Crockett, don't knock it
FOR A WHILE I lived in a little town of 3,000 called Crockett, in an unincorporated part of Contra Costa County, twenty minutes north of Berkeley. It's a kind of a White-Trash ghetto surrounded by refineries.
A handful of yuppies look down on the town from the hill. It reminds me a bit of the place I grew up, a factory town, all hilly and brick. Crockett has only one factory, the C&H Sugar factory. I lived directly across the street.
Unincorporated means no police force, so it was the county sheriff department's responsibility to protect us. The county sheriff's department is stretched pretty thin up there. Most of the time we never saw them.
Every once in a while, usually just before the first of the month, the California Highway Patrol, who also had jurisdiction, would come by and ticket all the cars on the street that were out of registration. The rest of the time we never saw them, either.
That is, except for the time a speed freak in a stolen car shot one of them, stashed the car out back of my place and hid in a basement on the next block. Then the CHP got real interested in Crockett. They pulled me over in front of my building for supposedly running a stop sign on the corner. I didn't do it.
I paid the hundred dollar fine anyway.
It was the cheap way out.
It was my word against his, and the judge always believes the cop.
This CHiP followed me up the block and waited till I was just turning across the sidewalk into the overhang in front of the building where I habitually parked. He drove up on the sidewalk, threw his door open and crouched behind it with drawn pistol. OK, the guy's a little nervous.
I can understand that. It's a dangerous job. One of his work mates had just gotten shot in the course of a routine traffic stop. OK, I'd have kept my thumb on the safety too.
But why give me a ticket? That was gratuitous.
I raised my hands very slowly. He ran me through the computer. My papers are in order.
He didn't have to rip off my hundred bucks to find that out. I'd have showed them to him. He could have asked politely. There was no need to terrorize me. But hey, to be perfectly frank, if somebody shoots one of my buddies, I might resort to a little terrorism too.
I don't have too many other choices.
He did.
Where was he when my partner's car was being burglarized? These guy's only get out of the donut shop when their own business is involved. Our business, they could give too shits about. Eventually they caught the guy and lost interest in Crockett again.
They went back to their monthly schedule.
Their business is booming.
We were having a lot of trouble with auto burglaries. We decided to start a Neighborhood Watch. Maybe the sign would scare them away.
We scheduled a meeting at a neighbor's house. A couple of us baked cookies. The Sheriff sent out a deputy with a video about how not to get ripped off. It contained such pearls of wisdom as, "lock your doors," and "tell the paper boy not to deliver when you were on vacation.
" We were given detailed instructions how to dial 911. Other than that we were on our own.
Like they say in poker, "No help.
" I'd been hoping for flashlights and walkie-talkies, or something, anyway.
Well at least we could get a sign out of it. The crooks didn't know that Neighborhood Watch is bullshit. The sign would scare 'em.
"Can we have the sign now, please," I asked.
They wanted to sell us the damn sign for $28.
00.
The Contra Costa County Sheriff's Department can kiss my ass.
In Richmond, CA, the next big town down Route 80, where sulfuric acid has been known rain from the sky, and tough guys from Oaktown go armed and in convoy, there is a sort of (for lack of a better word) "gang" known as the "Richmond Cowboys.
" The Richmond Cowboys are all Richmond city police officers.
They work together and party together. They're a "club.
" Between them they account for a vastly disproportionate majority of the atrocities committed by the force as a whole. Their escapades have been well documented in the local press. Their photos have been printed. They are well known and widely feared. They are staunchly supported by the brass and the union.
Four of them got bored one night when they were off duty and went to Crockett to carouse at Club Tac with the rednecks and bikers who drink there.
They got shit faced drunk.
One thing led to another.
One, perhaps two, of them shot a local kid to death in cold blood in the street out back of the bar.
I wasn't there. They way I heard it, all the locals thought the kid was a real asshole, and they were all glad that somebody shot him. Clearly, though, none of them had been gladdened enough by the idea to have shot him themselves.
There is no shortage of weapons in Crockett. The shortage was of will.
All agreed he was killed in cold blood.
Supposedly, he was the first white guy the Cowboys ever killed. I'm not so sure about that, but hey, what do I know? One of the Cowboys left in a hurry. The others stood around till he returned. Then the county mounties (and, in one account) the CHP were called. A .
22 pistol was found near the kid's body. I don't know what else happened (like I said, I wasn't there) but I do know that they were never prosecuted.
I never heard anyone express any surprise.
Not to justify the Cowboys actions but there's more to this kid than meets the eye.
My roomie knew somebody who employed him. This guy claimed the kid was a Klan hanger-on. Periodically we'd see White Aryan Resistance leaflets spread around in that part of the county. I'm pretty sure WAR has a base in Crockett. I sorta recall seeing one on a list somewhere, or maybe it was an address on a leaflet.
In fairness to Crockett, I must point out that anti-Nazi graffiti can be seen on the base of the bridge supports, down by the water where kids hide when they don't want people to see what they're doing, and also further down the tracks next to the sewage plant where the fishermen fish.
On the other hand, "Ton," one of the two junkie plumbers we had for neighbors for a while, wore a large swastika tattoo on his back. He had a lot of friends. They came and went at all hours.
Crockett is drenched with drugs. Syringes litter the street and the park. Burglary, and auto theft are real problems there. Mugging isn't. In six years there I was challenged on the street only once, and that was by a guy too drunk to know better. He hadn't been trying to rob me. He had mistakenly concluded I was stealing a dog, which he tried to rescue to impress its supposed owner. It was my partner's dog.
She's worth impressing.
He didn't know. All dogs are gray in the dark.
He backed down right away, and not from the dog. I'm pretty gray in the dark, too. I didn't say anything, I just stood there. He was very apologetic.
I was safe on the streets of Crockett the whole time I lived there. Not so my partner's glove compartment. Junkies are a damn nuisance, but they're so much easier to deal with than crack fiends. Junkies are cowards. They don't even want to confront their own lives, let alone their victims.
That's why they're stoned all the time.
While I lived in Crockett, I didn't really hang out on the street or drink in the bars there much. Mostly I stayed in the hotel and rode to S. F. and Berkeley for my social life. So I'm not really an expert on the history and sociology of the town. But I do know that the town's tradition of illegitimate capitalism and it's accompanying physical and social infrastructure spans generations. Secret rooms are commonplace. The town is riddled with tunnels where booze used to be distilled and/or stored. Today? Who knows. The smell of ether is not unknown. Mostly the stench of the refineries in Rodeo, the next town up wind, drowns it out.
I've heard it postulated that the C&H Sugar factory is a drug factory, on the basis of sugar itself being a drug. I'm not entirely convinced of this. I think you have to add coffee first, which I highly recommend. On the other hand, the robot freighter that arrives every ten days from Hawaii filled with raw sugar cane, was busted in '77 with a load of Da Kine.
Crockett's an archetypal town of it's type, blue-collar rednecks and their head-banger kids. It could just as easily be in New Jersey, Michigan or Massachusetts.
Before the white folks got there the salmon run was so dense at the Carquinez Strait that they crowded each other onto the shore. Hundreds of bears would come to feast. Those days are over.
At least when that great cloud of sulfur dioxide drifted out of Richmond, precipitating sulfuric acid rain and sending 3,000 people to the hospital, it dissipated before it reached Crockett. It was scary though. We closed all the windows and waited it out.
I have seen the future and it is grim. This is a death trap planet. I want off.
The hotel itself was great. It was my only real reason to live in the town. We had a sign in the front window that read, "Crockett, don't knock it.
" We had free run of the park (by daylight). We had a LAN. That's where I started using the e-mail handle "nessie.
"I wanted to be Bigfoot, but Dr. Sue beat me to it.
She always was more quick on the uptake than I was. It was one of the things that made her such a great partner. We had a complete electronics shop, a metal shop, a motor shop, a wood shop, an art gallery, a park for a yard, a PA big enough to fill a nightclub, a bunch of motorcycles, some great musicians and a giant Tesla coil that shot enormous sparks when it wasn't breaking down. We held some truly great parties. I miss some a lot. I'd probably still be there if the sugar factory hadn't bought the place and thrown us all out.
Police protection was a joke, though. We were on our own. Fire protection sucked too. For a while we had the part of the building on the other side of the park as well as the hotel. It burned to the ground. The fire station was literally on the same block. It took them twenty minutes to get there.
Crockett is the last thing that happens before Port Costa, a bucolic wannabe tourist trap and haven for retired drug dealers. The town was once a great port. Now it has pretensions of being an "art colony.
" Artists do live there. I saw one once. Artists live where ever they can. People have more money there than in Crockett. I believe there's only 300 or so of them.
Crockett must have 3,000. I'm guessing on this. I'm weak on numbers; I'm more comfortable with words.
I never lived in Port Costa. It's a nice scenic ride to get there though, and a couple of places sell beer. I recommend it (the ride, that is). If you like that sort of thing you'll like it a lot. If you want to know what the town's like, go buy someone a drink. They wont mind. They're used to tourists. Ask dumb questions. That'll set 'em at ease.
This goes for Crockett as well. It goes for a lot of places.
About once a month about a hundred Harleys roar down the main street of Crockett on Sunday morning, headed for brunch in Port Costa. If you like that sort of thing, it's one of them.
While you're up there, take a spin through Crockett and see the place for yourself. It's on the best route to Port Costa and a site to behold in itself. The architecture is scenic as hell. Check out the factory. It looks like a mill from west Pennsylvania.
We lived right across from the office, half a block up the hill from the main entrance. It has a big flashing sign you can see from the Carquinez bridge. At night clouds of steam sometimes obscure it. As it changes color, the light strikes the steam from different angles, creating an effect reminiscent of Blade Runner and Alien. Psych yourself up first with a drink at Yet Wah's, on San Pablo Ave.
, on the premonitory just south of town. The place has a panoramic view. The sun seldom sets better. As dusk settles in after in, the lights from the bridge and the Mare Island shipyard shimmer in the waters of the strait like the backs of a million salmon. Personally, I would have preferred the actual salmon.
Sturgeon still abound in the strait. Fishermen catch really big ones sometimes. They don't eat them, the water's too much polluted. So they sell them to yuppie restaurants in Berkeley.
Eat at Yet Wah's instead.
Then drive into town. Hang a left just past the school. Park at the bottom of the hill, across from the ATM and watch the light show. It can be fairly spectacular. Some nights, however, the sign's not turned on. This happens at random. No problem.
The ATM and the pay phone across the street are show enough any time. Keep your motor running, and the transmission in gear, and you'll be safe as milk. Don't worry about looking suspicious. The cops wont bother you. Everybody in Crockett looks suspicious. The cops aren't around much anyway, at least not during donut season. If you're scared of the dark, go in the daytime. The floor show in front of the ATM never slacks off. The drug trade is a 24-hour business.
Every Sunday hundreds of bicyclists pass through town. They're definitely worth a look. Sometimes, they even ask dumb questions. Pay 'em no mind. It's the junkies you gotta watch out for.
There's an awful lot of antique shops in Crockett. It's a great place to find bargains. This is probably because antiques are a cash business and antiques don't have any serial numbers. But then I'm the suspicious sort, I would think that.
Now that I think of it, the Crockett fire station was on the next block, not the same block. It just looked like it was on the same block 'cuz it was a T-intersection.
See, I'm forgetting how the place looked already.
Phew.
At last.
I do have a few fond memories of the place, though. None of them revolve around feeling that my stuff was safe if I turned my back on it.
The hotel (the Parkview) was fortified, but nothing like its sister site, the Hotel Milwaukee (or the "Milwaukee Art Complex," as it fancies itself), down between the refinery and the projects in Richmond. Now there's a fortress. Tough guys live there. Tough wimmin too. Sensitive artists, everyone. Productive, too. But tough. Because that's what takes to be an artist today. That's where we get all this tough art from.
You want pictures of sunbeams, maybe? Songs about flowers and birds? You want something happy, maybe, to hang on your wall or play in your bored little ears? Give it up. That aint the kinda stuff that most artists get to think about.
Most artists, young ones especially, get to think about how to pay the bills, and will their stuff be still there when they get back, because that's how poor people live and that's the status to which this society relegates artists because this society is boorish. This is why smart artists always make sure there's a couple of bikers around to protect them, 'cuz the cops don't do shit to protect most artists because most artists are poor, and cops don't do shit for poor people but get in their way and rip them off.
Sometimes they sell them drugs.
Mostly they just ignore them.
Cops work for rich people, and not very well, even for them.
Poor people are on their own.
No problem. poor people know how to take care of themselves. It comes with the address. To be poor is to know how to know how to improvise. Rich people only know how to spend money.
A couple of locals were climbing up the back fire escape at Parkview one night and a guy (not me, another one) leaned out the window and stuck an Uzi in their face. They climbed right back down. They must of gossiped for days because all their friends took the hint for a very long while.
But nothing can keep junkies out for ever. Junkies have supernatural powers. They can walk through walls.
Eventually we caught Dennis, Ton's partner, stealing breakfast cereal from our communal kitchen. He didn't live there. He didn't have a key to the front door. He was just hungry. That's all it takes.
They walk through walls; it's the only explanation. That's heroin for ya.
The guys a plumber, fer chrissakes. Do you know how much plumbers make? More after dark. He works all the time. He's the hardest working man I've ever seen. Seven days, this man works. And late. But he can't come up with enough extra change to cover a bowl of Fruit Loops for his goddam breakfast. I feel sorry for the guy, really.
Old junkie proverb: God made the white junkie, so the black wino could have somebody to look down on.
Plumbing is a good job for a junkie. What a great way to case houses.
What was I supposed to do to this guy? I aint gonna kill somebody over a bowl of damn Fruit Loops. Sorry. Get somebody else; I aint gonna do it. Get the guy up the block; he's cheap. Not me. I don't even eat the damn things. I quit eating sugar.
Did I ever tell you how they make it? You probably didn't know about the charcoal dust made from cow bone they use to get it really white. Two days out of ten it filled the air. You could write your name on your wind shield.
I gave Dennis five bucks, and told him we'd kill him the next time. He didn't stop stealing, but he did stop stealing from us. He aint gonna stop stealing till stuff's cheap and legal or he dies, one of the two. There's a lot of guys like him. They're everywhere. It's impossible to lock them all up. They're a plague of locusts upon the land. Forget keeping them out of your house. It can't be done. They will get in. It's only a matter of time.
Now what do you suppose the cops would have done if we'd called 911? I did actually call 911 once, but not on Dennis. It was a couple days after the neighborhood watch meeting. Dr. Sue and I came home from the grocery. A large unkempt man was nodding on the steps leading down into the backyard. We went around him and took the groceries upstairs.
We took the dog down to the park next door to piss. Junkies cook up in this park. Their cookers flicker in the dark like Wills O' the Wisp. This time the park was empty. I let Dr. Sue deal with the dog. I wanted to check on this guy.
He'd been awfully damn still. I thought he might be turning blue. Ten feet before I reached him he stood bolt upright and came at me with that Frankenstein stagger peculiar to Angel Dust fiends. I got out of the way. He lurched right past me. I don't think he saw me at all. He stumbled up to the back door of the basement and began pounding on its glass upper half with his great ham fists.
Behind this door was a storage room which contained a great many personal effects, tools and bike parts belonging to a seedy-ass scooter tramp named Blotto, who we had recently thrown out of the building for anti-social behavior. He'd been bootlegging power for his welding rig straight off the pole with a bright orange cable that Ray Charles couldn't miss. We'd have let him slide once he took it down, but we then caught him stealing phone service from the rest of us with a set of alligator clips. Last straw.
Hit the road Jack.
No way was I gonna fight a duster to save Blotto's tools. He aint worth it. Dusters are dangerous. You pretty much have to cripple them before they quit. They feel no pain and their strength is as the strength of ten. They can't tell you from the hallucinations. I doubted he was trying to steal anything. I doubt he knew what he was doing.
I joined Dr. Sue on the way upstairs. We were afraid he'd start a fire in there and get us all killed. I called 911. A couple of deputies showed up about ten minutes later. I met them at the front door and introduced myself. I asked them to go around back and please deal with this guy. They said they would. They didn't.
They went around the side, instead, and woke up the people who lived there, and hassled and scared them. Then they went away.
I guess they didn't want to fight a duster either. Can't say I blame 'em.
At the Hotel Milwaukee, no one ever calls the cops. They seem to get along just fine without 'em, which is a good thing, because the cops don't come around that part of Richmond unless they absolutely have to. Then they come in convoy. This don't faze the Hotel Milwaukee crew in the slightest. They're still there, and still making art.
Whenever I see one of them he always brags on the latest upgrade of their defenses. They've tightened up their perimeter a bit since I was last there, and reinforced some of the fortifications. They're fairly well armored and dug in for keeps. They're all doing well and promise to invite us to their next party. The kid's six now and cute as a button. She'll grow up weird for sure.
That's good. We need more weird people.
It's you normal guys that screw up the world.
