Big Dreams (59 page)

The city came by its conservatism honestly. Earlier in the century, it had been known as “Iowa on the Pacific” because so many elderly Hawkeye farmers had retired there to die. They lived on their savings in efficiency apartments and were so numerous that a corn-on-the-cob picnic at Bixby Park might attract fifty thousand of them.

The newspapers back home were captivated by the farmers’ migration and dispatched their writers to Long Beach to file reports about such esoterica as the practice of sunbathing. In 1937, Harlan Miller of the
Des Moines Register
had this to say about his journey to the Coast:

Although the sunlight in California could be blinding, Miller said, the farmers didn’t need any movie-star “smoked glasses” to protect them. They had toiled in the fields of Iowa and had no fear of wrinkles. He heard them complain about the quality of western beef and cast aspersions on the fried chicken, but they loved the warm weather and wouldn’t trade it for anything. What a thing it was to feel welcome on earth at last!

The Hawkeye spirit still lingered in Long Beach, armored and wary. The beaches in town were sometimes as modest as the sandy, lakefront strips at midwestern fishing resorts, and hardly anyone wore
a bikini. Sometimes the beaches looked out on manmade islands where oil was stored. The islands were named for dead astronauts, Chaffee Island and Grissom Island.

A lid was clamped on the downtown area after dark, Main Street again capped and shuttered and losing out to the life of shopping malls. The skyscrapers and hotels fronting on the ocean, monuments to redevelopment, had a sepulchral isolation at night and seemed huddled together to keep some unseen threat at bay.

The U.S. Navy was a major employer in Long Beach, with three active battleships home-ported to the naval shipyard, but the off-duty sailors didn’t stick around to carouse and play as they used to do. They couldn’t afford the housing prices in the city, so at the end of their shifts, they became commuters and went home to such suburbs as Lakewood, Carson, or Torrance instead of spending their money in honky-tonks.

The few honky-tonks that were left in town had been banished to the urban fringe, hidden as they might be in Iowa. Soon I came to recognize a familiar litany painted on stucco buildings in faceless neighborhoods:
Cocktails, Beer, Wine
. Often
Girls
was appended to it, and then the front door was not wide open but instead guarded by a muscular, long-haired greaser whose schooling had stopped somewhere shy of the eighth grade.

One night, cruising, I was drawn into Angel’s, where the girls danced almost naked and did what they could to shake their rigid silicone breasts. The breasts had a remarkable shape and design. Maybe it was the navy presence that caused me to search for a military analogy, but they looked as indomitable as nuclear warheads. Bump into a nipple by accident, and you ran the risk of blinding yourself.

At Angel’s, the specialty of the house was hot-cream wrestling, a variant of mud wrestling during which the strippers coated themselves in what looked to be slightly heated Gillette Foamy and did some sloppy Greco-Roman posing for a rowdy crowd of college kids, a few navy lads upholding tradition, and workers from the many oil refineries around.

Oil had always figured prominently in the life of Long Beach. At Signal Hill, a township nearby, geologists had discovered a huge oil field in 1921, tapping into gushers that had yielded about 250,000 barrels a day at their zenith. Some pumps were still dipping into the ooze of the hill with those curious, birdlike motions I’d seen around Bakersfield.

Big tankers brought crude oil to the city from Alaska and abroad, discharging more than 145 million barrels of it annually at the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles on San Pedro Bay. All the important oil companies had storage tanks there. They funneled their stock to refineries such as Atlantic-Richfield’s in Carson, where about 5 million gallons of gasoline were refined every day.

The refineries also handled oil piped in from the San Joaquin, and whenever the wind failed to blow, or whenever it blew the wrong way, you could taste and smell a thick petroleum haze. It was a fact of life in Long Beach, and though the haze sometimes made for a pungent olfactory experience, it had the beneficial side effect of keeping trendy Angelenos from those midwestern beaches, preserving the flavor of another era.

L
ONG BEFORE THE
Queen Mary
became a Disney tourist attraction, it used to carry passengers across the ocean, and Matthew Faulkner, late of Cornwall, England, could remember arriving in the United States aboard it as a child. Faulkner had stayed where he had landed and now found himself in the same boat as me, unable to deny that he’d turned into a Californian, however reluctantly. Whenever he went back to England for a visit, the folks regarded him with both admiration and suspicion, but he was not unhappy to have surrendered his birthright in exchange for a life in Long Beach and a position as a vice-president with the Chamber of Commerce.

When anybody asked Faulkner about Long Beach, he was never at a loss for words, and the boosterish words most often on his lips nowadays were
Pacific Rim
. I had no doubt that he would agree with
Henry Huntington, who had addressed southern California’s prospects in foreign trade in the 1880s.

“I believe that Los Angeles is destined to become the most important city in the country, if not in the world. It can extend in any direction as far as you like. Its front door opens on the Pacific, the ocean of the future. Europe can supply her own wants; we shall supply the wants of Asia.”

Huntington was prescient, but he had erred in omitting Long Beach from the equation. Quietly and efficiently, the city had been stealing some of Los Angeles’ business.

Among its new waterfront skyscrapers was a highly visible World Trade Center that was destined to be second only to the World Trade Center in New York, the biggest on the planet. The plans called for four office towers, a hotel, and many shops and restaurants in a 2.2-million-square-foot complex—a living, breathing hothouse for the generating of capital.

The project was a true Pacific Rim venture, undertaken jointly by Kajima International of Japan and IDM Corporation of Long Beach. IDM, a consortium, had some American partners, but it also included several Japanese banks.

In Faulkner’s office at the World Trade Center, I learned that Long Beach had been limping along as a dying navy town until the Alaskan oil boom had started around 1975. By chance, the Port of Long Beach had proven unusually suited to handling the cargo on tankers, and it had added to its capacity ever since, bringing in more container terminals and giant gantry cranes. The nearby Port of Los Angeles, which was annexed to L.A. through the harbor towns of Wilmington and San Pedro, was similarly equipped and also expanding.

The Port of Long Beach afforded shippers another advantage in that it was located in the only foreign trade zone in southern California, which meant that certain imported goods could enter the United States and not be hit with a customs tax.

Both ports did a lion’s share of their trading with Pacific Rim
countries. The trade accounted for as much as three-quarters of each port’s annual gross receipts. Automobiles headed the tally of imports, to the tune of some $30 million a year. Next came shoes and other footwear, followed by data-processing machines, motor vehicle parts, and tape players and recorders.

Oil was the primary outgoing cargo. The last sawlogs from our dwindling forests were shipped from Long Beach, too, and cotton, wheat, hides, and corn were exported in some quantity.

The economic prospects in Long Beach seemed bright, indeed, but Faulkner didn’t want me to think that the redevelopment scheme was trouble-free. He directed my attention to the Long Beach Airport. It was smack in the middle of the city and had no room to grow.

Land everywhere in Long Beach was at a premium—that was why there weren’t any new subdivisions around or any affordable houses. Only two large parcels were still available within the city limits, Faulkner said, and the Disney organization was studying one of them.

“What for?” I asked.

Faulkner shrugged. “They’re very secretive, you know.” But he assumed that they must be thinking about attracting the captive audience at the
Queen Mary
and the
Spruce Goose
nearby. He made the Disneys sound like the Rosicrucians.

Faulkner’s main concern was that Long Beach might become too bland as the port grew and the redevelopment continued. Money had a way of driving out diversity. Some chamber members were already demanding a united front to put a best foot forward.

From Faulkner’s office, I rode down to the lobby in one of those silent, high-speed elevators that have the impenetrable integrity of a space capsule. Several dark-suited American and Asian men, the millennium’s strange bedfellows, were waiting outside it to be transported to their appointments high, high above the streets.

S
OMETIMES WHEN THE WIND FAILED
to blow in Long Beach, or when it blew in the wrong direction, I thought I could smell a trace of fish in the petroleum haze, a whiff of mackerel essence, but I must have been imagining it. More fish used to be landed at San Pedro Harbor than anywhere else in the country, but now the commercial fleet was down to about thirty boats, and navy subs on maneuvers ripped through the fishermen’s nets.

“All they had to do was look,” John Emirzian told the Long Beach newspaper after losing a $3,800 net.

The paper was in trouble. Its circulation was in decline. In southern California, below Los Angeles, nobody wanted to be informed. They just wanted to be entertained.

Long Beach had a symbol of what life might be like away from the petroleum haze. It was Lake Tahoe. The cool, clear lake, the snowcapped Sierra Nevada, and the air-conditioned casinos were pictured often on billboards and advertised in the media.

At a Chinese restaurant one evening, a man across from me was chatting up a waitress, trying to seduce her with the lake, with its icy cleanliness, saying, “Close your eyes and try to imagine it, baby. It’s twenty-six miles long and eleven miles wide.…”

You could see her going to Lake Tahoe in her head, sniffing at the comforting mountain air and watching this man, this stranger, put dollars on a counter to pay for a hotel room.

My waiter, a Vietnamese youth, was listening, too. He was ready for Lake Tahoe. He lived in Alhambra now and wanted to go to college, but he couldn’t save enough money.

“Used to be, I think, you work hard and you get ahead,” he told me, accurately handicapping the angles. “Now you need ideas!”

Still, he didn’t take it personally, the absence of ideas in his brain, and was glad just to be in the United States,
big free country
. It was harder for a Vietnamese to get in than it used to be, he said, and easier to get stuck at a refugee camp in Hong Kong.

Used to be, used to be
. Another evening, at Pine Avenue Grill, where a department store used to be, the cashier, Lily, noticed my
surname and said that I was her second Slav in a row. You looked for such small conjunctive treats when you worked an eight-hour shift behind a cash register.

Lily was a Slav, too, from Queens, New York. Her parents had brought her to California when they’d retired to Orange County, but Lily wasn’t ready to retire. She was twenty-one, red-haired, punked out, speedy, rebellious, and about to join the navy. Maybe. Lily was confused.

“I have some bad news for you, Lily,” I said, teasing her. “It doesn’t get any better.”

“Please don’t say that.”

“The positive side is that it doesn’t bother you so much.”

Lily pouted. “If I join the navy, I’ll get to travel, at least.”

“You’ll see the world, Lily.”

At my motel, I opened the windows to smell the ocean air and tried to block the petroleum haze. Colored lights were blinking on the dead-astronaut oil islands. I thought about the Slovenian Hall in Delano, platters of beef, Iowan picnics, Japanese investors, and knock-off Italian shoes made in Taiwan coming through the Port of Long Beach.

Then I lay in bed and tried to hold California together in my head, but I couldn’t, so I drifted instead and in half-sleep began ticking off a checklist of items you’d need to survive in the state once the calendar rolled over into the next century—goat cheese, arugula, condoms, yen.…

O
UT ON SANTA FE AVENUE
one afternoon, Keith Williams and Brittney Powers were painting a mural on a four-foot-high stucco wall that ran for thirty or so feet around the border of an older neighborhood. They were true artists and threw everything they had into their work. Passing motorists slowed down as if they’d been stunned by a bolt of sunlight and raised a hand in salute.