Junipero Serra, The Serra Society, Drake's Plate of Brass, California fiction, Moors, California history, Junipero Serra, California missions, Old Spanish Days Festival, Annual California parades

   At least, that’s how I imagined it happening—the theft of the heart. To be honest, that’s how I wrote it. As the curator of the El Fornio Historical Society and a trained archeologist, I had taken the amateur historian part of my career and hitched it to my nearly legitimate career as a curator.
   That’s how I became a fiction writer.
   As a side project I had been writing an account of Father Junipero Serra’s heart as it chugged its way through California history. Actually, I kind of had to write it because my “cousin” was discouraged by my lack of interest in the subject. As the curator of the historical society—and a close friend of the local Indian tribe—I was, in her opinion,www.multiluxury.com in a position to be more empathetic to the tribe’s interest in the heart. So I began the story six months ago, beginning the narrative in 1789, the day the old boy’s heart was taken from his unwarming corpse, slipped into a ceramic jug filled with brandy, and rode away on horseback.
   Believe me, I have been completely realistic about the difficulties of writing a book—especially about the marinated heart of a Spanish padre. Even if it turned out to be any good, “The History of Junipero Serra’s Heart in a Jar,” conceived without a single car chase scene or radio pop anthem, seemed at best a gentleman’s pursuit, a stoned idiot’s collection of doodles writ upon a dozen moleskins.
   I often thought of just dumping all the research into a lightly written travel guide. I already had all the pictures and text.
   A Drive Down 101 was my working title. You see that kind of fluff all the time in the bookstores. Recipes from the California Missions or Great Hidden Trails in Your Own Backyard, Vol. 4 (which aren’t hidden anymore if you write about them.) Somebody was making a career out of this stuff. So I, of course, asked the question that shouldn’t be asked: Why wasn’t I doing it? I mean, why sweat the literary thing when I could just plug the whole project into captions and photos?
   Collecting the necessary flotsam to write a book made me no different than anyone else in the state. Throw that many half-educated people into one society and they’re all going to think they have a book to write. Some even get around to doing it— then one day when they walk away from it, their kids find tomes-in-drawers next to half-loaded revolvers.
   Which I didn’t want.
   So I decided to take a serious stab at my cousin’s proposal to write about the heart because—until it was stolen—she was right: I barely noticed it.
   Maybe it was because it got lost in all the other bric-a-brac the previous curators had collected over the years. I only saw my own collections, my own point of view of history through the historical society. For my cousin, who was part Indian, the heart in the jar was like a rosetta stone amongst bricks and mortar. For me, it was like a another pinpall machine with a theme—and I wasn’t really into the theme. At least not at the time.
   Except for Junipero Serra’a heart in a jar, The El Fornio Historical Society was no different than any other historical society in the state. We had a collection of Indian things and European things. The Indian things we had, the artifacts to be professional about it, were objects the local Fornay Indians hadn’t managed to reclaim through the dozen or so court orders issued through the decades. We had your usual grinding stones, arrowheads, bone flutes and needles. Nothing particularly special.
   Technically, the Native American stuff we had was here because it was never assigned to any particular tribe. We all knew the collection was Fornay—everybody did—but by never designating it, the historical society was able to hold on to the modest collection it did have. It was territorial pissings enough that we had Serra’s heart in the jar. The Indians so wanted it but knew—by an agreement going back to 1926—that if the heart stood under the roof of the historical society, it was our’s. But there will always be plenty of time. The afternoon the grail was walked out of the building, a big game of grown-up finders-keepers was under way.

   I was in my office that day, upstairs, a Friday, scribbling away about the holy pumper’s narrative, circa 1876, trying to focus my writing of the book against the backdrop of the week-long Old Spanish day festival getting started outside. Even a dedicated bachelor scholar like myself, playing Mr. Writer, had to throw in the towel. Three skyrockets shot by the window and burst their innards against the glass (laiizez faire El Fornio had never outlawed the blasters—too many Chinese and Indians . . . Mexican and Irish, Japanese, Croatians—you name it.)
   Figuring why be burned alive in an old wooden Victorian full of dusty jars of formaldehyde, I stopped writing, cleaned up, and went out for a drink. Was the back door locked? Was it not locked?
   I wondered.
   The whole town was about to descend into its annual ritual of smokey barbeque, horsey parade and drunken revelry—not an afternoon that seemed like someone would sneak in and take an old padre’s pickled heart.

   My name is John Peabody—John Henry Peabody. Like Robert Plant shouting, “John Bonham! John Henry Bonham!” at Zeppelin’s `75 Madison Square Garden show.
   But not.
   For the most part, people called me Hank. I don’t even look like Robert Plant. My hair was dark, when I had it. My beard was scruff but trim to balance the strandy pate I mentioned growing above my eyebrows.
   As for Peabody being my last name, it pretty much summed me up as a boy, second-string linebacker-type, resilient, but continually knocked on my ass by the larger guys. In baseball, I loved playing catcher, even as the gear quietly suffocated me. I could do it, sure—but a throw to second base usually ended up in the back of my head, between my hair and the straps, the mask, shin guards and chest protector pulling me to Earth.
   It was only through much concentration, steak-eating, beer drinking, body surfing, trailblazing and what passed, in my case, for girl chasing, that I made it to five feet nine inches tall (it was probably eight, but I kept with the nine, anyway).
   Half way through college, I was more body than pea, finally.
   I’ve now been the curator of the El Fornio Historical Society for the last two years. My specialty was Native American coprolites—from the Greek, “dung stone”—which, yes, made me a high-falluting shit collector.
   My science was collecting poop from people who had been dead for hundreds to thousands of years. I examined poop so that others might know something about dead people and what they pooped when they pooped it.
   The Neverending Poop, I called it. While not exactly as fossilized as dinosaur remains, the term’s origin, the ancient scat I relished was nearly always dried to perfection, just waiting for me to come along, manipulate and catalog it.
   Catalog?
   As you can imagine, being an expert on Native American coprolites was a real panty dropper. Take a girl back to your place and see how she reacted to that esoteric specialty. Maybe that was why I have been single for the better part of a decade. One person’s scientific specialty was another person’s gag reflex. While a lot of people could take the ladies to their den and show them arrowheads and mysterious shamanic totems, all I had was a vast and well-footnoted collection of dried up indigenous litter with which to hypnotize the local mädchen. As Spongue Bob Square Pants once said, “Good luck with that!”
   Yeah.
   I was born in El Fornio, California in March of 1962. I was one of those fishy Pisces let loose along the California coast, just south of San Luis Obispo and north of Santa Barbara. I went to El Fornio High School—where I was a Moor—and got both my undergrad and graduate degrees from the University of California at Santa Barbara, where I was a Gaucho. My mother, Elizabeth McCandy Peabody, from Nebraska, lived until I was twelve years old when she was killed in a car accident with the mother of a school friend of mine. My father, the well-known and occasionally disparaged California ethnologist, Francis Henry Peabody, PhD., died after my fifth birthday.
   A trained linguist and ethnologist, old “FHP,” as he signed his name, documented the vanishing languages and cultures of California Indians throughout the 1920s to the late 1950s. Some two thousand wax cylinders and magnetic tapes of Southwestern and California Indian languages are attributed to his fieldwork. Completely dedicated to his career, to the point of eccentricity, it has been generally accepted that Francis Henry Peabody—my old man—went a bit “native” at the end of his life.
   In a notorious front page, lower left (or second section top right) news story—depending upon the paper you read—Dr. Frank Peabody died at the home of the Saticoy sisters, Linda and Hermosilla, Central coast Indians whose mother was one of my father’s original informants. He was found in a sweathouse built out back of the sisters’ white Victorian, dressed in a loin cloth with shell beads and stone fetishes hung from his neck.
   A formal man who wore slacks and a blazer everywhere he went—even into the field—Frank Peabody had stopped shaving in the last year of his life, given to wearing native costume and body markings in pursuit of what I’m assuming to be his final anthropologic quarry. Although the coroner’s records say he died of a heart attack—which at eighty-one years old, raised on an early twentieth century American diet, was not surprising—most accounts suggest that the night of his death my pops was pretty high on datura or toalache, the Indian psychoactive used in religious rituals for centuries. However you want to think about it, my father took his work seriously. How many white guys of his generation died like that?
   When I signed on to the job of director and curator of the El Fornio Historical Society, I had some pretty clear intentions. Although I had only met my father once—when I was five (I don’t remember it)—I was determined in some hazy way to continue his work, aside from the loincloth get-up.
   After ten years in Santa Barbara and Ventura, doing Environmental Impact Reports for the county as well as archeology for private firms like James & Doore, Native Reclamation, and Malibu Flute Expansions, I had seen my career get completely sidetracked. Every time a movie guy in Montecito put a hot tub or putting green in his back yard, they would call me in. I’d sit there, chewing gum, drinking Dr. Pepper, waiting for the backhoe to dig up some ancient local. On site with me would be an NA, or Native American—sometimes called a CLR or “Closest Living Relative.” One thing NAs were good for, I always said, was gum, soda and menthol cigarettes, most of which I never imbibed in. But once in awhile, your career in the shits, a couple of sticks of gum and a Dr. Pepper were the only things between you, a cigarette and oblivion.
   I always had a studious eye pealed for my specialty. The occasional short log stuck in the dirt—almond roca from 236 A.D.—shined to me like a Spanish coin. Mostly when you worked county and private firms, you paid attention for ribs and kilter, skull caps and shell, ash, dust, people stuff that suddenly presented itself under the weeds. I knew ancient log like no one.
   In 1991, after mostly finishing my dissertation at the University on “Central Coast Native American Coprolite Densities,” then putting in a few odd years of EIRs, I could definitely say my career was twice as shitty as when it began.
   In those days, I would apply for assistant curator positions at places like The Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History or Director of Archaeology at the Channel Islands Historical Society.
   No luck. Once I applied to be curator at the Goleta Train Museum (I liked trains well enough), but eventually I just couldn’t bare the thought of driving a miniature locomotive around for kids on weekends, dressed in overalls and a conductor’s hat. I also realized that after years working the area, Santa Barbara had its own caveats. There was only one of anything in town. So once you were it, that was it. If you weren’t anymore, you weren’t it—and you could never be it again. Since I had never even been it once, I was happy to get my stuff and go.
   To be honest, it was pretty clear that no one was interested in an expert on dried turds, even if they were Native American turds—and it wasn’t like I wasn’t invested. I was prepared to donate my Central Coast coprolite collection to any one of the institutions I had applied to.
   They were nice display cases, real glass and mahogany (how much is real glass and mahogany anymore?). Most people didn’t even know they were looking at dried scheiss unless you told them. They just figured they were gazing at important artifacts—which they were. Whole families placed their hands on the wooden and glass cases and went, “Wow!” while gazing at my work.
   The afternoon that Serra’s heart was taken from the historical society—also known as my office—I imagined, and was pretty sure, that the heart and its liberateur headed out of the building and in the direction of the growing party. Together they would have eyed the wooden stalls of tamales, olive oil, T-shirts, cheeses, lettuce, tri-trip sticks, wheat grass shots, and Bear Republic flags on margaritas.
   The old padre’s carburetor passed the apple-smoked sausage and chorizo stall put on by the local Jaycees. It floated by the century old Aliso-Kennedy brand tomatillo salsa booth. Through the streams of Friday night festival-goers, the heart made its way up the avenue in rhythm with the bandit’s stride. Together they passed children in red, yellow, black and green uniforms, dresses and vests ironed for the parade now a bit unbuttoned and wanting to go home, to play with friends . . . A skyrocket whistled into the air from behind a fence and beer bottles broke with drunken laughter as the rocket cracked, sending sparks flying all around. A man in a pelican costume sauntered waist-high amongst the crowd. He waved to the crew on the patio at the Rusty Pelican, deep into their fourth round of Rob Roys where a band clanged out a hazardous version of “Walk Don’t Run.”

   “Hey, Sean!” one of them leaned over the rail, waving.
   Sean Heany, music critic for the local “Daily Breeze” paper, pelican mascot around town, shorter than anyone you’ve ever seen and a man worth knowing, was making his Friday late afternoon, early evening rounds.
   “Keep it up, Heany,” I toted.
   Sean saw me and nodded with a knowing Heany scowl. Everyone had shown up for an Old Spanish Days inoculation and Sean was ready to administer it. That’s what he did.
   The pelican spiraled his arms with the feather coverings of his proxy wings. “This should keep everything cool,” he said, feathers fluttering in the dusky heat. The crowd cheered him.
   I knew that I would be back to the Rusty Pelican in the next hour or so, but right now I had to walk through the droves, conducting my annual stroll down Main Street to see just how dazzled everyone was getting. And Dazzled was what they got on Old Spanish Days (also known to the locals as “Old Spicked Out Gays”).
   Every year, in the first week of August, the town threw its annual festival, drawing tourists up and down the coast in the hopes that they would spend their time on paper cups, plastic hats, grilled fauna and the narrative fantasies of adjacent history.
   Protesters to the event claimed the scene to be “White people dressed up like the Mexicans they displaced, dancing on the graves of the Indians,” which was kind of true. But a lot people at the annual festival were rich in melanin and a lot of Indians who lived up in the Pass had never died, and some people, the tour guides proclaimed—cameras flashing—were “dressed in the manner of the great days of the Spanish Californios, right down to the silver belt buckles.”
   Whatever. Everybody had their own story to tell, but any attempt to define the area was always incomplete as it was a slippery business to begin with—born out of a slippery history. Just as winter mudslides had continually changed the topography of the adolescent geology, a moving in and out of peoples had continually changed the face of the locals. After picking up everybody’s shit for the last two thousand years, I liked to think that I had a pretty good picture of who everybody was around here. Only later did I find that I only had an inkling.
   In my case, I had always thought of myself as a teenager in permanent state of wonder. I think you need that to be in my profession. In fact, you needed it to be Me. I had spent so much time wondering about the deaths of my mother and father that wonder became a state of being. I wondered what it would have been like to grow up with my father. I wondered what it would have been like if my mother wasn’t killed in an accident. I wondered if anyone was going to figure out that I had never, technically, finished my degree.
   I just plain wondered.
   My wondering could get the best of me. The Hollywood director, John Ford, who directed Mitchum and Ava Gardner in Mark Twain’s “The Trails of El Fornio,” knew about my father’s work through his relationship with the Indians he had been casting—and shooting off of horseback— for years.
   In “Trails,” he cast William Powell as “The Anthropologist,” which was a nod to my old man. In some of the scenes shot in downtown El Fornio, you can see my father standing in a crowd listening to the actor Victorio Gassman, portraying the great Abraham Librado, chief of the Fornay for most of the twentieth century.

In these scenes, my father was tallish, thin, dressed in ill-fitting trousers and a blazer looking slightly unfocused. Powell, portraying my father, stands in the foreground. The look on my father’s face, ever the observer, seemed to be saying how lost he was standing in a fiction, looking at the man he was being portrayed by, while at the same time being himself looking at the people he knew to be real set amongst all the actors. My father, from what I heard of him, made his career getting at the core of a person’s nature, their narrative. Movie-making, as much as he might have appreciated it, was one, even two steps back from the reality he was after . . . These thirty seconds of him shifting and blinking his eyes as a movie extra were the only animated record I have of my father. I am the only person in the world that knows that I watch this scene four or five times a year. And if I have enough beers in me, I wonder until the tears run down my face.

The Opening Chapter from

“The Reeducation of a Turd Peddler”
by
John Henry Peabody

The Opening Chapter from

“The Reeducation of a Turd Peddler” by John Henry Peabody

“The Reeducation of a Turd Peddler”
by
John Henry Peabody