I GREW UP a hundred miles south of here, or at least I got bigger, agreeing at least partially with the feminists who maintain that American men never really grow up but remain forever boys. Last weekend I journeyed south to see a couple of movies and check out book stores, my idea of a hot time. (Whatever you do, don’t pay your way in to see Scorceses’ new one, “After Hours.” It’s Awful. Many critics are praising it to the skies, of course, but then most critics are on the take one way or another.)
HAVING AN HOUR OR SO to squander before movie time, I had a look at a new shopping center erected on the marsh where in the winter thirty-five or so years ago my buddies and I would make rafts of old railway ties and float around the edges of San Francisco Bay. I won’t bore you with the usual harangue about shopping centers other than to say I am looking forward to the next earthquake as a restorative measure. Many of these monstrosities will be reduced to rubble, hopefully with the developers in them. This particular one, at Corte Madera, would seem to be at risk of flooding. Pray to your respective gods that Mother Nature soon reasserts herself.
AS I WANDERED AROUND, marveling at the degeneracy of the place, men in their fifties, fat buns stuffed into designer jeans, shop after shop dedicated to the principle there is no tomorrow, cashing in on the basic American economic delusion that there is no difference between necessity and luxury, my attention was caught by what appeared to be a corpse propped up on a bench in one of the shopping center’s plazas. A woman of indeterminate age, caked with a couple of layers of make-up, had apparently been disinterred for one final shopping binge.
I MUST HAVE STARED TOO LONG. The crone suddenly rose from her seat to ask me, “You have crank?” One anticipates these kinds of berserk encounters in Berkeley or downtown San Francisco, but not in consumer’s paradise, Marvelous Marin. By the least rigorous standard, I am no fashion plate, but I maintain a reasonably respectable appearance. I huffed back at her that a toot of crank or a sniff of uncut whiff would return her immediately to her drawer at the mausoleum. If she wanted to survive long enough to see the rest of the gew-gaw shops in this particular shopping center open, she’d better lay off the dope and eat all of her vegetables.
THAT SAME MORNING I saw a story in the newspaper that Ferris Fain had been arrested for cultivation of marijuana somewhere up around Placerville. To baseball fans of a certain age, that news comes as a bit of a shock. Ferris Fain played for the San Francisco Seals in the thirties and forties and went on to become a great major league hitter. I used to memorize Coast League batting averages and, as a little kid, saw Fain play. I mulled over the bad news while standing in line at an ersatz French bakery. A guy about my age asked me what I would like. I pointed at one of the pastries, refusing to attempt pronunciations of words from a foreign tongue. “Yes, you want the pastrie groseille.” No, I want that sonofabitch right there, the one with the goddamn berries on it.” He handed me the muffin, averting his eyes.
AS MOST OF US KNOW here in Mendocino County, we live in perhaps the most ethically corrupt jurisdiction in the State. The bureaucracies theoretically charged with protecting our health, safety and the public purse are riddled with incompetents and toadies of the basest kind. Various right wing money bags can get whatever they want from local agencies, viz the recent Coast giveaway where a bunch of wealthy condo brains got permission to destroy farm and timberland to erect versions of Sea Ranch., the gauche abode of the vulgar rich defiling a large area south of Gualala.
A LOCAL RESTAURANT OWNER recently told me about an inspector from the Mendocino County Department of Environmental Health who decreed that the Boonville restaurant guy would have to prove to the satisfaction of the inspector that potatoes from a crate marked “Idaho Potatoes” were actually from Idaho. We wouldn’t want and unsuspecting diner to bite into a spud smuggled in from Oregon, would we? I mean, really, think of the menace to public health that would present! Local bureaucracies, especially health and building, are regularly manipulated by the MCA and other anonymous wanks into harassing people the snitches don’t like. Genuine health hazards owned and operated by, say, friends of Superior County Judge, Timothy O’Brien, are ignored by health and building flunkies.
PUBLIC BODIES in Mendocino County are packed with Republican know-nothings of the Marilyn Butcher, John Cimolino variety. Members of the County Grand Jury are interchangeable with the membership of the Mendocino County School Board, the Mendocino County Juvenile Justice Commission, the Private Industry Council and most County school boards. Any complaints about local officials or bureaucracies will be sloughed off because the people you are complaining to and about belong to the same clubs and are often close personal friends. They certainly share assumptions. For justice you’ve got to go abroad, to the state and federal levels which is where I’ve gone recently and I will report back to you on what I’ve discovered.
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