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 did 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