Flash

  Table of Contents

  Praise

  Title Page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  About the author

  Support AK Press!

  Copyright Page

  ADVANCE PRAISE FOR FLASH A NOVEL

  BY JIM MILLER

  “This remarkable novel is nothing less than a secret history of California—a radical past that might yet redeem our future.”

  —Mike Davis, author of City of Quartz

  “Flash is about the search for a usable past in a time and

  place where, as in Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil, the future has

  been all used up—or gentrified. Miller’s historical sense is

  rich and particular, showing a Pynchonesque flair for secret

  history, and a comparable tenderness for the lost lineages and

  resilient utopianism of the permanent left.”

  —David Reid, editor of Sex, Death, and God in LA

  “If Howard Zinn had written a novel about the I.W.W. in

  border country during the Mexican revolution, one that was

  also a family saga and a mystery revealing the secret history of

  the twentieth century, it would read like Flash, which deals

  in the rarest of commodities: hope for our future.”

  —Forrest Hylton, author of Evil Hour in Colombia

  1

  WANTED FOR GRAND LARCENY. BOBBY FLASH

  Nativity, American; 25 years old; height 5 ft. 4 inches; weight

  150 pounds; brown hair; smooth shaven; light complexion;

  occupation dish washer, harvest stiff, bricklayer, etc.; two

  gold upper front teeth; corduroy pants, brown corduroy hat;

  tan button shoes, blue shirt. Member IW.W.., Holtville, Cal.

  Was under Stanley at Mexicali and under Price at Tia Jua-

  na-Mexican Revolution. Left here in the company of Gus

  Blanco. He was with the IW.W.. bunch that took four horses

  from Holtville and was mixed up in the robbery at Coyote

  Well on the night of December 24th, 1911. He is a bad man.

  I hold warrant for his arrest.

  Arrest, hold, and notify,

  Mobley Meadows, Sheriff

  Imperial Valley, Calif.

  Dated: El Centro, Cal.,

  January 2d, 1912

  Who was Bobby Flash? I copied down the information and put the yellowed Wanted poster back in the folder. The next piece in the file was a mug shot of a young man staring hard into the camera with a defiant half smile that revealed what appeared to be a gold tooth. I looked at his face, under a mop of short but shaggy brown hair. His gaze was piercing and he had a fresh-looking scar under his left eye. I noticed that his work shirt was unbuttoned at the top and his overalls hung higher on his right shoulder than his left. On the back of the photo someone had written “Buckshot Jack, San Diego 1912,” but that had been crossed out by a different hand and replaced with “Bobby Flash, San Diego 1912?” I smiled at the thought of myself, Jack Wilson, being tagged with the nickname “Buckshot,” but I was more intrigued by the correction. Was this really Bobby Flash? I stopped for a moment, lost in thought. What drew me to him? Perhaps it was the vague stories about my “crazy commie great grandfather” that my mom would toss off when she was assailing my father’s side of the family. They had always resonated with me—just not in the way she had intended. And, perhaps it was just a flight of fancy, but I thought Flash looked a bit like my son Hank thrust back in time (minus the gold tooth). OK. Enough already. Maybe it was just the name, Flash.

  I checked the time. It was 4:30. I looked up and saw that the librarian was still occupied at the front desk so I continued to inspect the file. The next piece was another Wanted poster:WANTED FOR GRAND LARCENY AND ROBBERY. GUS BLANCO OR BUNCO

  Nativity, American; age 30; height 5 ft. 8 in.; weight 157

  pounds; brown hair; no beard; small moustache; gray eyes;

  chunky nose; red cheeks; occupation bronco buster and cow

  puncher; slightly stooped shoulders, upper lip hangs over

  lower, walks like a man stove up from riding horses; left

  here wearing blue overalls and black felt hat. Is a member

  of I.W.W. [agitator], canvasser for Industrial Workers of the

  World. Was in Mexican Revolution, first under Berthold at

  Mexicali, and at Alamo under Mosby at Tecate also un-

  der Price at Tia Juana in C Troop. Will probably find him

  around IW.W.. halls and men. He is also in the bunch that

  took the horses from Holtville and started for San Diego.

  He was the leader of the I.W.W. men here and is an all around

  bad man. Anything you may do to get this man will be very

  much appreciated. I hold warrant for this man.

  Arrest, hold and notify,

  Mobley Meadows, Sheriff.

  Imperial County, Calif.

  Dated: El Centro. Cal.,

  January 2d 1912

  So Bobby Flash was with Blanco and the Wobblies who flooded into San Diego in 1912, the year of the free speech fight. Except this band appears to have been fleeing after the Mexican army took back Tijuana, and the United States sent in Federal troops to round up the American revolutionaries. Many were killed, hundreds arrested, but somehow Flash and Blanco slipped out of the trap. By March, the I.W.W. would call in an army of thousands of bindlestiffs and professional agitators to join them in the battle for free speech, but it looked like Flash and Blanco were there before the main action started. It had been a blood bath, and I thought a story on the centennial anniversary would be great, but I needed an angle and perhaps these two outlaws would provide it. I looked for another mug shot but, unfortunately, there was no picture of Gus Blanco. What I did find was a picture of the lawman, Mobley Meadows, Imperial County’s first sheriff. He didn’t fit the mold of a TV western tough guy. Instead, he was a patrician-looking fellow, almost effete—the kind of guy who liked to call people “bad men.” Just as I was about to dig through the rest of the file, the librarian, a balding, pudgy, middle-aged man, walked over and told me it was closing time. I managed to talk him into making me a couple of photocopies of the Wanted posters and then headed out of the archives room past a cluster of homeless men outfitted in army surplus and Padres giveaway gear who were lingering by the restroom, waiting to be prodded over to the stairs and out onto the street for the long hard night.

  Out on E Street, everything was vivid as it always is after your head has been stuck in a stack of papers for the better part of the afternoon. I stopped and noticed, for the first time, the lantern in the center of a circle of mosaic tiles on the sidewalk in front of the library, and the sailing ship at the heart of the San Diego seal a few steps away. Walking past the stout fellow packing up the coffee cart out front I nearly bumped into a pair of sleek Italian women, language school tourists most likely, on their way to the Gaslamp District. They both had long, lush black hair and were chatting animatedly in their native tongue. One of them threw her head back when she laughed and raised her arms in the air like a conductor. A car rolled by with a Radiohead song blasting and another with radio news. “Today, the markets fell on reports…” was all I heard before it faded into the evening. The sky was dark blue beginning to bleed red as I crossed the street and begged my way past the security guard at the post office door so I could check my mailbox. Once inside, I hustled over to the wall of little copper squares and quickly di
d my combination to find some junk mail and a letter from my son. I shut the box and stopped for a moment to look up at the ceiling of the beautiful old WPA building. Like the funky fifties library, it is one of San Diego’s few remaining nods to history with its simple yet elegant modernist design, the light blue molding framing the ceiling, a long rectangle with a row of lamps lining the center. It was quiet like a church with the crowd gone and I wished I could stay and read Hank’s letter there, but the guard was already on his way over to put an end to my reverie.

  I put the letter in my back pocket, strolled down E street to 5th Avenue, turned left and walked half a block to where The New Sun had just opened up its office on the second floor of the Hub-bell Building, above a wine bar. It was a gorgeous late-nineteenth century space—1887, to be precise—that we’d never be able to keep, but it was great for the time being. My boss, Neville, the owner and editor, was a solid guy, a trust-fund radical from a conser vative family who was willing to spend a lot of money for a while in order to irritate his family. Once things got close to affecting his personal bottom line it would be over, but, for now, it beat the alternative—unemployment. I had burned all my other bridges in town.

  I started back with the SD Weekly, a sad imitation of an alternative weekly owned by a pugnacious Christian conservative who reveled in irritating the powers that be as long as they were his personal enemies. He was an ex-Marine who still wore a crew cut. He had a face like a bulldog and sported a bowtie and pants that were always a bit too high. “Sarge,” as all the writers called him, could be nice, but he had a mean streak. Thus he loved my pieces exposing land deals that benefited the business elites who had funded the campaigns of half the city council and the mayor. It turns out that this wing of the local Republican Party was at odds with the “values” folks. So I went after the money people. This led to a brand of quixotic muckraking that Sarge thought was perfectly fine until I started going after some of his sacred cows. The piece that got me fired was an exposé on an education reformer who went to the boss’ church and turned out to be a convicted pedophile. I called it, “Reform, This.” He thought it was “tasteless” and replaced me with a guy who went after the labor unions instead, as the city’s only daily, the right-wing Imperial Sun, always did.

  My next stop was The Independent, a former punk rock mag that was trying to compete with the Weekly. The editor there, Billy Zero (he went by his pen name), was a well-meaning but not particularly sharp fellow who thought of himself as the coolest guy in town. Zero answered directly to the corporate office that ran about twenty other “independent” weeklies across the country, but he had a tattoo and a little earring so the alternateens he hired to write rock reviews for nothing thought he was hip. I treaded water there for a few years as a kind of utility infielder doing stuff on culture and politics without much problem. I did a piece on the owner of the Weekly and his connections to the Christian right, anti-abortion, and anti-gay rights crusades and Zero loved it. I wrote a column called “Lotusland Blues” for a year and pissed off half the city. Zero loved that, too. Things were looking up—for a while.

  What got me in trouble with The Independent was a story I did called “Cool Gentrification” about how the last old bars and single-family businesses were getting pushed out of downtown by “hipster capitalists,” a few of whom frequently advertised in the paper. That piece led to a chat with Zero over beers at the Barge, the oldest bar in the city, which used to be a haven for fishermen and union factory workers before those industries largely vanished from town. Now the old scrap yard and dingy boat dealerships that had surrounded it had been replaced by high-end condos. Bye bye blue collar, hello hipsters! In any event, Zero bought me a beer, sat down next to me at the bar, ran his hand through his spiky hair, and said, “Jack, I think you are getting too predictable.”

  “Predictable?” I asked, staring at him as he squirmed a little on his barstool.

  “Yeah, Jack, all the ‘fuck gentrification’ stuff is getting old,” he said with a whiff of condescension while refusing to look me in the eye.

  “How so?” I queried deadpan, but suspicious. “I thought we were an alternative weekly.”

  “I don’t know,” he said trying to look caring as he delivered a dose of what he seemed to think was tough love. “Maybe the alternative to alternative is alternative.” He looked down at his tattoo. I laughed once I realized he was serious.

  “Zero,” I started, unable to help myself, “that’s the dumbest fucking thing I’ve ever heard. You can fire me if you want to, but that’s just stone cold stupid bullshit.”

  “You can be defensive if you want to,” he said, assured of his wisdom. “But I think you should be open minded and think about what I said.” He got up and left the money for the beer. I stayed and ordered another. Later that night, I got online and did a little research on Zero. I found an article in an industry rag where he said that, “We may come off as more left than thou, but all the while we’re busting our asses to please our advertising base.” It turns out that the hipster capitalists had flooded the paper with complaints and threatened to pull their ads if the tone of the paper didn’t change. If Zero had been straight with me, I might have considered his plight with the corporate office, but his pathetic advice had pissed me off. I decided to write myself out of a job, make him fire me like a good old-fashioned “uncool” boss.

  I began by doing a story on the hideous architectural malpractice of one of The Independent’s main advertisers. Entitled, “A Sick Joke on the Avant Garde,” the piece included pictures of some of their marquee condominiums and mocked their stunningly ugly design. My “Best Of ” list included “Best Santa Fe Style Stalinist Block Building,” “Best Postmodern Prison Bunker,” “Best Retarded Sailboat-Themed Monstrosity,” and a special category for “Best Unintentionally Cartoonish Mural Art on a Live/Work Space.” They lost the ads. No comment from Zero. One of the alternateens got a TV show about local rock bands on the local FOX News station, and I did a column entitled “OK, Punk Really is Dead Now.” Still, I was gainfully employed. Only my final shot, “Alternative, Inc.” featuring Billy Zero’s quote in the industry mag and a discussion of the parent corporation’s other connections, which included lots of unsavory, uncool things like toxic waste dumps and union busting law firms, did the trick.

  Eventually The Independent’s parent corporation outsourced the local reporting to India, I kid you not. The “reporters” watched the City Council meetings over the internet live and Googled their sources. They even got rid of the underpaid music reporters by holding a weekly contest on the paper’s blog called “Concert review of the week,” where an unpaid blogger’s take on the big show took the place of an underpaid staffer. Album reviews came off the wire. Mercifully, the parent corporation’s experiment with outsourcing local news and hip commentary died, and they shut down the paper, but give it time. Oh brave new world with such creatures in it…So anyway, that’s how I ended up here at The New Sun tossing copies of century-old Wanted posters on Neville’s desk.

  “Let’s find out who Bobby Flash was,” I said without any introduction.

  Neville picked up the copies and read them studiously, pushing his little round glasses down his nose a bit and nodding slowly. “Do you want to do a quick piece or a feature? And why not Bunco? He was the leader of the group wasn’t he?”

  “Well, the hundred-year anniversary of the free speech fight is coming up so I think it merits a series.” I said, pushing the envelope as always. “And we’ve got a picture to go with Flash’s name. Plus, I’m drawn to bit players. The folks in the background are always more interesting, no?”

  “And that’s important to you and a handful of people,” he said without looking up.

  “I’ll make it important.”

  He smiled and looked up slowly. “Start doing it and talk me into it later. In the meantime, I’ve got a few other things for you, one on something big in Tijuana. The other is local. You can work on Bobby Flash for the lon
g haul.” He handed me a folder.

  “Fair enough,” I said looking over a letter in the folder that Neville had just handed me. It had been written on behalf of the women in a Tijuana neighborhood who lived down the hill from an abandoned maquiladora. When the rains hit, the waste from the plant flowed down into the dirt streets by their homes. Bad things were happening, and nobody was paying any attention. Bobby Flash would have to wait until next week.

  I said goodnight to Neville and headed down the stairs out onto 5th Avenue. There were a few couples sipping zin in Vineland just out the door. I headed up toward Broadway to the bus stop, pausing at 5th and E for a moment to try to imagine the soapboxers stirring it up a century ago. The fancy bar and grill on the corner made the job tough, but I thought for a moment of Bobby Flash hopping up to say, “Fellow workers and friends,” before being dragged off by the cops. Or maybe he got into a good little rant before they could grab him: “The Working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace as long as hunger and want can be found among millions. How come the bosses got all of the good things? You tell me why.” I smiled as a pack of suits strolled by to hit Ostera, a “Watergrill.” Crossing E, I made my way past the new restaurant of the week, a pawn shop, a check-cashing place, and the last remaining cheap eats joints before I hit Broadway and just caught the bus that would take me up to Golden Hill where I lived in a flat behind a big old house. I dropped in my fare and walked to the back. In the dirty white light I saw the tired, after-work faces of cashiers, janitors, secretaries, security guards, and the homeless men who rode the line like Bartleby the Scrivener, preferring not to leave until they were kicked off at the end of the route.

  Neville never told me what to write or even what the lead was, he just handed things over to me like an old-school newsman in a thirties movie. I loved that about him. I sat down and looked over the other item in the folder he’d given me. It was a copy of an email the paper had received from a Marine at Camp Pendleton whose buddy had shot himself the week before. The local TV news had done the “fallen hero” bit but there was some nasty stuff about his experience in Iraq that nobody had mentioned. The Marine wanted to talk to somebody. I looked up at the reflection of my fellow passengers in the window. Indistinct shapes, blurring together. The bus rolled by Church of Steel Tattoo, Chee Chee, El Dorado, and a block that had been leveled for redevelopment. Just then I remembered my son’s letter in my back pocket. I took it out and read:Dad,