In Fresno You Survive

The next day I got the story from Rick, about what had happened with the guitar shop. I went over to their place for dinner.  It was a just a couple blocks from my motel, in a decent part of north Fresno, in a unit in a complex. In that part of Fresno that means it's either a first floor duplex or attached bungalow, with covered parking. Like the little houses around the complex, each unit has tiny backyard, accessible by a patio door to a small concrete patio, with a fence of wood or cinder block.

The backyards are flush up against each other.  It is a small perfect piece of paradise, right inside an old fig or orange grove. Yet one is very close to one's neighbors. I tell Rick it feels like camping, or even like Burning Man. There is plenty of vegetation, at least---this being Fresno. It truly feels like Eden sometimes.

Rick rails against being hemmed in with all the other folks around him. I can see that it gets to you after a while. He rails too against the fact that he is stuck in Fresno---all three of them are, in fact, at least for the time being. But they are stuck there together, which makes it bearable.

In the late afternoon, in a perfect temperature, we sit on the lawn chairs in the shaded backyard and look up at the sky above the Central Valley. Rick tells me about the police helicopters that come often at night, shining the lights down into the backyards. They broadcast a message, evidently to some assailant, to surrender peacefully.

During my own previous visit, I had encountered this several times while staying at the respectable Ramada Inn on Shaw near the Fresno State campus---a place popular for local conventions and events. One night I had heard the broadcasts right into my room. I had gone to the front desk to ask about this, and inquire about any danger,, but the young Hispanic desk clerk had said he hadn't even noticed it. I soon learned that the police helicopters use the nearby interchange at Shaw as part of their nightly flight corridor.

It feels somewhat like a prison society, of course, a pilot program for a post-apocalyptic refugee city under martial law.  Fresno feels like a big petri dish experiment that way.

Rick claimed that he had detected that the announcement from the helicopter was almost certainly a recording.

"Maybe they just fly around and put it on speakers, and see who comes out," I suggested, somewhat jokingly. "It's a rational strategy, given the personnel reductions of the local police force."

"Eventually the helicopters could just be drones," I added.

"Maybe they already are!"

Rick makes a hobby out of watching the military fighter jets from the nearby base that use the city as a base for maneuvers. There is almost always one in the sky at any given moment, sometimes right overhead.

"Probably Fresno looks a lot like certain desert cities around the world," I said. "Ideal for training, when you think about it. The main avenues are a perfect grid pattern from the old agricultural roads."

As for the apparent  demise of the guitar store, the story turns out to be that the boutique owner, from whom he had sublet his room for his store, had over the winter, taken it upon herself to provide an outreach to some of the homeless folk along the sidewalks of Olive Street.

This outreach took the form of allowing some of the homeless folk to sleep in the small bedroom in back of the house, down the narrow interior hall from the guitar shop. Soon these invitees became a presence in the boutique and around the house at nearly all time.

One day one of the homeless men came into the guitar store wearing a belt from which hung a broadsword of some kind in a scabbard. The man seemed somewhat drunk. He accosted Rick and at one point the homeless man actually started drawing out his sword from the scabbard. At that point Rick, having decided that enough was enough, threw the guy out of the house. For such a matter, it was pointless to call the police of course.

Nevertheless in due course the landlord heard about the homeless outreach program being run out of the boutique by the boutique owner, and he kicked her out. Unfortunately that included, for the time being at least, her sublessee Rick, and the first incarnation of the shop.

But Rick wound up on good terms with the owner, so it is possible the East India Guitar Company will reopen in the same location.

We both agreed it was not a bad location at all. His plan to get noticed by foot traffic and drive-bys from the Tower Theatre nightlight district had seemingly begun to work. Wherever it is that the shop reopens, I hope Rick gets the chance to have a real storefront next time. In the meantime he might get to sell his guitars out of the window and front wall of another music shop in the north side of the Tower District, one where he knows the owners.