The Golden State

There is a very young woman making her way to the microphone, she is beech-tree slim fair-skinned straight strawberry blond hair and can’t be more than fifteen I think, and how awful that her parents are trotting her out like this when she can’t even vote etc. etc., and she begins speaking. “I’m not even from Paiute County,” she says confidingly. “I live down in Shasta, but I wanted to come up here to tell you that we are with you. Other counties are with you. The next generation is with you. I’ve lived in the North State my whole life, all twenty-three years, and I tell you now as a wife and mother myself”—impossible, I think to myself—“the State of Jefferson is the kind of place I want to raise my baby son now.” A hooting sound, and a blur of happy motions around a sturdy good-looking man with a beard, who is wearing the Snugli with the infant. “We didn’t have the problems of the rest of the state,” she is saying. “We didn’t have drugs, or gang violence, or those types of urban problems.” There it is, I think. Suddenly I have a vivid memory of someone at my grandfather’s funeral cornering a pregnant blonde near me and asking apropos of nothing if she was “gonna give it one of those names like Sharniqua,” an interaction I didn’t quite grasp. Maybe this is about Urban Problems. But she is going on. “We don’t need to pay a tax for a water tunnel or a bullet train we’re never gonna use, we don’t need to send our water down south, and we know we’ve got everything we need right here. Anyway, we’re with you,” she says, so confident. She heads back to her little tribe and cups her baby’s head in her hand and her husband puts his arm around her. Bitch, I think. Clabbers leans forward into the microphone and says “I’m not supposed to say anything but I just have to tell you it’s so nice to see a young person in here today,” and there’s more quiet hoots and affirmations from the audience and I want to throttle this smug interloping teen with her intact family and her burly husband and her white panic. Until now I have regarded the proceedings as something of a sideshow because obviously the fucking Union is not going to get a fifty-first state and obviously California is not going to accept being split in two, not to mention part of Oregon, but Clabbers who is an actual elected official appears to be affirming everything that’s being said here.

The supervisor who called the proceedings to order leans forward into his microphone again and says, “Like I said we’re gonna do this the right way, so anyone who still wants to say anything, I really encourage you to come up to the podium. You’ll have to fill out a comment card, but you can do that after you speak—we don’t always need to follow the rules just exactly as they’re spelled out! So come on up, folks.” I have a brief insane thought that I will go up and say something about, I don’t know, my grandma and how she was in the historical society and how she ate Crab Louie and bled California gold but the impulse dies in its cradle. From the doorway between the cool dark air of the rotunda and the fluorescent buzz of the room I see the Cunt stand. I look over at Cindy and feel a little wave of almost fondness for her as she shifts in her seat and turns down the corners of her mouth with admirable economy of expression.