THE BEST BAD THINGS

We live faster than any other people. We think more promptly; a thousand times more freely than our fathers of the east and of Europe. Our passions are stronger; our intellects keener; our prejudices weaker…
—Casper T. Hopkins, the Pioneer, or California Monthly Magazine, April 1854

Driving across the country with my mother in her new 1949 Ford convertible we were 100 years late, but hopeful in ways that promised transformation. My mother would teach school and have a new life without my dead father. I would be a ripsnorting new 49er with my cap pistol, in my cowboy boots. There was a wildness in heading for California that I remember even though I was a toddler.

Our more exact destination was “The Valley of Heart’s Delight,” which is what it said on a billboard on El Camino Real—a map of the Santa Clara Valley spotted with painted fruit like a postcard. Soon after we arrived, my mother brought me to a PTA meeting because she couldn’t afford a babysitter and we did not know the neighbors yet. She was to be introduced as a new teacher, and I was afraid the parents would not like her because she brought her kid along, but mostly they talked about how smart they were to be living in California with its warm weather and the orchards and the new roads and the new schools.

There were always new kids. They would just show up at school, or I would see them riding their bikes in my neighborhood. I’d ask where they were from and hear “Oklahoma” and “Illinois” and even further back east. When they asked me, I would say, “California.”

“Where you really from?”

“Here,” I would say.

If I thought they did not believe me, I would tell them I might sock them in the mouth, is how I said it. Sometimes I hit them without saying anything, like it was part of becoming friends later.