The Golden State

The sidewalks are completely empty except for a little group of youngish people in big T-shirts and short shorts for girls and big shorts for boys. Three kids are white and two are brown and I wonder if this is indicative of demographic change. There was one lone black family in town when Mom and Uncle Rodney were growing up but I don’t know what became of them. The kids move slow and laugh among themselves and Honey and I pass them and I give a little wave which yields a murmur of “Hi”s. We walk all the way through town to the Desert Sunrise, which is the Indian casino which is three conjoined trailers with slot machines and a few poker tables inside. I took Engin there on his inaugural trip to Altavista because I wanted him to see something he’d never seen before and I’d never seen the Desert Sunrise myself but it’s not like Las Vegas or even Reno where you can visit a casino if you aren’t gambling—there are about six grim-looking men and women at the Desert Sunrise, and everyone stares. Engin fancies himself a man of the people and gets into involved conversations I suspect he secretly regrets with old men and aunties in Anatolian gas stations but the Desert Sunrise does not create an atmosphere of folksiness so much as one of incipient murder. So we moonwalked out of the trailer and I noted the “Silly faggot dicks are for chicks” bumper sticker in the parking lot.

I reflect on Engin’s first visit to Altavista that Christmas with Rodney and Helen. Engin I think made certain assumptions about my class background which combined with certain assumptions that any foreigner has about what America is, which are no less bizarre and misguided than any American’s assumptions about what another place is, led him to believe that a trip to my ancestral land would be something like the movie Father of the Bride, even though I tried to prepare him by using words like “village” and “cowboy” when I described the town. When he first came to California and we got married in Uncle Rodney’s backyard in Quincy first we went up the Sonoma coast and then took 128 back inland through the golden country which if you squint looks Mediterranean and then we went inland to 49 up the Yuba and the Downie and the majestic forests and the stone peaks of Lassen and then into the green valley around Quincy and Quincy itself with its beautiful false fronts and historic theaters and the sound of water wherever you go and I could tell wherever we went that he got it. But then you get up in the north and east and things just get a little scrubbier, the buildings flatter and the people less likely to have started a playhouse with a free library out front. The beauty here is the great slate sky the sound of the birds in the morning the color of the hills and the fields at dusk. Engin said it reminded him of Ang Lee. But I told him that’s not accurate, since Ang Lee trucks in the maximalist blue-sky beauty of Montana or Wyoming, blowsy hills like big green breasts, not the high, thin, stony West, full of volcanic stone washes and scrub oak. Then he pointed out that Brokeback Mountain was actually filmed in Canada and I said “How do you even know that” and he said “I googled it because I liked the scenery” and I laughed. Engin loves vistas.

When Honey and I hit the turnoff for the Desert Sunrise we turn back around in order to find Wi-Fi to Skype with our Ang Lee fan and thus we find ourselves at Sal’s Café in the lobby of the High Desert Hotel on Main Street. It’s open and populated by two tank-topped blond white teen girls at one table and a very, very old white woman with a gray bob who sits at another with a cup of coffee staring vacantly ahead. I buy a coffee from the proprietress maybe Sal herself and unpack Honey from her stroller and take a banana from the bag and squeeze it into pieces and she begins shoveling them into her mouth and I set up the laptop. I open Skype and put on the headphones but then realize Honey won’t be able to hear so I will just have to be rude and let him talk to the room. I click Engin’s face and it rings and he answers and there he is in the flesh or in the screen rather, his gray eyes pale skin brown hair and his newly clean-shaven face and I think how handsome he is and instead of feeling happy and proud I feel a pang because he has been unattended for eight months looking like that and I am here looking like this and then I remember that he is on the shorter side and his arms are also the tiniest bit too short for his body and maybe that will keep the women away and then I think God should just smite me we haven’t even exchanged three words.