My family moved a lot, the way poor people will, the way a pile of dry leaves will get sucked up suddenly by a troubled gust of autumn wind and blown far afield. My father’s gut seemed to ache constantly for whatever lay over the next hill, the likes of which he figured must certainly be better than what he currently had. But he had a wife and children to support. He knew the hobo’s lifestyle wouldn’t suit, so he tried other ways to relieve his ache and its attendant rage. He sought the company of other women more stimulating and distracting than my mother. He guzzled down countless bottles of whiskey and beer. Nothing changed—except now, in addition to being chronically restless and angry, he was a chronically philandering drunk. He was like a dog who can never seem to find a comfortable enough place to lie down, snuffling and pawing, first this, then that patch of ground he figures he might like, circling around and around but in the end never quite willing to settle his tired butt to the dirt. No one alive today knows what he was looking for. I’m guessing even he didn’t know, didn’t need to know, he’d recognize it when he saw it.
And so we moved. We moved so often that it seemed to be all we ever did in life, so often that no particular town or city through which we happened to pass stands out in my mind today as “hometown.” Instead, many of my earliest memories are of camping out on the hard wooden benches in Greyhound and Trailways bus stations, over floors strewn with cigarette butts and blackened slabs of chewing gum. That, and of nearby greasy-spoon diners where you could get a burger, fries, and a Coke, all for fifty-five cents. And I remember the dark interiors of the buses themselves, reeking of stale cigarette smoke and days-old sweat and diesel fumes and other strange odors whose origins we really didn’t want to know, my family scattered among the seats, going who knew where. And, certainly, never to stay for very long.
We moved from Missouri to San Francisco in the late spring of 1958. I don’t recall ever knowing why. Perhaps it was as simple as Daddy feeling restless again. Or maybe he’d grown tired of picking someone else’s vegetables or milking other people’s cows, and wanted a regular job in a regular city. I’d also heard him more than once talking about school to Mama, how he wanted to go, to finish his education, complaining to her that there weren’t any decent schools around Missouri. I couldn’t help thinking it was funny, Daddy wanting to go to school. I pictured him sitting at a little desk, learning to read and write all over again. I couldn’t understand it. School was for kids, not grownups.
For once, we didn’t travel in a bus. Instead we drove in a big station wagon with wood panels on the doors. I never knew if the car belonged to Daddy: I hadn’t seen it before our trip, and it would disappear soon after we arrived in California. We towed an old wooden trailer behind the station wagon, packed to overflowing with everything we owned. Not everything fit inside the trailer; there was still a lot of stuff crammed on the back seat and on the floor: stacks of cardboard boxes containing Mama’s dishes and knick-knacks and Daddy’s books; paper bags filled with every conceivable odd and end; and piles of loose clothes that reached all the way up to the headliner. Daddy had made a little bed in the back of the station wagon for my sisters and me with some blankets and sheets, and we stayed there the entire trip except for potty breaks and meals. It was tight and uncomfortable, but we loved the adventure of traveling to a new place. We drove straight through, as I recall, Daddy stopping only a couple of times during the late night and early morning hours to rest his eyes or to get a cup of coffee with Mama and smoke a cigarette before pushing on. It took us nearly two full days.
In San Francisco, we got a room on the sixth floor of a cheap hotel and stayed there while Daddy went out and looked for a job and a place to live. We were there for three days. We kids all slept on the floor. Mama kept us in the room the whole time we were there, afraid to take us out in what she called the seedy part of town. She’d go out herself just long enough to walk quickly to a nearby market or a burger stand to pick up something for us to eat, and she always locked the door behind her when she left. We spent most of our time watching old movies and game shows like Tic-Tac-Toe and I Love Lucy re-runs on the tiny television (a luxury I don’t recall our owning while we lived on the farm). Other times we just stared out the window at the crowded street below and threw stale popcorn—left over from a huge bag of the stuff Daddy had bought for us the afternoon we arrived—out to the nervous-looking pigeons that roosted along the nearby ledge.
Daddy didn’t find a job. But he found an apartment in a housing project on Sunnydale Avenue, just west of Candlestick Park, where Willy Mays and the San Francisco Giants played baseball. Daddy said it wasn’t the prettiest place on earth, but it was the best he could do without having a job yet. I wouldn’t learn until many years later about income-based and other subsidized housing, and that that was likely the only way he could have managed this miraculous feat. He said the apartment had three upstairs bedrooms (I got to have my own!) and a kitchen with running water, and an honest-to-goodness bathroom, with a bathtub and shower. There was a huge empty dirt lot behind our apartment building, surrounded by a deep but scraggly pine woods, and there were hundreds, maybe even thousands of kids right there in the neighborhood for my sisters and me to play with. Best of all, our apartment was right across the street from the elementary school where I’d be starting kindergarten in the fall. It was perfect.
Mama’s face was blank when Daddy pulled our loaded station wagon and trailer up to the curb and jumped out enthusiastically to start carting armloads of boxes and paper bags to the front porch of our new apartment. “C’mon, everybody!” he said. “Billy! Karen, you too! We’ve got work to do!” Mama didn’t move. She stared through the car windows at the kids swarming up and down the street. I jumped out of the back of the car after Daddy opened the tailgate, and took a box from the trailer to carry. A few kids walked by, and I noticed then that they were black, and in fact that most of the people I saw milling around were black. Along the walkways, black men were gathered in various clumps, all of them watching us with obvious interest. No one offered to help unload the car or said hello or made a move toward us. They just watched. When Mama finally got out of the car, she stood and looked up and down the street, at the row upon row of dirty white cement buildings, the yards with their thin patches of grass and weeds, and the garbage that no one seemed interested in cleaning up. She sniffed the air, and looked worried.
Daddy came back to the car and immediately grabbed another armload of clothes from the back seat. He looked at Mama irritatedly. “What’s the matter with you?” he asked. “Why aren’t you helping?”
“It’s a slum, Bill,” she said sourly.
Daddy’s eyes narrowed. He glanced over at the closest group of spectators, and then turned to face Mama squarely. He smiled at her in a way that made me glad he wasn’t looking at me. “I told you,” he said, “it’s the best I can do.”