Crockett: a little cluster of buildings at the bend of the Carquinez Strait, wedged between the hills and the shoreline, the highway and the bridge, like food caught between teeth. Home to saloons and antique stores and the C&H Sugar Refinery; to the stubby remains of hundred-year-old piers and a set of railroad tracks that freights still rumble down a few times a day.
A high school boyfriend FBs me that he and his sister have bought a bar in Crockett. Tom’s new band is playing, he writes, and I should come out. So I do. Because it’s a Thursday night, because I have a friend’s car at my disposal, and because I have fuck all to do. A little old-school would do me good, I tell myself, descending the steep incline of Crockett’s small downtown. A cruise through memory lane. A field trip into what remains. (...)
I’m driving down Second Avenue—really, there are only three avenues—and I’ve already forgotten the name of Matt’s bar. I figured I wouldn’t have to bother remembering it and I’m right: I pass a neon martini glass with the silhouette of a naked girl inside, extending one leg in the air, and I know that must be it. The letters run down the side, right beneath the second-story bay window: Toot’s. (...)
I feel suddenly self-conscious, not sure what to do with my hands. I put them in my pockets. “What’s up?” I ask.
He shrugs. “Just this,” he glances over his shoulder with a smile and he’s proud, I can tell.
He’s running the place, he tells me, managing and bartending some too. His sister does the books and I should see how big she’s gotten, how much of a woman she is. He’s spending most nights here. He’s living in Rodeo and I have to ask where that is. “Another town around the corner, like ten minutes from here,” and I wonder how many towns like this there are, tucked into the crooks and crevices of this part of California.
He stubs his cigarette in the sand. “Can I get you a drink?” he asks and I squint at him a little. I wonder if maybe he doesn’t remember—doesn’t recall that a month after we broke up, I got clean and stayed clean. That I later made amends to him for the shady way I dumped him and the story I wrote about El Sob, telling him that I was fucked-up then—not telling him that I was still fucked-up and always would be, that a piece of me was trapped in those blackout nights and wouldn’t ever leave.
That information is lost somewhere in the crooks of his memory, the terrain inside him. “A soda water would be great,” I tell him instead.
We go inside and he asks the bartender for a soda water: “This lovely lady is having a soda water,” he says. A dude on a stool turns around to look at me—Carhatt overalls and a beard and those hard deep wrinkles. The bartender says, “You want a lime?” And I inhale as though I’m seriously debating it, then say, “Fuck it, Thursday night, let’s go crazy.” Which is what I always say, and they all three smile, the way people always smile when I say it.
The inside of the bar is painted deep red and there are taxidermied mounts of the walls, deer and elk heads turned at different angles, as though they were frozen in the moment they heard the rifles’ pop. There’s a pool table and those old-timey mirrored beer signs. A woman with saggy knees and wedge sandals fingers a beer label, leans suggestively towards a man with a moustache, and I think, “America!” And I think, “Salt of the earth!” And I distinctly try not to think, “Redneck!” which is what I always tried not to think while hanging out in Crockett.
Here is where I could tell you about the history of the place, how Crockett came to be and how I came to be there. I could start with the boom times: the railroad and the ferries and the shipyards and the mills and the refineries. I could start with industry men, the seekers with their bushy beards and pocket watches, their sharp eyes and big dreams. I could tell you about the workers, the two-bit hustlers and bootleggers, about the smuggling and the gambling in the brothels and saloons. I could start with the land parcels after the Mexican-American War, the squatters and the gun-totters, the Russians, the Spanish, the Portuguese, the wayward Westward-running Americans. I could start with the Spanish Missions and the diseases they spread, the way the native Karkin Indians died inside those white-washed walls. I could start with the Karkins, a tiny sect of the Ohlones who occupied pretty much the exact territory of the incorporated towns today. I could start with the bears that used to line the shores, hunting for salmon that don’t swim there anymore.
I could start with my high school, trace the bus routes, the nearest train station, the left-side exit ramp Matt’s dad drove me off once. I could probably still tell you how to get to Matt’s old house, could point out the bombed-out methhouse down the block, describe the sharp chemical sting it emitted for weeks. I could tell you about Hell Hole and the landfill and coming out of a blackout on the train tracks in Port Costa—how the gravel crunched beneath my sneakers and the lights glinted in my eyes and the horn rumbled in my chest. I could tell you the way our bodies slid in the back of B’s truck when he took a sharp turn, the way the death metal blared through the speakers, the way the smoke curled and clung—how black the nights got out there.
And I could tell you how it all ended: that my time partying in El Sob and Crockett were some of my last months using; that I was tracing the contours of my bottom while I dated Matt; that I left and got clean and never looked back. I could tell you how the automobile killed the freight traffic; how the factories burned and the old piers rotted; how the lavish ferry the industry men once rode was abandoned and sank into the Strait waters slowly, over the course of decades. I could tell you the way everything was consumed: fires and earthquakes and toredo worms eating into the structure of those men’s dreams, drinking and whoring and gambling eating into them. I could tell you how the little townships like Crockett slowly faded in the landscape, got incorporated into larger towns, and eventually disappeared, how Crockett only avoided this fate because of the C&H Factory and the jobs it provided. I could tell you about the secret passageways that remain, the architecture of the past: backrooms and crawlspaces, and the rumored ghosts who walk them.
What I can’t tell you is what actually happened. What I did in Crockett, what the nights were like or how those people lived in them. That part is gone.
by Lauren Quinn, Vela | Read more:
Image: uncredited
