly humbled by the nakedness of Hank’s need for my love and the possibility that withholding it, even unconsciously, could burden him forever.

      I remember when, as a young boy, Hank would ask me an endless series of questions, from the mundane to the profound. It was everything from “Why do elephants have long noses?” and “Why are clouds big and small?” to “What is God?” and “Why do people die?” Sometimes I’d come up with crazy answers to make him laugh, but I knew when I was serious that Hank trusted me totally and that I couldn’t let him down. So while we had great fun with some of his queries, I’d sometimes be hit by a terror that my answers would harm him somehow. When he asked, “Why does grandma say bad things?” I knew those things were about me, and I fought a gut-wrenching mixture of rage and shame and helplessness, as I looked into his earnest little face, his big eyes watching my every move.

      Other than our too-infrequent visits, I knew my son through letters, first in crayon, then pencil, then pen, then word-processed. I had them all in binders: colorful, primitive sketches of baseball players, guys playing guitar, animals at the zoo all with captions and short stories like “The Hippos eat lunch at the zoo and miss their families in Africa” or “Rock stars make people dance and sing.” Then, later on, I would get confessions about crushes or philosophical musings about something he’d read. That was one thing I’d credit Trish with, she always had him reading. In one letter he told me he’d read “Sonny’s Blues” by James Baldwin, back when he was in high school, and said he thought he understood what the jazz player meant by “the storm inside”:

      The brothers are talking about suffering but I think it’s more than just Sonny’s heroin addiction. It’s about the fact that everybody suffers and there isn’t any way to escape it. The only thing