A SUNDAY IN VACAVILLE

VACAVILLE, CA.

I step out of the “movie theater” into the California heat. I’ve found somewhere to wait out the next hour or two while I wait for Leyla to finish up, so I start walking the 5 minutes to TJ’s Bar. With each step, something odd happens. The other people, the crowds of cinema-goers who thronged out of the lobby, seem to melt away, thinning out with each step until, by the time I reach the edge of the car park, I’m literally the only person on foot. Given the film I’ve just seen (Warfare: intense), this is unsettling. I feel like I’m in a zombie movie. Albeit a sunny one.

After three days in San Francisco, where most of the different areas are so walkable they feel (almost) European, this is the America I’d been told about, where the car rules, where walking 5 minutes from cinema to Main St. is unthinkable. I’ll talk more about San Francisco itself in my next post, but for this first one I wanted to plunge you, as I was plunged, into Vacaville.

We’re there because Leyla has an all-day community sewing event as part of her research, and wanted navigation help on the hour’s drive from SF into California. We took the other bridge, sadly. (Has any bridge ever been so neglected? I couldn’t even tell you it’s name, and yet we walked for hours to get all the best views of its Golden neighbour… Truly the most ugly step-sister of bridges.)

Brenden's Movie Theatre, Vacaville, CA.

So, I’m in Vacaville for a full 9-5 on a Sunday. After a couple of hours’ work in a cafe - wifi password: “youmatter” - I head out to explore. I’ve been to Andrew’s Park, a gorgeous mix of manicured lawns and massive trees, I’ve got a sandwich from Mr Pickle’s, I’ve seen a film at Brenden’s Movie Theater. And now I’m sitting at the bar in TJ’s. The bar is U-shaped, flags on the wall, pool tables in the back, fans spinning lazily overhead. This feels pretty American to me. I order a beer, and pull out my notebook, intent on writing down my impressions after our first few days in San Francisco.

Almost immediately as my beer is set down, a woman on the long edge of the bar catches my eye.

“I’m gonna offend you,” she mumbles.

“Sorry?”

“I’m gonna offend you!”

“Oh, right.”

She tips off her stool, rights herself, and comes to sit next to me. Kat/Katie (it changes each time she introduces herself), is late 30s/early 40s, white with auburn hair, and one of the drunkest women I’ve ever met. She likes to conduct a conversation mostly in statements, for example:

“You’re from New England.”

“I’m actually from old England.”

This takes her quite a long time to process. “I went to church earlier”, she says eventually. “I love Jesus.” I swear she said these actual words.

Meanwhile, the bartender has come over to see if I need help, as Kat is now off her stool and leaning quite a lot of her body on me. Whether for support or with other intentions is unclear, until she starts moving her bum up and down on my leg. What would Jesus think, I can’t help but wonder. Kat reaches for the zip of her hoodie with a questioning look at the bartender.

“Yaya…?”

“Don’t be flashing no titties up in here, girl,” warns Yaya, who clearly knows the signs. “And give my friend Quentin here some space.” I like Yaya. She spent part of her childhood in Birmingham, and went to York once. She told me, and now I’m telling you.

Kat gets back on her stool and Yaya gives her her bill. It’s $143, which I assume explains why she’s struggling to sit on a bar stool and speak at the same time. She immediately adds my beer to her tab. It turns out she’s only had two drinks at TJ’s, but she’s already bought two rounds for the whole bar, and is now having to be talked down from adding another $144 tip, including by Yaya herself. At this point Anthony also gets involved. He has a wide smile and an even wider afro, nursing a whisky on Kat’s other side. We have joint goals: talking Kat down from leaving a massive tip and getting her to drink some water. After quite a lot of negotiating, Kat is still refusing to budge on either front. No one’s quite sure how Kat has so much money; she doesn’t have a job, but her family are “from Napa”. I don’t really know what this means. 

Eventually, Yaya takes matters into her own hands. “Just let her put it, I’ll fix it after,” she says quietly to Anthony and me.

“What are you whispering about?!” Demands Kat.

“Nothing, just saying I’ll fix it. You put whatever tip you want.”

Kat stares down at her $143 bill and $144 tip for a while. “It’s $287,” I say, trying to be helpful. 

“Woah, Mr Calculator over here,” says Yaya. 

“Your accent is beautiful, n*****,” adds Anthony. It’s the first time I’ve been called the n-word as a term of endearment. It feels pretty good, I have to say, in some vague and no doubt problematic way. When I tell Anthony this, he laughs his head off. “That shit is funny, man.”

Kat introduces herself to me again - “good morning!” - this time with a very long, and I think masonic, hand shake. As we chat for a while, she seems baffled that I haven’t immediately told her to piss off - “who are you? You’re so normal” - and am talking to her like a normal person. “You’re a Christian” she adds confidently. I tell her I was raised Christian. “You’re a Christian,” she says again, happily. 

“Do you think you have to be Christian to be kind?” I ask her. She stares at me for a while, and then down at the bar, clearly not in the mood for philosophising. My attention is caught by the TV, showing a delighted Rory McIlroy, who’s just won the Masters at Augusta. I have very little interest in golf, but I like Rory McIlroy, I’m glad he won it after so much time, and it clearly means so much to him, sobbing on the green of the final hole. When I look back at Kat, there are tears trickling out of her eyes too that have nothing to do with golf. “You’re a Christian,” she says, for the third time.

This high opinion of me is threatened when Anthony gets back from his cigarette, asks me what I’m doing in Vacaville and I explain that my partner has an event here. Both are interested in my choice of the word “partner”. 

“Partner like friend, or…?” probes Anthony.

“No, like who I’m with. She has this sewing thing on here today, so I’m just hanging out for the day.”

Kat digests this information. “Next time, don’t come back here with your not-wife. Then you can come by. Without your not-wife”.  

“Dude, he just said he got a lady. Let a good man be a good man,” Anthony reasons. 

We finally succeed in getting Kat to drink water by turning it into a downing contest. Three cups and she crushes us every time. In the moment, I feel like we’ve done a good deed, especially as I don’t yet know that these three downed cups of water are going to have devastating consequences for me in about an hour’s time, ten minutes in to the hour long car journey back to San Francisco. Man, that was a loooong fifty minutes.

After about ten false-endings, Kat finally decides that she will actually leave, for real this time. “Ok”, she says sadly, and gets up off her stool. She turns back, and I assume she’s going to come back and introduce herself again, as she’s already done many times. But this time, she turns, head bowed, and walks out of the bar.

“Honestly, you got off lightly,” says Yaya, coming over and pouring me a second beer. “I can’t believe you got her to leave so quickly”.

I don’t really think I got her to leave, I just talked to her, and was open to everything she said, apart from declining her request for a hug, which I felt might be sending the wrong signals. She did grind on me a couple of times though, so perhaps my signals were too subtle. After she’s gone, I chat to Anthony for a while, and he tells me his struggles. Currently homeless, living in California to be close to his kid, struggling to hold down a job, struggling not to get into some “sketchy situations”. He seems very put together, and very different from the obviously homeless people I’d noticed in Andrews Park earlier, skulking on the edges, in the same place as the families by the play area and picnic tables, but walking very different tracks. Homelessness is an unavoidable part of being in California, and talking to Anthony opens my eyes to how many layers of homelessness there must be here within that one broad term. Eventually, he wanders off to play darts and I start finally making those notes. 

Leyla texts me: time to go. I settle up with Yaya, and buy Anthony a beer to replace the one Kat got me; thus the circle of life in TJ’s Tavern continues. 

I head out into the deserted streets of Vacaville, towards a parking lot where my not-wife is waiting in our hire car.

Andrew's Park, Vacaville, CA. I forgot to take a picture of TJ's...

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