An Angle on the World Read online

  Copyright © 2016 by Bill Barich

  The contents of this book first appeared, in slightly different form, in the New Yorker, as well as the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle. San Francisco Examiner, Los Angeles Times, Irish Times, Narrative, Islands, Salon, and Outside.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  Cover design by Anthony Morais

  Cover photograph courtesy of QT Luong/terragalleria.com

  Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-0833-4

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-0834-1

  Printed in the United States of America

  For Imelda

  Table of Contents

  Introduction

  One: Dispatches

  — Board and Care: San Francisco

  — La Frontera: The Mexican Border

  — The Victim’s Wake: Murder in the Caribbean

  — Ulster Spring: Belfast

  — The Crazy Life: Youth Gangs in L.A.

  Two: Diversions

  — Still Truckin’: Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead

  — On Luck and David Milch: A Screenwriter’s Education

  — Writers and the Movies: Joseph Mitchell

  — Two Tales of Nigeria

  – One Pound Sterling

  – Houseboys

  — San Francisco: Haight-Ashbury Days

  – True Believers

  – A Real Writer

  — Travels

  – An Innocent Abroad: Florence

  – Barbados: All Right

  – Culebra: An Island Dream

  – Cavagnaro’s Bar & Grill: East Hampton

  – A London Village: Islington

  — Reviews

  – The World is My Home by James Michener

  – James Thurber: His Life and Times by Harrison Kinney

  – Sir Vidia’s Shadow by Paul Theroux

  – Kingsley Amis: A Biography by Eric Jacobs

  – My Racing Heart by Nan Mooney/Stud by Kevin Conley

  – The Horse God Built: The Untold Story of Secretariat by Lawrence Scanlan

  – Black Meastro by Joe Drape/Man O’ War by Dorothy Ours

  – Horse Heaven by Jane Smiley

  – Every Time a Friend Succeeds Something Inside Me Dies: The Life of Gore Vidal by Jary Parini

  – Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone

  Introduction

  I once had a schoolteacher who joked that I was the most curious boy she’d ever met. She meant that in the dictionary sense of “eager to learn or know something” rather than “strange, unusual,” or so I choose to believe, although I may have been guilty on both counts. Whatever the case, I’ve spent much of my writing life indulging that curiosity, throwing myself into situations and subcultures to gain an education and acquire my own angle on the world. The dispatches collected here arose from that desire. All but one first appeared in the New Yorker, where my editors gave me the support and encouragement to tackle such in-depth reports.

  The dispatches have a common thread. They all explore stories that the press had ignored or reported on in a desultory way, at least in my view. For years I’d been reading about the Troubles in Northern Ireland, for instance, but the focus was always on the sensational aspects of the conflict. I had no idea what Belfast looked like or how the people of the city conducted their daily affairs, so I decided to spend three weeks there. My hope was to capture what Norman Mailer described as “the feel of the phenomenon,” or a palpable sensation of living in Ulster.

  To keep from repeating the usual clichés, I avoided politicians, official sources, and other journalists. Instead I talked with greengrocers, butchers, newsagents, and so on, including a barber who swore he’d never visit San Francisco, my hometown at the time, because he was scared of earthquakes, proving that fear is relative. I walked from my hotel near Queens University through the Catholic Falls and the Protestant Shankill, and heard from the locals how the paramilitaries operate and the price they extract from the citizens they supposedly protect. It soon became clear who reaped the biggest benefits from the sectarian divide.

  “Board-and-Care” addressed the plight of the homeless in San Francisco. A great many suffered from a mental disorder. Government programs to help out were sadly lacking, so I looked elsewhere for a possible solution. A psychiatrist friend, an activist in the field, steered me to Chateau Agape, a Queen Anne Victorian in the Mission District, where twenty-seven chronic adult paranoid schizophrenics lived together in relative harmony.

  The chateau struck me as a cost-effective model for what could and should be done in a caring society. Its owners, the Loopers, were heroes in my eyes, and so, too, was Manuel Velasquez (“The Crazy Life”), who labored to prevent teenage gang members in Los Angeles County from dying young in turf or drug wars.

  The disheartening mess along our border with Mexico hasn’t improved much since I wrote “La Frontera.” When I first arrived in San Ysidro, California, directly opposite Tijuana, I expected a tightly controlled perimeter as in the movies, but instead I witnessed an elaborate, never-ending game of cat-and-mouse. The border patrol was understaffed and overwhelmed, and its agents were almost powerless. So little has changed I’d only have to include the Trump factor and the vigilante patrols to bring the story up-to-date. As long as there’s work on offer, the migrants will continue to risk a crossing.

  “The Victim’s Wake” came about when an editor at Outside asked if I’d like to cover a murder trial in the Caribbean, in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, where a wealthy American couple stood accused of killing a water taxi operator named Jolly Joseph. If a jury found them guilty, they might hang from the gallows. I sat in the dusty old courtroom and listened as bewigged barristers argued the case, while islanders in their Sunday best observed and delivered a whispered commentary, trying not to laugh or applaud.

  The pieces I’ve grouped together as diversions offer lighter fare. I’d probably never have met Jerry Garcia, if the New Yorker under Tina Brown hadn’t doted on celebrities. When David Milch invited me to work on his HBO horse racing show Luck, sadly short-lived, I got a master class in screenwriting from a genius of the form and lots of laughs in the bargain. The trips I made to Barbados and Culebra were courtesy of Islands. The essays on Italy, my Peace Corps days in Nigeria, and the Haight-Ashbury add up to a fragmentary portrait of my often-confused youth, when the dream of being a writer seemed too farfetched to ever be realized.

  An Angle On the World is meant to be a bedside book, one to dip into at random and at leisure. Hopefully, the reader will find much to enjoy and only a little to provoke. Even when investigating the most difficult subjects, I’ve attempted to be as optimistic as common sense would allow. Looking back, as Satchel Paige advised us never to do, I’m pleased to see that I’ve made an adventure of my writing life and remain deeply grateful to all those who helped that miracle to happen.r />
  One: Dispatches

  Board and Care: San Francisco

  Chateau Agape, San Francisco, seven o’clock on a February morning. The air smells of bacon frying, coffee percolating. With a spatula, Leroy Looper eases an egg off a stove-top grill and onto a plate, then hands it to a woman who wears an old raincoat for a robe. She’s holding tightly to the collar, clinging to it for security. From a plastic tray, Leroy gives her two Mellaril pills and smiles at her in approval, pleased to see that her hair is neatly combed and her eyes are bright. Only yesterday, the woman was confused and frightened, unwilling to eat or to speak, and Leroy’s wife, Kathy, had to coax some nourishment into her by offering cups of hot chocolate.

  “You look real nice today, Carla,” Leroy says to her, in a rich, preacherly voice, and this simple bit of praise seems to lift her off her feet. Meanwhile, he takes another egg from a cardboard carton and lets it rest for a moment on his palm. Against his skin, it resembles an oblong marble. He is a very big man of sixty-two, built on the scale of a retired pro-football tackle, and when he walks through the Tenderloin, a tough downtown district where he runs a hotel and works as a neighborhood organizer, the pimps and dealers scatter. A former addict himself, he spent twelve years of his youth strung out on heroin, bouncing from prison to prison, but he kicked his habit for good.

  Leroy cracks the egg and sets it to sizzling. He lays out more bacon strips—cheerful, humming to himself—and starts another pot of coffee, and the seductive aromas drift up a broad mahogany staircase to rooms on the second and third floors. The Chateau, a rambling Queen Anne Victorian mansion, is a board-and-care home for the mentally disabled, and all but one of twenty-seven men and women who share it with the Loopers are chronic schizophrenics. A secretary, a practical nurse, a rock musician—in a few minutes, they begin to roll into the dining room, half awake and in need of caffeine. They range in age from nineteen to fifty-two. Often in the past they’ve had to be hospitalized, some in locked facilities, but here they usually function well, creating an atmosphere of mutual support, a therapeutic community.

  From an urn I help myself to hot water for tea, and I ask one of the boarders, whose name is Anatole, if I can join him at his table. “By all means,” he says, gesturing grandly with an arm. In the weeks I’ve been visiting, we’ve become friends. We shoot pool in the basement, or sit around and discuss global affairs, solving—with amazing ease—many of the world’s problems. Anatole has a quick wit, and the handsome, grizzled, toothless face of a prospector. His longish black hair is flecked with gray, and when he served in the Army, near Frankfurt, the Frauleins told him he was a double for Elvis. He, too, is looking good, having recently and reluctantly agreed to increase his daily dose of Stelazine, an anti-psychotic. Like most mental patients, he wants to be free of drugs and doctors, free of craziness, but at least he’s sleeping better now, not staying up most of the night, wired and rapping.

  When I first came to the Chateau, in late January, Anatole was hostile toward me, suspicious of my motives, informing me in his regal way that the only good writer around was Tom Brokaw of NBC. He resented the idea that I might be studying him, reducing his life to the stuff of research, so I had to be very clear about what I was doing. I explained that I’d got curious about the nationwide crisis in housing the mentally ill. In every major urban area of the United States, the streets were thick with disturbed people living in squalor, and I wondered if, in the absence of hospital beds, there was truly no place for them to go.

  The number of mental institutions in the country has dropped radically since the nineteen-fifties. In California, privately owned, state-licensed board-and-cares are the primary long-term shelters for individuals with chronic illnesses. When I began to look into them, I met a local psychiatrist, Mel Blaustein, an expert in the field. He took me to two homes he visits weekly, acting as a medical adviser. (There are seventy-three board-and-cares in San Francisco, with seven hundred and five beds.) The homes I saw were small and run-down, set on busy, dismal blocks in poor neighborhoods, and the patients in them were sullen, giddy, or without affect, dozing in chairs, drinking beer, or watching endless hours of TV.

  In terms of quality, Dr. Blaustein said, the homes were about average for the system, providing clean rooms, regular meals, monitoring of medication, and some supervision—an acceptable alternative, certainly, to forcing people to camp in alleys. Yet he believed it was possible for a board-and-care to be much more than just a holding tank, so he brought me to the Chateau, where the Loopers, with no special training or financial aid, were investing a tired concept with fresh energy.

  All this I explained to Anatole (I have changed his name as well as the names of the other residents), and he nodded gravely, using his radar—a sixth sense some schizophrenics seem to have for determining the truth—to see if I was being honest. Apparently, I passed the test, because afterward he started seeking my company, laughing, teasing me, telling me jokes.

  “I might be doing some writing myself pretty soon,” he informs me this morning, rolling a cigarette from a pouch of Bugler, one of the sixty or eighty he’ll smoke today.

  “What will you write about?” I ask.

  “Oh, something important, probably.” He pauses for effect. “You know, like the Jurassic Age.”

  Light pours through the curved windows of the dining room. It’s a balmy day, and in the garden roses are blooming, flaring up in reds and strong yellows. Again I am impressed by the beauty of the Chateau. Built in 1881 by a lumber tycoon, it was a mansion in ruin when the Loopers bought it, but they have gradually restored it and turned it into an architectural landmark. With bright white paint, a widow’s walk, and an eccentric Turkish cupola, it stands out from the other houses on Guerrero Street, and often makes passersby stop to wonder what’s going on inside. Sometimes at the Chateau, I feel as if I were on a fine old sailing ship. That comes in part from its size and in part from its period flavor. In every room, there are valuable antiques—brass beds, lamps with marble bases, armoires, gilt mirrors from the Barbary Coast.

  The decor is even more remarkable when you consider that Kathy Looper scavenged every piece from a thrift shop or a garage sale, and refinished it. Now in her early forties, she is a short, sturdy, supremely dedicated woman of Greek ancestry, who wears glasses and bold colors, and hates to think that anything on earth might be going to waste. She was educated at Catholic schools in San Francisco and met Leroy in 1969, while she was still in college. “He was the first guy I ever dated,” she told me once, giggling, her hands on her hips. “Yeah! Can you believe it?”

  I notice that Anatole is involved in the morning paper. He has been reading a lot lately, hoping to reconstruct the areas of his brain he feels are damaged, so I leave him alone, walk down a hallway to the front door, and bump into three of the Looper children—a girl and two of the boys—on their way to school. Residents are also milling around, collecting themselves, preparing to go to day centers or to volunteer jobs. I pass Dorothy and Jane, and then I pass Georgie, a gentle, long-nosed Russian in a neat shirt and tie. Years ago, Georgie underwent electroshock treatment at Napa State Hospital. “And you know what?” he whispered to me the other day, fiercely proud. “I still remember how it felt!”

  He grins as I stroll by, and picks up the thread of our ongoing conversation. “You like your meat rare, right?” he asks.

  “That’s right, Georgie.”

  A broader grin. “Just throw it on the barbecue and take it off, right?”

  “Right again.”

  Very happy now. “Did your father have a temper?”

  “When I was a kid. Not so much anymore.”

  With a wicked sort of glee, he says, “Did he give you lickings?”

  “A spanking once in a while,” I say.

  Georgie quits talking and processes the data, storing it in a memory file he keeps on me. Always, he begins on a casual note and then grows more intimate, probing. He works by making comparisons, holding up another’s life
against his own, so that a measure is taken, something is gained. You should have been a tailor, Georgie, I think, stepping onto the front porch. Out in the yard, a resident named Darnell is uncoiling a hose, getting ready to water some pansies in tubs. A recent arrival, he is a shy young black man in a yellow knit cap. He waves to me. The sky above him, all around him, is a delicate, almost transparent blue.

  * * *

  When Leroy Looper was a boy growing up in Washington, D.C., his father sometimes drank too much and beat him. He beat Leroy’s mother as well, and whenever he knocked out a tooth of hers he replaced it with a gold one. But in Leroy’s eyes the gold was less an apology than a form of insurance, something to be yanked out and pawned during the next bender; and at the age of seven, to keep from getting hit, he ran away from home. He earned some pocket money by shining shoes, begging for pennies, and selling copies of the Afro-American newspaper in bars and fancy hotels. His own name turned up in its “Missing Persons” column once, but he ignored the message, having already fallen in love with the streets.

  Often when he was hungry, he would go to his Aunt Carrie’s house, in Glick Alley, behind the old Howard Theatre. The alley was a hive of action, thick with numbers runners, bootleggers, prostitutes, and entertainers down on their luck. Leroy soon got caught up in the flow of crime, nabbed a woman’s purse, and was sent to a reform school for a year—the year he was eight. The discipline there was strict. If you misbehaved, you were rapped on the knuckles with a ruler or were made to kneel for hours on concrete, under a blazing sun. Major offenders were stripped to the waist, tied to a rack, and lashed with a bullwhip.

  On his release, Leroy vowed to avoid trouble, but he began cutting classes and roaming again, and, once more, when he was eleven, he foolishly stole a purse. The judge thought he must be a little crazy to repeat himself, so she sent him to an institution forty miles from the District that offered some psychiatric counselling. It had acres of land, and the security was not so tight. Leroy taught himself to box, played horseshoes and baseball, and steered clear of gangs. He had one very good teacher, Mr. Orange, who was Jewish and had been denied jobs at better schools because of his religion. Mr. Orange gave him books to read and started him on a course of self-education. At times, Leroy swore that he could feel his mind expanding; and as he walked over the vast property he dreamed about escaping.