A geezer’s lament

When I first landed in Sonoma I met a guy named Brady Brady, who was a friend of Stanley Mouse, who knew Earl LeClaire the chef from the Sonoma Hotel, who wrote a poem about his dog, Spike, and recited it while a guy called Norton Buffalo played harmonica in the background (almost as good as Butterfield) and it was all for free at a place called The Center of the Universe. I suspected this was the town for me.

Then there was religion, New Age style, at the Westerbeck Ranch on Sundays in a gigantic wine barrel-shaped house, where we sat in a large circle and communed with gods, goddesses, spirits and whatever good ju-ju one could conjure up, led by Brother Jessie, a defrocked padre who as it turned out was unfrocked for a damn good reason, but that’s another story. Still, I knew it was my kind of town.

Scoring pot was as easy as a stroll down Broadway. There was a blacksmith off Highway 12, an offspring of the vaunted Westerbecks, as big as a Clydesdale and just as imposing, but in a brilliant and talented way. Our first next-door neighbor was a far fallen Mormon with a dog named, Barf that easily weighed 150 lbs with a head the size of a bear’s.

That first year we lived off a creek in a rental where mice not infrequently dropped on the stove while cooking. That year it rained so hard and so long the creek flooded, leaving dead fish on our driveway when the waters receded. Barf enjoyed nature’s catered meal.

During the storms and endless rains we played poker all night with the Mormon neighbor and his wife, drinking wine, smoking pot, snorting coke on religious holidays, and noshing whatever we could get our hands on as we were semi-stranded in Schellville and too afraid to go to sleep. The Mormon had great records and a decent turntable. Somehow we all survived, even the mice. The Mormon came to a bad end, face down in the same creek he loved to fish, but he was a guy who walked the edges. It was a helluva town.

The wife and I moved and found a place on the outskirts in what used to be the dumping ground after graduating from San Quentin, but it sat high enough off the nearest creek not to worry about flooding. It was enough of a house to rebuild and a speck of land to grow some food, have a family, and house and feed a bunch of dogs and cats. Even room for a mother-in-law. No jokes. Best damn mother in the world. Mexican restaurants around every corner and places to get work. A place for a 40-year-old loser to regroup and start again. Was that a town, or what?

A walk around the town square then and you’d meet farmers, artists, barkeeps, hippies, musicians, phonies, grifters and deadbeats and every stripe of fool human a village could offer, and enough of the Chamber of Commerce types, Rotarians and assorted professionals to work on your teeth, body parts and lightening your bank accounts to keep the town feeling respectable. There was a place to buy hardware and a drug store with a soda fountain. Sure, it was light on blacks and Asians, but had lots of browns and in-betweens. You can’t have everything. Enough bars and cheap restaurants to keep the likes of some happy and enough more pricey joints to keep the other set in line. It looked like an actual town square and not a rabbit warren of banks, real estate storefronts and watering holes for wine tasters.

And story-wise. More stories than you could remember if you’d wanted to. Stories of Juanita’s restaurant and the legendary proprietress herself who’d wield a frying pan on the out-of-hands or flop a large-portion breast on a counter diner’s shoulder for a laugh. Or so the story went. The joint mysteriously burned down one night as seemed to happen with Juanita’s establishments with a certain frequency.

Then there were the brothers Bisso off the Schellville Slough where the garbage piled to the sky as monument to “screw the government,” and the cops stayed dutifully away. The Bisso boys packed and they owned the land and the law was something to laugh at. One did not mess with the Bisso gang. So it was said.

Vines and wines were always king, queen and jacks, but it wasn’t worshipped and fawned over like some religion. It was farmed and it was hard and the landowners worked the fields with the hired hands. It wasn’t some retired Wall Street geek with a wallet made fat from cheating people and selling them snake oil, looking to stick his name on some high-priced vintage produced by someone else. It was work, not a dilettante’s wet-dream ego-fix.

It’s different now. Yeah, yeah, don’t tell me about change. I know about change. It’s manicured, and pedicured and everything’s for sale. Even history. It’s all about profit now and accountants run the show. They run the state and the counties and we entrust them to because we’re too lazy to keep score. They run City Hall and they call themselves bankers or brokers or developers or lobbyists, but they’re parasites and hucksters who live off the work of others and buy and sell it all. Don’t tell me about change.