Tad Williams - The Dirty Streets of Heaven

We stretched out our breakfast ’til close to noon. Several hairs-of-the-dog-that-bit-me stabilized my head, and we mostly just read the papers, but the whole thing was beginning to feel kind of creepily comfortable. See, I actually like Monica a lot, but…well, nothing more than that. She always seemed to see things in our relationship that were invisible to me. Also, the mathematics of our time together seemed to work out that for every week we had fun together we spent a week later on making each other miserable. I really didn’t want to set myself up for that kind of karmic payback. Things were complicated enough.

“So what’s going on with you, Bobby?” she asked at one point. “You hardly talked at all last night.”

“Is that why you brought me home? To talk?”

She scowled, half in jest. “Don’t be that way. It was nice and you thought so too. I’m just worried about you. You seemed…I don’t know, kind of freaky. About Grasswax and that Walker guy and everything.”

The last thing I wanted to do was talk about any of that. At best it meant she was feeling protective of me again, and at worst…well, I didn’t know what that might mean, but it bothered me that she was so interested in my recent work history. Paranoia can be caution by another name, especially when you live in the world of the unlikely full-time, the way I do.

Feeling this twitch of old habits returning was actually beginning to worry me a bit-I didn’t want to become that guy again. “It’s just the same old shit with some new twists,” I told her as I called for the check. “I gotta book, I’ve got some stuff to do. Take your time. Finish your coffee.”

“You’re going?” She gave me a wistful smile. “Okay. It was fun. Like old times.”

“Definitely.” I didn’t know what else to do so I bent and kissed her-on the mouth but promising nothing. “I’ll probably see you tonight. At The Compasses, I mean.”

“Oh, yeah,” she said. “At The Compasses.” I could feel her watching my back as I went out. On a hunch I waited half a minute, then doubled back past the front window at a different angle. She had her phone out and was talking, her face serious. Didn’t prove anything, of course, but it didn’t make me feel any better, either. And now I was definitely starting to feel like that guy again, the trust-nobody guy. It’s not a nice way to feel, which is one major reason I gave it up.

It was a warm day for so early in the year and the waterfront was covered with downtown workers brown-bagging or just enjoying the bay breezes and watching the boats. With the return of brain-cell function I remembered that I’d promised Sam I’d take the kid off his hands the next day, which meant that, advocate work permitting, this afternoon was going to be my only chance to do some reconnaissance-I wanted to head over toward the university to check out The Water Hole and the surrounding neighborhood before the evening.

I also wanted a little time on my own to think. Some people can manage that while they’re making slightly awkward conversation with an ex-lover with whom they might or might not have just started up again. I’m not one of those people.

Even if you don’t know San Judas all that well you may know something about Stanford University, the Harvard of the West, alma mater of several US presidents and (although they don’t talk about this quite as much) nursery of uncounted numbers of extremely unpleasant tactical weapons, including the hydrogen bomb.

Back in the middle of the nineteenth century there was only one real city in Northern California-San Francisco, which started its boom with the Gold Rush and never looked back, selling prospectors’ gear to all those suckers on their way to the gold fields, then taking more money from them when they came back in exchange for all manner of services, a few of them actually legal. Across the mouth of San Francisco Bay, Oakland became the jumping-off point for those on their way to the golden hills.

Two other large towns also began to grow beside the bay, one centered around Mission San Jose at the bay’s southeastern end, the other around a secondary mission named “San Judas Tadeo” beside what later became the Redwood River. See, contrary to what a lot of idiots thought then (and still do), the name San Judas has nothing to do with Judas Iscariot, betrayer of Jesus (although later on it came to fit amusingly with the growing image of the place). The city’s named for St. Jude, patron saint of the hopeless, the unloved, and other lost causes-in other words, an even better fit than being named after Christ’s ex-pal.

As more and more people began to need wood for boats and houses, sawmills sprung up all over the hills west of San Judas and settlers dredged the Redwood River so the logs could be brought by water to the new harbor there. Then, just when the town was really starting to grow, somebody found oil up in the Santa Cruz Range and a lot of it got shipped out down the river to San Judas and its new harbor. The boom only lasted about a decade or so, but that was enough to leave Mission San Jose and any other pretenders to the title of the Bay Area’s second city in the dust.

And that’s kind of been the nature of San Judas ever since-boom and bust, feast then famine. It’s been an oil town, a port town, and eventually a factory town because of all the defense industries that set up here around the time of the Second World War. And a main lure for that kind of technology were all those science and engineering graduates from Stanford and the other local universities, which is why Jude, along with Berkeley and San Francisco itself, wound up at the center of the information revolution.

Leland Stanford was a Victorian-era entrepreneur-a “robber baron” to many-who became the governor of California. When his only child died of typhoid, he and Mrs. Stanford built the university in their son’s honor, and for the first few years it was a remarkably forward-looking institution. Then Stanford’s wife died in a fire, with the ex-Governor himself unable to save her because of a locked door. The governor heard her last terrible moments and was never the same man after that, nor was his university the same kind of open and open-hearted place it had been: No more modern, sandstone buildings, no more sweeping vistas to the beautiful western hills. Instead the university grew upward as much as out, spiking the skyline with dark, Gothic towers. The governor’s gift to the state also grew more inward as well, surrounding itself with turreted walls that made it look more like the castle of an occupying army than a modern seat of learning.

Once the Camino Real, the great north-south highway that stretches from San Francisco all the way down to the far end of the bay, ran right through the university itself, but sometime in the 1920s the Stanford board of regents decided they didn’t like the hoi polloi motoring freely through their expensive and exclusive university so they lowered the road and turned it into a long tunnel that passes under the narrowest part of the university property. If you decline to use the tunnel your choice is either line up to be examined for admittance at one of the two forbidding university gates or just turn the hell around and go back.

Perhaps because the deadly fire that killed Mrs. Stanford was rumored to have been started by a drunken servant, or perhaps because he was just a mean old bugger, Governor Stanford was also very, very down on alcohol-not a drop to be had on campus, and for years not a drop to be had anywhere near the campus. That’s eased over the decades. Although the university itself is still famously dry, a number of drinking establishments sprang up in the shadow of the walls to serve Stanford students. Preparing to rule the world can be thirsty work, I’m told.