3. c/o Tom Bates Field

 

3.  c/o Tom Bates Field 

“I just think Kamala doesn’t get fracking,” Jason explained to Glynda.  “It’s going to kill her in Pennsylvania.  “Can you drop me off afterwards,” she’d asked.  Glynda had caught the 57 bus up to the library in order to meet Jason there.   Wasn’t Kamala from Berkeley too?  It was funny people didn’t talk about that more.

Things are a lot nicer around here since they cleared the tent people out last year, Glynda babbled to Jason as they went over I-80 toward the SeaBreeze coffee stand.  “This black fence is all new, put up by CalTrans.  You couldn’t blame them, there was garbage and shit everywhere.   And it made things harder for the car people too.”  At its horrid peak the homeless encampment had filled the University Avenue cloverleaf, dozens if not hundreds of the destitute sleeping rough under camping tents and tarpaulins.  Glynda had watched in amazement as work crews trundled away the rubbish and transformed the curved landscape into a hostile field of jagged boulders.  Like pigeon spikes on public buildings, she thought.    Anyway, it was a lot easier to park now, she told Jason.  “Turn right here.”

Jason drove along the frontage road.  “Oh, I remember this place.  We used to ride our bikes here.”  It’s about half a mile on the left, she said.  On the back side of the practice field and Glynda had him turn in and park next to Sara.  “This is it, my humble abode,” She pointed nervously at the campervan.  “Would you care for the ten-cent tour?  A glass of wine or a toke or two?”

“Here’s the solarium, I see my plants are still alive.   This is the kitchen.  There’s a table that folds out where I write.”  She could see his vision trying to fit his way into the tight space, failing.  “Let’s sit outside.”

“It’s nice,” he pronounced as she shook out two collapsible camping chairs.  “It’s perfect for you.”

“If I get high I might sing.  Do you fancy red wine?”  Trader Joes had a lot of French wines pretty inexpensive these days and she’d purchased three bottles.  Jason said he’d love to try whatever she had bought.  See, he could do it if he tried.  “Such interesting people today…those women.”

“Wouldn’t it be perfect if the whole Tom Bates Sports Facility turned out to be built on an Indian graveyard?  No, I mean like in Spielberg’s movie Poltergeist,” Jason said.  It was getting dark now and the football players scrambled to and fro in the dusk like ghosts.  “That’s really not what I had in mind,” Glynda laughed.  The sports complex had come years later, hadn’t it?  No, what I was trying to tell them about is this area.  She waved at the scrubland to the south, a wide, unfenced expanse of brush and grass perhaps a half mile long.   It looked far more sinister than the modern facility, which had just turned its lights on.

“That Mr. Marquez was quite a character, wasn’t he?  I wonder what his story is,”  Glynda mused, “the sisters of Sogorea Te I get that, about respect for our native ancestors, the connection to the land, deep but poetically straightforward, you know.  Did you notice how they didn’t really like him?  I mean, he reeks of the Patriarchy.”

Jason took the rebuke in stride, accepting a solid glug of wine.  “Marquez Murillo.  He’s seen it all!  Pine Ridge through the worst of it, when the FBI was gunning for AIM in the 70s.  Dad and Mom were still in South Dakota, only they hadn’t met yet.   I was born here in November 1989, the year of the Earthquake.”

She didn’t think he looked like a typical Scorpio, doubtless his worser qualities would be revealed later.   He did have certainty and a lockjaw enthusiasm she found endearing.   He was surprisingly tall, perhaps as much as an inch or more over six feet.

“Not fully individuated,” she decided.  “My Mum was an actress,” she explained, that’s where I get it. “Gloria Stempel, you can IMDB her.  I’m thirty-five, born in eighty-eight.”

“What part of the U.K. are you from?”

“New Jersey.  Dad’s the real Brit in the family.  Now you know my other secret.”  She could see him start to ask.  Maybe later.  “Is your birthday coming up then?”  November first, he said, two days ago.  They had only just met, you know.  “Oh,” she said.  That explained the lack of meanness.  “Earth Snake,” he said proudly.

“I suppose you’re voting ‘yes” on Prop 33.  I still haven’t decided on Measure PP, which was the tax on old buildings in Berkeley that burn too much natural gas.”    What made Jason the maddest was Donald Trump and his lies in the mainstream media over the Haitians eating dogs and cats, sorry to bring this up right now.  “The way they’ve been picking on that poor city, Springfield—J.D. Vance said the other day that they were going to ‘start there.’ Fucking Fascists.  Excuse me.  Let them try that crap in Berkeley.”

Glynda laughed.  “Now, are you speaking as a communist or as a centrist democrat?”  She’d known for ages that politics in the United States always ends up in the collision of great social forces with peoples who will not be moved.  “My Grandfather fought against the Germans, I met him one time in Wessex.”

“My parents were both tear-gassed by Ronald Reagan,”  Jason brooded.  “You got to listen when he says he’ll bring in the troops.”  He gulped a little more wine, holding the ceramic cup out for more.  “I have some weed somewhere here.”

“Did you see the comet?” Jason asked later, interrupting her thoughts.  “We saw it pretty clear in North Berkeley.”  Their first kisses had been wine-stained, hungry, unsuited to the side-by-side chairs.  Now they sat on the metal bench on the bluff overlooking the bay inlet, holding hands again.  Dark, except for when Jason occasionally worked the lighter.  “Enough for me,” she said.  She hadn’t brought the guitar, so she just sang it, a cappella:

 

A few facts about the comet—

She’s backin’ out fast, she may have Seen Too Much.  She’ll be back to see you later in about Two Hundred Years.

There are no second chances in InterStellar Space.

Solar Wind.

 

It will happen just after sunset, if you’re ever up that late.

I never get up this early, I just wanted to let you know.

‘There’s a Comet in the Sky!” (Don’t let the World End)

“Pretty wacky, huh?  Kinda needs the twelve-string.  I’m having trouble finding the right rhyme for Oort Cloud?  Dirt Proud?  Do you remember the Hale-Bopp comet?  I was just a girl, but we always went out to look at it.  Nine, I guess I was.  Wow, that takes me back.  Do you remember it?”

“So Oorta There?”  Jason tried.  “Yeah!  I got to see the comet through a big telescope a few times.  Magic!  Like the first time you see fireflies.  Do you know fireflies?”

 “Of course, I’m from New Jersey, remember.  I don’t think they have them in Britain.  Glow worms, maybe.  Wait, did you see that?”  As if on cue a turned down light came on and began to move across the darkened field to their left.